Jack sought out Ah Por, a wizened old woman wrapped in a quilted meen naafi silk jacket, her tiny feet in sweat socks and kung fu slippers. She squatted among the old women, on her footstool, quietly chatting with another ancient spirit.

The old women looked atJackwith great curiosity, though they were careful to avoid the rudeness of staring. They watched him sidewise, framing him in their peripheral vision. When he stepped tip to Ah Por, there by the fence, the old women moved aside to allow him in, then re-formed around him, all wondering what this young Chinese man wanted from their eldest sister.

Jack had remembered Pa going to Ah Por many years after Ma died. His visits were to get lucky words and numbers to play the Chinese Lottery, or to hear of good fortune. Now he was coming to Ah Por with victim photographs of young girls, Chinese girls with long black hair.

There was neither recognition nor fear in Ah Por's eyes. She simply accepted him with a sweeping graceful look, and he squatted down on one knee and held the two pictures in front of her.

"Tell me about them," he said.

She took the photographs and studied them intently, then turned them upside down, narrowed her eyes again.

Two preteen girls who looked enough alike that they might be sisters. Preppie school jackets, big smiles grinning out at the world, deep obsidian eyes.

"This one is shy," said Ah Por. "She holds back her laughter. The other is bright, a brave girl."

Ah Por took up her cup, rolled a bundle of bamboo sticks in her alm, letting them fall back into the cup, rolling them again, dropping them again. She did this for thirty seconds, did it with the practiced grace of someone telling rosary beads.

She bobbed her head in a slow rhythmic nod, closed her eyes. Tai Seung, thoughtJack, the art of reading faces.

Ah Por awoke with a shudder. When she rattled the sticks in her cup, they all seemed to rise and dance near the rim. One stick shot out and it was numbered seventeen. She consulted her red booklet with the black ink-brushed Chinese characters, the Book of Fortunes.

She stroked the pages with her long thumbnail, ran it down the columns of proverbs, tapped it on a section of fortunes.

"The first one," she said softly, "will marry a rich man and have two boys." Jack leaned in with his ear.

"The second will do well in school, make a lot of money."

Jack said nothing when she glanced at him.

"But there is something bad following them, isn't there?"

Jack said quietly, "A bad man has hurt them."

Ah Por caught her breath. "Oh dear."

She repeated it several times and then there was a long pause, her eyes looking distant when she said, "I see fire, and someone with small ears."

"The bad man?" Jack asked.

"Fire," she repeated, voice so faint it was almost gone, "and small ears."

Jack got up, gave her five dollars. He thanked her and made his way through the circle of old women.

Nothing, he thought. He had nothing but riddles and proverbs, spirit mumbo jumbo and witchcraft.

And someone was out there raping young Chinese girls.

Nothing, he groused, as he came back around the park, passing through the queues of junket buses, caravans loaded down for Atlantic City, fat with Chinatown cash.

On Canal Street, the last of the gray day was fading out around the gong chong por, factory women, slogging their plastic bags of groceries toward the subway.

Jack turned onto Mott and headed back toward the Fury. He still had Billy's boxes to get, and frustration once again fueled the need to get away from Chinatown.

Change

He took the Brooklyn Bridge across the East River, felt the rumble leave the tires as they bit into the steel grating, the car making a blurring dull buzz-saw sound as it descended toward land.

He drove down the sloping streets south to the Forties, to Sunset Park, the newest Chinatown and his new neighborhood. He had moved out here a year ago, only the second place he could call his own, the first being the Chinatown railroad flat he had shared with Wing Lee that teenage summer before his friend was murdered.

Once a Scandinavian community called Finntown, Sunset Park had become largely Latino, but in the 1990s, the Chinese garment industry had followed low rents out of Manhattan, settled into old warehouses and factories here, blazing the way for the thirty thousand Malaysians and Fukienese who came afterward. Their food shops ran along the main streets, bringing to South Brooklyn the aroma of the Asian hot pot.

Jack took a studio apartment in a renovated red-brick condominium building. It had a view of the harbor and the Bush Terminal docks and, ten minutes across the river, it felt like another world, light-years from the Chinatown he'd grown up in.

He liked the sight of the ships, the freighters that glided across the water, nestled into their docks by the tugs bumping alongside. The way the sunsets played over the harbor was like new medicine, soothing, long overdue.

Now, however, there was nothing but darkness spreading across the overcast horizon.

He poured a Johnny Black into a tumbler and chased it with beer, felt an easy peacefulness settling over him as he scanned the studio.

Even now, a year after he'd moved in, he still kept things to a minimum, mostly portable, transient, disposable items, his life in flux. The spirit of his father, the sojourner, was still in his blood. He leaned back in the recliner, taking a visual inventory of the room.

There was the convertible sofa bed, a Trinitron TV on a plastic Parsons table, and a halogen floor lamp. At the end of the table was a compact digital clock/radio/stereo CD/tape player, and on the windowsill sat a miniature orange tree.

Across from the kitchenette stood a black folding table bearing stacks of Newsweek, Guns amp; Ammo, and a disconnected beeper he'd bought so Pa could call him, but he never had. There were a few books: Wing Chun, the deadly art of thrusting fingers, and Choy Li Fut Kung Fu. Beneath all that was a bar stool; a pair of dusty Rollerblades rested against the baseboard.

He had a Mr. Coffee, a wok, a twenty-five-pound sack of rice in a Tupperware barrel.

The only thing on the walls was a poster he'd gotten from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Japanese one with the wave crashing.

In the bank, he had the eight thousand dollars he'd saved. He had no outstanding payments or mortgage debt, his financial life was balanced on a cop's salary. His was a workingman's life, so much like Pa's, a slave to his paycheck, never knowing the luxurious lifestyle of the people he was duty bound to serve and protect.

His thoughts flashed wide and scattered, his mind adrift, anchorless. He ate takeout from Eighth Avenue, reloaded the black knapsack, felt he needed to finish something so he finished the Johnny Walker and fell out, puzzling over the old family photographs with the radio on.

The Easy Score

The Yee Bot was a Fuk Ching gambling-spot setup in a tenement storefront, one of many in a long row of walk-up tenements fading to the far end of the street. Lucky knew this end of East Broadway, knew it was the Chinese frontier, where they had pushed into areas traditionally Jewish, now mixed with spics and niggers and squashed up against the East River into the Projects.

He knew the tenements connected along their backyards, like a spine running between them, some of the passageways blocked up or gated. He had broken into some of these apartments when he was younger, terrorized the neighborhood until one day he entered a place he thought was Chinese but was actually Puerto Rican and almost got shot dead. He stayed clear of that end of East Broadway until he hooked up with the Ghosts, quietly watching the neighborhood fill with Fukienese businesses.