“Committing how many Class A felonies in the process?”
“Several, if you must know, but none that are likely to come within the cognizance of the law. Do you want to talk about this or not?”
“What’re we talking about?”
“Lucy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she’s extremely unhappy and she’s taking this business with the Chens very hard. I think they’ve closed ranks in this crisis-family only-and she’s feeling left out. She won’t talk to me about it. Maybe you can get through to her. Also. . Tran told me a lot of stuff he picked up. The details don’t matter, but the Chens could be in a bind. It’s tong stuff, like that. Jesus! Yet another reason for her to go to Sacred Heart, the damned obstinate puppy!”
“Tong stuff? You mean for real?” Karp was incredulous.
“So it appears. I thought maybe we could slip the word to Mimi Vasquez and the cops, to the effect that there’s no point in hassling the Chens. They don’t really know anything, and the guy who did it is probably sipping a sloe gin fizz in Kowloon as we speak.”
“Go easy because they’re our friends.”
Marlene missed his tone. “Yeah. Come on, Butch, they really don’t know anything.”
“This is what they teach in Yale? You’re pals with the D.A., so you get a free one? That’s exactly the reason they can’t get special treatment, Marlene. What’re you thinking of?”
One thing that Karp could not bear was tension in the bedroom, and there was plenty at that moment, so he curled an arm around his wife and said, “Look, Lucy just needs some attention. We’re both somewhat workaholic-”
“I’m not workaholic. .”
“No, you’re worse, you’re a fanatic. We’re supposed to be having a family here. Maybe you should cut down on the Wonder Woman routine and spend some more time with her.”
“What about you? When was the last time you spent any time with her?”
“Okay, let’s not get into it right now. Let’s both spend time with her-we’ll plan something for the weekend, all of us, the boys, too. And this thing with the Chens can’t be that bad. If Lucy knew anything really bad was going on, she’d tell us.”
Marlene thought that was about as likely as Santo Trafficante confessing to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa out of remorse, but held her mouth, which in any case was being nibbled by that of her husband. Marlene thereafter gratefully abandoned her miasmic thoughts to the brief oblivion of sex, not all that brief in this particular case, because Karp, though no Lothario (and thank God that was something she did not have to worry about, him sniffing up other women’s skirts), knew all her fleshly buttons and how to push them, and Marlene, for her part, had found that, contrary to every marriage manual she had read, screwing was better when she had something sneaky going on.
Afterward, they fell into the usual divine swoon, but at 3:10 Marlene popped awake from an unpleasant, unremembered dream, sweating, her heart thumping. She put on her T-shirt and went out of the room, stumbling as she always did on such sleepless excursions over the great dog who was sleeping across his mistress’s doorway, as mastiffs have done for three thousand years. She stifled a curse, patted the dog, went into the dark kitchen, where she filled Zak’s Star Wars tumbler half full of red wine.
She drank and tried to arrange her racing thoughts. Triads. The Mafia. The dead men from Hong Kong and the Chens. Jumping Jerry couldn’t wait. The woman in room 37. The abortion clinic. Her mother and the flying missile. Lucy. What had she mumbled? You have to be cute to be anorexic. Oh, Jesus! Oh, Mary, full of grace. Mama mia! Motherhood, an impossibility in the present age. What a tangled web we weave. She entertained vague escape thoughts (an assumed name, a trailer west of Tonapah, a job with the school board, blast away beer cans on the desert at night, fuck brainless cowboys, shoot crank, and drive her car into an abutment at ninety) and wondered how long she could sustain her current life. Perversity, its origins? Tran had got that right, the bastard. Thinking of that conversation, she chugged down the rest of the wine, gagged slightly, went through the long central hall of the loft to her little office. She looked out the window, pressing her moist forehead against the cool glass. Crosby Street was empty, lit by the nasty orange light from the street lamps. Free of danger, for now.
From her bookcase she took her copy of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, the purple-bound Hachette edition, and thumbed through to number 310. She translated: Sometimes in life situations develop that only the half crazy can get out of. She laughed, her laughter sounding maniacal enough in her ears, until the dog came trotting in to see what was the matter.
Chapter 7
The Chinese man in the blue suit believed ardently in the principle that contemplative thought should precede action, especially violent action, and so for several days after the incident with the Chen girl and the two White Dragon boys he sat and thought and did nothing. In his youth he had, in contrast, been a passionate advocate of violent action with no thought at all, thought itself having been rendered nugatory by the intellectual achievements of the Great Helmsman. Later, bobbing in the vast sludge of broken humanity left by the Cultural Revolution, he had discovered individualism, and for a while he imagined that the discovery was original. Later still, he met others, former Red Guards like him, without education, family, culture, or hope, who had also become individualists, and together they rediscovered feudalism, a system in which a few strong individualists become rich through the imposition of pain and terror upon the weak. This suited him very well, and it suited the leaders of his country, who had found, contra Marx, that feudalism was necessary for the operation of a communist state since, unlike communism, it worked.
He stared into the steam rising from his teacup and through the amber liquid to the leaves on the bottom, and tried to fit them into the shape of a character, although he knew he did not have the skill, if skill it was. He should have an oracle cast, he thought, although he had never found them useful in the past. Regrettably, their usefulness seemed to depend on the cultivation of self-knowledge, something he was disinclined to do, as he suspected, rightly, that it would interfere with his goal of accreting to himself as much raw power as he could. Still, he knew others believed, and that was what was important. After the brief bubble of chaos brought on by the Cultural Revolution, the dense substance of Chinese life had flowed back into its original immemorial spaces. It no longer paid to advertise disbelief. People might think you were unlucky, which was a disaster for any cooperative enterprise among the Chinese, at home or abroad.
He drank, slurping. The man in the blue suit spent a good deal of his time here, sitting on the lumpy bench of the rearmost of the four booths, facing the streaked window and the street. There were no other customers in the restaurant at this hour, understandable at ten in the morning, but there were few at any hour. Nevertheless, the tea room, a twelve-by-twenty-foot box on Bayard Street, was on paper enormously profitable. It was called Li Gwun, or Lee’s Place, that is, the Chinese equivalent of “Joe’s,” and its primary purpose, like that of a great many similar holes in Chinatown, was not the dispensing of the world’s most sophisticated cuisine but the metamorphosis of illegal cash into spendable income. It was, in fact, a Chinese laundry, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the man’s organization.
He was calling himself Leung nowadays, which did not mean much, as underworld Chinese change names nearly as often as they buy shoes. What was important was what he represented, that and the plan. When Leung thought about the plan, the two words that came into his mind were yu and bang. The first means a kind of wading bird, a snipe. The other means a clam. They are the first two words of a Chinese idiom, based on an ancient fable. The clam lies open on the shore, and the snipe grabs it. The clam closes its shell on the snipe’s bill. Neither will let the other go. The snipe holds on because of greed, the clam because it fears being eaten. A fisherman comes by and catches them both. The success of the plan depended on keeping the contending parties focused on one another and not on the fisherman creeping closer.