Act of Revenge (2 page)

Lost in the story and struggling with the antiquated provincial slang of the French, she almost missed her stop, and had to shove her narrow body through a dense mass of strap hangers to the almost closing doors. Lucy did not mind the subway in the least, and rode it at most hours, especially enjoying those rides when, as now, her mother thought she was safe in a stuffy cab. None of the things that were supposed to happen to lone young girls on subways had yet happened to her. No one had even pinched her, but then, she admitted to herself, she had little enough yet that was pinchable. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass of a wall ad and grimaced. This was something the lovely Claudine had no reason to worry about, and Lucy was of two minds about it. Boys ignored her, which was good, because she
certainly
didn't want them nosing after her as they were starting to do to her friend, Janice Chen. On the other hand . . . on the other hand, what? She couldn't fully articulate it, not yet, but the thing was there, beneath her conscious mind, fueled by the menace of hormones coiled in ambush: sexual rivalry, the ever ignored issue in the lives of mothers and daughters. It did not help that she looked like a geeky boy, and her mother looked like a baroque saint as imagined by Bernini.

Lucy stepped out of the subway station, blinked in the bright June sunlight, took a left, and walked into Asia. The outposts of Chinatown had taken over much of Canal Street in her own lifetime, pushing up from the south via Mott and Mulberry streets and spreading east and west on the broad thoroughfare. Lucy knew Chinatown. She was practically a native, having been born a few streets north on Crosby Street, where Little Italy meets Soho, and had from an early age been a presence on its streets, gadding about with the four Chen children and their parents, cousins, in-laws, and associates. And Chinatown knew Lucy. Hardly a merchant on its streets had not done a double-take when the
gwailo
infant had addressed him or her in the clanging accents of Guangdong. For when Lucy's mother had unexpectedly rescued the Chen family's honor, she had created an enormous burden of
bao
, a debt of reciprocity owed to her not only by the Chen family proper, but by the Chen name association, its allied name associations, the tong to which the family belonged, and, to a lesser extent, the county and village associations of the fifty-millionfold Chens. That Lucy's mother had only been doing her job was a laughable concept to the old-country Chinese, to whom life was largely a meshwork of unspoken obligations. Thus it happened that Lucy Karp, being first her mother's daughter, and second, the foster daughter of the Chen clan, and thirdly a miraculous and rather spooky speaker of perfect Cantonese (and arguably not less than a reincarnation of Chen Renmi, the dead sister), had achieved a status that few Caucasians are ever granted in that community: she had become a real person, someone with
mihnhai,
with face, and no longer merely a white ghost.

She had emerged into a fine New York summer evening, Canal Street packed with trucks and cars going to the tunnel or the bridges, sending up a fine stink of fumes to the sky, which was just going slatey blue, the stink mixing with the higher notes of fried fat, starch, spice, and decay to make the true Chinatown perfume. The wide sidewalks teemed with shoppers just out of work, enough of them Asians of various tribes to make the
gwailo
among them stand out. Lucy threaded through the crowd and into the Asia Mall, a wide double storefront on the north side of Canal, and a typical enterprise of the district. Its show-windows were nearly covered with hand-lettered ads on white butcher paper, Chinese characters in red paint touting shoes, clothing, fabric, drugstore items, and food specialties of the Orient. It was a great success and the result of over twenty years of backbreaking labor by the Chen family.

As she passed through the Asia Mall, she greeted the checkout ladies in Cantonese, assured them she had eaten, inquired after their families, and they about hers (their hands never stopping to punch in and stuff bags, never pausing in the accumulation of wealth), and she moved on to the back of the store, and through the swinging door to the storeroom. She made her way down the aisles of the cavernous space, treading familiar pathways until she came to the pillow section. She scampered up the pipe scaffolding like a young monkey, crawled through a space in the chicken wire, and wriggled through fake-fur passages until she came to a void, a cave about ten feet on a side, entirely surrounded by fluffy beanbags dyed colors so garish that they were hardly salable, even to Filipinos. A space had been left above, like a hairy skylight, through which a sickly fluorescent glow penetrated, enough to read by. It was a perfect hideout, if you ignored the stink of cheap plastic, and here she found, as she had expected, Janice Chen and Mary Ma.

