China Trade (30 page)

“You might get some of the others, too.” I tried to
sweeten the deal as much as I could. “For illegal weapons, anyway. You’ll have probable cause to search them.”

“Don’t use cop terms when you’re trying to sell me something. It makes me suspicious.”

“Sorry.” I held my breath. If Mary weren’t my good, good friend, she wouldn’t be yelling at me for wanting to do something this risky. But if she weren’t an ambitious cop, she wouldn’t have made detective this early in her career. I asked, “Will you do it?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Will you?”

“I’ll have to run it by my C.O.”

I stopped myself from cheering. “Go ahead. Call me back.” I gave her Mrs. Blair’s number, hung up, gave Bill and Mrs. Blair a big grin and a thumbs-up. Bill returned the grin. All Mrs. Blair had for us was a disbelieving stare.

T
H I R T Y - T W O

M
ary called back. There was a lot of arranging back and forth. Mrs. Blair, still both amazed and reluctant, called Lee Kuan Yue and asked him to come uptown. When he got there he had the same reaction to the plan as she had had, but he was finally persuaded that it was a good idea, good for Chinatown and good for all of us.

So he made his phone call and went back downtown.

And we waited.

While we waited, Mrs. Blair, her breeding impeccable even in a situation as absurd as this, had Rosie O’Malley prepare lunch. We ate in the dining room, around a table so polished—probably by Rosie—that I could see my reflection in my own eyes.

Eating sliced chicken on very curly lettuce, with a fine-crumbed white bread, butter, and pickled green beans, we talked about Hong Kong, which Bill had seen in the Navy and where Mrs. Blair grew up. We talked about my childhood in Chinatown, and about Bill’s, in Kentucky and then on Army bases all over the world. It was polite conversation, the kind people have at the dining table in a dining room where family portraits watch you eat. I’d never been watched by family portraits before.

As we were finishing our coffee and tea, Rosie came to announce that Mr. Lee was on the telephone. The electricity in the room, so civilly veiled as we’d waited and conversed, jumped to life. I felt it fly through me, sparking off the table and the portraits and the glinting silverware.

We all gathered around the telephone in the hall, where Mrs. Blair briefly spoke to her brother. She replaced the receiver softly in its cradle and turned to us. “It’s arranged,” she said. “Kuan Yue doesn’t know exactly what will happen next.”

“He’s not supposed to. He’s out of it now. Now it’s up to us.”

“And what is it that’s up to you? What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to go downtown,” I said. “And wait some more.”

Which is how Bill and I came to be hanging twitchily around my office, staring at the silent phone, listening to the radiator hiss. Bill smoked endless cigarettes, I drank endless cups of tea. We sat, stood, paced, sat again, stood some more, and talked about nothing.

The only argument we were thinking about having we got out of the way early.

“There’s no
point
in your being there,” I objected, for the third time. “It would be better if you were with the cops.”

“It wouldn’t be better.” Bill knocked ash off his hundred and fourth cigarette. “It would only make you feel better, because
if you got killed I wouldn’t get killed too. Although allow me to point out that if you get killed you won’t care whether I get killed or not.”

“Only in your cynical white person theology. In reality, I’m being particularly unselfish in not insisting that you do get killed with me so I could have someone I know with me on the other side.”

“Baloney. You want me to live if you die, so you can come back and haunt me. I’m just trying to avoid that.”

“I wouldn’t haunt you.”

“You do anyway, and you’re still alive.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“That you’re alive, or that you haunt me?”

I glared.

“Anyway,” he said, “it is. Your tall alabaster body with its long tanned limbs, your flowing mane of golden curls, the clear pale blue of your eyes …”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I’m nervous. A Chinese gangster half my age is planning to kill me and he doesn’t call, he doesn’t write … Besides, the vests are mine.”

He waved his cigarette at the Kevlar body armor piled on my desk.

“I thought you were going to give me one for Christmas.”

“I didn’t, did I?”

“Bill—”

“Forget it. This is a crazy idea, and the only possible way I’m going to let you do it is if I’m there.”

“What do you mean, ‘let me’? Just how do you think you could stop me?”

