Finally, after sixteen hours on the job, with weariness pulling at his eyelids, he called for a Chinatown see gay, car service.
The Chinese driver spoke Cantonese, and took him straight out to Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Chinatown, without asking directions. Exhausted, Jack powered down the window and let the icy wind slap him awake.
He’d been thirsty long before he reached his studio apartment, but once inside he went directly to the cupboard in the kitchenette, took out a few sticks of incense, and lit them. He shook off the ash and fanned the wiggling tails of smoke as he planted them at the little shrine he’d made for Pa on the Parsons table near the windowsill, where he’d placed an old photo of his father dressed in Chinese-styled tong jong clothing.
Pa was now seven weeks buried in the hard ground of Evergreen Hills.
Jack’s next visit to the cemetery wouldn’t be until mid-January, on what would have been Pa’s birthday.
This sad day reminded Jack that he, too, though only twenty-seven, was at the end of his bloodline, a solitary remnant of the Yu clan, whose ancestry retreated back through the generations.
Eighty-eighth cop of Chinese-American descent. A lucky number, he’d thought. But it hadn’t worked out that way.
He could still hear the old man’s words. “Chaai lo ah? Now you’re a cop?” Pa had said with derision when Jack first put on the blue uniform. “Chinese don’t become policemen. They’re worse than the crooks. Everyone knows they take money. Nei cheega, you’re crazy. You have lost your jook-sing- American-born-mind. I didn’t raise you to be a kai dai-punk idiot-so they can use you against your own people.”
I never took any money, Jack hadn’t found the chance to say to his father.
Jack bowed three times before the shrine, then quickly found the Johnnie Walker Black and poured a tumbler full, cracking open a can of beer to chase it.
The whiskey had only coated his throat with fire. He told himself that the beer would chill him out, would let him sleep better, as he drained the can. He’d lost any appetite he’d had at the crime scene. Now he sat on the edge of his convertible couch nestled in the far corner of the studio. He kicked off his shoes, trying to focus, to make some sense of the days and weeks gone by since Pa’s death.
Four months earlier, what began as a hardship transfer to Chinatown’s Fifth Precinct to be closer to his dying father, had ended up with a promotion. Then he’d been transferred to the Ninth.
Bad memories from the period in between twisted together as the alcohol reached his brain. He drew the blinds against the afternoon light.
When he closed his eyes, his mind drifted. He fell asleep on the couch.
His sleep was pervaded by a restless disconnected feeling, fitful, punctuated by dreams.
He was seventeen again, running across rooftops at twilight, with Tat Louie, and Wing Lee. Three bloodbrothers, hingdaai. Tat was throwing pebbles at the tenement windows and they were shrieking with juvenile laughter as they ran; three Chinatown boys, mad with mischief, having the time of their young lives. Then suddenly, there were the ugly, sneering faces of Wah Ying street-gang members, wielding nasty 007 knives. A swirl of images: Tat, fighting, and Wing, being stabbed. For himself, a quick blackness as he was smashed across his forehead, blood running into his eyes. Then the scene faded to a Chinatown funeral parlor. Wing in a casket, his face dead white, and Tat running out, past the pallbearers, followed by the wailing of Wing’s mother. The incense smell of death.
He was watching his youth flash by, viewing it like a camcorder tape, the pictures harsh, unforgiving. Suddenly, Chinese cursing from somewhere, a sound he’s heard before. Pa’s voice.
Jack felt his body quake uncontrollably. The images flashed in his brain like sparks from a live wire. Japanese soldiers charging forward, samurai swords raised, hacking at Chinese babies, lunging at Chinese women with their bayonets, raping them. The flag with the red Rising Sun fluttering violently in the gale. Butchery. A thousand Chinese heads bouncing and rolling down a blood-slicked slope. And he is sliding, falling.
But this is Pa’s nightmare.
There is nonstop screaming and yelling, Say yup poon jai! Pa cursing, Jap bastards! Jack is at Pa’s side then, punching away at the bayonets and swords, until he bolts upright on the couch, nearly kicking over the boom-box radio, slowly realizing that it’s his own voice barking into the shadowy dark of the small room.
He sat up for a while, caught his breath, and after downing another shot of Johnnie Walker Black, gradually fell back to sleep.
The final dream was short, a twisted vision of Tat, a Chinatown gangster in a black leather trench. Tat “Lucky” Louie, offering him a big bag of money which he didn’t accept. Tat, who’d become an ugly liability.
The sound of wind chimes.
Tat has a nine-millimeter strapped to his hip, with sneering street punks spread out behind him. Jack sees his gold police shield dangling from a 007 knife.
He’s reaching to block the blade, to retrieve his shield, when darkness finally puts him down for the count.
Dog Eat Dog
Lucky gave the nine-millimeter Smith amp; Wesson a quick wipe along his shirt sleeve, slipped the clip back in, and chambered a hollow-point round. He flicked down the safety with his thumb and put the spare clip into the side pocket of his black leather blazer, which was draped over the recliner. His attention locked onto the television where Fukienese Chinese demonstrators marched across the big color screen, yelling and carrying signs as they surrounded One Police Plaza.
Lucky sucked back the last of the sensimilla joint, held the smoke a moment, hissed it all out. Then he closed his eyes and thought about face, and the future. As dailo-boss-of the powerful Ghost Legion gang, he knew that without face, there was no future. He knew intuitively that changes were occurring in his piece of the underworld, especially since the murder of Chinatown’s Hip Ching tong godfather, Uncle Four. For the younger Hip Chings, the subsequent death of Golo, Uncle Four’s dreaded enforcer, signaled a movement in the ranks. Ambitious heads hinted that the old leadership was ineffectual, and that the organization should be looking toward China-based alliances with outside forces like the triad Hung Huen, the Red Circle, alliances with triad paramilitary connections in the south of China. These alliances would bring them AK-47s and grenades. But with a hundred thousand Fukienese on the other side of East Broadway, Lucky felt this might not be a good thing. It might upset the balance of power.
On the TV, the five thousand Fukienese demonstrators were screaming for justice, protesting the shooting death of a Fukienese woman by a gang of teenaged thugs.
A trio of black and Latino teenagers had shot and killed a Chinese woman in a botched robbery of a 99-cent store.
Lucky thumbed down the volume and slipped the Smith amp;Wesson into a large gun pocket that Ah Wong the tailor had sewn inside his leather jacket. The newcomers to Chinatown, the Fukienese, were trying to gain control, to take over from the established tongs, the On Yee and the Hip Ching. Everyone was looking toward China now and the Fukienese-the Fuk Chings-were leading the way.
The earlier wave of immigrants had come from Canton, now known as Guangzhou, and had spoken Cantonese, as did their brethren from Hong Kong. They couldn’t understand the dialect of the recent Fukienese arrivals, who formed their own gangs-the Fuk Chow and Fuk Ching-that respected no one. They recruited only from the desperate dregs of their community.