A Bitter Feast Read online

  “Are you finished?” she said, starting down the stairs. “I was delayed. Someone rang the bell, a new neighbor with foolish questions. Where is the butcher, he asked, where is the dry cleaner, do any of the teenage boys here cut the grass or shovel the snow if you pay them. What will a teenage boy not do, if you pay him?” She shook her head at the inanity of her new neighbor. “Were you successful?” she asked me.

  “Yes.” I beamed. “Yes, I was. Big Sister Liu, you have no idea how much you helped me this morning. My partner will be so impressed with my skill. From this point this can be handled from the street, without troubling you any further. Thank you so much.”

  Smiling, she said it was nothing, but I could see in her eyes the pleasingly illicit satisfaction at helping another Chinese woman beat the odds. I said it was more than I could ever repay and she said again that it was nothing. We did that a few more times, and then I picked up my toolbox, climbed the stairs, and strolled down her driveway in the bright suburban sunshine. She went into the house by the kitchen door and was back among her shells before I rounded the corner.

  Five

  Once out of sight of the Liu household, I headed down the block. In the leafy morning sun, my shoulders ached from the weight of the toolbox, and I was sweating in Luke’s scratchy, heavy winter jacket. I wondered sourly whether lending me the winter jacket in May was really worth drinks at Windows on the World, and then, as I approached the end of the block, wondered in a different mood about the scrap of brown paper that had recently migrated from one of the waiters’ pockets to mine. The picture of the woman and child under the pine trees came back to me, and with it the sense of sadness I’d felt in the air of the musty basement room.

  I was absorbed in thought, about my next step, about next steps in general, and new lives, and shared fifty-pound bags of rice. I didn’t see the gray car as it rolled up beside me, didn’t hear the window noiselessly lowered. I plodded along, one foot in front of the other, as unaware as any civilian, as heedless as any person who hasn’t spent years training her senses to notify her immediately of any unusual happenings in her vicinity. I didn’t know he was even there until the low, insinuating voice slid through the soft spring air to reach me.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he called across from the driver’s side through the open window. “Wanna come take a look at my cable?”

  I spun around, stopped still on the sidewalk. Gripping the toolbox tightly, I took in his lazy grin, the curling smoke from his cigarette. He drifted the car to a stop beside me and reached to open the passenger side door.

  I felt the hot blood rush to my face. “What are you doing?”

  “Following you,” he said with an easy shrug of his broad shoulders. His face was shadowed as he leaned across the car’s front seats. “If you didn’t want me to do that you shouldn’t have been so gorgeous. Get in.”

  “You—” I resisted the urge to heave my toolbox through the open window at him. The street was silent and empty, no other pedestrians, not another car. I looked around and saw what there was to see.

  Then I got in.

  We took off before my door was even closed. “Why is it,” I said to the driver, exhaling a sharp breath as the car rolled down the quiet, deserted street with me inside, “that you can’t stick to the simplest plan?”

  Bill Smith, my sometimes partner, who was supposed to be waiting for me in this very car at the end of the next block, grinned at me from the driver’s seat. He switched his cigarette to his left hand so he could hold it out the window where I wouldn’t have to breathe it.

  “Just taking a little initiative, boss,” he said. “I heard you liked employees who thought for themselves.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Around the union hall.”

  “Rumors. Gossip. Not a word of it true.”

  “Uh-oh, my mistake. You going to fire me?”

  “Immediately.” Restrained by seat and shoulder belts, I struggled my arms out of the sleeves of Luke’s winter jacket and tossed the thing in the back. “This is a very unpleasant item, by the way.”

  “But you look so fetching in it. How’d you do?”

  I settled myself more comfortably into the seat, putting my feet up on the toolbox, which I’d thunked onto the floor in front of me.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “That’s good.” He nodded sagely. “It always makes the next step easier if you don’t know how this one turned out.”

  “How come you have a smart-guy answer for every question?”

