A Bitter Feast Read online

  “No,” he said. “Wait. That’s not the point.”

  “What’s not?”

  “For you to get involved in this.”

  I gestured around our table, at the diminished mounds of scallops and watercress, the depleted bowl of rice. “I thought it was exactly the point. You buy dinner; I find your guy.”

  “Lydia, come on. Mary would kill me if I hired you for this.”

  “You hire me all the time.”

  “But this—Lydia, these guys have disappeared. I don’t think it means anything bad, but we have to consider that it could. This could be dangerous. You might …”

  He trailed off, so I finished for him. “I might go chasing out to Elmhurst and get myself killed?”

  “Well, Lydia, it wouldn’t be—”

  “Don’t start. I did you and Mary a major favor that time.”

  “Mary would be the first to agree. She just wants to make sure you come to our wedding before we go to your funeral.”

  I stopped, a mushroom halfway to my mouth. “Wedding?”

  “Hey, just metaphorically. Just in a manner of speaking.”

  Oh, sure. And the sudden burgundy flush of Peter’s face behind his thick glasses was just a reflection off the neon sign in the window. And his sudden consuming interest in his glass of beer was just idle curiosity. And I was the Monkey King’s uncle.

  “You know,” I said, “you’re lucky your problem intrigues me more than your love life. Though not very much more, I might add.”

  “Please. Can we leave my love life out of it?”

  “Fat chance. But we can put it off long enough for you to tell me what it is you do want me to do.”

  “I want you to tell me what to do.”

  “About your love life?”

  “Lydia! About Chi-Chun Ho.”

  “And what do you mean, tell you what to do?”

  “To find the guy. How would you go about it? What should I do next? Should I hire someone? Should I—”

  “Peter.” I put down my chopsticks, spoke slowly to my old friend. “Peter, who exactly would you hire if you didn’t hire me?”

  “Well, I …” The wine tint was back in his face, but the reason was different this time. “I guess I hadn’t gotten that far.”

  “Uh-huh. And why exactly, if you did hire someone, would it not be me?”

  “Oh, please, Lydia.” Behind the glasses Peter’s eyes looked panicky. “Mary—”

  “Mary. My best and oldest friend. And I’m sitting here with possibly my second best and certainly my second oldest friend. And you asked me here to get advice on what I would do if you hired me to do what I do so you can go get someone else to do it?”

  “Lydia, don’t look at me that way.”

  “Peter, you’re kidding me, right? I’ll just decide you’re kidding me.”

  I nodded in a satisfied sort of way and went back to my watercress and my scallop-sauced rice.

  “Oh, Lydia …” Peter trailed off, unhappily, and drank some beer. I kept eating. “But …” he said. I kept eating. “I …” More eating.

  “Okay.” He sighed. “I know when I’m licked.”

  Three

  I left Peter among the ruins of our dinner and headed over to the Mott Street address he’d given me. Propriety demanded he spend some time chatting with Mr. Shen, and under normal circumstances I would have stayed and done the same. But I had a case to work, albeit for a client who had to be steely-eyed into giving me the address of his client and practically strong-armed into calling over there to say I was coming. It was already a few minutes past eight, and I didn’t want to take the chance of finding no one there.

  Although according to Peter it was a small chance: Warren Tan, twenty-two-year-old honors Yale grad, dedicated organizer, brilliant union strategist, was always there.

  And he was when I arrived. The chipped plastic directory nailed to the side of the Mott Street building listed the occupants of the basement space as “Restaurant Workers” in English, the Chinese characters adding “Chinese.” No one mentioned “Union.” I went down the areaway stairs and knocked on the only door I found there, a scratched painted-steel thing with a tiny peephole.

  It was opened, after my second try, by a thin young man with wire-rim glasses and buzz-cut hair. He seemed to be bouncing on the balls of his feet, not quite standing still, as he said, “Yes?”

  “I’m Lydia Chin,” I told him. “You’re Warren Tan, right? Peter Lee called to say I’d be coming over?” I added, “I know your brother Jeremy.”

