“Really? So you think I would be welcomed at Janice’s.”
“I believe so,” said Tran. “Of course, as they are Cantonese, they may cut you up in small pieces and fry you with green onions and garlic.”
This brought a smile to her face, and seeing it, Tran felt a warm current in the place his heart used to be. His own daughter had never reached thirteen, having been incinerated by a B-52 along with his wife in 1968. He had no photographs of them anymore, and to his dismay their faces were fading from his mind. When he dreamed of his daughter now, she had Lucy’s face. Pathetic and sentimental, he thought, but there it was.
“Perhaps I’ll call her and go over now.”
“A fine idea, after you have apologized to your mother. In a harmonious world, parents should teach children, and it is an unfortunate thing when the child knows more than the parent about certain things. I have observed that this is more common in America than elsewhere, especially among those from foreign lands. Nevertheless, you must apologize. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” said Lucy. It had not occurred to her that her mother was in any way imperfect, and the knowledge both intrigued and appalled her.
“Now,” said Tran, “of what are you so afraid?”
Lucy’s heart performed an unpleasant leap. “What makes you say that?”
“In the instant you spotted me awhile ago, before you understood that it was me playing a game, you had a look of terror on your face and in the stance of your body. Is it possible that someone is after you in earnest, my child?”
Lucy waited some long seconds before answering. “You won’t tell my mother?”
Tran looked down at his devastated hands. “I believe I can keep a secret.”
“I can’t tell you the whole thing because I swore not to, but. . it might be a good thing if you watched my back for a while.” She placed her hand in his.
Tran nodded and rose, and they walked out of the park hand in hand.
“Who is Cambronne?” Lucy asked abruptly.
“Ah, Cambronne. Marshal Cambronne was the commander of the Old Guard at Waterloo. At school all of us little mites were taught that when the British called upon him to surrender, he said, ‘The Guard dies, it does not surrender.’ ”
“What is mites?”
“Oh, that is just a word the French used. From Annamites. That is to say, we Vietnamese. You would say ‘gooks.’ But, naturally, we also knew this expression, ‘the word of Cambronne.’ ”
“You mean, he really didn’t say that heroic thing, he just said, ‘merde’?”
“So it seems. Another thing among many that confirmed for us the absolute hypocrisy of the French. You Americans are insane, but far less developed in your hypocrisy. This is refreshing. I am proud to be an illegal immigrant in your country.”
Chapter 5
The Chen family emerged from seclusion early in the afternoon of the next day and reopened their emporium, the police having finished with it. They did a remarkably good business for a weekday, as people in the community flocked in to demonstrate ethnic solidarity and assuage morbid curiosity. Lucy Karp walked in somewhat later, and after a brief conversation with one of the checkout bag girls, put on an apron, replaced her, and started stuffing. As she had promised, she had called her mother on the car phone and offered a formal apology, and said dutifully that she was about to visit the Chens. Her mother was still sufficiently stunned by her conversation with her own mother to accept this without asking any questions. Lucy’s tone had been cool and polite, which was in itself something these days.
In a break between customers, Lucy waved to Mrs. Chen, standing watchfully in her elevated glass booth, and Mrs. Chen smiled and waved back. Tran had been right, Lucy saw with vast relief. For her part, Mrs. Chen understood what Lucy was doing and understood its benefits to her daughter. As she had often before this, Lucy would take half a shift for free, so that the bag girl would work a half shift for Janice, thus giving Janice four hours of free time. Mrs. Chen had never had any free time when she was Janice’s age, and if Mr. Chen had his way, neither would Janice. Mrs. Chen had heard, however, that most American children did not work twelve hours a day, every day, during school vacations, and so she was prepared to be indulgent, as long as nothing interfered with the intake of cash. Not that the Chens were greedy, not compared to those operating a quarter mile to the south of the Asia Mall in Wall Street, but they had obligations. In China a vast Chen cousinage awaited opportunity, sponsorship, transportation to Gold Mountain, so that they in their turn could prosper and achieve glory and honor and add luster to the name of Chen. A few hours of leisure for her daughter, Mrs. Chen thought, would take little enough from this enterprise.
The two girls walked in companionable silence along Canal Street, both of them inexpressibly glad that normal relationships had been reestablished after the disaster.
“You want to go listen to music at Sounds Like?” Janice asked.
“Yeah, later,” said Lucy, “but first I have to do something. Let’s cross here.”
She dashed south across Canal, dodging slow-moving cars and trucks, Janice in her wake, and continued south on Mott.
“Where’re we going?” Janice asked.
“You’ll see.”
“I hate it when you get mysterious, Lucy.”
“That’s too bad, girl, because I’m mysterious a lot.”
Janice stopped in her tracks. “Tell me this isn’t about. . you know, because no way am I. .”
“No, this is personal. I have to open a bank account.”
They kept walking south into the heart of old Chinatown, herb shop and gambling cellar country, and other stuff, too, that the girls were not supposed to know about but did.
“Are we going to the Republic bank on the Bowery?” Janice asked.
“No, there’s one in there,” said Lucy, pointing down the narrow opening of Doyers Street. Originally an eighteenth-century cart track and not much improved since, narrow and twisted as a lane in Guangdong, Doyers is the shortest street in Chinatown. The sharp bend in its middle was known around the turn of the century as the Bloody Angle, because it was there that the hatchet men of warring tongs would wait to ambush one another, and for a while more people were killed here than on any other street in the nation. The tongs were respectable business associations now, of course, and didn’t employ hatchet men anymore. If you asked.
At Number 10 on this street, just across from where the original Chinese opera house used to be, stood a grimy building barely ten feet wide, fronted by a dusty glass window showing off three desiccated snake plants and bearing the legend in red characters “Kuen and Sons, Importing and Exporting.” No English translation was provided.
“This is a bank?” asked Janice.
“Kind of,” said Lucy. “Tran told me about it. The Kuens are pretty famous.”
“I never heard of them,” said Janice.
“Famous among mysterious people,” Lucy amended. She opened the door and they went in. A bell tinkled. They were in a small room lit by the streaked window and an overhead fluorescent fixture with two tubes dark and the remaining pair buzzing and flickering. A settee and two chairs in brown-painted rattan and a low lacquered table on which sat an old copy of China Today made up the room’s furniture. A calendar from a Chinese food company and the sort of cheap framed chinoiserie prints available in any shop in the district made up the wall decor. A ceiling fan hung motionless above them.
They heard soft footsteps. An elderly Chinese man stuck his head out of a door. Reading glasses were pushed up on his freckled, nearly bald pate, and he held a Chinese newspaper. He frowned when he saw Lucy and said to Janice in Cantonese, “What do you want? I am busy.”