A Bitter Feast Read online

  The street didn’t need their help to stay cool on this windy day, but I was grateful for it. The uniform jacket I’d wheedled out of my cousin Luke last night, with an absolute promise to claim I’d bought it at a yard sale if any trouble happened—and a promise to take him for drinks at the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, trouble or not—was made for colder days than this. “Well, I can’t lend you the light one,” he’d reasoned. “I have to actually work tomorrow.” And the box I was lugging was full of flashlights and wrenches and pliers and things like that, which my mother had complained about my taking as I’d loaded them up the night before, even though she has never in recorded history held one of them in her hand.

  “What if one of your brothers comes here to fix something? He can’t if you have all those things out with you,” she’d said as I’d clicked the box shut.

  “Is anything broken, Ma?”

  “No.” She shook her head.

  “Okay, well, I promise you nothing will break until I get back with the tools.” I’d kissed her good-night and hauled the box into my bedroom as she squinted after me, probably thinking of the dire consequences to follow if the bathroom faucet, affronted by the arrogance of my guarantee, chose the next morning to begin to drip.

  Anyway, maybe she was right. The toolbox was only insurance anyhow, just a costume accessory. I was the one beginning to drip, with sweat. The box was getting seriously heavy by the time I reached the house where, according to Peter, Chi-Chun Ho and three other workers from Dragon Garden lived in the basement.

  The house was no different from others on the block: two small rectangles of treeless front lawn bisected by a straight cement walk led to the steps and the red-painted door. A driveway on the left ended in a garage. On the right, the house shared a wall with the house beside it. I stood for a moment, looking it over, then crossed the street and headed up the walk.

  At the top of the steps I rang the bell. A few moments’ wait, then the door half opened and a woman’s face peered out. “Yes?”

  That one word sounded Cantonese-accented to me, and she certainly looked Chinese. So, speaking English, I thickened my own accent, normally imperceptible, I’m told, to all but the most serious linguists among us. “Cable TV.” I whipped out the ID I’d run off last night at the twenty-four-hour color-copy-and-laminating place.

  She frowned, checked out the ID, my uniform jacket, my navy-blue pants, and my sensible shoes, and said again, “Yes?”

  “Ah, problems in whole neighborhood. My partner, around the corner, with truck.” I eyed her, switched languages. “Do you speak Chinese?” If I was right, “Chinese” would mean “Cantonese” to her, as it did to me.

  She nodded. “Chinese,” she said, Cantonese-fashion, sounding relieved. She continued in the ancestral tongue. “We aren’t having trouble with the cable TV.”

  “No, the trouble is over on the Avenue.” I gestured vaguely over my shoulder in the direction of the sounds of traffic. “But my partner has instructed me to check some houses where he thinks it might be coming from.” I put down my toolbox—a welcome relief—and took a small notebook from my jacket pocket. I flipped it open and stepped back to check the number on her house, then closed it again. “Liu, is that right? May I please check your connections?”

  She pursed her lips. “We aren’t having trouble.”

  “Please,” I said nervously. “I just got this job. My partner has a lot of seniority. I have to do what he tells me or I’ll get fired.”

  I could see her soften. Being Chinese, she would have a hard time letting herself come between a worker and her boss’s orders.

  “Please,” I said again. “It will just take a few minutes. Just a fast look at each TV.” I flipped open the notebook again. “My records show you have cable on the first floor, upstairs, also in the basement. Very quick. No mess,” I added.

  Still she frowned.

  “Oh.” I let my eyes light up as though I’d caught on. “You have people living in the basement?”

  Her face froze with suspicion.

  “Don’t worry about it.” I grinned, lowering my voice conspiratorily, even though we were still speaking Chinese and even though there wasn’t another human being on the street. “My mother has three people in our old garage in Flushing. After all, you have to make a living. Times are so hard.”

  She nodded in flint-faced agreement.

  “That’s why I need this job,” I said. I almost added “To help out my mother,” but I’d probably be struck by lightning if I used my mother in a lie. “I won’t even see anything else down there except the TV,” I told her. I looked over my shoulder anxiously, as though scanning the street for my partner’s truck.