  “You’re the detective?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can I see some ID?”

  So brother Jeremy’s not enough, I thought, as I took my license from my wallet and handed it to Warren Tan. Of course, if I were lying about being Lydia Chin, I might be lying about knowing Jeremy, too.

  Since most people have no idea what a New York State investigator’s license looks like, I always wonder why they ask for it; I could show them anything. Sometimes I do. In this case, however, I handed Warren Tan the real thing, and he ran his quick eyes over both sides of it, actually reading it, expiration date and all.

  “I had to check,” he said—by way, it seemed to me, of explanation but not apology—as he handed it back. His words were quick, too, as though, having thought of them, saying them was just a mechanical necessity to be gotten out of the way as fast as possible. “I think I remember you, actually. You were in chem lab with Jeremy in high school.”

  “That wasn’t my fault,” I said hastily. “He was the one who wanted to see what happened if you added the yellow stuff to the blue stuff.”

  Warren Tan’s face lit with a grin. “Funny,” he said. “Jeremy always said it was you. Come on in.” He stood aside so I could enter the offices of the Chinese Restaurant Workers’ Union.

  The place was a single small, low-ceilinged room, with a painted concrete floor and one too many glaring overhead lights. The battered file cabinets, chairs, and desks looked like refugees from a used-furniture dump. Not that you could see most of them, covered as they were with files, papers, newspapers, and white take-out containers, which scented the air with stale garlic and yesterday’s sesame oil. My mother would have sniffed that this was what happened when men set up housekeeping without women. In my heart I tended to agree with her, although her solution—that I should marry one of them and civilize him—was not, to me, the logical next step.

  Warren Tan lifted files off a folding chair for me, one of four around a table that had probably seen more mah-jongg games than someone’s old auntie could count before it was donated to this cause. His eyes darted around for a place to put the files; then he gave up. Sprawling in an even more rickety chair than mine, he balanced them on his lap. His shirtsleeves were rolled up above the elbow; he had, I noticed, well-muscled forearms.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  I said, “You know I’m here because of Chi-Chun Ho.”

  “Yes.”

  “I just wondered if you had any ideas where he and the others might have gone.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Or why.”

  Warren Tan cocked his head and, as though reminding me of the obvious, said, “Ho’s a union organizer.”

  “You think what Peter thinks, then? That they ran because they were threatened or something?”

  “That’s what Peter thinks,” he corrected me. “I think ‘ran’ is too big an assumption.”

  “You think something’s happened to them?”

  He met my gaze directly as he said, “It’s always a risk being in at the beginning of a union. Here more than most places.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, glancing around the paper-blizzarded, too-bright office. “Peter says it’s not done that way anymore.”

  Warren Tan gave me the quick smile again, this time with an ironic tinge. “Peter’s great,” he said. “He thinks the law can outmaneuver the bad guys. And in the end,” he said,
shifting in his chair, keeping the files in his lap by some fast grabbing, “he’s probably right. I think we’ll win, because we have to. But for now, the bad guys have a lot of moves.”

  “Including threats?”

  He gestured around the office with a sweep of the hand that took in the room, the union it housed, Chinatown. “Most of these guys are new here, some without papers. They’re in pretty desperate situations, a lot of them, and even the ones who’re legal are used to the way things were done in China. You can see them being intimidated, turning tail and running, even if Peter’s right and the threats are empty.”

  “And you’re not so sure he’s right.”

  “No.”

  “Has the union been threatened?”

  Warren Tan nodded. “Sure. Every major restaurant owner would like to see us disappear. One of them offered to chop me up and serve me as shiu mai.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “I don’t think so.” He grinned.

  “Anyone in particular making threats lately?”

  He pursed his lips and shook his head. “I don’t imagine we’re real popular with H. B. Yang these days. But he doesn’t have to be direct anymore.”

  “He doesn’t? Why not?”

  “With this East Point thing, he’s under the covers with some serious heavies. Peter must have told you about the NYLC?”

