A Bitter Feast Page 6

  “I don’t know,” I sidestepped. “They’re actually roommates, those four guys. They live in Queens.”

  Now Joe Yee shrugged. “Well, we don’t handle Queens, so I don’t know what to tell you. But they sent you to us?”

  I nodded.

  He flashed me a grin. “Well, who knows? But as long as you’re here, suppose you tell me what you’re looking for.”

  So I made up some nonsense about two bedrooms and a good view, and Joe Yee wrote my nonsense on a three-by-five card. We chatted a little about walk-ups versus elevator buildings, and distance from transportation and shopping.

  Once or twice Joe Yee’s eyes caught mine, and I thought I saw in them a spark, something bright in their almost-black depths that said that this was more than just a business encounter and I was more than just a customer.

  Or it might have been that Joe Yee was a salesman, and eye contact is a salesman’s tool.

  Not that Joe Yee had anything to sell me. He told me again there really wasn’t anything but he’d call me when the market loosened up. “Listen, Marilyn, leave me a number. Things are bound to get better soon. Thanks for coming to us.”

  So I gave him a phony number and got up to go. Joe Yee held the wood-framed glass door for me, and we shook hands again as we said good-bye, another firm and friendly clasp. I crossed the street to the Hill of Beans, where Bill sat reading the Times in the front window, with dark strong tea the foremost thing on my mind.

  Six

  “Useless!”

  Bill folded his paper as I flopped into the spindly wire chair across the table from him at the Hill of Beans. As opposed to the sludge at Jayco Realty, the fresh-ground coffee scenting the air at the café smelled good enough to drink, even to me.

  “Me?” Bill asked politely.

  “Probably. But what I actually meant was spending the morning trawling among the petty bourgeoisie of Cobble Hill, looking for someone who knows four men I don’t know myself.”

  “You came up empty?”

  “Depends on your definition.”

  A thin young woman with a nose ring, an eyebrow ring, and a stud in her lower lip strolled up and asked if I’d like something.

  I gave the blackboard tea list a quick scan. “A pot of English Breakfast?” Which was orange pekoe in the language of my people, not a subtle tea, but strong and dark, very revivifying.

  “No problem.”

  “And I’ll have another espresso,” Bill said.

  “I’ll bet you will.” She grinned at him and sauntered away.

  “How many does that make?” I asked him.

  “Five.”

  “Good God.”

  “They also serve who only stand and wait, but something has to keep them awake. So: no luck?”

  “Well, as I say, it depends. You want to put on pink tights and learn the five classical ballet positions? You want to lose twenty pounds?”

  “Which comes first?”

  “Keep making wisecracks and I’ll divorce you. Two hundred and fifty dollars, sixty days, no-fault. Although, come to think of it, that wouldn’t work with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s bound to be your fault.”

  “If you divorced me, you’d have to have married me,” he pointed out, “and that would certainly have been your fault.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “That’s true.”

  The decorated waitress brought my tea in a round and comforting-looking white pot. She put another espresso in front of Bill and, with a smile, gave him a clean ashtray, too.

  “They let you smoke in here?”

  “They’re enlightened in Brooklyn.” He lit a cigarette to take advantage of the ashtray. “I’m sorry your scrap of paper was a bust.”

  “There’s just one thing,” I said. “I think it’s likely I’m merely delirious, but let me ask you something. Don’t real estate agents work on commission?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, if you walked into the office of one, wouldn’t you expect to be snarfed up and jealously guarded by the first person who saw you?”

  “Uh-huh. You mean the place on the ground floor?”

  I nodded through that first, perfect sip of tea.

  “Weren’t you?” Bill asked.

  “Just the opposite. ‘Go away, little girl, you bother me.’ ‘No, you might as well come on over here and sit down.’ One guy didn’t want me, the woman totally ignored me, and they had nothing to offer me anyway.”

  “Maybe they already knew how difficult you could be.”

  “You zipped across the street and told them?”

  “Absolutely. It seemed only fair. What do you mean, they had nothing to offer you?”