  She frowned again, but then she nodded. I moved past her as she held the door; she shut it behind me. She gestured me to the left, and I went that way, into a sky-blue-carpeted living room with brocade-slipcovered furniture and some really ugly three-dimensional landscapes made out of shells hanging on the walls. The TV wasn’t hard to find; it was huge, filling the center of a wall of shelves, each of which held one or at most two showcased shell-encrusted items: statues or reliefs or bookends with no books between them.

  “You have a lovely home,” I told Mrs. Liu, setting down my box. “With times the way they are, you must be as skilled a homemaker as my mother, to keep things like this.”

  That was using my mother, but it wasn’t a lie—at least, the part about my mother wasn’t—so I didn’t worry about the lightning.

  “Everything is dusty,” Mrs. Liu said, rejecting the compliment, which meant I had hit my target with it and she was flattered. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  “Of course not, with how busy you must be. I do appreciate your letting me in. I won’t be long.”

  Mrs. Liu watched as I swiveled the TV on its revolving stand, poked at its wires, scribbled in my notebook. I opened my toolbox and took out a device I’ve seen my brother Elliot use. Elliot is responsible for electric repairs at our apartment; Ted does the plumbing and Andrew does anything that requires hammers and nails. Tim, of course, is totally useless.

  Elliot uses this gadget to determine whether a circuit is live or not. I touched its ends to the place where the cable came into the box and to some other place, then turned on the TV and did it again, wondering whether I’d get electrocuted. I didn’t, so I packed up the box and gave Mrs. Liu a reassuring smile. “This one’s fine.”

  She took me up the stairs to the bedroom, past shell reliefs mounted on the walls. I was prepared for the bedroom to be Shell Central, even hoped for shell-covered nightstands and a shell-studded four-poster bed, but when we got there there wasn’t a shell in sight, just the sky-blue carpet, simple gauzy drapes, and some family photographs. I wondered what that meant in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Liu, and decided never to ask. It took just a few minutes to go through the same rigamarole with the bedroom TV, and then we were ready for the apartment in the basement.

  Mrs. Liu took me into the kitchen, down a few steps and out the side door onto the driveway, and immediately to another door right next to it. She knocked; nothing happened while we waited. She knocked again.

  “Are your tenants home at this time of day?” I asked.

  Mrs. Liu answered, “I don’t know when they’re here. We don’t hear them coming or going. They probably left for work early today, as they usually do.”

  “Are they nice?” I asked. “The men who live in our garage seem to be nice, but they speak Fukienese, so nobody understands them.”

  “Nice?” She looked at me a little blankly. “I suppose. They pay their rent on time.”

  “They speak Cantonese?” I gave her a smile. “That makes it so much easier than it is for my mother.”

  “No,” she corrected me, so I wouldn’t think she had it any easier than anyone. “Three of them speak Fukienese, one also speaks Mandarin. My husband learned Mandarin during the war, so we can get by. Of course, they all speak some English, but mostly on
ly the names of dishes at the restaurant they work in. All but one of them can read, also write, in Chinese.”

  The many dialects of the Chinese language are so different that they’re mutually incomprehensible when spoken—not like British English and American English, but more like French and Spanish, where the structure is similar but all the words are different. But written Chinese characters have no phonetic content and always have the same meaning. That’s how two Chinese people from the far ends of the country can communicate, and always have, provided they’re both literate. Speaking the same sentence, they’ll sound like gibbering idiots to each other; but if they write it down, they can smilingly agree and walk like brothers, arm in arm.

  It didn’t surprise me that three of these men could read and write and the fourth couldn’t. Three waiters and a busboy.

  I watched Mrs. Liu’s face sidelong as she took out a key ring and put a key in the lock. Maybe she was blandly lying, and she knew all four of her tenants had hopped the night plane to San Francisco; maybe she knew they were sprawled in a pool of blood at the bottom of the basement steps. I thought back to her pursed-lip nervousness when I’d first proposed that she let me in, and to her decision to let me in anyway.