“Not by physical means, clearly. But I have enormous moral authority in your life. You know that’s true.”

“God,” I said. “If I say you can come, will you shut up?”

“Uh-huh.”

So Bill won the argument. I felt guilty, but secretly I was glad.

Then came the babbling about nothing, folded in with short silences in which the radiator hissed and Bill and I each thought our own thoughts. Maybe the radiator thought thoughts, too.

It was close to two hours before the phone rang. Although that was the one thing we’d been waiting for, the sudden shrilling of the bell froze us both. I didn’t grab it up until the third ring.

“Chin Investigative Services. Lydia Chin speaking.” I tried not to let my words trip over themselves the way my heart was flopping around in my chest.

“So, little private eye really got office.” The sneering, taunting voice was the one I’d hoped to hear.

“What do you want?” As if I didn’t know. I nodded to Bill.

“How you feel? Hurt a little?” the voice asked me with mock concern.

“Go to hell.”

“Mustn’t talk like that,” he scolded. “Not good for woman, use bad words. Little private eye still looking for porcelains?”

“Why? You have some?”

“Might. Want to talk about it?”

“Last time I talked to you I was sorry.”

“Last time, because you snooping. This time Trouble inviting you.”

“Where?”

“Someplace private. Better for business.”

“I don’t like your kind of business. Where?”

“End of pier, Christopher Street. Nice breeze, nice view. Tonight. Eight o’clock maybe.”

“The end of the Christopher Street pier?” I repeated, looking at Bill. He shook his head, pulling his hands toward his chest in a way that meant “come closer.” “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said to Trouble. “You expect me to go to the end of the pier in January? At night? To meet you? Forget it.”

“Little private eye want porcelains, better come.”

“The pier, but not the end. The parking strip in front.” I raised my eyebrows at Bill. He nodded.

“Hmm,” Trouble said. “Okay, sure. Parking strip.” It was easy to see what he was thinking: that Lydia Chin was dumb enough to think that a fifty-foot-wide block-long strip beside the highway, inhabited by stumbling junkies and the cardboard-housed homeless, was a safe place.

“It’s more public,” I told him. “Easier to get away from.”

And, I didn’t tell him, easier to fill with cops hiding behind things.

“Okay,” he said. “Eight o’clock See you, little private eye.”

“One more thing. I’m bringing my partner. I’m not talking to you alone again.”

“Sure, no problem,” Trouble agreed easily. “Like to meet him anyway.”

I hung up with no good-bye.

“What did he say?” Bill asked. “I wish you had an extension, by the way.”

“Where would I put it, in the bathroom? Buy me one for Christmas. He said he wanted to meet you.”

“Most people do. It’s the price of fame.”

“The parking strip in front of the pier? Does that sound good?”

“Terrific. What time?”

“Eight.”

“He’ll be early, to plant his guys.”

“So Mary will just have to be earlier.”

Mary, at the station house, answered the phone before the first ring was over. “Where the hell have you been?” she barked.

“You’re getting repetitious. I’ve been in my office waiting for Trouble to call, just like I was supposed to be.”

“And?”

“He called. He wants to get together.” I told Mary what Trouble and I had arranged.

“Nuts. You’re nuts.”

“Mary, think ‘collar.’ Think, ‘Second Grade.’ ”

“Think ‘funeral.’ ”

“Think ‘we’ve already set this in motion, it’s too late to stop it now.’ ”

“I know. I never should have let that happen. I’m having serious second thoughts.”

“I’m sorry. But even if we wanted to stop now, we really can’t. Trouble thinks he’s got a contract on me and Bill. He’d get suspicious if Lee suddenly told him don’t bother. That could be dangerous for Lee. Unless you want him actually to go through with it, we have to do this. This way at least you’ll have the situation under control, and end up with Trouble on a plate.”

“Nothing you’re ever involved in is under control, Lydia.”

“Mary, don’t shake my confidence right now, okay? Let’s fight later, when it’s all over.”

“I just hope we get the chance.”

From then on our talk was all business, going over the plan. Mary drilled me on alternative moves for different scenarios. There really weren’t many alternatives: Basically, Bill and I were supposed to drop to the ground when the action started and not come up until it was over.

