Murphy stood there speechless, the red rising in his cheeks.

Jack turned and went up the stairs, the tension at the back of his head now.

Back to work, his mind was telling him, let the work clear out the funk of Pa c passing. His anger had been vented, and he channeled what remained of the adreno-rush toward the open-case files on the desk.

He took three breaths, centered himself, focused. The thinnest file was the most recent, labeled Chinatown Rapist using the headline slug from the Daily News. The report said that a slender Asian man in his twenties was raping young Chinese girls on the Lower East Side. Detectives from the Sex Crimes unit had officially taken over and composite sketches had gone out, and were posted throughout the Fifth and the Seventh Precincts, in apartment buildings, Bung chongs-factories-bodegas, on corner lampposts. By-the-book procedure.

A week after the headlines, he'd struck again. A six-year-old Taiwanese girl this time. Forced her to the roof at knifepoint and sodomized her. Right back into the neighborhood, snatched another one right under their noses.

They had semen samples and Chinatown rumors. The Fuhienese, the new ones, it must be them. One of the boat slaves. Who else could go so low but theFuk Chow?

The Benevolent Associations respectfully pressured the police for action. The families of the victims secretly met with their tongs.

Now, there was only the waiting.

Jack went from the file to the night-shift blotter on the wall behind him. There was a notation after the shift changed that four Chinese men had been admitted to Emergency at Downtown Hospital with nonlethal gunshot wounds. All were Fukienese, and all claimed to be victims of a drive-by shooting by perpetrators unknown. Beat cops at the alleged shooting location found no evidence of any shooting.

Somebody's lying about something Jack thought immediately, to cover up something bigger. For a moment his mind drifted, then he caught himself. The night dicks. Their shift, and they'd caught the squeal. He'd be wasting his time.

He went back to the files.

The last file, which he'd titled Fuk Ching/Golden Venture, was thick with photographs and news articles.

Ten Chinamen had drowned in the rough and frigid chop as hundreds more jumped ship. The reports had crackled back and forth on the Fury's radio. The Coast Guard plucked up the dead bodies, rounded up the shivering human cargo for Immigration. They were counted, declared a menace, shuffled onto buses for detention, escorted by a flotilla of police wearing surgical masks.

The backlash began almost immediately. The media painted them ugly, called them "human contraband," "economic refugees," the newYellow Peril, coming to take American jobs, to take food out of the mouths of American children. The New York Post declared Thousands Feared in NYDungeons, dragging up the Ghost of Fu Manchu, and illegal alien slaves kept prisoner by Chinese se jai, snakehead, gangsters. The tag "Snakeheads" was added to the American vocabulary.

At City Hall, the first black mayor said nothing. No black voices rose up to decry the new slave trade.

One ship a week, seven hundred workers per, thirty thousand a head. Twenty million per shipload. It wasn't the first time Chinese people jumped ship. Grandpa had done it several times in the Forties. America didn't want the Chinese then, didn't want them now.

Never had a Chinamen's chance, thought Jack, frowning at the irony.

He scanned the most recent report describing gunfire blasting the pre-dawn quiet over Teaneck, a sleepy New Jersey town near the Hackensack River. The state troopers had arrived at the rented Fuk Ching safehouse and found the bodies.

On the first floor, two Chinese men lay dead of knife and gunshot wounds. In the basement, two others, bound with duct tape, shot in the head point-blank. Outside the house, another wounded man, DOA at Hackensack Medical.

A Chinatown gang war had spilled across the river.

Stuck to the case file was a square of yellow memo on which he had written Alexandra Lee-Chow, AJA, 10 a. m.

The methods of the flesh smugglers had morphed, and suddenly Chinese boat people were detained in Honolulu, Southern California, San Francisco Bay, San Diego Harbor, Jacksonville Bay, and as close as Baltimore, and Charlotte. Now they had arrived in New York City, crashing only because a violent rift between the Fuk Ching smugglers prevented transport from reaching the mother ship Venture.

Jack took the file, turned his back to the squad room, and headed out toward East Broadway. On the street he moved past pairs of shifty eyes, came up behind groups of Chinese men huddled outside the Fukien Employment Agency storefronts, crowded around payphones, beneath the nimble of subway trains descending along the Manhattan Bridge. The men spoke Fukienese in gruff tones, their phrases weaving, punctuated, like a cross between Vietnamese and Hakkanese. They commandeered the phones to call internationally with stolen calling cards and numbers. But Jack knew better, knew you couldn't rely on a payphone in NewYork City if your life depended on it. He felt the hard edge of his own cell phone in his pocket, then he was at Division Street, moving away from the crowds massing in the noonday. New immigrants, out from rent -a-bed apartments and basement subcellars.

He crossed Division to Market Street, past the Service Center, saw loitering zombies waiting to cop their methadone fixes, trade WIC coupons, food stamps, prescriptions, and then infest Chinatown seeking opportunities to steal, maybe rape. Junkie time, Jack called it, when parents were out at work, children at school, old folks in the park or buying the evening's groceries. Any advantage. An open window, an unguarded hand truck, a car left idling, a dangling handbag, a briefcase unattended. Looking to get paid.

The low-life scum of NewYork City, thrown down here with the Chinese because no other community wanted them, and because the Chinese were too politically impotent to fight back.

He went east again on Market until he could see Chrystie Slip, closing his mind to the ugly politics of it all.

Knowledge

The AJA, pronounced Asia, was an activist organization that got its juice from young Asian lawyers doing pro bono time, financed by private donations and matching government grants.

They were operating out of a converted storefront down on Chrystie Slip, where the streets left Chinatown and entered Noho.

Jack drifted past the junkie parks and the auto-repair garages until he came to what was once a bodega, under a yellow sign that read ASIAN AMERICAN JUSTICE ADVOCACY.

When he entered he saw her.

Alexandra Lee-Chow. She was thirtysomething, dressed downtown and wore a diamond band on her wedding finger.

The receptionist stalled him at the front desk, and watching Alexandra now, across the room, Jack began to think how uneasy women with hyphenated names made him feel. Ambitious women. The ones who wanted the lab careers, the motherhood, the perfect marriage, strung tight and fully charged.

Lee-Chow. Taking her husband's name but refusing to give up her own, trying to impose the past upon the future. Or maybe it was a gender power thing that came with the white collar.

She reminded him of Maylee, the type she'd become.

"Alexandra Lee-Chow," she announced to him, with a look of skeptical appraisal. "How can I help you?"

"JackYu," he answered. "I'm following up the Golden Venture situation."

"Right, that's what you said on the phone."

Jack saw the impatience in her eyes, and he said, "Right, a murder occurred-"

"And I told you they're being detained in minimum-security facilities on the East coast."