  When she had the door opened Mrs. Liu knocked again and called downstairs. No answer came, so she switched on a light and we headed down.

  The basement was different. No sky-blue carpet, no knickknacks, no gauzy drapes. The glare of fluorescent lights totally defeated the daylight drifting dispiritedly through a row of small windows near the ceiling to reveal a large single room, smelling faintly of old garlic and oil and the mustiness of basements. The room was vinyl tiled and divided down the middle by the row of steel posts that held up the house. Blankets strung from clotheslines between the posts half hid the four beds on the other side. On this side, a rickety-looking bridge table and four folding chairs stood next to a sink and a hot plate. A line of open shelves on the wall held a mismatched collection of plates, mugs, and silver. Next to the shelves, pinned to the wall, was a four-color calendar from a Chinese grocery store in Flushing, plum blossoms framing a painted pagoda. Two shabby Naugahyde chairs and a broken-down sofa were arranged around a threadbare rug. They faced a TV.

  I breathed the still, musty air, trying to feel what it would be like to live here. Maybe this was a place of optimism and excitement, a first new home in the new world, the first step up Gold Mountain for these men and so for their families back home. Maybe they sat around at night and laughed and talked about what they would do when their debts to those who’d brought them here were paid off, when they could bring over their wives and brothers and mothers from China, buy their own houses like this one, and send their kids to college. Maybe they got up early, eager for the new day, their fresh chance to make a new life.

  Maybe; but this shabby room felt to me like a sad place, a place no one would come to, no one would stay in, if he didn’t think he had to.

  Mrs. Liu, arms folded, nodded at the TV, in case I hadn’t seen it. She pursed her lips, waiting for me to begin.

  I set down my toolbox, wiggled the TV’s wires, scribbled in my notebook. I took out Elliot’s circuit tester, touched its ends to things, turned on the TV, touched things again.

  I frowned. Around at the front of the TV, I switched cable channels, first with the remote, which I found on the bridge table, and then with the button on the TV. I went around behind again and poked things, and scribbled in my notebook some more.

  I looked up at Mrs. Liu. “I think this may be it,” I said with excitement in my voice. “How wonderful that would be, if I were the one to find the trouble! Me, so new on the job!” I turned back to the TV, trying to look as though it held my glorious future career in its electronic innards. “Can you help me?” I asked Mrs. Liu.

  Her lips pursed again. “Help you to do what?”

  I spoke a little breathlessly. “I need you to go upstairs, to turn on the other TVs, one at a time. You leave one on for a minute, turn it off for thirty seconds, then on again for another minute. Then you do the same for the other. Normally my partner would help me do this part,” I added, to sidestep her hesitation, “but it would be so good for me if I found the trouble before I called him. Please, Big Sister? My family would be in your debt.”

  That wasn’t exactly using my mother, I reasoned with myself. Besides, if Mrs. Liu helped me and I helped Peter and that helped my career as a P.I., it would sort of even be true.

  Meeting my eyes, Mrs. Liu gave in. With a small smile of Chinese sisterhood she left the room.

  That gave me a total of five minutes if she followed instructions. I began what I’d come to do.

  Parting the blanket curtain, I moved to the beds. I pawed through the mismatched side tables—well, three side tables and a battered file cabinet—that separated them. I sorted through the meager possessions of men who’d come here with nothing and lived with no privacy, who had deliberately left behind on the other side of the globe exactly what the rest of us make sure we have with us when we leave home every morning: driver’s licenses and passports, student IDs and library cards, the things that tie us into a family, a town, a place, a history.

  Two of these men were illegals and couldn’t afford any of that. The other two might have come here legally but left China illegally, might have gone through five other countries where they didn’t have papers on their way here, might just be in the habit, as so many of the new immigrants were, of not leaving paper pieces of themselves where they could be found. I wasn’t looking for that and didn’t expect to find it. I didn’t even know if Chi-Chun Ho was Peter’s client’s real name, but it didn’t matter. What I was looking for was something that would lead me into the pattern of the lives they were living now—a name, a phone number, an address scrawled on a scrap of paper: anything that would take me beyond the opening move on the board Peter had laid out for me, the place where he’d gotten stuck, this small-windowed, musty room.