  “So you’ll recognize me. Seriously, did you find anything?”

  I sighed. “One thing. One dumb thing, and even it’s probably not anything.” I reached into my pocket and withdrew the scrap of brown paper bag. I held it up for Bill to see.

  He glanced over, then returned his eyes to the street. “Looks like Greek to me.”

  “Hah. Shows how much you know.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It’s an address.”

  “Where?”

  I frowned at the paper. “Brooklyn?”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “Only because of how much you know. Four-eleven Baltic Street. Is that Brooklyn?”

  He nodded. “Probably. There is a Baltic Street in Brooklyn, anyway, and I don’t know if there’s one in any of the other boroughs.”

  “And you know so much. Of course, it could be in Kansas.”

  “What’s it the address of?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe it’s a pizzeria, for when these guys get tired of eating Chinese.”

  “If I said that you’d kill me.”

  “That’s absolutely true. The thing is, it’s the only thing I found that ties these guys to someplace besides that apartment and Dragon Garden.”

  “Do you want to go there now?”

  I considered that as the wind blowing in the car’s open windows tossed my hair around. “Can we just drive by to see what it is? I have to think a little before I know how to go in.”

  “Sure, boss. Anything you say.”

  “You’re certainly agreeable,” I said suspiciously.

  “I’m trying to learn from your remarkable instincts. I still don’t know how you could be so sure these people were bound to have cable TV.”

  “Because there aren’t nearly enough Chinese-language shows on standard broadcast TV, American cultural imperialism being what it is—”

  “All right, all right. And they provide it to their tenants out of the goodness of their hearts?”

  “Oh, you can bet those guys are paying for it. But if they’re living four to a basement such a distance from work, they must be saving money as hard as they can to get out from under their debts to whoever paid for their passage. Cable TV is cheaper by far than any other source of entertainment they could find, especially gambling.”

  “That’s what they’d be doing if they weren’t watching cable?”

  “Well, they can’t go to the movies if they don’t speak good English. And movies are expensive. They probably have wives or girlfriends back home, and even if they wanted to date, that’s expensive, too. They work in a restaurant, so they don’t have much incentive to go out to dinner. They probably gamble anyway, because it’s such a big thing with, as you would say, us Chinese types, but having TV at home might keep them from getting carried away with it.”

  “You are a genius. I bow before your mighty brain. Where’d you find your scrap of paper?” Bill headed the car up the ramp for the expressway.

  “I was lucky on that one,” I said. “I’d looked through most of their stuff without turning anything up, and Mrs. Liu was on her way back down there when some neighbor rang her doorbell. He kept her occupied another couple of minutes with a bunch of dumb questions, and that gave me time to search their clothes.”

  Bill grinned as he eased the car into the whooshing traffic. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought you’d like that.”

  I stared at him. “What—wait. You saw that?�
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  “Oh, from very close up.”

  “Close up—hey, that was you?”

  “Just doing my job, boss.”

  I frowned. “What were you doing on that block?”

  “Watching your back.”

  “I didn’t need that.”

  “No one ever does.”

  He was looking casually ahead, and I knew why. I took the time he was giving me and felt the flush that had crept into my face recede. “You make me mad when you do that,” I told him.

  He looked over at me, eyebrows raised. “I seem to recall you popping up all over town trying to keep me out of trouble on innumerable previous occasions.”

  “And what a hopeless cause that is.” I sighed. “Okay, draw. Drive on.”

  Which is how, in my own way, I said thank-you.

  Bill drove us from Elmhurst, Queens, to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, using a combination of the expressway and those back streets that only someone who grew up at least partially in Brooklyn could know.

  “Is this near where you used to live?” I asked him as we turned a corner in a neighborhood of slightly shabby three-story row houses and down-at-the-heels two-story shops. A huge schoolyard ran all the way through the block, with brightly graffitied handball walls and basketball backboards with baskets that had no nets.

