Then a thinner sheaf, these in color, the worst ones, and who knows how Sym had wormed them out of the official files, probably the same way she had procured drugs, whining and money, but here they were, what happened when a body fell nearly a thousand feet and reached terminal velocity before striking asphalt. He’d landed facedown, although it was hard to tell from the photograph; no, there was a black patch that had been the back of a well-tailored lawyer’s pinstripe, relatively untouched by the wide pool of horrors that surrounded it. Marlene made herself look, even wielded the hand lens, identifying the bits. Fein had gone out without any identification that morning-that could be a significant detail-which was why it had taken the cops some twenty-four hours to discover who the jumper had been. He’d left no note. Marlene put the lens down and gasped in some air. She’d spotted the dimpled chin, curiously blood-free, attached to a long, twisted piece of disassembled face. Well, enough of that! She put all the photographs away in their folders. She could make no connection between the robust, dashing man in the earlier photographs and the offal on Fifth Avenue. Sure, in literature they had them, Gatsby and Richard Cory, the shiny front with nothing behind it, but she doubted that Gerald Fein had been such a man. On what evidence? That look at the daughter, maybe? Panofsky was wrong; the law hadn’t been his whole life. Gerald Fein had a family.
Sym stuck her head in. “Phone for you. Some woman named Chau. Wants to know where Lucy’s at.”
“I’ll take it in back.” Marlene got up, stretched, yawned, and went back to her desk, located behind a bookcase full of potted plants in the rear of the big room.
Dr. Chau introduced herself and informed Marlene that Lucy had not shown for their noon lunch date; nor had she arrived at one-thirty for her regular lab session. She had never missed one before.
“Maybe she just forgot,” said Marlene, not believing this at all. “I mean, she’s a genius, but she’s twelve.”
Chau seemed satisfied with this, and Marlene got rid of her as soon as she could, pressed the disconnect, and immediately dialed Tran’s pager. She waited. The torment lasted ten minutes, and then Tran was on the phone.
“Is Lucy with you?”
A rather long pause. “I presume she is not at the laboratory, then.”
“No, they just called. Tran, you don’t think. .? I mean, those men who bothered them before. .”
“I very much doubt it, Marie-Helene. However, I will find her.”
“Where? Where is she?”
“Do not become upset, my friend. There is no one who wishes to hurt Lucy at present. She is an impulsive child and may have gone off somewhere. I will inspect her usual haunts.” In English he added, “No sweat it.”
“Don’t sweat it, you mean. ‘No sweat’ means a trivial problem.”
“This is also apt,” said Tran in French. “I will call. Until later.”
It had to be Leung, Tran thought, one of those phone calls from Li’s Restaurant had set up a lift, and they would have had to be good to have netted Lucy in daylight, in the city. The other day Leung had used his own boys, Chinese, and they had been foiled easily. He would not do that again. He would use. . who? Local people, certainly-you wouldn’t import a group from Hong Kong to lift a little girl; they might get lost or make some stupid error out of mere. . what was the word? Disorientation? Disoccidentation? There was no such word in any language, attesting to the cultural hegemony of the West. They would be Asian, probably; Tran couldn’t see a tong man hiring long-noses for such a job. That narrowed the field. Kidnap-capable gangs were not exactly common, even in Chinatown. Tran knew several, and he decided to start with the one he used himself, when he had need of such services.
The business offices of the Hoi Do an-truong were located above a Vietnamese grocery on Lafayette, just off Canal, in the heart of the area that Vietnamese gangs had recently claimed for their own. Vietnamese gangs are not squeamish in their choice of names, unlike the Chinese, who prefer flowery vagueness with a “harmonious” or “benevolent” tossed in. One Viet gang of the period was called Born to Kill; Hoi Do an-truong means “the society of those with severed entrails,” aka “The Sorrow League.” In Vietnamese folklore that name refers to an association of men and women of talent doomed to a life of woe by cruel fate.
When Tran approached the building, its doorway was decorated with the usual gaggle of black-shirted, sunglassed young thugs. Others leaned against late-model Lexus or Maxima cars, also black, parked and double-parked in the street outside. These young men had all been children during the war; most were orphans and the Hoi Do an-truong was the closest thing they had ever known to a family. Tran did not exactly approve of them, but he understood the wounds they had experienced and did not condemn their predation on the Vietnamese refugee community, many of whom had spent a good deal of energy trying to kill him back in their native land.
Tran passed through these youths without challenge and entered the building. They looked at one another through their sunglasses and laughed nervously. There was some debate among them as to who the old guy really was. Some thought their dai lo called the man Major Pham as a nickname, as an American gangster might call an associate King Kong or Terminator. Others thought he actually was Major Pham, the unkillable terror of the Iron Triangle, whose name was used to frighten children at a time and in a place where children were not easy to frighten. In any case, they treated him, as their leader did, with vast and wary respect.
The dai lo, or big brother, of the Hoi Do an-truong, called himself Freddie Phat. He was thirty-five, tall for a Vietnamese, and had a handsome, intelligent face. He wore fashionable tinted aviator glasses, a gray silk suit, and a dark blue shirt with a pale blue tie, open at the collar. His office was the kitchen of a tenement apartment in which many of his associates dwelt. When Tran barged in, he immediately dismissed the two men with whom he was talking and offered Tran a chair at the chrome and formica kitchen table that served as his desk. Tran remained standing. He said, “Tell me you didn’t take her.”
Freddie Phat swallowed the insult represented by Tran’s tone of voice, and his refusal of a seat, and the implied refusal of tea and snacks and a civilized conversation before getting to business. Phat was one of four people in the United States who knew who Tran really was (the others being Lucy Karp, Marlene Ciampi, and a woman who worked in a fish-packing plant in Texas) and so he did this out of respect, rather than because he was afraid of him (although he was afraid of him, too), respect for what Tran had been through in the service of his ungrateful country.
It did not occur to him, although he was an excellent liar, to lie in this instance. He said, “No, naturally not, although I was approached with the contract.”
“Leung?”
“One of his people came, a little before noon. I said no, and I suggested it was not a good idea to annoy that particular girl.”