‘The grandfather?’ Xiao Ling pursed her lips and blew a jet of air through them to demonstrate her contempt. ‘Like all the rest. Short and fat, with a big belly and bad breath. They get on top of you and hump for a couple of minutes and then they’re all spent. It’s hard to tell who you’re with.’
‘Anything else?’ Li prompted. ‘Anything else about him you can think of?’
She shook her head. ‘The shuk foo who gave me to him as a gift told me that it was an honour for me to be taken by the ah kung. He said no one else knew that’s who he was. And I was to tell no one or I would be in serious trouble. Then, when he introduced us, he called him something strange. A nickname. I remember thinking it was unusual. And the ah kung nearly struck him. He was very angry and told him never to call him that again.’ She thought back for a moment, shuddering at some unpleasant recollection, and then she said, ‘Yeah, that’s right. He called him Kat. I asked one of the other girls what it meant, and she said it was Cantonese for “tangerine”. You know, like for luck. I thought it was weird.’
‘Who was the shuk foo?’ Li asked.
Xiao Ling shook her head. ‘I don’t know his name. But he was always around the club. ‘You’d need to ask the dai lo. He was Badger’s uncle.’
Chapter Eleven
I
The Golden Mountain Club sat in a corner of Ximen Plaza, flanked on either side by rows of shops. Mona’s Skin Care, Mountain Optical, Old China Fast Food. A billboard tacked to the exterior advertised, in Chinese characters, John P. Wu, Dentist—Dentista. Immediately next door was a Vietnamese restaurant boasting dancing and karaoke. The entrance to the Golden Mountain Club itself sat back in the shade of a covered walkway. A couple of felony notices in English and Spanish were pasted to the smoked glass of the door. A sign read: SMOKING PERMITTED WITHIN. Which brought a smile to Li’s face. The idea of a non-smoking Chinese club was risible.
They had been watching the club from Hrycyk’s beat-up old Santana on the far side of the plaza for nearly three hours. It had opened shortly after midday, and a steady flow of customers had followed the first staff — a dozen or so young to middle-aged men wearing suits and ties beneath overcoats that were superfluous in the midday heat of a Texas fall, several girls with short skirts and painted faces, miscellaneous youths in jeans and sneakers. You could tell the staff from the customers. The staff all had dead eyes and a reluctant gait. The customers had an air of anticipation about them, a sense of optimism.
Reluctantly, Li had left Xiao Ling at the house in Georgetown, protected by two armed police officers. She had refused to accompany them to the morgue where Margaret had made a positive identification of one of Li’s attackers — the one who had made the slit-throat sign to her from the passenger seat of the white Chevy. He was the one Li had wrestled the gun from the previous night, blowing away one half of his face in the ensuing struggle.
Now he, Fuller and Hrycyk were going after the dai lo known as Badger. It was a straight line of connection from dai lo to shuk foo to ah kung. The problem, they knew, would be in persuading Badger to squeal. There were codes of honour and loyalty here that law enforcement officers had been unable to break in thousands of years.
It was nearly three when they saw the unmistakable white stripe through the dark hair of a young Chinese wearing a black leather jacket. He was walking across the plaza with the swagger of someone in possession of absolute self-confidence. His hands were pushed into the pockets of tight designer jeans, and he wore soft green suede shoes. His white tee-shirt was emblazoned with the logo of some American heavy metal band. The ubiquitous cigarette dangled from his lips. He swung open the door of the Golden Mountain Club and waltzed in like he owned the place.
Fuller was set to move there and then, but Hrycyk stopped him. The old immigration hand had been here many times before. ‘Give him time to settle,’ he said. ‘Time to have a beer or two. Time to relax. We’re not so likely to lose him that way. We go in now, he’s still buzzing. Physically, mentally alert. And let me tell you, Agent Fuller, I’ve had it with chasing people up alleys. I’m too old for that kinda shit.’
So they waited another half-hour. Li and Hrycyk smoked more of Hrycyk’s cigarettes. ‘First stop, you’re buying some of your own,’ Hrycyk kept saying.
Fuller, full of impatience and irritated by the constant smoking, kept the window wound down at his side. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘we bring along a HEPA mask so I can breathe.’
Li, sitting in the back, kept his own counsel and said nothing. Even if they were successful in pulling in the dai lo, he had grave doubts about how much, if anything, they would learn from him.
Hrycyk turned to him, and out of the blue said, ‘You were kidding me, right? About this heap being built in China?’
Li shook his head solemnly. ‘Rear off-side window winder always breaks off on them.’
Hrycyk looked at the broken window winder on the rear off-side window and narrowed his eyes. ‘You already clocked that,’ he said.
Li shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘Shit,’ Hrycyk said. ‘I’m trading this wreck in first chance I get.’ He opened the driver’s door. ‘Time to go and get that little Oriental bastard!’
Inside the main door there was a small reception area with a desk and a gold 3D profile of the United States mounted on the wall behind it. It was gloomy here, subdued red lighting, smoked glass doors turning day outside into night. A flunky in a suit looked up, startled. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘this is private club. Members only.’
Hrycyk pushed a warrant in his face. ‘Picked up my membership this morning,’ he said. ‘From a judge downtown.’ And he flipped open his wallet to show him his badge. ‘INS.’
Fuller waved his badge at him, too. And Li held up his maroon Public Security ID. ‘Beijing Municipal Police,’ he said. ‘CID, Section One.’ Which had a great deal more effect than either of the other two. The flunky paled. He reached forward under the desk, and Fuller grabbed his arm.
‘Uh-uh,’ he said. ‘No warnings. Where’s Badger?’
The flunky gulped. ‘In the bar.’
‘Show us.’
He pulled the little man out from behind the desk, and they followed him up dark, carpeted stairs and through a door into a large salon with tables set around an empty dance floor. There was a small stage at the far side, and a long bar set against the near wall. Subdued lighting around the perimeter of the salon revealed groups of two or three men, and the occasional girl, sitting drinking at tables. The light along the bar reflected in the faces of customers and girls perched on high bar stools, nursing drinks and smoking cigarettes. Badger and a couple of his ma zhai stood in a group at one end drinking beer by the neck. Some record from the singles charts was belting out across the sound system.
‘Turn that shit off,’ Fuller shouted at the flunky and pushed him toward the bar. The little man squeezed in past the barman and switched off the stereo. The sudden silence startled everyone in the salon, as much as if a gun had gone off. The hubbub of voices became instantly self-conscious and quickly died away. Eyes turned toward the three law enforcement officers. Hrycyk stepped up to Badger and pushed a gun in his face and flapped his badge at him. The dai lo grinned his passive defiance as Hrycyk frisked the pockets of his leather jacket and drew out his wallet, flipping it open to the ID window.