  “The what?”

  “New York Labor Council. We’ve been talking to them for months. They were all set to take us on. Now suddenly they won’t even take my calls.”

  I remembered back to the sunny street corner, the demonstration, and the guests who hadn’t shown up. “You think H. B. Yang is behind that?”

  “A friend of mine over there told me as much over an unofficial beer. There’s still community opposition to East Point, you know. The mayor appointed H. B. Yang to smooth that over—that’s what being the Mayor’s Adviser is all about. Until the community’s satisfied, the state won’t throw in its share, and until it does the project won’t move. And the NYLC’s construction trade members have an interest in it moving.”

  “And H. B. Yang can stop it dead.”

  He shook his head. “He won’t go that far. He wants the mayor to see him as a man who can deliver. But he can deliver faster or more slowly, easier or harder.”

  “So what do you mean, then?”

  “Well, he could insist on concessions from the unions as the price of community peace. He could demand, for example, that the construction unions take on Chinese workers. Other communities demand that, and they get it. Or, on the other hand, he could tell Chinatown how fabulous this new commercial center will be, and to think how much money it will bring to our restaurants and stores, and to sit down and shut up. He seems to be going that route, but don’t think there’s not something in it for him.”

  “And that something is the NYLC abandoning your union?”

  “It would make a big difference to him, and what does it cost them? They weren’t so sure they wanted us anyway. It’s not like we’re real red-blooded Americans or anything.”

  “They don’t really say that?”

  “Oh, of course not, but you know they think it. Yerrow people, eat lice, talk funny, ah-so, math geniuses, go correge, their kids get better jobs than my kids, to hell with them.”

  He shrugged. I didn’t have an answer, so I asked another question. “What you need from the NYLC—clout, Peter called it—can you get it somewhere else?”

  “What we need,” Warren Tan said, “is to be so visible we can’t be ignored. And yes. If the NYLC won’t help us, we’ll do it ourselves.”

  “How?”

  “Tomorrow night, for example.” Pinning down the files in his lap with one arm, he rummaged on a desk, yanked out a red-paper flyer a lot like the one from the coffin demonstration. “We proved we could disrupt the dim sum business. Now we’re going to show we can louse up dinner, too.”

  I read the flyer. It called, in English and Chinese, for a demonstration the next night, Friday, in front of Dragon Garden. “There might be banquets,” I said. “Family dinners. Friday’s a big night.”

  “That’s the point. Every member we can get together will be there. I called the media; this is our first night action, so they might even come.”

  “Do you think you can get a big enough crowd to make a difference?”

  “In H. B. Yang’s pocketbook? No. In the restaurant owners’ perception of us? Maybe. If not this time, next time. Or the time after. We have a lot of plans. A lot of actions coming up. But there’s no next time without this time.”

  I looked once more at the snowbanks of papers, the dusty, low-hanging overhead pipes, and thought about the difference between this place and the hushed halls of Yale. I asked Warren Tan what I’d asked Peter. “Doesn’t it bother you to be going up against H. B. Yang?”

  Warren Tan sat forward so abruptly that two of his files slipped to the floor. “No. We have to take Chinatown back from those guys. It’s time.”

  “Take it back?”

  His eyes glittered as he said, “It’s over, the way they used to run things. The ways they brought from China, where a few old men have all the power and that’s okay with everyone as long as we’re taken care of. Where Chinatown runs separately from the rest of the city, like Hong Kong used to run separately from China. It’s time for Chinatown to reunite with America.”

  The air was electric with his excitement. I couldn’t help grinning. “Is that one of your recruiting speeches?”

  “It’s one of my best. Don’t you think it’s true? You must. You’re still here.”

  “Here, in Chinatown? I was born here.”

  “You didn’t have to stay here. Your brothers didn’t, right? Jeremy moved out. Lots of people move out. But you’re still here. Like Peter. You must feel it: it’s our turn.”

  “Our turn?”