They say that two boys is half a boy and three boys is no boy at all; it is as true of girls. Janice Chen was supposed to be “helping” in the stockroom and had asked Mary Ma to share the burden and goof off. The two—Lucy's closest friends, Janice as good as a sister—might have stood in a pattern book for the two most familiar types of Chinese girls. Mary had the flat moon face, rosebud mouth, cheeks like peaches, and the bowl cut with bangs, while Janice was slender and golden as a flute, with high cheekbones, a sharp small nose, and forty inches of black hair running down her back in a braid like a python.

“Lucy!” the other girls both cried, but not too loudly. “We thought you were getting your brains scrambled at Columbia,” Janice added.

“I was, but I got out early and took the train.”

“What did he make you do?”

“Strip naked and walk around on my hands. He's really a little bit of a sex maniac.”

“No, really!” Mary insisted.

“Oh, just science stuff. I had to wear this like old-fashioned bathing cap with wires coming out of it and translate from
Guóndùngwá
and
guoyu
and French and Vietnamese, back and forth. Totally boring. But he's going to pay me. A lot.”

“Really?” asked Janice. “Are you going to keep it?” In her world earnings were the property of the family.

“Of course,” said Lucy, “and don't tell anyone, okay? What're you guys doing?”

“We're supposed to be breaking boxes,” answered Janice. “My brother's being a total dork about it. He loves to give orders—big deal, he's in
charge
of us. So we're hiding.”

Mary added responsibly, “We should go back. He'll tell your dad.”

“Oh, let him wait,” said Lucy. “Later we'll all do it together and get it finished. You want me to read you more Claudine?”

Glittering eyes and giggles. Lucy got out her book and translated the part where the schoolgirls have a fight in a hotel room with their chemises rucking naughtily up around their various interesting parts. The rural dialect in which much of it was written gave her some trouble, but she bulled through, in the process adding some lubricious details omitted by Colette. Like the girls in the novel, the three of them were, in fact, as pure as boiled eggs, but, in the manner of many such children, they very much wished to think of themselves as sexy devils. Of course, they had swiped copies of
Playgirl
, and they had weathered copies of
Zap Comix
—they were 1980s rather than 1880s girls, after all—but still the lush and sensuous language of a ninety-year-old French novel provided them with the required combination of secrecy and salaciousness. The three of them lay stretched out, belly down on the fur, with Lucy in the center, their bodies touching, and Lucy toyed with Janice's long rope of hair as she read. Each would remember this span of time—it could not have been more than forty minutes—with regret and a certain longing, as the pinnacle of something sweet and absolutely lost. So intent were they on what they were doing, so deliciously close and intimate was the atmosphere of the furry cave they had made, that it took some little time for it to register that strange voices were rising through the beanbags from directly below them. Lucy stopped reading, and they all listened.

“
Sssh!
Listen!” Janet interrupted in a hoarse whisper.

“Your brother?” asked Mary.

“No, dummy! It's two people, right below us.” They all listened.

“That's not your dad, is it?” Lucy asked Janice in a low voice.

“No, it's strangers,” whispered Janice.

Lucy said, “Let's go and see who they are.” With that, she stashed her book and wriggled away through the bags, but not the way she had come in. Instead, she pushed her way to the face of the bin that overlooked the main aisle of the stockroom. Shortly, Janice followed, and then Mary, their three faces pressing against the wire mesh through a narrow slit between a pair of beanbags.

Looking down, they saw three men, two youthful and one elderly, all Chinese. One of the young men and the older man were standing together, and were dressed in cream silk suits. The other young man, clad in a blue suit, was addressing them in Cantonese, in the accents of rural Guangzhou. He was using extremely courteous language, flattering words, something about staying, about others who would arrive soon. The older man replied in the same tongue, but with a Hong Kong accent, a heated reply to the effect that he had come a long way, and did not appreciate the waste of time. His younger companion concurred, but more vigorously. The blue-suited man resumed his appeals. From their high angle, the girls could not see the faces of the men below, but it was clear from the body language of the two Hong Kong men that they were not mollified.