  “Zippo, zilch, nada. They say the market’s tight but it’s bound to loosen up soon. The prices in their window are high, so I upped the limit on what I said I could spend, but they still said they don’t have anything. Is the market that tight?”

  “I didn’t think it was,” Bill said. “Not in Cobble Hill.”

  I sipped some more tea, felt its warmth and enthusiasm encouraging my body back into a functioning state. “Can we have something to eat?” I asked.

  “Always. You’re hungry?”

  “Always.” I scanned the blackboard again and proposed a slice of carrot cake. Bill went to the counter and told them about it. A moment later the waitress, who was preparing to go off duty and had therefore just put a row of silver hoops in the five holes in her right ear—maybe she had a date—brought the cake to the table with two forks.

  “Actually, there was something else,” I said to Bill as I slid one of those forks through the moist brown crumbly wedge.

  “What’s that?”

  “One of them’s Chinese.”

  His eyebrows went up. “I thought they all were.”

  “Not the guys we’re looking for, dingbat. One of the real estate agents. Joe Yee. ABC, obviously. By his accent I’d say he’s from some state in the middle, one of those places I’ve never been to.”

  “Never mind, everyone all looks alike out there anyway.”

  The cake was dreamily spicy with nutmeg and cinnamon, and studded with chewy raisins and crunchy nuts. Its cream cheese frosting was cool and silky. I reached for another forkful and told Bill, “Maybe the other guy thought we’d look good together. That’s why he passed me on to the Chinese guy.”

  Bill looked at me over his espresso. “Do I have to charge over there and defend your honor?”

  “Thanks, but don’t bother.”

  “Anyway, they didn’t react to any of our missing guys’ names,” Bill said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “You’d have told me. You wouldn’t have been able to keep it to yourself.”

  “Ah. But he did ask about them after I brought them up.”

  “What did he ask?”

  “Whether they’d said Jayco had found them their apartment. But then he said they don’t do Queens, so it’s not something as simple as that.”

  “Not as simple as that,” he repeated. “But you think this is the connection.”

  I looked up and met Bill’s eyes. They’re brown, too, not fathoms-deep, coal-black-brown, but plain, straightforward brown. “Until you said that,” I said, “I wasn’t sure I did. I’m still not sure. But they were weird, one of them trying to get rid of me, one totally ignoring me, one spending a little too much time with me for someone who has no apartments for rent. I think there’s something peculiar about Jayco Realty. Or maybe I just hope so, because if there’s not, this whole day has been a bust.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to go home,” I said, scraping up crumbs and raisins with the edge of my fork, “and look these guys up.”

  So we finished our carrot cake and our tea and espresso. I paid the check because this was my case. The waitress, who now had a delicate chain linking the ring in her nose to a stud in her left ear, waved to us as we left.

  Bill dropped me at my
office and drove away. He was off duty for the rest of the day, unless he thought of some path to follow that could move this case along. Because the case was mine, if that happened he was supposed to call and tell me what he had in mind; on the other hand, we’d been working together for so long that if he couldn’t get me he’d just go on ahead anyway. That would be all right with me, and he knew that, and I knew he knew that, although it was one of the many things we’d never discussed.

  My plan was to settle in at the computer in my office and see what the state board that licenses real estate agents had to say about Jayco Realty of Baltic Street, Brooklyn.

  My office is on the west end of Canal Street, in a part of Chinatown that wasn’t Chinatown when I was born. As immigrants become citizens and sponsor their families; as Hong Kong money looks for a place to skeptically wait out the first years of one-country-two-systems; as threadbare and thin villagers choose cold, hungry, two-month trips in the lowest holds of cargo ships, all packed in the same windowless, rolling room, breathing stale air, never coming on deck, for their chance to work sixteen hours a day on the slopes of Gold Mountain because they think it’s better than their chances back home; as all these things happen, Chinatown grows. People need places to live, money needs businesses to invest in, places to live need coats of paint and sheets and towels and pots for cooking in, businesses need lawyers and shopkeepers and pens and pencils. Everyone needs tea and chopsticks and fifty-pound bags of rice.