  “No, that was further in. But I had a girl here when I was seventeen.”

  I waited for more, but there wasn’t any; there never is. Bill doesn’t talk much about the three years he lived in Brooklyn, between when his army family moved back from Amsterdam and when he joined the navy himself, at eighteen. He doesn’t talk much about his childhood at all. It’s none of my business, of course, and besides, there’s no reason why I should really care about the parts of himself he doesn’t want to share; so sometimes I ask a question, and if he won’t elaborate then I just let it drop.

  Or he cuts me off before I can ask the next question— supposing, of course, that I wanted to—which is what happened now.

  “There,” he said, nodding at a solid-looking brick building on the corner where a residential street met a commercial one. “That’s the address.”

  I looked, but looking didn’t tell me very much. The ground floor was taken up by a concern called Jayco Realty, which had propped corkboards in the windows and covered them with color photos of attractive properties for rent or sale in this convenient-and-still-affordable area. On the two upper floors were offices of one kind or another, dentists, I assumed, and lawyers, and CPAs, neighborhood folks making a living providing services to each other. Why any of these businesses here in Cobble Hill would have been the destination of an undocumented worker from Fukien Province by way of Elmhurst was not clear to me.

  “I’m going in,” I said to Bill, who’d parallel-parked us across the street from the place and was lighting a cigarette.

  “Where?” he asked, shaking out his match.

  “The upstairs businesses, then the realtor. Somehow for illegals living four to a room, they seem least likely.”

  “Although most needed. How are you going?” Which meant, what’s the gag, the cover story?

  I shrugged. “Nice Chinese girl looking for fill-in-the-blank. Got your name from a friend of a friend. I’ll drop the names I know, Peter’s client and the missing roommates, and see what happens.”

  “You want help?”

  “I don’t think it would help. Actually, you don’t even have to wait. I could take the subway home. This could take a while, and it’ll probably turn out to be boring and useless.”

  “Those are a few of my favorite things … . No, thanks, I think I’m getting into this chauffeur business. I’ll get a cup of coffee and keep an eye on the building, in case someone tries to steal it with you inside.”

  “I feel so secure having you around. Enjoy yourself.”

  “You, too. Write if you get work.”

  So Bill went to drink a double espresso at a window table at the Hill of Beans, while I went to see what manner of services were available on Baltic Street in Brooklyn.

  As it turned out, they were many and varied. I was given prices and suggested appointment schedules for root canal, no-fault divorce, incorporating your small business—that one actually interested me—plus ballet classes for adult beginners, Lamaze lessons, and free introductory Weight Watchers sessions to get me ready for the summer swimsuit season, which would be here before I knew it.

  It might be here already, I thought, arriving unnoticed while I was trooping, increasingly discouraged, through 411 Baltic Street. No one was responding to any of the names of the missing men. I forgot who’d sent me, I said over and over. Probably it was Chi-Chun Ho … or maybe Chan Song … . I’d used the other two names, too, Yuan Lee and Gai-Lo Lu, but all I’d gotten were polite blank stares. No smiles of recognition, no starts and quick cover-ups, not even a single pair of widened eyes. It wasn’t fair, I found myself telling the universe: these men had come here alone, leaving their families, everything they knew, leaving a place where the machinery of daily life would have to rearrange itself to go on working without them. A place that missed them, where people thought about them, over and over, at little times, like when someone cooked a favorite food or the baby said his first word. They’d come from that to a place where they’d touched down so lightly that it hardly noticed they were here, a place they could disappear from as though they’d never existed. I thought back to the forlorn basement in Queens they’d tried to make into home.

  I made my weary way downstairs from the last of the offices, a Lebanese immigration lawyer who specialized in his countrymen but was willing to give me the name of someone in Chinatown who specialized in mine. I took it, because some of the missing men were, after all, Chinese illegals, but the idea that they’d get to a Chinatown lawyer through a Lebanese in Brooklyn was far-fetched enough to make a visit to the ground-floor realtor seem like a hot trail to follow.