What happened next happened so fast that for a stunned instant the girls could not believe what they had witnessed. A slightly built man, wearing a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and tied in place, walked around the corner from an adjoining aisle and, holding a pistol stiffly at arm's length, shot the two Hong Kong men in the back, and when they fell down he shot them both in the head.
Pop-pop
.
Pop-pop
. Then he was gone.

Lucy heard Mary Ma take a sharp breath, and knew that in another half second a scream would burst out and so she twisted like a fish and clapped a hand over the other girl's mouth. This quick motion made the beanbags shift, and the man in the blue suit lifted his head up and looked right at them. Hours seemed to pass. Lucy could feel Mary's rapid, boiling-hot breath swish past her hand. Her palm was soaked with drool, and Mary's breathing was starting to make a nasty bubbling sound against it, which Lucy was sure could be heard across Canal Street.

“Be quiet!” she hissed into Mary's ear. The other girl took one long, shuddering breath and was still. The man stared for a little longer, then turned on his heel and walked away. The two Hong Kong men stayed where they had fallen, the runnels of blood from their heads joining into one round, ghastly pool, black as tar under the harsh fluorescent lights.

Janice Chen was the first to move, sliding backward through the sticky, clinging vinyl and the whispering fake fur. Back in the hideout, Mary Ma burst into blubbering tears, and the two other girls threw themselves on her to get her to stop, Lucy going so far as to grab a handful of Day-Glo pink fur and hold it over her mouth. In a minute or so, Mary had regained control and they got off her.

“Oh, God, what are we going to do?” she whimpered.

“I know that guy,” said Janice, ignoring this. The other two stared at her.

“What guy?” Lucy asked.

“The guy in the blue suit, the guy who walked away. I don't know his name, but he's always hanging around with my father.”

“A tong guy?”

Janice nodded, eyes dropping. Lucy understood Chinatown well enough to understand this. No important Chinatown businessman, especially not a first-generation Chinese immigrant like Louie Chen, was unconnected to the tongs. The Chens' tong was the Hap Tai Association, but Lucy had never heard a breath that they might be involved in murder, at least not recently. The tongs worked their wills far more subtly nowadays. On the other hand, there were certainly gangs in Chinatown, and gangs killed people, and nearly every gang had some affiliation with a tong.

“What are we going to
do
, Lòuhsì?”

Lucy became aware that both of her friends were watching her expectantly. She expected this. The word for “teacher” in Cantonese is
lòuhsì
, and Lucy had been called that, as a joke, by the Chens and by every other Cantonese speaker she had met from an early age. At first it had been amusing to give a little mite (and a female at that) such a name. Later, as Lucy's personality developed, it seemed more appropriate, sometimes disturbingly so. Lucy was, in fact, the leader of the little band, both of the inner circle here assembled and of a satellite clique of a half dozen girls at school. There was nothing racial in this; Lucy would have been a leader anywhere, and added to that there was the thing with the languages, and also (although no one mentioned this to her) she was the daughter of the legendary Shenpei Meilin, the one-eyed, who shot people, and crushed evildoers without mercy, like a warrior woman from the old tales. So they looked at her to see what she would do.

“Well, so first of all, we're not going to tell anyone about this,” Lucy said firmly, and she detected tiny sighs of relief from her companions. No explanation of this was necessary, but she gave one anyway, to make sure the reasons were fixed in both their minds. “Mr. Chen didn't know what was going down here” (this to save Janice's face), “but if the cops know about Janice seeing this guy with him, he's going to be in big trouble.
Big
trouble.” She meant with the tong, not the police. There was no question in any of their minds about this.

“And, of course,
Mary
can't say anything either,” said Lucy, and they all knew what
that
meant, too, because they knew that Mary and her family were
ren she
, smuggled illegals, with phony papers that would not survive any official inspection.