  And Chinese people, those who’ve made it, need to go back home, bringing gifts for those who stayed, visiting the graves of those who never left. To do that, they go to travel agents, like the three ladies at Golden Adventure, on the ground floor at 127 Canal Street. And if traveling is not what they have in mind, if what they really need is someone followed, something looked into, some exploration carried out in secret—a private investigation—they can, once inside, continue past the door to Golden Adventure and come see me. My name’s not on the street door; Lydia Chin Investigations is not on the buzzer. Not only would that not bring me business, it would probably cut down on the prosperity of Golden Adventure, as people would hesitate to go to them for fear of being suspected of coming to me. Chinese people don’t like to admit they need to hire someone to help solve their personal problems.

  Peter’s not that way, of course, but Peter’s a lawyer, and to him this problem wasn’t personal, except in the way all his work is personal. Although, I reminded myself, he hadn’t exactly been thrilled about the idea of my working on it, and that was personal. On the other hand, I hadn’t gone very far toward solving it, either.

  The street door was propped open, as it usually was during the day. I saluted Ava, Andi, and Mei-Lei, the three cheerful, bustling, middle-aged, and prosperous proprietors of Golden Adventure. They were always waving me inside, offering me a deal on a direct flight to Shanghai, a three-day shopping extravaganza in Hong Kong, a cruise package on the Yellow River. “Lydia, good bargain,” Andi would say while Ava opened brochures one on top of the other. “Last minute, very low price.” I kept thinking that one of these days I’d take them up on one.

  At the end of the hall I unlocked the door to my own office, which was one room plus a bathroom that I sublet from Ava, Andi, and Mei-Lei. I was thinking about China, about the misty peaks of Guilin and the towers of Shanghai, about the mountain village in Guangdong both my parents were from, the frogs in the rice paddies and the dusty winding path leading away.

  I wasn’t thinking about my office, whether the door creaked in the usual way, whether the silence was the usual silence. I wasn’t thinking, as I reached for the light switch, about the shadows.

  Then: no shadows, just darkness. Cloth, rough, over my head, scratching my face, pulled tight around my throat, some kind of rope. An arm around me from behind, pinning my arms. My heart slamming wildly in my chest.

  I kicked out, found nothing; I snapped my head back. That made contact—my skull, his nose. I heard a grunt behind me, and the grip loosened. I staggered forward, trying to keep my feet.

  His hands on my shoulders spun me around. Then a blow, a tremendous, pounding, breath-exploding blow, crumpling my stomach. Through the rough cloth I gasped, choked, coughed for air. My whole body doubled up, contracted around my empty center. My desperation to breathe drove all thoughts from my head. I felt like I was drowning, struggling uselessly, helplessly, in a sea of dusty burlap.

  A foot swept my legs out from under me, and I fell, crashing to the ocean floor. Pain flared in my knee. I lay still, forcing my chest to expand. I drew in a slow breath; flavored with dust and cloth, it was still the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted. I felt my arms yanked behind my back, my wrists tied together, and could do nothing about it.

  Breathing took everything I had.

  A booted foot pushed at my shoulder, rolling me onto my back. It planted itself, with weight, on my stomach. I drew the biggest breath I could, expecting the boot to suddenly stomp, expecting to drown again.

  “Now,” a voice came from above me, “stupid girl, stop make trouble. Shut up, listen me! You will? Say!”

  English with a Chinese accent, Fukienese probably; a man’s voice, young, a voice I didn’t know. I had a cloth tied around my head, my hands fastened behind my back, and a boot on my stomach. I said hoarsely, “Yes, I will.”

  “Good. Not so stupid, maybe.” The boot pushed in a little, just to remind me, then lifted away. “Now. You wondering, where gone, four men go away? You asking, here, there?”

  I felt the boot toe my chin. It must be my turn to talk.

  “Yes,” I said, straining to make my breathing almost normal. “Do you know?”

  “No! No one know! No one want know, you understand me?”

