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In the same language Lucy said, “Venerable Kuen, forgive me for interrupting you, but I wish to deposit some money with your house.”

The man’s eyes opened wide at this, then narrowed. He calculated swiftly, a well-honed skill of his. Clearly this was the famous spirit-possessed daughter of the she-demon Shan-pei, and the other one must therefore be the eldest daughter of Chen. An interesting opportunity-it would not hurt to put the Shan-pei in his debt, and the Chens were also numerous, prosperous, and attentive of their obligations. He stepped back from the door and motioned them forward.

This room held a scratched table, three oak desks, with accompanying swivel chairs, one desk with a manual Underwood on it, the two others supplied with abacuses, two steel tube chairs with green oilcloth seats, several oak filing cabinets, a Barcalounger in green leatherette, a television on a metal stand, a typewriter table with a large many-keyed machine that Lucy recognized as a Chinese typewriter, and a tangerine tree in a big round blue ceramic pot. The walls were stained dark yellow-brown with decades of cigarette smoke. It smelled of boiled rice and old paper and tobacco and ink.

Mr. Kuen sat in one of the swivel chairs and favored the girls with a smile, about which the only genuine thing was the gold in three of the front teeth.

“An account, you said?” he inquired.

“Yes, Venerable Kuen. I have one hundred and ninety-two dollars.”

Mr. Kuen nodded and held out his hand. It was not a contemptible sum. Some of Mr. Kuen’s clients made that every week, others every two minutes. Mr. Kuen paid no interest on deposits, nor did he pay attention to the Internal Revenue Service or to the currency regulations of the United States of America. The house of Kuen had therefore many customers. He counted the bills and placed them in a desk drawer. Then he got out a cheap pad and a ballpoint pen. Passing them across the desk to Lucy, he said in Cantonese, “Write your name.”

Lucy wrote the character equivalent to the sound kap in Cantonese, which means grade or rank, and then the characters for old and poetry, or teacher, louhsi. Mr. Kuen took a ledger from the desk drawer, made a notation in a three-hundred-year-old code, wrote some characters on the pad, tore the slip off, and handed it over. Lucy tucked it away without impolitely studying it. She knew very well that it would be honored for $192 or its equivalent in goods in every Chinese community from Penang to Panama. After some ritual words expressing the honor that the house of Kuen realized from her patronage and Lucy’s declining of that honor, instead expressing the deep obligation she felt toward the house of Kuen (which was more nearly true), the girls left.

“Would you mind telling me what that was about?” Janice demanded.

“That guy at the med school is going to pay me big bucks, and I need a place to run my checks through without going through a regular bank.”

“Why don’t you just give them to your mom to cash?”

“Because I don’t want my mom to know.”

“What! Why not?” Janice was astounded. She could imagine having secrets from her mother, but not about money.

Lucy shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. Which was true; that was the problem.

Janice dropped the subject, and they walked out of Doyers and back the way they had come. They were just past Pell on Mott, weaving through the increasingly crowded streets, when Lucy picked up the tail.

“I want something to drink,” said Lucy suddenly, and grabbed Janice’s arm.

“A soda? We can get one-”

“No, I want tea, and food, I want to sit down.” So saying, she hustled her friend down the short flight of stairs to one of the street’s many tea and bun shops. The place was sparsely occupied, a couple of old people at the counter and a few at tables. It was not a tourist place. Lucy pushed Janice into a chair facing the mirrored wall at the rearmost table, and Lucy used the pay phone briefly. Then she sat down with her back to the wall, watching. A sullen waiter came over; without being asked, he placed a steel quart pot of fresh boiling tea in front of them and departed.

“Lucy, what’s going on? Why are we in this joint?”

“We’re being followed by a couple of ma jai. Here they come. For God’s sake, don’t look around. Speak in Cantonese and play along with whatever I say.”

The two ma jai, little horses, gang members, swaggered in and sat at the next table. They called out loudly for tea and steamed pastry. Both of them wore sunglasses and black shirts worn outside dark trousers and opened to the chest, showing bridal white T-shirts. One had a broad, pockmarked face, a beefy guy in his early twenties. His companion looked younger, a teenager, thin-faced and jumpy. Lucy could feel their eyes on her through their dark glasses. She poured tea, took a scalding sip, and said, in a noticeable voice,“. . anyway, I’ll never do that again.” She gave Janice eye signals.

“Um, no, me neither,” said Janice haltingly.

“Damn it, I was wasted! How much did you drink?”

“Oh, a lot. Four cans.”

“Four! I had six, and Mary Ma had the same. We must have finished half a case. I completely lost track of time.”

From an early age Lucy Karp had been able to make up stories, precociously sophisticated ones about little girls who slipped between the cracks in reality, and expansions of traditional fairy tales, in which Cinderella, Tarzan, and the Wolfman would visit Mars to rescue Barbie. So she had no difficulty making up a yarn in which the three of them, Mary Ma, Janice Chen, and herself, had slipped away to the West Street docks, where the bad boys and the hustlers hung out (although not in the early afternoon, as a rule) and gotten drunk on beer, and become sick, and staggered back to the Asia Mall to find there (Surprise! Horror!) the uproar of the shootings. Once Janice saw where the theme was headed, she had no difficulty embellishing the plot with many an amusing detail. The gangsters were glowering and mumbling to each other, an ideal audience for this lie. Janice was growing more nervous by the second, however, and Lucy was not confident that her friend would keep up the fiction without letting out something harmful. Janice was not a liar in Lucy’s league. What was needed now was a graceful, or at least a plausible, exit.

Lucy found it after five tense minutes of stiff, false chatter. She pointed past the steamy window to the street. “Look,” she cried, “there’s Warren Wang. Oh, God, how do I look? Pay the bill! No, give me a mirror.”

“Warren Wang?” said Janice in an astonished voice, and received a sharp kick under the table.

“My boyfriend, you idiot,” said Lucy in English under her breath, and then louder in Cantonese, “Come on, Jen-dai, let’s catch up with him.” Lucy stood and, using the mirror Janice handed her (for she did not carry one herself) pretended to primp, after which she attempted to mime the appearance of young love, in the style of Gidget reruns. The disgusting little squeals that issued from her throat rang absurdly false to her own ears, but she hoped they would convince a pair of Chinese nogoodniks just off the boat.

Warren Wang, an eighth grader with plump cheeks, thick spectacles and a bad haircut, a Spiderman devotee and the vice president of the math club, was a well-known dweeb, and to be considered a dweeb in a Chinese-American environment is to have achieved dweebness in its most refined form. That Janice Chen, the most beautiful girl in eighth grade, and Lucy Karp, the weirdest, might suddenly accost him on Mott Street in the light of day, gripping his arms and cooing, was not something he had ever expected outside the world of teenage boy dreams. He knew Mary Ma, another math club stalwart, and he knew that these two hung around with her, but heretofore he had only gazed at her two friends from a distance. Yet here was Lucy’s bony little hip pressing in on one side and Janice’s softer one on the other, their arms linked in his, the both of them chattering gaily, how you doing, Warren, want to go somewhere, Warren, listen to records, a movie? Warren had heard about dog dates, of course, and was well informed about the boundless and inventive cruelty of in-crowd girls. He stiffened, like a hen in the jaws of a fox, waiting for the punch line.