  It wasn’t, I was sure, but I had no other trails, hot or cold; if anyone in this building knew any of the vanished men, they were either superb actors or I hadn’t met them yet.

  I went back out into the late-morning sunshine and ran my eyes over the boards in the windows at Jayco Realty, checking out the apartments, homes, and business properties on offer. Some of them were appealing, but the prices seemed high to me. Cobble Hill, as the signboard said, is convenient to Manhattan, but it isn’t Manhattan, and these were prices I might have raised my eyebrows at even on the other side of the river. I wondered as I entered the office just how out of touch with New York’s real estate market I had become.

  Three people sat at three desks in the neat but crowded office. The air gave off the faintly singed aroma of coffee whose useful life is over. A middle-aged white man with a bristling mustache looked up as I came in; a blond white woman was typing on a computer keyboard; and a youngish Asian man was on the phone in the back of the room. I felt a small electric charge sizzle up my spine. Good grief, Lydia, I mentally scoffed, are you so desperate that a set of Asian features is enough to make you think you’ve cracked this case? He’s probably Japanese, anyway, so just relax.

  But he wasn’t.

  The mustached man in the front of the room looked up when I walked in. “Can I help you, miss?” he asked, maybe a little more grudgingly than I would have liked. I therefore gave him my sweetest smile. The Asian man hung up the phone; he looked at me, too. The woman went on typing.

  I said, “I’m looking for an apartment.”

  “Nothing right now,” the other man grunted. “Market’s real tight.”

  “Really? Chi-Chun Ho said you’d be able to help me out.”

  The mustached man looked at the Asian man and shrugged his shoulders. The Asian man smiled and came around his desk, extending his hand to me. “Joe Yee,” he said. “Larry’s right, we don’t have much at the moment, but come on over and sit down.”

  Joe Yee was tall, a dark-skinned peasant like me but with a narrower nose and handsome, high cheekbon
es. His smile was engaging and his English unaccented, unless you counted a slight Midwest twang. Chicago, I guessed, or Madison, Wisconsin. As we shook hands he rolled his eyes in Larry’s direction and gave me an ironic smile. His eyes, I noticed before I knew I was noticing, were that deep, intense brown that’s as close to coal-black as eyes can get. Not all Asians have that eye color; my brothers don’t. But my eyes are like that, too.

  Joe Yee held my hand, and my eyes, a few seconds longer. As I sat, Larry turned back to his own paper-strewn desk as though he didn’t much care whether I found an apartment or moved right in and lived in their office. I wondered whether Joe Yee got tired of doing damage control with the customers Larry spoke to first.

  “Can I get you something, Miss … ?” Joe Yee gestured to the Mr. Coffee machine on the shelf behind him, the source of the air perfume.

  “Ko,” I said, in keeping with my principle of trying out a new identity whenever possible. “Marilyn Ko. No, thank you.” The dark sludge in the pot looked like something even Bill might not drink. It reminded me, though, of the tea I wasn’t having, and Joe Yee’s smile and clear dark eyes notwithstanding, I determined to get my business with the realtors of Jayco over as fast as possible.

  “Who did you say sent you to us?” Joe Yee asked me, pouring a mugful of the awful-looking coffee for himself.

  “Well, I’m not sure. I thought it was Chi-Chun Ho, but there were a bunch of people at this party, you know? It could have been Chan Song, or Yuan Lee, or maybe Gai-Lo Lu. I’m sure it was one of them.” I gave everyone’s name its English order, not Chinese, since Joe Yee seemed like such an All-American boy.

  Joe Yee’s brow furrowed. “Those names mean anything to you, Larry? Maggie?” The other two shrugged. “I don’t remember any of them,” Joe Yee said. “The one who told you about us, he said we found him an apartment?”