“You mean the Mandarin and Cantonese business?”
“For starters. There are lots of dialects in China, really they’re independent languages, and so in the nineteenth century when they brought the telegraph in, they concocted a standard code for every character, and that’s the only way you can figure out someone’s real name, by getting him to write down the character and using a code book to look up the STC number, the standard telegraphic code. That’s what the Hong Kong cops use to keep track of people. Anyway, we obtained from Mr. Lie’s landlord a signature in characters-he says he’s Lie Tan Wo-and we faxed it to Hong Kong. His surname came up 2621, fine, but not much help. It’s like Smith, only worse, because that particular name is the third most common name in China. It means ‘plum.’ There are probably sixty million people named Li, or Loei, or Looey. Now, besides those, there are regional variations of any particular name that might not sound anything like Li. For example. .”
One thing about V.T., Karp now recalled, was that when he got his teeth into something, he went on about it, telling you more than you wanted to know. Besides, the conversation was reminding him uncomfortably of his daughter, sinking perhaps even now into some new oriental miasma.
“Cut to the chase, V.T.,” Karp interrupted. “Did you find the guy or not?”
“But this stuff is interesting. Jeez, what a grouch! Okay, we also faxed fingerprints and a snap one of Fulton’s guys took on the street. I spoke to a Captain Chui over there, and his people ID’d him as Nia Tu Wah. They were very surprised to learn Mr. Nia, that’s the surname first here, had shown up in New York. They thought he’d gone to the Yellow Springs.”
“Where’s that?”
“The land of the dead. He was, or maybe we should say is, a hot prospect in a triad called. . let’s see here, Da Qan Zi. It means ‘big circle gang’ or ‘big circle boys.’ ”
“And who are they?”
“Mainlanders. Big Circle was a Red Guard camp back during the Cultural Revolution. These people are all former Red Guards who got to like kicking in teeth back then and kept up the practice, except now they do it for money instead of for the Great Helmsman. Recently they’ve been expanding outside of the People’s Republic-Taiwan, Macao, Indonesia, and Hong Kong itself-leaning on the local triads. They do drugs, immigrant smuggling, prostitution, plus extortion. Very upsetting to the old-line triads is what I hear. Mr. Nia worked out of Macao.”
“Upsetting as in tong war?”
“Triads aren’t tongs, but yeah, there’s been violence. For example, in Jakarta last month. .” He stopped and looked at Karp, on whose face he recognized the lineaments of deep thought. Karp was off line, and V.T. waited while the processor hummed. “Yes?” he said when Karp’s eyes had unglazed.
“Oh, just something else. You know, we had a double murder in Chinatown the other week. Apparently a couple of big triad honchos from Hong Kong, father and son. Isn’t Macao near Hong Kong?”
“Like the Bronx and Brooklyn. You think there’s a connection with Lie? Or Nia?”
“I don’t know. I’m worried about Lucy. She’s involved in some way in it. Some heavy guys went after her the other day. No, she’s okay, but my mind keeps going back to it. She won’t tell me anything about it, apparently because she doesn’t want to get her pals in trouble, which leads me to believe some of the pals’ parents are embroiled in it. It’s just one more damn thing.”
“Interesting, though. How many triad guys from Hong Kong are in New York at any one time?”
“Fourteen hundred and two, for all we know,” said Karp sourly. “There’s not a lot of intelligence coming from that sector.”
“True, but it strikes me as funny anyway that two of them get whacked and another claims he arranged a murder for the Mob. Maybe that’s his regular line of work.”
Karp shrugged. This was speculation, and V.T. knew that speculation in advance of any evidence was to Karp the next thing to an indictable offense. It always amazed V.T., who loved speculation himself, that his friend had no interest at all in whodunit, but only cared about how-you-got-’em.
After a vaguely embarrassing pause Karp said, “So what else do you have besides this ID?”
“Not a lot,” V.T. admitted. “The guy’s illegal, so he has no decent paper and we have no record of entry. He lives in a two-room, third-floor walk-up on Bayard Street, pays cash, no phone, no car, no bank account that anyone can find. The feds, of course, tossed the place pretty thoroughly by the time we got our warrant, so no great finds there. He hangs out in little restaurants, uses pay phones. He’s connected with a Chinatown gang called the White Dragons, runs the usual extortion business, supplies guards for illegal gambling games, provides girls for Chinatown big shots. A typical small-time gangster, just like he says he is. Or so it seems.”
“Why ‘or so it seems’?”
“Because why would a major Hong Kong triad hood come to New York with just the clothes he’s walking around in to shake down Chinese restaurants for lucky money?”
“He was a major drug trafficker.”
“So he says, but still, it doesn’t answer the question why, of all the hoods in Chinatown, he gets picked to whack a heavy wise guy. Then, instead of splitting to Hong Kong or some other Chinese neighborhood where there isn’t a chance in hell the Mob would ever find him, he walks in out of nowhere and asks for Butch Karp and spills his guts in return for immunity and protection. Which, when he doesn’t get it, he waltzes over to the feds and slips into a federal witness-protection program. This is a guy from a criminal subculture that never deals with the authorities. These guys make the Mob look like a flock of canaries. It doesn’t make sense.”
Karp made once again the deep sniffing noise he had used with Keegan earlier. V.T. grinned and nodded. Karp related the same suspicions to him.
V.T. said, “So you think somebody is knocking off the Bollano family in a very subtle way, so as not to engage the attention of the other families. The Bollanos are having a little trouble, we’ll wait and see what happens. The Gambinos, the Lucheses et al. are watching each other, nobody’s making a grab for the territory like they would if it was a full-scale intra-family struggle. And you think the Chinese might be involved?”
“It wouldn’t exactly surprise me. I wish to hell, though, I could figure out his game. The guy’s on ice. When he gets out, he’s not going to be a gangster anymore, he’s going to be a protected witness. Where’s his win, except staying alive, and you already pointed out the flaw there. All he needs is a ticket to some other Chinatown. Can you see some low-hairline Italians trying to find this guy in, say, Panama City? Or Manila?”
“It’d be nice if we had the actual trigger man in Catalano,” said V.T.
“Yeah, it would, but my suspicion is he is never going to give them up unless and until he gets full transactional immunity from all state prosecution on the evidence he presents. Which I am not going to offer. We have to come up with physical evidence, or another witness, or the trigger man or men, so we can put the squeeze on him. I might cut a deal to get the guys who ordered the hit, but I’m not giving this mutt a free ride with as little solid information as we have now. Colombo can play that game, not me. Frankly, I was hoping you’d find a stash of money with Joe’s prints all over it or a pocket diary with an entry ‘three a.m., commit murder, pick up milk and corn flakes.’ You let me down again, V.T.”
“What can I say, I’m a sack of shit. Talking about games, we don’t know what game Hong Kong is playing. We don’t know this Captain Chui from a hole in the wall. He could be bent. The real Nia wants to disappear, the cops there get this call from New York, who is this guy? Captain Chui, who’s been on the triad payroll for years, says to himself, oh, great, we’ll say it’s Mr. Nia. That way there’s a record of the guy in custody in New York, case closed in Hong Kong.”