Scheduled for Day Two was a late afternoon series of the Lion Dance, performed by six traditional kung fu academies. Afterward, the Gala Anniversary Dinner at twenty dollars a head, hosted by the Silver Palace and the Harmony Palace, the biggest Chinatown restaurants. The Nationalists ritually issued threats to the Chinese Communists and vowed to retake the mainland. One year they drove an armored half-track with.50 caliber machine guns and camouflage netting down Mott Street and chewed up the asphalt. The following weekend featured the Senior Citizens' presentation of Cantonese Opera, and the boh lo, northerners, offering Peking Opera out in Flushing. In Queens, the Nationalists from Taiwan, the Republic's forty-five-year seat of power, provided an even greater bang-up celebration of the day. That was to be expected, Uncle Four thought, Flushing being a KMT stronghold.
The wind gusted up and Uncle Four shielded his eyes from the dust. Double Ten drew people to Chinatown, his stronghold, and was good for business. The celebration allowed the Nationalists to blow off steam, to show off their face in the Chinatown power configuration: the alliances between Associations, the tongs, the Ian jai, punk-thugs, street gangs, the Kuomintang Nationalists and the triad secret societies.
The sunny morning turned gray and blustery, the October wind carrying on it an edge of wet and cold that made the beauty queens wrap their slender arms about themselves, shiver, and scrunch up their made-up faces. The marching band from the Chinese School came down the street, a platoon of old veterans from the American Legion dragging along behind it.
Uncle Four folded the program and stepped out of the wind. He'd seen it all before and none of it held any surprises for him. He turned toward the Community Center, but was thinking about the stacks of hundred-dollar bills in the plastic takeout bag, and the cache of diamonds and gold in his bedroom that Golo had entrusted to him.
Run
In the haziness of his sleep he imagined the distant beeping of his pager singing in his ear, but when he stirred from his pillow, the sound was more distinct, a tapping on his door that made his eyes focus on the faint sliver of light and shadow that seeped in under the door from the stairwell.
He rolled off the bed, tiptoeing toward the door and the tiny hushed voice calling, fun Yee, Jun Yee!
Johnny squinted through the peephole, saw it was Mona, and unlocked the double deadbolts. She brushed past him like a cold gust, saying in a rush, "You must run, the old bastard put a contract out on you." She looked desperate.
Was he dreaming? What?and How?were all he could manage against the force of her outpouring.
"There are loongjaai, Dragons, searching for you. Your face cannot be seen on the streets." Her body quaked in the darkness.
"He found out about us. I don't know how. I have left the apartment. I am going to Lor Saang, Los Angeles." Breathless, talking to him in the night shadows, her words jumped out in a steely, angry chopping rhythm.
"I need you. I want you to meet me there." A heartbeat passed. "Take the bus." She gave him a ticket folder, red, from jade Tours.
He felt his heart hammering, a dryness blotting up in his throat, anguish and dread sweeping over him.
"It's all there," she said, her voice expectant.
He saw the Greyhound bus ticket, the Holiday Inn reservation, and swiveled his eyes back to her.
"I will call you in three days," she said, the moonlight flashing in her eyes. There was silence around them, his bloodshot eyes burning questions into hers.
"What's going to happen?" he finally asked, swallowing his fear.
"Don't worry. I have some money. We'll be partners." Then she turned to go and he grabbed her by the elbow. She jerked it back, tears welling up in her eyes.
"I'm going!" she cried out. "He's not going to hurt me anymore." She stepped toward him before he could wrap her closer and pounded her fists against his chest, angrily sobbing, suddenly pushing away. "Hurry! They're after you!"
He watched her slip out the door, stunned, listening to her heels clatter down the rickety stairs. He went to the window and folded back the blinds. Saw nothing but night, streetlamps, and a yellow cab pulling away.
Under the cover of night, once she was beyond viewing from Johnny's window, Mona walked to the street phone, inserted a coin. She heard the metallic rattle, then a dial tone, and tapped in Johnny's pager sequence of eights. She took a breath, waited.
Johnny's beeper sounded before he finished buckling the belt on his jeans. In the dark of his apartment, the luminous display on his pager read 444-4444. Death numbers all across the digital display.
The old bastard seeping him.
Just like Mona had said.
He reached under the nightlight, pulled his cash and a Ruger Magnum from the floorboards under the sink. Stuffed fugitive items into a duffel bag.
He tucked the ticket folder into his pocket, stepped out into the yellow light of the stairway, moving down the steps and thinking, Goodbye to Chinatown.
Nite cruiser
Two A.M.
Homeless predators and mental-hospital fugitives stalked the carbon-monoxide-infused spread of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, watched warily by the sex hustlers, pimps, and returning New Jersey johns. Two PA cops patrolled together, tense, a nervous pair of birds.
Johnny kept the neat, flat packets of fifties inside the back game-pouch of his hunting vest, covered the vest under a loosefitting barn jacket, dark, his entire presentation colorless. The Ruger in his waistband.
He went directly to a bank of telephone booths, which carried the stench of urine and stale ugly sex, nestled the greasy handset into the bend of his neck and punched in Gee Man's number. Held his breath for three rings, got a message machine.
"Take care of the car," he said. "Leave me a voice message if anyone asks for me." Stepping back from the stench, he hung up and went toward the brushed-aluminum Greyhound Star Cruiser idling at Departures.
On board he took a window seat across from the driver. The Cruiser held forty-five passengers and carried a ton of luggage in its belly hold.
He scanned the other passengers.
There were no other Chinese on the bus. Just as well. He didn't want company, small talk, or questions. The bus rolled out, only half full.
There was a group of students, a club maybe. Baseball caps worn backwards. Jansport knapsacks. An old white couple carrying cane suitcases. A woman and her daughter who looked Mexican. Most of the rest were hard-scrabble working-class by the look of their clothes: whites, Latinos, farm laborers, construction dogs returning westward, ho.
The Lincoln Tunnel snaked them through to NewJersey. A weariness settled over them inside the bus, a surrender, a resignation known by those who came hoping to conquer but ended up stealing away, back into exile in the dead night, their spirits swallowed whole by the unrelenting, unforgiving metropolis.
Johnny saw the last of NewYork City fading into the receding urban nightscape. The Greyhound pushed along, seeking the Interstate, where it could cruise at seventy-five.
His mind always came back to Mona, the idea that they could be partners. What business could they possibly have in common? Had she mentioned other partners? Women like her had to know some big players. He imagined a karaoke nightclub operation-something catering to an uptown clientele, until somewhere in the Pennsylvania night he realized Mona could never be more than a silent partner, and only in a legitimate business that wouldn't catch the attention of Big Uncle, or the Dragon Boys.