A Bitter Feast Page 9
“Please, no. I haven’t done anything but eat for the last two days.”
“That’s bad?”
“I didn’t used to think so, but I’m beginning to wonder. Our new client fed me the foods of my childhood. That’s not fair, is it?”
I turned my head to follow him as he came out of the kitchen with a mug of coffee. “You sure you don’t want anything?” he asked.
“I’m sure. Answer my question.”
He sat and took a thoughtful sip of coffee. “It’s an interesting technique. Maybe I should feed you the foods of your adolescence. I wonder if the taste of them would bring back those hot, steamy nights of wild abandon—”
“That was your adolescence. We didn’t have those kinds of nights in New York.”
“You’re kidding.” His eyebrows went up in mock surprise. “I moved here for those.”
“Twenty-five years ago? And you haven’t figured it out?”
“Twenty-six, and so I’m slow. I didn’t know we had a new client.”
“H. B. Yang.”
“The guy you were so afraid of?”
“Please. I don’t think you can refer to H. B. Yang as a guy.”
“He’s a girl?”
I made a face. “He’s a revered and respected elder member of the Chinatown community. He’s an adviser to the mayor. If this were a Cantonese village he’d be the village leader by virtue of his age, his wisdom, his generosity, and his longtime survival.”
“He sounds like the Wizard of Oz.”
“There are certain similarities,” I admitted. “Although Chinatown’s not a Cantonese village anymore.”
“Full of unwashed newcomers from the wrong side of the tracks, huh?”
“They’re washed. But they’re not from Guangdong so much, now. They’re not hooked into the same networks. They don’t slot right into the village associations and family name societies. They have their own power structure, different from the old one.”
“So Yang’s not the emperor of Chinatown anymore?”
“No, but he’s still right up there. And there’s another thing about him.”
“And that thing is?”
“He owns Dragon Garden.”
Bill lifted his eyebrows again, this time for real. “Where the waiters work?”
I nodded.
“Uh-oh. That sounds bad.”
“That’s what I thought at first. Now I’m just confused.”
“So rare for you.” I shot him a look. “What does he want?” he asked. “You to lay off and forget about it?”
“Just the opposite. He wants to find them.”
Bill nodded slowly, drank some coffee, then put the mug down on the table beside him. “Why?”
“One, because he’s a concerned elder. I think you have to think of it as a feudal kind of thing, like he’s responsible for these men.”
“Can I withhold judgment on that?”
“It’s cynical of you, but okay.”
“What’s another reason?”
“They owe him money.”
“And you called me cynical. His employees owe him money?”
I told Bill what H. B. Yang, over tea and sweets in the orderly peace of his office, had told me. “From before they were working for him. He paid for their passage over.”
Bill picked up his coffee again. “And now they have to work it off, and if they’ve disappeared he’s out what he laid out?”
“Right. But I don’t think it’s like you make it sound.”
“How do I make it sound?”
“Bad.”
“Bad like difficult, or bad like morally reprehensible?”
“Both.”
He shook his head. “When my great-great-grandfather came here in the 1800s, they called it indentured servitude.”
I cocked my head to look at him. “Did they think it was bad then?”
“Not him,” he said. “He thought it was great. Life was hell for a few years after he got here, but it was hell back home anyway.”
“Where was home?”
“England. Nottingham.”
“Was he glad he came here?”
“Sure. After he paid off what he owed, he had the chance to make something of himself.” Bill finished his coffee. “Of course, in his case, what he made was white trash, but that’s not the fault of the system.”
“So you don’t think this is bad, either?”
He shrugged. “I don’t see why your people shouldn’t have the chance to be white trash, too.”
“Do we have to eat Twinkies and Chef Boyardee?”
“It’s one of the privileges.”
I shuddered. “We’ll never make it. But, Bill …”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just … those poor people, on those long trips. And they end up so far from home.”
“So you’re the one who thinks it’s bad.”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. “One of the Dragon Garden guys had a picture of a woman and a little boy on the table by his bed. I bet it’s his wife and son. Why can’t he stay home with them?”
“Because the world is a lousy place. If that’s your point I can’t argue with it. What do you want to do?”
I glared at him, because the world was a lousy place. “I want some tea.” I got up and headed into the kitchen.
“I thought you were never going to eat again.”
“A ridiculous notion.” I put up the kettle and opened the cabinet where the tea I bring over gets put. Bill doesn’t drink tea, but he’s made room, over the last few years, for mine. I reached for the Yunnan, smoky and slightly perfumed. “H. B. Yang,” I told Bill, “was sort of like the bogeyman of my childhood.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was so important, so powerful, in Chinatown that some parents told their kids that they’d better behave or they’d tell H. B. Yang. It was all they had to say.”
“Did your parents say that?”
“No. My father was always polite to him, but I got the feeling that really, he didn’t like him very much. It made me even more afraid of him, actually.”
“Of your father, or of Yang?”
