No tricks this time, no wizardry; the bartender fills three snifters with a trembling hand. He drains his glass in one gulp. Cone and Lee right the toppled barstools, sit down, turn to watch the confusion on Pell Street. A squad car, siren growling, has nosed through the mob and parked. They hear more sirens coming closer.
“Ah, Jesus,” Lee says, taking a swallow of his brandy, “he was a sweet man.”
“Someone didn’t think so,” Cone says. “Who are the bastards?”
“What?”
“When I told you he was dead, you said, ‘The bastards, the rotten bastards.’ Who did you have in mind?”
“Oh,” Lee says, “that. I meant the man who shot him.”
“Uh-huh,” Cone says. “Probably more than one. Wang is pretty well perforated. Sounded like forty-fives to me.”
Two uniformed officers come into Ah Sing’s Bar amp; Grill. One is Chinese, the other black. They have notebooks and pens ready. The Chinese goes to the back of the restaurant where the patrons, now seated at tables and booths, are again digging into their rice bowls. The black officer stops at the bar.
“Were you gentlemen seated here when the incident occurred?” he asks them.
“Yeah,” Cone says. “Having a drink. Then all hell broke loose. We heard shots, and the plate glass window came down.”
“Did you see anything that happened outside?”
“Not me,” Cone says.
“You?” he asks Edward.
“I saw nothing,” Lee says. “We were talking together, facing each other.”
“Okay,” the cop says. “This is just preliminary. Could I have your names, addresses, and phone numbers, please. And I’d like to see any identification you have.”
He copies everything down in his notebook.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” he says politely. “Anything else you can tell me?”
“Yeah,” Cone says, pointing at the holed and starred mirror. “A wild slug went in there. You’ll be able to dig it out if you need it.”
The officer looks. “Thanks again,” he says gratefully. “I might have missed that.”
“Can we leave now?” Lee asks him.
“Sure,” the cop says. “Everything’s under control.” He moves down the bar to question Henry.
“He didn’t even search us,” Lee says.
“Why should he? They’ve probably got witnesses who saw the shooters make their getaway. I doubt if killers would pop Mr. Wang and then come into his bar and order drinks.”
“If he had searched us,” Lee persists, “he’d have found your gun. I saw you take it from a holster on your leg.”
“So?”
“You always carry it?”
“Yep. My security blanket. I’ve got a permit for it.”
“You’re a valuable man to know,” Edward Tung Lee says in a low voice.
What he means by that, Cone has no idea.
Two
He wakes in a grumpy mood, hauls himself off the mattress, lights his first cigarette of the new day. He goes growling around the loft, washing and shaving, drinking black coffee and then adding a smidgen of brandy just to get his eyelids up.
“So I tell him a good customer has been scragged,” he says to Cleo, who is working on a breakfast of leftover chicken chow mein. “And he says, “The bastards, the rotten bastards.’ So I ask him who the bastards are, and he says he meant the guy who popped Chen Chang Wang. Now I ask you, does that make sense? Of course it doesn’t. So he was lying. But why? No skin off my ass. I couldn’t care less who ventilated Mr. Wang. Cleo, you dirty rat, are you listening?”
It’s a peppy August day, which does nothing for his crusty mood. So the sun is shining. Big deal. That’s what it’s getting paid for, isn’t it? And that mild azure sky with fat little puffs of clouds-it all looks like a sappy postcard. “Having fine time, wish you were here.” And when the hell was Samantha coming home?
There’s a guy waiting for him in the Haldering reception room. He looks short and squat sitting down, but when he stands up, he’s lean and mean, only an inch or two shorter than Cone. He’s Chinese, with black hair cut en brosse, and he’s got a mouthful of too many white teeth.
“Mr. Timothy Cone?”
“That’s right. Who you?”
The gink hands him a business card, and the Wall Street dick reads it aloud: “Johnnie Wong. Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Cone inspects the card, feeling it between thumb and forefinger. “Very nice. Good engraving. You mind showing me your potsy?”
“Not at all.” Wong whips out his ID wallet and displays it.
“Uh-huh,” Cone says. “Looks legit. What’s with the Johnnie? Why not just plain John?”
“Take it up with my mom and pop,” the FBI man says. “I’ve been suffering from that all my life. The Wong I can live with, but please don’t tell me ‘Fifty million Chinese can’t be Wong.’”
“I wasn’t going to,” Timothy says-but he was. “You want to palaver, I suppose. This way.”
Johnnie Wong follows Cone back to his weeny office and looks around. “I like it,” he says. “It’s got that certain nothing.”
“Yeah,” Cone says, and holds up the brown paper bag he’s carrying. “My breakfast: coffee and bagel. You want something? I’ll call down for you.”
“No, thanks,” Wong says, “I’ve had mine. You go ahead.”
Cone lights a Camel, starts on the container of black coffee, the bagel with a schmear. “So?” he says to the other man. “How come the FBI is parked on my doorstep?”
“You were in Ah Sing’s Bar and Grill on Pell Street when the owner, Chen Chang Wang, was killed.”
“Oh-ho,” Cone says, “so that’s it. Yeah, I was there. But how come you guys are interested? I should think it was something for the locals to handle.”
“We’re working with the NYPD on this,” Wong says. “That’s how I got your name. Would you mind telling me what you were doing there?”
“Yeah, I’d mind. There’s such a thing as client confidentiality.”
“Sure,” the FBI man says. “And there’s such a thing as obstruction of justice.”
The two men stare at each other a moment. Johnnie Wong is a jaunty guy with eyebrows like mustaches. He’s a little chubby in the face, but there’s no fat on his frame; he looks hard and taut. He grins a lot, flashing all those Chiclets, but it’s tough to tell if it’s genuine merriment or a grimace of pain.
“Tell you what,” Cone says, “you tell me why the FBI is interested in Wang’s murder, and I’ll tell you what I was doing there.”
Wong considers that a moment. “Fair enough,” he says finally. “But I trade last.”
It’s Cone’s turn to ponder. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll deal. I was with Edward Tung Lee, the chief operating officer of White Lotus. You’ve heard of them?”
Wong nods.
“Haldering and Company was hired by White Lotus to find out why the price of their stock has shot up in the last six months. That’s what Edward Lee and I were talking about.”
“Interesting,” the FBI man says, “but not very.”
“Now it’s your turn.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I got nothing better to do than listen,” Cone says.
“All right then, listen to this: Since 1970 the number of Chinese immigrants in this country has almost doubled. I’m talking about people from Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong. Add to those the immigrants from Macao, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, and you’ll see there’s a helluva lot of Asians here. Ninety-nine percent of the come-ins are law-abiding schnooks who just want to be left alone so they can hustle a buck. The other one percent are dyed-in-the-wool gonnifs.”
“And that’s where you come in,” Cone says.
“You got it. I’m a slant-eye, so the Bureau assigned me and a lot of other Oriental agents to keep tabs on the Yellow Peril. What’s happened is this: In the past few years the Italian Mafia has taken its lumps. The older guys, the dons and godfathers, are mostly dead or in the clink. The new recruits from Sicily are zips, and the guys running the Families today just don’t have the clout and know-how. There’s been a vacuum in organized crime. Or was until the Asian gangs moved in. The biggest is United Bamboo. They’re mostly from Taiwan but have links with the Yakusa, the Japanese thugs. Their main competitor, not as big but growing fast, is the Giant Panda mob, mostly from mainland China and Hong Kong.”