  “Their families want to know.” Oh, God, Lydia, my lungs cried, could you possibly shut up? But he was Chinese; the family thing might work.

  It didn’t. “No! No one! No one care, these four men. You don’t care. Don’t care now, anymore.”

  He knelt on my chest, squeezed a hand around my chin, forced my head back. The burlap scratched my neck under the grip of the rope, and his weight made my breath come short again. Something about the hand was repulsive, made my skin crawl; maybe it was the simple fact that it was around my neck. “Say,” he demanded.

  “I don’t care.” My voice was hard to force out of my constricted throat.

  “Say again.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “About what you don’t care?”

  “The four men,” I rasped. “Who disappeared.”

  “Good.” He released my head and patted my cheek like a big brother complimenting a child on a clever recitation. Through the burlap his hand felt large, but still somehow creepy. I coughed, and wondered how big he was, what he looked like. “Good. Now you don’t care, you stop look. Look for something else, husband maybe.”

  He laughed. Then the weight was suddenly gone from my chest. I heard noises, rustling, clonking, not from the direction of the door but from the window. Then silence, and I was alone in my office.

  My heart beat fast with leftover fear, and anger, and the effort to get up. When I was finally standing, I shook my head wildly, like a dog climbing out of a lake. The action did nothing for me except raise more dust inside my burlap hood to choke myself on.

  Completely disoriented, I took two steps forward. On the third step my shin banged into something and I yelped. That must be the coffee table; the thing to do, then, would be to turn around and go the other way. One, two, three, four steps, and I’m at the door. Well, okay, the wall, but the wall next to the door. Move over, turn around, grab the handle behind my back, twist it—no, not that way, the other way, you’re backward—and a click as the door opens. Turn around again and yell.

  “Mei-Lei! Ava! Can you come help me a minute?”

  “Lydia?” Mei-Lei called back.

  “Can you help me?”

  I heard the scraping sound of a chair being pushed back and footsteps down the
hall.

  “Don’t scream,” I said, just before Mei-Lei screamed.

  “Lydia! Lydia, what happened? Oh, my God!” Mei-Lei, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, is the one of the three of them whose English is perfect.

  “Mei-Lei, I’m okay,” I said as another set of footsteps hurried toward us. I turned around. “Just untie my hands, will you?”

  “Ah? Lydia? What you do?” That was Ava.

  Mei-Lei said, “Look at her! Oh, my God! What happened?”

  “Just untie me?” I asked again.

  Ava said calmly, “We untie her, she tell us what happen.” Hands reached for my wrists, poked and pulled, and the rope fell away.

  My own hands reached for the rope holding the burlap around my head. I heard Mei-Lei drawing in sharp little breaths while I fumbled and found the knot. Before I could begin to figure it out, another pair of hands—Ava’s, no doubt—moved mine away and poked some more. The rope came loose. I grabbed for the burlap and pulled it over my head.

  Ava’s placid, chubby face and Mei-Lei’s thin and worried one filled my view. I shook my head, sneezed, and looked down at the cloth I was holding.

  It was a burlap bag made for fifty pounds of rice.

  It took me fifteen minutes to calm Mei-Lei down, to satisfy Ava and Andi that I would call the police, that I wasn’t in any serious danger now that whoever it was had gone, that this kind of thing was all in a day’s work for Lydia Chin, P.I. Most importantly, I had to assure them that none of this was their fault; they couldn’t have heard the glass cutter slicing the window above the lock, shouldn’t have been listening for the sound of evil people climbing in, were not responsible for the fact that the window had no bars.

  It was about to, though. The first thing I did after bundling them back off to their own office with thank-yous for the tea Andi brought me from their ever-steeping pot, renewed promises to call the police, and a polite but heartfelt rejection of Mei-Lei’s offer to call my mother, was to call the locksmith.

  Then I called Bill.

  “Don’t get excited,” I said when he answered.

  “I’m long past getting excited just because you call,” he told me in an elaborately bored-sounding voice. Behind him I could hear classical music, a piano and a violin. The piano played deep, quietly resonant chords, while the violin chattered nervously above it.