The work he had in mind was detective work of a sort, but it had nothing to do with the 87th Squad. The moment Augusta left the apartment, Kling opened the Isola telephone directory and searched out an address for a restaurant called Ah Wong’s. Wearing blue jeans, loafers, and a blue T-shirt with the numeral thirteen across its back, a souvenir of the interdepartmental baseball game in which he’d represented the Eight-Seven as a second baseman last summer, he went downstairs, hailed a taxi, and told the driver to take him to 41 Boone Street, down in Chinatown. The moment the cabbie threw his flag, Kling looked at his watch. It was precisely eleven minutes past noon.
“Hot enough for you?” the cabbie asked.
Kling grimaced.
“I hear it’s gonna be the whole week,” the cabbie said.
“I hope not,” Kling said.
“The whole fuckin’ week,” the cabbie said. “You know where my wife and kids are today? They’re at the beach today, that’s where they are. You know where I am today? I’m pushin’ a fuckin’ hack is where I am today.”
“Yeah,” Kling said.
The traffic on a Sunday — especially on a Sunday in August when those people who weren’t away on vacation were most certainly out at the beaches with the cabbie’s wife and kids — was so light as to be almost nonexistent. Augusta had told him that the cab ride to Ah Wong’s last night had taken a half hour; she’d left the restaurant at ten-thirty and did not walk into the apartment until eleven. That had been Saturday night, though, the busiest night of the week, and given the number of people out on the town howling, and the attendant vehicular congestion, Kling figured he’d have to add maybe ten, fifteen minutes to however long it took him to get downtown now.
The cabbie dropped him off in front of the restaurant at exactly twelve twenty-six by Kling’s watch. Fifteen minutes. So okay, it could have taken Augusta a half hour last night. On the other hand, with him or without him, she’d probably taken taxis to and from Chinatown at least a dozen times this year; she knew how long the trip took, she wouldn’t have come up with something absurd like ten minutes on a Saturday night. Kling paid and tipped the cabbie, and then walked toward the front door of the restaurant.
Ah Wong’s was sandwiched between a Chinese five-and-ten and the station house for the Chinatown Precinct, one of the oldest in the city, in fact about to celebrate its centennial this year. He was tempted to stop inside, say hello to Frank Riley, who’d gone through the Academy with him and who was now a detective/second working out of the squadroom on the second floor of the ancient building. Instead, he stood for a moment on the pavement outside the restaurant, and looked up the street, trying to visualize it as it had been last night, when Augusta said she was here.
Silken banners lettered in Chinese hung lifelessly on the leaden air, crossing the street at intervals overhead, fastened to the buildings on either side. The street was thronged with restaurants similar to Ah Wong’s, their neon signs dead in the brilliant sunshine; last night, the street would have been alive with oranges, blues, and greens. It was almost deserted now, the garbage cans overflowing into the sidewalks in front of the restaurants, green plastic bags squatting beside them like bulky sentinels. A meter maid’s motor scooter was chained to one of the metal posts flanking the steps to Ah Wong’s basement. Kling thought it ironic that even the cops had to chain up their bikes in this city, outside their own damn station house.
Even so, the Chinatown Precinct was not an “A” house, like the Eight-Seven or some of the other high-crime houses in the city. It encompassed The Straits of Napoli (as the Italian section of the precinct was called) as well as the city’s mile-long strip of sleazy hotels and shabby bars (known familiarly as The Vineyard, for its collection of vagrant winos), and its boundaries also enclosed several pockets of blacks and Hispanics, mostly in the Governor James L. Grady Housing Project bordering the River Dix and in that end of the precinct where The Stem joined Dallas Avenue. The biggest crime in the precinct these days was the extortion committed by the Chinese youth gangs, many of whom were suspected of having connections with the older Chinese who ran the basement gambling houses, where Mah-Jongg was the favored game. The gamblers, tired of getting ripped off by itinerant holdup artists, had only several years back begun hiring these kids to protect their premises. The minute the kids tipped to how much money was being wagered at the tables, they began demanding higher fees and threatening mayhem if the demands weren’t met. From the gambling dens, they had branched out to the restaurants and stores, and now held the honest merchants in terror of their organized power.
There were no whorehouses, as such, in the precinct and no massage parlors, either, an oddity in a city that for the past ten years had been sprouting them like venereal lesions. But there was a large contingent of streetwalkers (none of them Chinese) working the area between Aqueduct and Clancy, and occasionally a pimp would decide to exercise his authority by slashing a breast or a pretty face, and — even more often — a visiting fireman in search of a cheap thrill would get mugged and rolled and left in an alley that stank of stale urine and sour wine. The continuing feud between the Dominicans and the Puerto Ricans up around Dallas was a headache to the cops, and since the Criminal, Family, Municipal, and City Court buildings were clustered within the precinct, farther downtown on High Street, there was a steady parade of offenders moving through the precinct to and from the corridors of the law. But for the most part, the precinct was a quiet one.
Riley, who had once worked out of the Marine Tiger Precinct in Riverhead, named after the ship that presumably had carried the first Puerto Ricans here from San Juan, had described his new job as “a month in the country,” this despite the twenty or so homicides committed here annually, and a fair share besides of burglaries, robberies, and grand larcenies. But Riley had come from a precinct where the life of an unpartnered foot-patrol cop wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. The Chinatown Precinct wasn’t a cop-killing precinct like either the Marine Tiger or the city’s notorious Vale Street Precinct. Nor was its crime rate as high as the Eight-Seven’s, where, thank God, the populace had not yet taken to stoning policemen. Kling thought he might have liked working here; he loved Chinese food.
He realized how hungry he was the moment he stepped into the restaurant and a swarm of exotic aromas assailed his nostrils. He took a table near the wall, ordered a gin and tonic and an assortment of fried shrimp, egg rolls, barbecued spare ribs, dumplings, and then — still hungry — ordered the moo goo gai pan, with which he drank a bottle of Heineken beer. When the waiter came back to the table to ask him if there would be anything else, Kling debated flashing the tin before asking his questions, and decided against it.
“That was delicious,” he said. “My wife told me about this place — she was here last night with some friends.”
“Yes?” the waiter said, smiling.
“Big party. About a dozen people.”
“Ah, Miss Mercier party,” the waiter said, nodding.
Miss Mercier was Bianca Mercier, who only last month had adorned the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, a dark-haired beauty with a Nefertiti look that was currently driving the city’s fashion editors wild.
“Yes, that’s the one,” Kling said.
“But no dozen,” the waiter said. “Only ten.”
“Eleven, I guess,” Kling said.
“No, ten. Only one big table here,” he said, pointing to a round table across the room. “Seat ten people. Was only ten last night, Miss Mercier party.”