  “To take over. To run things. To actually bring these guys into the American dream”—he waved his arm around the room—“instead of throwing them crumbs and telling them how lucky they are and to work hard so their children can do well.”

  “Is that why you’re doing this?” I asked. “So you can run things? I don’t believe that.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “Not me. Us. All of us, not a small crowd of old men. Look at us: educated, healthy, middle-class Americans. Our folks lived hard lives so we could be that. There’s got to be more to it than a Rolex and a loft with a river view for all they gave up. My dad’s gone. I can’t pay him back for what he did any way but this: by fighting for these guys.”

  “Taking care of your ancestors,” I said softly. “The ABC way.”

  Warren Tan looked at me, then picked up the fallen files and sat back in his chair. “You’re right,” he said. “Damn, but you’re right. You see? You never stop being Chinese, no matter how American you are. Come on. Don’t you want to be part of it? Bringing Chinatown into the USA?”

  I met his gleaming eyes. “The only thing,” I said slowly, “that I want to be part of right now is finding Chi-Chun Ho and his roommates. If that helps your cause, I won’t object. But I have a job to do.”

  He was quiet for a moment. We both were, as heels clicked by the sidewalk-level window and water flowed in the overhead pipes. “Okay.” He smiled. “It will help, even if that’s not why you’re doing it. From each according to his means. You have more questions for me?”

  “Yes,” I said. The electric moment passed. “Can you tell me anything about the men who disappeared? Anything at all might help.”

  Warren Tan ran a hand over his bristling hair, came back to the everyday. “The only ones I know are Ho and Song Chan. And I don’t know much about them. They room together, but you know that.”

  My eyebrows went up. “You know Song Chan? Is he a union member? Peter didn’t tell me that.”

  “No. A sympathizer, but he won’t join. Peter probably doesn’t even know. Chan comes around and does grunt work, stuffing envelopes, folding flye
rs, even makes contributions out of his two bucks an hour, but we can’t get him to sign up.”

  “Isn’t that peculiar?”

  “Unfortunately not. We have a bunch like that. Mostly they’re scared, though I don’t get that vibe off Chan. But we don’t push. Whatever they can do.”

  “And you don’t know the others, Yuan Lee and Gai-Lo Lu?”

  “No.”

  “Friends, co-workers, girlfriends?”

  “No one I know. You might check around at Dragon Garden, if anyone will talk to you.”

  “They will. I’ll find a way.”

  “That’s what you do, huh?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Find a way. We’re alike like that, that’s why I recognize it. Yours is more private—maybe solitary’s a better word—but that’s what we both do: find a way. So now tell me: why do you do what you do?”

  “Me?” I surprised myself by telling him the truth. “I have four older brothers. All my life I felt like no one would ever tell me what was going on. This way it’s my job to find out.”

  That brought the grin back. “You like it?”

  “A lot.” I felt my cheeks redden. Well, gee, Lydia, I thought, just because you just told this almost-total stranger your deepest stuff is no reason to go getting embarrassed.

  “Listen,” I said. “If that’s all you can tell me …”

  “I could tell you all sorts of stuff,” he said, still grinning. “But that’s all I know about those four guys. You sure you don’t want to join the revolution?”

  “Not right now,” I said. “Thanks.” I stood to go.

  “Invitation’s open,” he said. “Anytime.”

  Warren Tan walked me the three steps to the office door, still holding his armful of files. “Thanks,” I said, and shook his hand. He grinned a final time and closed the steel door behind me.

  I trotted up the stairs and back onto the streets of Chinatown. I paused on the sidewalk to look around as though I hadn’t seen the place before. Then I headed home.

  Four

  The next morning found me in Elmhurst, Queens. It was a bright, breezy, suburban sort of morning, and I walked along a peaceful grid of tree-lined streets between semidetached houses of red brick and beige brick and vinyl made to look like wood. Some of the trees had yellow-green leaves just unfurling, and some had gone further than that, waving big shady canopies over the sidewalks, practicing for when summer came.