I looked at him in surprise as the kettle started to sing. “Of H. B. Yang, of course. I was never afraid of my father.” I spooned tea into a strainer and poured hot water over it. “That would be an awful thing, to be afraid of your father.”
Bill said nothing, but the silence I heard was different from his usual silence. I turned around, looked at him curiously. “Were you afraid of your father?”
His eyes met mine; for a few seconds he didn’t move or speak. Then he said, “Yes.” He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the coffee table.
I asked, “Why?”
“Because he was a mean SOB.” He put a match to a cigarette, tossed the match into an ashtray. “What does the H. B. in H. B. Yang stand for?”
That was about as definite a change of subject as I’d ever been pointed toward. I took the hint.
“Hao-Bing, which, as it happens, means ‘great’ and ‘splendid.’”
“So he is the Wizard of Oz.”
“It was part of his legend, how his parents gave him that name in China because they knew he’d have to go off to America from the day he was born, and whatever family name he got stuck with, at least he’d have his given name to see him through.”
I carried my tea back over to the couch and sat.
“You know,” Bill said, “we don’t have to work for him.”
“What?”
“He seems to still make you nervous. If you don’t want to work for him we can say no.”
I took a restorative sip of tea. “First of all, you can’t say anything, because he doesn’t know about you.”
“He thinks you’re working alone?”
“I just didn’t see any reason to give everything away, even to H. B. Yang.”
“Good instinct.”
“Thank you. Second, I’m not sure I can turn down a dire
ct request from H. B. Yang and keep up any reputation in Chinatown. And third”—I drank some more tea, trying to think of a way to put this to Bill—“I can’t really say no. I sort of owe H. B. Yang myself.”
“For what, all those childhood nightmares? Just because he was a big wheel in Chinatown doesn’t mean he has any hold over you now.”
“No, not that. And he’s still a big wheel. But”—I gulped some more tea—“personally, I owe him. He brought my father over here, too.”
“How do you know that?”
“My parents always told us. I think they thought it would make us less afraid of him, like he was a nice man or something. But really it just made him seem sort of all-powerful. I mean, someone who can move your parents around the globe?”
“I get your point; it took the U.S. Army to move mine. But I’m not sure why you owe him. Your father must have worked that passage off long ago.”
“Of course. But still … it’s a connection I have to him now. Does that make sense?”
“Maybe. You mean it’s a connection your father would have, but he’s gone, so his children inherit it?”
“I think you’re beginning to think in Chinese.”
“Hallelujah, it’s a miracle.” He stubbed the cigarette out. “Okay. Maybe I’d feel the same in your shoes, except my feet would hurt. But I can see you want to do this.”
“Not exactly want. But I did tell him yes.”
“Again, okay.”
“But also,” I pointed out, “it does keep us on the trail of the waiters.”
“An extra added benefit.”
“Well, it is. There’s obviously something wrong here, and if Peter wasn’t going to let us keep looking into it—”
“How’s Peter going to feel about this?”
“Not so good. But he’ll understand; you don’t say no to H. B. Yang.”
Bill’s look was skeptical, as though he wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t either; but after all, Peter had fired us.
“What about the union guy’s idea,” Bill asked, “that they’re on the run because they’d been threatened because of the union?”
“Warren Tan, you mean? That occurred to me, and not only that, it occurred to H. B. Yang. He said he was sure I was aware of the attempt to unionize Dragon Garden. He called it, quote, ‘an unacceptable intrusion into my relations with those who work for me.’ He said some people might think he’d dealt too harshly with the organizers he’d uncovered, firing them, but he couldn’t allow so many people’s livelihoods to be endangered this way.”
“Harshly,” Bill said, “and also illegally.”
“About which I’m sure he’s worried. But after the waiters disappeared, he thought maybe they were union men and were afraid he was threatening them with something more serious than firing—deportation, or something even worse. If that’s why they disappeared he regrets it and considers it his fault, he says. He wants to make sure they know that as long as they forget about the union, they have a home with him.”
“Or he wants to catch them so he can have them deported, or ‘something even worse.’”
“I thought of that. But then I don’t think he’d hire me. He’d get gang members or somebody. He came to me—I mean, brought me to him—because I’m semilegit.”
“Semi? Is there something I don’t know?”
“No, I mean, I’m completely legit, but it’s still not going to the cops.”
“And speaking of that, why didn’t he go to the cops?”
“Well,” I said, “I could tell you it was because the cops wouldn’t do anything, because there’s no crime. I mean, that’s true; that’s why Peter hired us in the first place. But that’s not why.”
“Why is, the waiters are illegals.”
I nodded and finished my tea. “Not Chi-Chun Ho, Peter’s guy. He’s got a visa and he’s working on his papers. Peter’s in the middle of that for him, in fact. And not Song Chan, either. But two of them.”
“So Yang can’t ask the cops to find them, because if they did, he’d get in trouble for hiring illegals.”