“Don’t pull a gun,” she said. “And tell your cowboy boyfriend the same thing.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, and he’s not a cowboy.”

Bill made a face of wounded pride.

“Let us do the shooting,” Mary went on, ignoring me. I decided not to press the point, under the circumstances. “We’re going to be all over them the first weapon we see. That’s all we’re going to wait for.”

“Okay,” I said.

“He’ll get there early.” Mary repeated what Bill had said. “To spot his boys around. We’ll be there earlier. Don’t worry.”

“You’re the one who’s worrying.”

“Someone has to.”

“You just said not to.”

“I’ll see you later. You have your vests?”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye. Lydia?” she said, as I was about to hang up. ‘Good luck.”

“I don’t need it. I have you.”

She hung up, instead.

The next few hours were excruciating, just a long bridge, a cuseway to be sped over as fast as possible connecting now and later. Because there was the possibility, small as it was, that the appointment had only been to throw us off guard and Trouble could be planning an ambush, Bill and I had decided to stay together and out of sight. We left my office as soon as I hung up with Mary and took a cab to Bill’s place. No Golden Dragons were in sight and no one followed us.

At his apartment Bill put on music. We started with something relaxing and soothing—Chopin Ballades, he told me—but that didn’t work, so we moved to jumpy, fast-moving works, by Bartok and Scriabin (names I knew) and then Sessions and Part (names I didn’t). We read the
Times
. Bill, who works out of his house, did paperwork. At six we called Shorty downstairs and asked him to send up chili for Bill and a spinach salad for me. We ate, cleaned up, put the
Times
on the recycle pile.

We looked at each other.

I asked, “Can I say, ‘let’s roll’?”

“Just once.”

“Let’s roll.”

We Velcroed ourselves into the vests, me ouching as mine pressed on the bruises left from my last meeting with Trouble. Bill checked his .38, which we both knew was loaded and antiseptically clean, and slung his shoulder holster over his vest. I checked my .22 and put it in my jacket pocket.

“You’re going out there with that?”

“That creep stole my .38, I told you that. One of the
many things I have against him. This is the only other weapon I have a license for besides a slingshot.”

“You might be better off with a slingshot.”

“Mary says we’re not supposed to use them, anyway. She specifically said to tell you that.”

“I don’t intend to have to. Isn’t that the plan?”

It was. And it was a good plan, too.

And it almost worked.

T
H I R T Y - T H R E E

S
houldered with concrete barriers and filled with frozen puddles, the broken pavement of the parking strip at the end of the Christopher Street pier spread itself four car lengths wide on the river side of the West Side Highway. There was one way in, off the highway from the north, and one way out, onto the highway from the south.

A hard breeze was pushing in off the water as Bill and I drove in. Black choppy waves roughened the river’s surface, dulling the reflections of the lights that glinted from the New Jersey waterfront. As we rolled slowly down the length of the strip, I thought that the river’s other shore had never seemed so far away.

The tree-lined streets and intimate restaurants of Greenwich Village beckoned coyly from across six lanes of traffic; here, with the whoosh of cars on one side and the lapping of the river on the other, the most picturesque objects were a few parked cars, some abandoned ones, and a jettisoned supermarket cart.

On the strip’s north end, hard up against the wet, rough timbers that formed the river-side edge, three figures hunched
around a fire built in a steel drum. Cinders flew into the air, thrashed wildly in the wind, and blinked out.

Other scattered people could be seen in this freezing no-man’s land. Leaning on the burned-out hulk of a car, a pair of black men waved their hands in jerky, slow-motion emphasis to whatever drugged-out discussion they were having. A figure so swaddled in coats and hats that I couldn’t tell its sex or age snored, legs spread, back against a wooden piling, an empty bottle of Thunderbird by its knee. Others, shadowy, moving little, huddled in the darkness near the cars, or in the meager protection of the windowless cars themselves.

Bill pulled halfway down the strip and parked against the timbers, as we had arranged with Mary. He let the car idle for a few seconds longer than he usually does; then he turned it off.

We looked at each other.

He said, “You take me to the nicest places.”

I tried to think of a wise-guy comeback, but I didn’t have one.