4
In the morning, I drag my broken desk down the stairs to the curb before meeting a client at a coffee shop. I tell her what she’ll see in the photos I took of her husband, if she wants to look at them. She only asks to see the one that shows his face the best so she can’t kid herself that it isn’t him. I am relieved by this show of good sense. Denial is probably the biggest cause of contested invoices in my line of work, but I also don’t need her crying all over the prints in the coffee shop where we conduct our business.
With that done, I make a few inquiries among the neighborhood kids I’ve cultivated as informants. Whenever I have a few bucks to spare, I toss a Spider Man comic or a Playboy their way and get a good return on investment. Today, I ask them about Sammy Fong. They don’t know much except that he found the chopped up body of a dai lo, a gang big brother, and they want to tell me all about it in gory detail until I tell them I already know about that, like everybody else in New York, and then they want me to tell them all the gory details that weren’t in the paper.
I promise the little pack of dogs a paper bag full of hard liquor nips if they can get me something substantial on the guy’s business without dropping my name. I have very little faith that any of them grasp the concept of discretion, but they’re all I’ve got and they eagerly accept, so I send them off to do my bidding. Watching them go, I feel a little like Mickey setting the brooms loose to do his dirty work in Fantasia.
It rained hard the day before Chinese New Year, but it’s colder today. You can almost taste the threat of snow.
Knowing it will take my urchins a few hours to gather intel, I head up to the main branch of the N.Y. Public Library—scarfing down a sandwich at a deli near the Times building before wading into the stacks, where food will be forbidden—to read up on Tibetan Buddhism and see if yesterday’s crash course checks out with published sources.
The Deuce, 42nd Street, exerts a gravitational tug on my lower nature, and the animal in me almost takes a detour down Grindhouse Row toward the flashing bulbs and XXX posters. I keep my eye on the paycheck and stay my course to 5th Avenue, passing the Armed Forces recruiting station on the corner of 7th, where I don’t have to sidle through a crowd of volunteers lined up to defend Kuwait. Operation Desert Shield became Desert Storm when Bush’s January 15th ultimatum passed last month. It might not be a ground war yet, but everybody can hear the drums and nobody’s in a hurry to kill or die for the price at the pump. I spare a thought for old friends still enlisted, and then I’m jogging up the white steps, striding between the lion statues that flank the NYPL entrance, and reading the words I always look for engraved in the granite, part of the ritual of research:
BUT ABOVE ALL THINGS
TRUTH
BEARETH AWAY
THE VICTORY
Not a bad mantra for a private eye.
Two hours of combing through indexes and reading pages out of context later, my head is heavy and my eyes are sluggish. I’ve never been a big reader and this is not light fare. I’ve skipped over Buddhism 101 with this case and gone straight to the hardcore esoteric stuff. The 14th Dalai Lama’s popular book on tantra confirms the basic philosophy, but to check the details on Yamantaka, I’ve had to sift through tomes written by western academics. I’m not surprised that the fellows writing in their native English are less clear than the Tibetan master, but I try not to wade in too deep, keeping my focus on checking the books against my notepad. What the two monks told me yesterday checks out. Their explanation of tantra was truthful, if a little oversimplified.
I squeeze my eyes shut and rub my temples. I need coffee, and by now the kids might have something for me, so I head back down to Chinatown, taking a detour into The Magickal Childe bookshop on West 33rd on the way. Of the stack of books I’ve spent my morning with at the library, the one title I’m fascinated by is the infamous Tibetan Book of the Dead, and now I wanta copy I can mark up. The shop is a cramped little hole in the wall that reeks of voodoo oils and herbs. Ceremonial swords and shelves of dusty glass jars cover the walls. A leather-bound copy of the Necronomicon takes pride of place in the display window and again at the cash register, where an old warlock is painting his nails black. I read enough Lovecraft in high school to know it’s a hoax, but I manage to find a paperback edition of the more authentic guide to the underworld in the Eastern section and leave the shop with it in a brown paper bag. Weird energy in that joint. I only know the place because of a cheating husband who was banging a witch.
