“Your brother?” asked Mary.
“No, dummy! It’s two people, right below us.” They all listened.
“That’s not your dad, is it?” Lucy asked Janice in a low voice.
“No, it’s strangers,” whispered Janice.
Lucy said, “Let’s go and see who they are.” With that, she stashed her book and wriggled away through the bags, but not the way she had come in. Instead, she pushed her way to the face of the bin that overlooked the main aisle of the stockroom. Shortly, Janice followed, and then Mary, their three faces pressing against the wire mesh through a narrow slit between a pair of beanbags.
Looking down, they saw three men, two youthful and one elderly, all Chinese. One of the young men and the older man were standing together, and were dressed in cream silk suits. The other young man, clad in a blue suit, was addressing them in Cantonese, in the accents of rural Guangzhou. He was using extremely courteous language, flattering words, something about staying, about others who would arrive soon. The older man replied in the same tongue, but with a Hong Kong accent, a heated reply to the effect that he had come a long way, and did not appreciate the waste of time. His younger companion concurred, but more vigorously. The blue-suited man resumed his appeals. From their high angle, the girls could not see the faces of the men below, but it was clear from the body language of the two Hong Kong men that they were not mollified.
What happened next happened so fast that for a stunned instant the girls could not believe what they had witnessed. A slightly built man, wearing a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and tied in place, walked around the corner from an adjoining aisle and, holding a pistol stiffly at arm’s length, shot the two Hong Kong men in the back, and when they fell down he shot them both in the head. Pop-pop. Pop-pop. Then he was gone.
Lucy heard Mary Ma take a sharp breath, and knew that in another half second a scream would burst out and so she twisted like a fish and clapped a hand over the other girl’s mouth. This quick motion made the beanbags shift, and the man in the blue suit lifted his head up and looked right at them. Hours seemed to pass. Lucy could feel Mary’s rapid, boiling-hot breath swish past her hand. Her palm was soaked with drool, and Mary’s breathing was starting to make a nasty bubbling sound against it, which Lucy was sure could be heard across Canal Street.
“Be quiet!” she hissed into Mary’s ear. The other girl took one long, shuddering breath and was still. The man stared for a little longer, then turned on his heel and walked away. The two Hong Kong men stayed where they had fallen, the runnels of blood from their heads joining into one round, ghastly pool, black as tar under the harsh fluorescent lights.
Janice Chen was the first to move, sliding backward through the sticky, clinging vinyl and the whispering fake fur. Back in the hideout, Mary Ma burst into blubbering tears, and the two other girls threw themselves on her to get her to stop, Lucy going so far as to grab a handful of Day-Glo pink fur and hold it over her mouth. In a minute or so, Mary had regained control and they got off her.
“Oh, God, what are we going to do?” she whimpered.
“I know that guy,” said Janice, ignoring this. The other two stared at her.
“What guy?” Lucy asked.
“The guy in the blue suit, the guy who walked away. I don’t know his name, but he’s always hanging around with my father.”
“A tong guy?”
Janice nodded, eyes dropping. Lucy understood Chinatown well enough to understand this. No important Chinatown businessman, especially not a first-generation Chinese immigrant like Louie Chen, was unconnected to the tongs. The Chens’ tong was the Hap Tai Association, but Lucy had never heard a breath that they might be involved in murder, at least not recently. The tongs worked their wills far more subtly nowadays. On the other hand, there were certainly gangs in Chinatown, and gangs killed people, and nearly every gang had some affiliation with a tong.
“What are we going to do, Louhsi?”
Lucy became aware that both of her friends were watching her expectantly. She expected this. The word for “teacher” in Cantonese is louhsi, and Lucy had been called that, as a joke, by the Chens and by every other Cantonese speaker she had met from an early age. At first it had been amusing to give a little mite (and a female at that) such a name. Later, as Lucy’s personality developed, it seemed more appropriate, sometimes disturbingly so. Lucy was, in fact, the leader of the little band, both of the inner circle here assembled and of a satellite clique of a half dozen girls at school. There was nothing racial in this; Lucy would have been a leader anywhere, and added to that there was the thing with the languages, and also (although no one mentioned this to her) she was the daughter of the legendary Shenpei Meilin, the one-eyed, who shot people, and crushed evildoers without mercy, like a warrior woman from the old tales. So they looked at her to see what she would do.
“Well, so first of all, we’re not going to tell anyone about this,” Lucy said firmly, and she detected tiny sighs of relief from her companions. No explanation of this was necessary, but she gave one anyway, to make sure the reasons were fixed in both their minds. “Mr. Chen didn’t know what was going down here” (this to save Janice’s face), “but if the cops know about Janice seeing this guy with him, he’s going to be in big trouble. Big trouble.” She meant with the tong, not the police. There was no question in any of their minds about this.
“And, of course, Mary can’t say anything either,” said Lucy, and they all knew what that meant, too, because they knew that Mary and her family were ren she, smuggled illegals, with phony papers that would not survive any official inspection.
There was a long pause after this, a silence broken only by Mary’s snuffling. Lucy felt the eyes. “Oh, right!” she said indignantly to the silence. “I’m really going to rat you out. Cao dan! Fang gou pi!. .” and more of the same, for although in English Lucy was as clean-mouthed as could be wished, in either Cantonese or Mandarin she could strip the chrome off a trailer hitch. “If you think that,” she continued, switching from Mandarin to Cantonese and moderating her tone, “the pair of you are dumb as wooden chickens. Do you think I would get my foster father in trouble? Or get Mary’s family kicked out?”
Shamefaced, the other girls agreed that this was not to be thought of.
“Okay, then, we have to swear never to tell anyone about this. Not your family or anyone. And believe me, they’re going to come after you.”
“What! How!”
“Silly turtles! When they find the bodies, they’ll want to talk to everyone who was back here, and Janice’s parents know you both were back here. Nobody knows I’m here, and I want you to keep it that way. Now, swear it! Give me your hands!”
The three clasped their hands in a knot. Lucy felt imbued with a rich excitement, as the situation combined the best aspects of Claudine and Kim, girlish intimacy and deadly danger. She thought briefly of pulling her little pocket knife and extracting a blood oath, but her natural practicality and her apprehension that, confronted with additional gore, Mary Ma would lose it again, decided her in favor of a purely verbal ritual. In Chinese, of course.
“Mary, you go first!” she ordered.
Mary, quavering, said, “I swear.”
Janice said, “I swear to the sky.”
Lucy said, “I swear, and if I go back on my word, let me be executed by heaven and destroyed by earth!”
Under this profound doom, Lucy led the way out of the secret nest and out the rear door onto Crosby Street.
“Go around to the front entrance and get lost in the store. Find something to do-like, grab some cartons and move them around until somebody notices you. Then you say, if they ask you, you were in the front the whole time. You didn’t see anything. They might not believe you, but if you stick to the story, they can’t do anything. And look, they’ll get each of you alone and they’ll say, like, ‘Janice, Mary told us the whole story, why don’t you tell us what went down.’ They always do that trick. Just keep saying you didn’t see anything. And cry a lot, and have to go pee every ten minutes.”