“And even if he got out of that, they’d turn them over to the INS, who’d send them back, and H. B. Yang would lose his sixty thousand dollars.”
“Thirty thousand apiece? That’s the going rate?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” Bill said. “For thirty thousand dollars you could get a suite on the Queen Mary to cross the ocean in.”
“If you actually had thirty thousand dollars, instead of promising to work it off when you got here.”
Bill lit another cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “And they think it’s worth it. All those guaranteed hard years ahead, just for the chance to come here.”
“Your great-great-grandfather did.”
“Uh-huh. I just wonder if he was right, that’s all. Okay, chief. So what do we do next?”
What we decided to do next was messy and a little bit confused, but it was better than the dead end we’d hit in the morning. It was also, at this point, all mine.
“H. B. Yang said if I want to go into the restaurant to ask around, just to tell him,” I said. “Warren Tan suggested that, too. I don’t want to go in straight—”
“You never do. I thought it was a matter of principle.”
“Just good, modern P.I. practice. I mean, I don’t think I’d get anywhere by asking the rest of the staff about these guys, saying ‘H. B. Yang wants to know.’”
“I’ll buy that. So what will you do?”
“The only women he hires are the dim sum ladies, so I’m going to go in as that, tomorrow.” Tomorrow would be Saturday, and the dim sum crowds would descend on Dragon Garden. The Chinese would start crowding into the place at ten o’clock, the lo faan at eleven-thirty or so; and there would be Lydia Chin, pushing a stainless steel cart full of red bean buns.
Bill grinned. “You’re not.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“What do you mean, the only women?”
“It’s traditional. The newer restaurants don’t do it this way anymore, but it used to be women didn’t work in them at all except as dim sum ladies. Not as waiters and not in the kitchen. That’s the way it was when I was growing up, at all the places my father worked. H. B. Yang’s too old to consider doing things differently.”
“And you didn’t take the opportunity to educate him in late-twentieth-century Chinese-American feminism?”
“How far do you think that would have gotten me?”
“Thrown out of his office. Then you wouldn’t have had to work for him.”
“Hmmm. I didn’t think of it that way. Actually, I’m lucky he was willing to hire a female P.I. at all.”
“Well, if he wanted a Chinatown P.I., you’re sort of it.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Anyway, facts notwithstanding, I’m still lucky.”
“If you call this lucky.”
He had a point. The idea of working for H. B. Yang was giving me that bug-under-a-microscope feeling, which made me want to hide behind something. And though I, Lydia Chin, hated to admit it, any case brought with it the possibility of failure, this no less than any other. What if I couldn’t find those guys after H. B. Yang had entrusted me with the job? The thought of the humiliation that would result, not only for me but for my mother and the rest of my family, made my stomach ache. I drank my tea and said nothing.
“So,” Bill said. “I just wait until you need me?”
“I’m sure you can find something to do. There’s also something else I have to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Well,” I said reluctantly, “I have to see Mary. So Peter can finish firing us.”
“What will you do if he doesn’t? About having two clients who want the same thing.”
“Oh, he will. And if there’s a miracle and he doesn’t, I guess I’ll just ad-lib.”
“Let me know if you want any coaching.”
“You’d be the first guy I’d call.”
“Go ahead.”
“What are you going to do about the guy who beat you up this morning?” He asked this casually, smoking his cigarette, just one partner reviewing the case with the other, and he carefully didn’t look at me, because he knows me. Still, I felt my face redden.
“He did not beat me up,” I huffed. “He threatened to beat me up, or something, if I didn’t stop.”
“If you didn’t stop doing what now you have two clients wanting you to do.”
“Well, you didn’t expect me to actually do what a guy like that told me?”
“You don’t even do what I tell you, so I guess not. But isn’t he worth considering?”
I nodded slowly. “He is. For one thing, I sort of thought, in the back of my mind, he was working for H. B. Yang.”
Bill stubbed out his cigarette. “So did I.”
“But if that’s not true and H. B. Yang wants the waiters found, then who else is interested in their not being found?”
“Any ideas?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Swell. And you wouldn’t recognize this guy if you saw him?”
“Not unless he looked like the inside of a rice bag. You know,” I said as a thought hit me, “there’s something else I didn’t tell you.”
He looked at me. “You know the Marx Brothers routine on the ocean liner in Night at the Opera, where Groucho orders room service and keeps sticking his head out to yell to the steward, ‘And one more hard-boiled egg’?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“You remind me of it. Never mind. What else didn’t you tell me?”
I gave him a confused look but continued. “Jayco Realty. I checked them out.”
“And?”
“And absolutely nothing interesting. They’re licensed real estate brokers. Newly licensed, and it’s a new firm, but so what?”
Bill laced his fingers behind his head. “So what indeed?”
I shrugged. “I still think something was weird in that place. And that address was in one of those guys’ pockets.”
“The building’s. Not necessarily theirs.”
“True. Maybe I’m just suspicious of that Chinese guy.”