I crack the book open on the subway and read the introduction. Grimy tiled stations flash past as we rumble through the tunnel, but I hardly spare them a glance and nearly miss my stop, lost in the cosmology.
Aboveground, I pick up a second paper bag, this one a sack of nips from a liquor store. I feel a pang of guilt buying alcohol for sixth graders, but they’re gonna get it somewhere.
Kenny, the pudgy leader of the little pack of scrappers, is waiting for me on the steps to my office. The kid looks tough enough with his spiky frosted hair, tight black jeans, and throwing star necklace, but he’s all boy when he cracks a smile at the two paper bags in my hands. Greedy little bastard probably thinks I bought too many bottles to fit in one. My return grin feels rueful on my face. Kenny will probably be in the Ghost Shadows or the Dragons within four years, dead within ten. He’s already working on the uniform. All he needs to finish it off is a pair of white Keds, a satin jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back, and a beeper.
“Whaddaya got for me?” I ask, as I sit down beside him on the steps.
He holds out his open hand.
I slap one of the bags into it and watch him feel the shape through the paper. He pokes his nose into it and says, “A book? What the hell?” Kenny speaks better English than most of his elders who alternate between Hong Kong Cantonese and fragments of it.
“Relax,” I say, shaking the other bag so he can hear the chiming of little glass bottles. “The book is mine. You get these after you tell me something I can use.”
Kenny tosses the bag with the book onto the step at my feet. “Sammy Fong is a Ghost.”
“Wow, what a revelation.”
“That’s why he was going to meet David Yu that night in the Bloody Angle. He thought Yu was gonna cap him because he was selling black market cigs to kids, but he went to the meeting anyway to talk him out of it, cause if he can’t be a Ghost, he might as well be dead anyway, right?”
“Why does a dai gor like David Yu care about kids buying cigarettes?”
“Because he’s not getting a cut! Sammy was doing this one thing on the side without telling his big brother about it. Guess he thought if he only sold to a few kids, he wouldn’t get caught. But if you want to be a Ghost, the tong gets a piece of everything you do, right? Sammy messed up. But crazy thing is he goes to the alley to meet his dai gor, and who comes out alive? Sammy! And David Yu comes out in a bunch of garbage bags. But after he finishes freaking out about the killing and he realizes the cops aren’t gonna put it on him, he goes right back to selling cigs. Maybe he thinks nobody knows about his side business now that Yu is dead.”
“How do you know?”
Kenny laughs. “I buy from him, dipshit.”
“Watch it. Does anyone—and I don’t mean kids, but the adults you hear talking—do they think Sammy killed David Yu?”
Kenny fidgets because he knows his story points in that direction, but no, no one does. No one who knows the streets, anyway. Sammy Fong’s continued existence is proof of that. The kid casts his gaze at the pavement while telling me what he knows is the childish sounding part, but after the little bit of gang intel, it’s all he has left: “People say it was a monster that got David Yu in the Bloody Angle. Like a demon or a dragon man or something. It’s bullshit, right?”
His eyes dart up and meet mine. He’s heard this from adults and wants one to refute it. As if the monsters he lives among and aspires to become aren’t bad enough.
“Don’t believe everything you hear in the tea parlors and laundromats.” I hand him his paper bag and resist the impulse to muss up his spiky hair. “But keep your ears open for me, bud.”
“You bet. See ya.”
Kenny trots off with his loot, the other boys clamoring around him. I go upstairs and transfer the book to my shoulder bag with my compact camera and note pad, thinking that I might play the angle of a reporter when I find Sammy. It could easily backfire, but if he thinks there’s an opportunity to send a signal that could improve his standing or cover his ass with the tong, he just might talk to me. I’ll need to get a read on him before committing to it.
