He stared at Lucky’s gaunt, ashen face, noticed the disinfectant smell of decay, death waiting at the door; a deteriorating body connected to adhesive electrodes measuring its heartbeats.
Jack remembered racing across Chinatown rooftops with Lucky, two hingdaai, blood brothers, leaping the gaps between buildings. There were three of them then, three teenage pals, before Wing Lee was knifed to death that seventeenth summer of their Chinatown lives.
Jack wasn’t sure why he was in the hospital room, watching Lucky’s passing moments. He wasn’t expecting Lucky to suddenly wake up and give him all the information he needed to close the case, but he felt that being in Lucky’s presence was somehow going to provide another clue as to what had happened leading up to the shoot-out at Chatham Square. A clue to how the Chinatown troubles had brought all these cases of death across his desk. Jack hoped, in a farfetched Ah Por-the-seer kind of way, that something would come to him here: a jarred memory, a symbol, a number or an address, something. He remembered the serene setting of the Doyers Street back-alley crime scene, where an old man, ah bok, had died of a heart attack, slumped up against a wall, and where a young gangbanger lay face-down dead, reaching out his gun hand in the bloody snow, four high-velocity .22s through his back.
Was Lucky involved?
The blazing shoot-out near OTB on Chatham Square was something Jack could understand: a sudden gun battle, instinctive, spontaneous. Jing deng, meant to be. But the back-alley killing behind OTB seemed removed, not just physically, from the rest of the bloodshed. What did the old man witness before he’d suffered the heart attack?
Had it involved Lucky?
Jack knew Lucky had had an apartment somewhere in Chinatown, probably paid for by the On Yee. He’d probably also had several crash pads around the neighborhood. Nothing would be under his name, of course, so they would be impossible to trace. Only the gangboys would know all the locations. The On Yee had probably swept through all of Lucky’s places already, Jack figured. All the places they knew about, anyway. Lucky had had other hiding places, Jack remembered, tenement niches scattered across the rooftops of their childhood.
The life-support machine continued to pump rhythmically as he leaned in toward Lucky’s face. In a whisper, he repeated what they used to say as teenagers, “Us against the world, kid.”
Jack stepped back, trying for a moment of clarity. Here was his old friend at the far edge of a life in the shadows, a nonentity, nothing in his name, no history. A ghost ironically, the latest dailo of the Ghost Legion. Jack remembered how Tat had claimed payback against the punk hotheads who’d killed Wing. Then he’d disappeared into gangdom, born again with the nickname “Lucky,” just as Jack was getting his discharge from army Airborne. Their lives went in opposite directions after that.
At 11PM Jack called for a see gay, Chinatown radio car, to take him back to Sunset Park. He closed the curtain to Lucky’s space and said good-night to the overnight nurse.
The see gay took him back to Brooklyn, to an all-night Chiu Chao soup shack on Eighth Avenue, where he quietly polished off a siew-yeh, a nightcap of beef noodles and tripe. Back at home, he felt exhausted but spent the night at his window, waiting for the light of dawn to break, watching the shades of blackness fade to a new morning.
Searching
When Mona first arrived in Seattle, she had scoured the listings in the Wah bo, overseas Chinese newspapers, settling for a basement rental from a Chinese couple in a two-family house that was formerly Filipino-owned, and was within walking distance of Chinatown.
Concerned about safety, the elderly pair had specified that they’d wanted a female tenant only.
Jing deng, Mona thought. Destiny.
She had told them that her name was Mona, a name she had taken after the Mong-Ha Fortress in Macau, where she’d gone on a gambling junket long ago. She’d paid two months in advance without question, two thousand, cash. No paperwork requested or offered.
They were delighted when she said she’d hoped to stay the entire year.
They’d dedicated a slot on the mailbox for her name. There were Filipinos in the neighborhood but she didn’t encounter any other Chinese in the area, which suited her just fine. Less chance of acquiring nosy neighbors.
The street sign at the corner read JAMES STREET, the English spelling of which she’d remembered from growing up poor in British Hong Kong, near King James Road.
Thirteen blocks west brought her to the cloudy bay. She passed through a tourist area of restaurants and quaint shops, until the waterfront opened to tracks and piers, a juncture for trains and ferries, ships and buses heading north, or south. Seven blocks south brought her to Chinatown, where she could blend in even as she purchased essential daily items and groceries, and memorized the locations of businesses, post offices, and banks.
Bo bo lay, she thought, step by step. Proceed with caution.
She’d learn the destinations of trains and ships soon enough.
The basement apartment was a large studio room that included a tiny shower and toilet. There was a closet and a wall shelf that served as a makeshift kitchenette, fitted with an electric hot plate, a rice cooker, and a toaster oven, all left behind by the former tenant, a pinoy seaman who’d skipped out on the rent. The old couple had recommended a Chinese locksmith, who’d changed the existing cylinder.
Mona had purchased new sheets and blankets for the full-size bed that came with the apartment. In Chinatown, she’d found ingredients for quick-fix meals, and had the Oriental Market deliver a hundred-pound sack of rice. It was more than she needed but would serve other purposes.
Her bed faced the door, in proper fung shui arrangement. Seated at the foot, she sprinkled some ginseng into the Ti-Kuan Yin, Iron Goddess, before sipping from the steaming cup of tea. Scanning the room she saw the small Buddha kitchen god, a mini orange tree and a potted jade plant, a statuette of the Goddess of Mercy, and various bot gwa, I Ching charms, facing northeast and fending off evil.
The apartment door was covered in red, the Chinese color of luck, like her new jade bangle, not expensive but lucky. The door was festooned with leftover Chinese New Year decorations she’d scooped up in Chinatown, crimson banners and gold posters proclaiming chut yup ping on, “exit and enter in peace,” and welcoming long life and prosperity. At the center of this red collage was a big fold-out lucky calendar from Kau Kau Restaurant, from which she frequently ordered takeout. Whenever she approached the door to leave the apartment, she believed she was heading into good fortune.
She’d found a Chinese hair salon seven blocks to the southeast, a left at Wong Dai gaai, King Street, another English spelling she’d remembered from King James Road. She’d also learned to avoid certain areas near Chinatown where gwailo, white devils, joy mao, alcoholics and addicts, aggressively panhandled. A couple had followed her for blocks through the dilapidated neighborhood of men’s missions and homeless shelters. She’d heard murmured growls of “China doll” and “Suzie Wong” as they wagged their slimy tongues obscenely at her. She didn’t understand the words but felt their angry sexual intent. Men were dogs, she’d remembered from Hong Kong, and these were strays and mutts.
Wong Dai gaai was the way to and from Chinatown, she’d decided, past the small park where elderly Chinese folks in their quilted jackets congregated, played chess, and gossiped away the time.
The Way