  I sped through the shelves and drawers, finding socks, handkerchiefs, changes of underwear. There were occasional photos: smiling young women, somber older ones, cheerful skinny young men. I found an airmail envelope from China addressed to Song Chan. The letter was gone, if there had been one; maybe the envelope came holding only the photograph in it now, of a laughing woman sitting in the shadow of a pine tree, with a toddler by her side. I closed the drawer I’d found it in, feeling myself an intruder into a life this man didn’t even really want to be living. The thought depressed me. Why couldn’t this man, this Song Chan, be home with this woman and her child, laughing in the cool breeze from the pines, instead of in a damp and smelly basement in a strange land on the other side of the planet with their photograph in a drawer?

  I shook myself mentally. Or not in that basement, Lydia, I pointed out. You’ve been hired—over the strenuous objections of your own client, I might add—to find out why he’s not here, and three other men not here with him, not to ponder the inequities of the human condition as you observe it. Get back to work.

  So I did. I couldn’t tell if anything was missing, if what I was looking at was half these men’s underwear supply or everything they owned. I looked around the sink and found soap but no toothbrushes. That was a good sign, at least indicating the men had gone away voluntarily; people who choose to go away, even in a great hurry, almost always take their toothbrushes.

  Unless the Dragon Garden waiters and the busboy were so newly out of some seriously downtrodden backwater-type Chinese village that they didn’t use toothbrushes.

  I took a quick glance into the bathroom. It had no sink—the one in the main room was the only one—and the rust holes in the dinged metal stall shower matched the rust streaks in the toilet bowl. It smelled musty and damp, and the cracked linoleum floor was curling at the edges. I didn’t want to think about what might be under it. Four towels hung from two old towel racks. I touched them; all dry.

  Scurrying over to a makeshift hanging rack—a pipe, swinging
on wires from a higher pipe—I started sticking my fingers in the pockets of the few pairs of pants and shirts there. My five minutes was almost up and I’d found nothing to help. Mrs. Liu would be back any moment. As I had that thought I heard her footsteps creak across the kitchen floor above me, heading for the side door. My heart pounded; I squeezed the clothes together like an accordion to stop the rack from swaying. I checked for my notebook and circuit tester, ready to give up the search for something to connect these men to the world outside and to turn back into Lydia Chin, Girl Cable TV Man.

  Then I heard another sound, the ring of a doorbell. The footsteps above me stopped, then turned and went back the way they’d come.

  Relief washed over me, and I wished a winning lottery ticket on whoever had rung the bell. I flipped rapidly through the garments on the rack, sticking my hand in more pockets, finding nothing, nothing, nothing. Then, something. A piece of paper. I pulled it out of the shirt it was tucked in and read it. An address, a few Chinese characters in a jaunty script across a scrap of paper bag. It might mean nothing to the man who’d scrawled it, only his dry cleaner, maybe his dentist. I didn’t know if it was Chi-Chun Ho’s shirt, or Song Chan’s, or another man’s. But it was something, a way to move into the game, past Peter’s opening square. This was a place one of these men knew, and so maybe a place that knew one of them.

  I tucked the scrap of paper in my pocket and kept searching. Nothing else came up in the hanging clothes. I started lifting bowls and mugs from the shelves and feeling around inside the pots and pans. It was unlikely I’d turn anything up that way, but I had the time, thanks to the sainted visitor who’d rung the doorbell. I was up to the plastic garbage pail with the fifty-pound burlap bag of rice safely tucked under its mouseproof cover when the footsteps overhead came back. Swiftly, I flipped the locking handles back on the pail’s lid, snapped shut my own toolbox, and was standing by the bottom of the stairs radiating beatific patience when Mrs. Liu opened the door.