“That girl actually died to get that fortune cookie to you. And for what? It was certainly wasted on Mei-Li.”
“I keep wondering what kind of help the fortune-cookie waitress was promising me. She knew I was there about the murder of Mr. Chen. She was listening to my conversation with the witness through the interpreter. Three-quarters of it was in Chinese. I think there’s only one way to find out.”
“We go back to Mei-Li.”
“One of us does. I don’t think you’re ready for another round.”
“Really, Mike? How’re you going to talk your way past the Dragon Lady?”
“I haven’t worked that one out yet.”
“I think I have. It’s going to take nerve. I know you’ve got plenty of that.”
“So tell me the plan. I’m open to suggestion.”
“It’s also going to take a knowledge of Chinese. How’re you fixed in that department?”
“Less than adequate. You’re still on the bench, Harry.”
“There’s no way you can do this without me, Mike. You’re stuck with me.”
I thought about the way Harry looked the last time I saw him. He’d have had to improve to die.
“I don’t think so. Out of curiosity, what’s the plan?”
“Here it is. You pick me up here tomorrow morning about nine.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it. You pick me up about nine.”
“And then what?”
“And then I tell you the rest of the plan.”
“You could tell me the rest now.”
“That’s right, I could. Then I could pick up the Globe in the morning and read about how parts of some unidentified Puerto Rican-WASP were found in six different places. When they put the jigsaw puzzle together-guess who?”
“I’ll pick you up about nine.”
17
The Globe had a spread the next morning covering half a page in the city section devoted to the funeral of Mr. Chen. The silent procession of mourners through Chinatown gave testimony to how deeply a quiet, good soul can move the heart of an entire community. I found myself wishing that he could feel the outpouring of love. The funeral mass was said by the auxiliary bishop for the Chinatown area. It was an honor, but I think he would have been even more deeply touched by the tears on the faces of the line of children that extended the length of Tyler Street.
Harry was on the sidewalk outside of his apartment house at nine sharp, as advertised, bundled up in layers of clothing until only his eyes showed below the fur cap. As he got into the car, I watched him move to see how much mobility had come back. If I were a scout for the Patriots, I’d be more likely to draft Barbara Walters.
He muffled a groan as he slid his rib cage into the front seat as if it were Ming dynasty porcelain.
“So how’re you feeling, Harry?”
He turned his head three degrees. “Terrific. You want to wrestle?”
I sat there looking at him. “This is crazy.”
“Just drive, Mike. It’s early. I get better as the morning goes on. Drive to Chinatown. Come at it from the South Station side. Just park as close as you can. I want to get to that place on Beach Street without walking past the no-name coffee shop.”
I put the car in gear and looked for a way to make a U-turn on Memorial Drive.
“Harry, what’s with the outfit? Is it that cold? You look like Na-nook of the North End.”
He squinted crosswise at me. “You’re saying I look Italian?”
I took another look and had the first good laugh I’d had since I gave up laughing-around the time this case began. He was referring to the fact that the North End of Boston is the domain primarily of people with more vowels in their names than Harry could buy on Wheel of Fortune.
“What you look like is Outer Mongolian.”
“It’s partly disguise. The idea is to get through to the Dragon Lady for five minutes before the boys come out to play. Actually, three minutes would do it. Do you have a hat with you?”
“In the back. I only wear it if it’s below zero.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me look like Henry Osterwald, Harvard, class of ’94. You remember our classmate, the king of hats?”
He managed to look at me sideways. His neck had loosened up a good ten degrees. “Is it that bad?”
“I don’t wear it until everyone else’s eyelids are frozen shut.”
“How about when a Chinese street gang would like to separate your ears by about six feet?”
“Then, too. Tell me the plan.”
Harry didn’t start right away. He seemed to be checking the extent of ice that rimmed the sides of the Charles River.
“I think it’s time you knew a little more about the culture you’re invading, Mike. This goes back a ways. You’ve heard of the tongs.”
“Sure.”
“You know much about them?”
“No.”
“A tong was like a club, an association. The word ‘tong’ means ‘hall,’ ‘gathering place.’ They were first set up in San Francisco. There was a wave of immigrants that came over to work on the railroads and the gold mines. They were pretty close to slave labor. They had to look to each other for protection. Some of the large families banded together for mutual support. Anyone with a name like ‘Lee’ or ‘Liu’ had plenty of relatives to form a family association. But the ones who didn’t belong to a large family were out of luck. They formed the first tongs. They grew pretty fast, because they could recruit anyone, regardless of family name. You’ve heard of the tong wars.”
“Long time ago.”
“Right. Originally, the purpose of the tongs was pretty good. Mutual protection and help. And heaven knows they needed it. They were in a strange country, and not exactly embraced with open arms.
“Then some years later there came a time when the tongs were taken over by leaders who got them almost exclusively into organized crime. The biggest moneymaker was gambling. Probably second was prostitution. Everything from shacks to ‘parlors’ were supplied by the open buying of girls from age two to twenty. They were smuggled in from China, usually through Canada first. Then, of course, there were drugs-opium being the big one. This goes back to the late nineteenth century.”
“Is this what we’re playing with in Boston?”
“Bear with me, Mike. I want you to know it all. You have to know where it came from. You drive, I’ll talk. At different times, there were wars among the tongs, especially in San Francisco and New York. Sometimes it was over a killing, sometimes over control of territories, particularly in New York and San Francisco. The warriors were usually the professional hit men of the tong called the boo how doy. In the early days they used to use ceremonial hatchets to split skulls. That’s where we got the word ‘hatchetmen.’
“There were so many killings over the fifty or so years of the wars that the tongs got a bad name. You almost never hear the name used by the Chinese. That doesn’t mean the organizations are gone.
“Many of the tongs are controlled by leaders from triads back in Hong Kong. Some of them are actually American branches of triads.”
“You’ve got a new word there, Harry. By the way, do you want the heat on, or would you fry in that get-up?”
“I’m fine. Just drive and listen.”
Harry shifted his position with meticulous care. I wondered if his plan for the brothel involved a lot of broken-field running.
“The triads go back into Chinese history. It’s an interesting story. After the Manchus conquered China, they set up the Ch’ing dynasty. They ruled China for over three hundred years. In 1672, the Ch’ing emperor, Kang Xi, got help from the monks in a monastery called Shaolin in Fukien. They were experts in the martial arts. Did you ever watch reruns of the television series called Kung Fu? ”
“Sometimes. In my high-school days.”
“Then you understand something about the idea of Shaolin. The emperor needed help to drive off the invading Xi Lu barbarians. There were only 108 Shaolin monks, but they repelled the Xi Lu barbarians. The emperor rewarded the monks, and they went back to the Shaolin monastery.