“If you are listening to me now and you are Korean, and you pridefully own your own store, your yah-cheh-ga-geh that you have built up from nothing, know these facts. Know that the blacks who spend money in your store and help put food on your table and send your children to college cannot open their own stores. Why? Why can’t they? Why don’t they even try? Because banks will not lend to them because they are black. Because these neighborhoods are troubled, high risk. Because if they did open stores, no one would insure them. And if they do not have the same strong community you enjoy, the one you brought with you from Korea, which can pool money and efforts for its members — it is because this community has been broken and dissolved through history.
“We Koreans know something of this tragedy. Recall the days over fifty years ago, when Koreans were made servants and slaves in their own country by the Imperial Japanese Army. How our mothers and sisters were made the concubines of the very soldiers who enslaved us.
“I am speaking of histories that all of us should know. Remember, or now know, how Koreans were cast as the dogs of Asia, remember the way our children could not speak their own language in school, remember how they called each other by the Japanese names forced upon them, remember the public executions of patriots and the shadowy murders of collaborators, remember our feelings of disgrace and penury and shame, remember most of all the struggle to survive with one’s own identity still strong and alive.
“I ask that you remember these things, or know them now. Know that what we have in common, the sadness and pain and injustice, will always be stronger than our differences. I respect and honor you deeply.”
Kwang then bowed and thanked the crowd and they applauded loudly as he hugged each minister in turn. I was pushed toward him as they shrank inward to get closer to him. I tried to hold those nearest to me back, but it was useless. I couldn’t find Eduardo or Janice. Kwang himself was talking, laughing, pointing, taking every hand he could, slowly roping through the crowd down the church steps toward the street as if carrying himself on a human vine. I could see he wanted to get out, maybe the crowd was getting too fervent. But he was going to move past them by moving through their very heart.
A dull pop went off, followed quickly by another. People ducked where they stood, half crouching, covering their heads. Quiet. Then screaming. They all started to run. I saw Eduardo dive toward John Kwang and grab him hard by the shoulders. He looked all right, but Eduardo had him quickly tucked under his arms. Eduardo saw me and shouted, “Henry! Henry!” He jerked his head desperately toward the car. I understood what he wanted. I hurled myself through the mess of people, shouting as Janice had instructed me, “Aide to Councilman Kwang! Aide to Councilman Kwang!” and I led a path for Eduardo to follow. John was still hidden away, but he was walking down low, keeping up. There was suddenly heavy smoke and we moved through a thick white screen of it, the smell sulfurous, burnt.
Janice appeared, kneeling in her skirt on the trunk of his sedan. She was yelling at a cop and pointing back toward the steps of the church. “Over there!” she screamed. “Over there! There! It’s a kid!”
They were holding down somebody to the side of where John had been speaking. Immediately the camera crews were trying to get there. We were still jammed in twenty yards or so from the car by all the people on the wide sidewalk. It was difficult to move. The traffic had stopped in the street. I didn’t see any police except for the young cop Janice had berated, who was making his way to the spot she had been pointing to.
Eduardo and now another volunteer from the office were covering Kwang. He motioned for me to take his position and I cuffed John at the elbow, his head still covered beneath Eduardo’s outercoat. Eduardo shouted for us to wait and then ran the long way around, halfway down the block and back. He finally got behind the wheel of the car and started it up. He was maneuvering it to and fro, trying to back it onto the sidewalk so that they could get to us. I could see Janice in the backseat urging him to keep moving. I thought they were going to roll over people, crush somebody. But a seam opened and Janice pushed out the door when they neared us. I shielded his head and slid him into the backseat. When Janice saw him she screamed but he assured her in a calm voice, “I’m okay, I’m okay. No worry. I’m okay.” He looked shaken but fine. I shut the door. He looked up at me through the window and gave a weak thumbs-up. His lips said, I was sure in Korean, Thank you. There were cameras behind me and I was careful not to turn directly around. I rapped the roof of the car twice and Eduardo moved it slowly through the crowd before squealing off north, through the red lights, for Queens.
Jack and I spoke regularly. I called him from various pay phones in Flushing or from the flat in Manhattan our firm rented. Sometimes, when we were both in the city, we met there. The apartment was nothing special. It was in the East Thirties, an alley-side studio on the third floor of a shabby rent-controlled building. The tenants were mostly older folks who’d lived there since before the war, and then all the illegal subletters. A lot of them were time-sharers like stewardesses or nursing students, or guys running dispatch for gypsy cabs and escort services or telephone rigs like astrology or phone-sex parlors. The kind of people who generally didn’t hang out in the halls or make conversation. It was the perfect setup for Dennis Hoagland, who himself had background-checked all thirty-six apartments. He paid the super $50 a month for any changes and names.
“The scared and the scamming,” he liked to say, “always give the best cover.”
You got in with a plastic key, the kind big hotels use. The door had a brushed brass plate with a slot and heavy-duty handle. You inserted the key and heard a plush click. A green pinlight went on. It was fully automated. This way, Hoagland could change the code at will from the Westchester office, then have Candace cut the appropriate keys. He readily admitted it was completely unnecessary. He said he was American and so reserved the right to flagrant displays of technology. Every few weeks he would distribute new keys to us. Jack immediately threw his away.
The place had two windows, a large, many-paned one in the main area that faced the alley, and then another in the bathroom. Both were blacked out with matte spray paint. There was an air conditioner for cooling and ventilation. Hoagland had furnished the place with a three-bay sound partition, each bay fitted with a dedicated phone line and laptop with fax/modem. There was a shared printer and a coffee machine. A blobby gesture at a sofa near the door, and his trademark fake orchids in the corners. The idea, in his words, was for the place to be a kind of “work lounge” for those of us on assignment in the city, or for “associates” of ours having unexpected layovers. Of course, it didn’t get much use.
Jack said it was the wet-dream version of the treehouse Hoagland never had as a boy.
“You’re all fucking over me,” Dennis answered him. He grinned. “But you’re wrong. It’s the one I burned down.”