“Just taking a page from IA,” Jack said. “It fits the tone of your question, right?”
“Yeah, well, we’ll be watching you, smart ass,” said DiMizzio.
“Look,” Hogan said, “just stay the fuck away from James Gee, got it?”
Jack bit his tongue and cursed silently as the two IA bulls turned and stomped out. He waited until their footsteps receded before following the trail back to Pell Street.
Golden City
BOSSY WATCHED FROM the backseat of the Town Car as Mon Gor loaded a case of Remy from the Golden City basement into the trunk. Bossy hadn’t told Mon Gor about the visit from the Chinese cop. What the Triad had advised him held true for Mon Gor also: the less he knew, the better. The chaai lo would drop the case soon anyway, he thought. Bossy leaned back and recollected what he knew about his longtime driver, who’d driven him to and from all the places of his overnight debauchery: whorehouses like Chao’s, Fat Lily’s, and Booty’s, where he liked his young, dark-skinned see yow gay, soy sauce pussy.
Mon Gor was rangy, almost as tall as Bossy himself. He’d arrived in Chinatown in the 1970s and, as an accommodation to the Hok Nam Moon Triad, Duck Hong hired him as a truck driver for the noodle company. He was around twenty years old then, around forty now.
All the trips to the racetracks-Aqueduct, Belmont, Roosevelt, and Yonkers.
All the bars and clubs, like Lucy Jung’s, Grampa’s, Yooks, Wisemen, Macao, China Chalet, or the Chinese Quarter. All driven to by Mon Gor.
All the hot sheets joints and happy-ending massage parlors on the outskirts of Chinatown.
His father, Duck Hong, had told Bossy that Mon Gor was once one of the top kung fu students in Hong Kong, a wing chun man. There were stories about his heroics in Chinatown bar brawls. Soon after, he became Duck Hong’s personal driver, also reluctantly driving the Gee women to facials and massages, to mah-jongg games and yum cha. Driving his son Francis wherever until he happily got his own license at the age of seventeen.
Now the women were gone, and so was his father. And Francis had his own car, the obnoxious red one.
Now it was just him and Mon Gor. Bossy and driver.
MON GOR HEADED back to the kitchen entrance for another box. Provisions for the condo Bossy’d agreed to try out, on the edge of Sunset Park. A two-week free trial run, fully furnished. The two weeks allowed him to scout the rest of waterfront Brooklyn, near the East River bridges. Extra time to consider other condominium developments, funded by Triad money behind barely legit front corporations.
He was relieved not to go back to Edgewater. And happy to be so close to Manhattan.
Mon Gor waited by the doorway for one of the da jop from the kitchen. His friends and associates had twisted his name Mak Mon Gaw into Mon Gor, a nickname, which in Cantonese sounded like “night brother.”
Because he usually worked at night, driving the denizens of the dark hours.
Nobody ever saw him in daylight, except Bossy and occasionally the family. It was like he was invisible in daylight, this barroom avenger, who was rumored to be a Triad man himself. He’d supposedly intervened in three near fights in the Hip Ching gambling basements, resulting beneficially to the Pell Street tong.
But in daylight he was invisible.
MON GOR TOOK a box from the puzzled kitchen worker and came back to the car trunk. A big box of roast duck and for yook and see yow gay. Fast food snacks would suffice until he had a chance to check out the takeout counters in Sunset Park Chinatown. Bossy straightened as Mon Gor slammed the trunk shut.
“Gau dim,” Mon Gor said in his slang Cantonese, “all done.” It was the same answer he’d given the Triad elders when asked if he’d washed the first matter, of the traitorous deliveryman. All done.
Snow flurries began falling from the slate Bronx sky.
“Gau dim,” Mon Gor repeated almost to himself as he slid behind the wheel and glanced at the rearview mirror.
“Good,” Bossy said. “Now drop me off in Brooklyn and you’re done.”
“Mo mun tay, Bossee,” Mon Gor answered. “No problem.” He fired up the engine and pulled the car away from the curb, turning for the FDR drive south.
Sunset Park and then home to Pell Street.
Mo mun tay at all.
Mak the Knife
THE SNOWFLAKES GOT thick and heavy, and Jack left a trail of dark footprints in the thin layer of white that covered the way back to Pell Street.
Number 8 Pell, Mak Mon Gaw’s address, was an old four-story, redbrick building that dominated the north corner of Pell and Bowery. The storefronts along Pell included a Chinatown gift shop, a China travel agency, and a Buddhist temple, but on the Bowery side the building was anchored by Bamboo Garden restaurant, a Chinese grocery store, and a small bakery.
In big block letters, the word ORIENTAL was still visible, high up on the faded green façade that overlooked the boulevard.
Jack noticed there were two sets of fire escapes on the Pell Street side, but just one set above the Bowery side, which led him to believe the main exit for the building’s tenants was number 8.
He went through the unlocked street door, a bad habit from an earlier time when Chinatown people didn’t bother to lock their front doors, when crime was almost nonexistent.
Times had changed.
Jack looked at the mailboxes. Unlike some of the older Chinatown tenements where the tenants all had their own scattering of mismatched metal boxes screwed into the wall, number 8 Pell had an old but standard split panel of metal mailboxes, recessed into the wall. The mail carrier keyed open the top panel, folded it down, and inserted the mail. Then he relocked it.
Each individual mailbox was vented so the tenants could see if they’d had mail delivered. There were three vertical rows of six mailboxes each, meaning there were eighteen apartments in the building.
These mailboxes meant that the building had been renovated over the decades and now had more new families than the old flow of transient single men. A few of the tenants’ names had been neatly typed and inserted into the little slot at the top of each mailbox. Newer tenants, figured Jack. Some of the tags had been whited-out, with the new tenant’s name in black marker staking a claim over it. A newcomer tagging over another immigrant’s story.
Most of the mailbox name tags were old, meaning the tenants had lived here a long time, over generations of the same family, the apartment passed down. The name Jack was looking for, Mak Mon Gaw, was one of the old ones. It was just a crude lettering, MAK/GAW, that barely fit into the name slot.
MAK/GAW handwritten on yellowed paper, not touched in twenty years.
There wasn’t any mail in his box.
Jack looked down at the baseboards, the floor, any tiles that might seem loose. He scanned the areas around both door frames, ran his fingers along the edges. He didn’t find the spare key that top-floor tenants sometimes secreted downstairs just in case they got locked out. Men, whipped at having to call lo por, and having their wifeys come down four flights to chide them before letting them back into the building.
It didn’t matter to Jack.
Chinatown was smaller then, he remembered, and he and his teenage pals had explored all the Chinatown rooftops, traveling across the heights the way immigrants did in the previous century. Across the rooftops. The rooftops ran evenly on both sides of the street until halfway down the block, near Doyer, where they butted up against taller buildings on the Bloody Angle. Still, someone could run across the rooftops on Pell and descend, emerging on Bayard or Bowery or Doyers or Mott. It was how the Hip Chings had defended their turf so well through the decades.