I hesitate at the door, then slip out of my jacket to strap on the shoulder holster with the Colt 1911 before slipping back into itand heading out.
***
They call Doyers Street Murder Alley. It’s the perfect place for any killing you would want to commit under the cover of gang violence. One block long with a sharp ninety-degree angle in the middle, it runs from Pell Street to the Bowery at Chatham Square and is—according to the cops—the bloodiest intersection in America. There are probably two reasons for this. One is the sharp bend in the street whence comes the nickname, “The Bloody Angle,” a feature that lends itself well to gang ambushes. The other is a pedestrian tunnel that runs under the buildings, offering quick escape routes to East Broadway and Catherine.
A tight channel, like a slaughterhouse chute, seldom traveled by cars, it’s a street that seems to serve no purpose as there are plenty of other ways to get where you’re going without it. Which is not to say it’s devoid of cultural heritage. Home to the oldest Chinese tea house in America, the Nom Wah, and the site of the 1905 Chinese Theater Massacre in which Hip Sing gunmen opened fire on a group of On Leong gangsters under cover of a string of firecrackers, today the street bustles with knick-knack shops, barbers, and restaurants between graffiti stricken corrugated metal panels at street level and rat-infested tinderbox tenements above.
The once secret tunnel has been converted into an underground shopping arcade where, on December 27 at 2:17 A.M., Sammy Fong found the remains of David Yu in a pool of blood long after the retailers, acupuncturists, and fortune tellers brave enough to hang a shingle down there had locked up for the night.
But I don’t find Sammy in Murder Alley today. I find him right where Joe Navarro told me I would: smoking a (probably untaxed) cigarette in another alley, a garbage-reeking space piled with empty wooden vegetable crates behind the kitchen of Mappow’s restaurant. He’s lanky but not without some muscle, dressed in black jeans and a white sleeveless t-shirt, arms and pockmarked face glazed with sweat from the kitchen steam, a white bandanna tied under his shaggy hair. He reminds me of an extra in a karate movie, but I’ve had enough karate for one week.
Spur of the moment I decide to forgo the reporter angle and play it straight with him. “Sammy,” I say, as I come around the corner from where I’ve been watching him. I’m not even sure this is the kid I’m looking for—they’ve kept his photo out of the papers—but he looks up at the sound of his name and the fear on his face confirms it.
He tosses the butt at the ground and backs up toward the screen door to the kitchen. I can see woks and colanders hanging on the wall, hear voices calling over the sizzle of stir-fry, but there’s no one in sight of the back door. “What do you want?” he asks and sniffles. I don’t know what he looks like on a good day, but he doesn’t look well to me today. It’s the look of a man who has not been getting much sleep. And no jacket or even sleeves in February? I’m sure it’s hot in that kitchen over the dishwashing sink, but it’s in the thirties out here.
I flip open my wallet and show him my PI license. “Miles Landry. I’d like to talk to you about the night that made you famous.”
“You a cop?”
“Private eye.”
He still looks like a skittish animal contemplating fight or flight, so I say, “Relax, buddy. You ever hear of a tong hiring a white detective?”
He runs the back of his hand under his nose, then opens the screen door and reaches inside. I very conspicuously slide my right hand into my jacket like I’m about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance . . . or draw heat. His hand emerges holding a gray sweatshirt. The pockets don’t look heavy. He puts it on, knowing that his cigarette break is going to run longer than usual, but the sweatshirt is a good sign: he’s curious enough to at least want to know my deal. He lights another and tries to act tough. “You got until I finish this to tell me who sent you. I’m at work.”
“Yeah, keeping up the act of a day job is wise when the cops and mob bosses are watching where your money comes from.”
“You working for a newspaper?”
“No.”
“Who then?”
“Nobody who can cause you trouble. Nobody who wants to. But I can if you don’t help me. Did you see who killed David Yu in the tunnel?”
Sammy scoffs at the worn out question. “No.” He draws hard on the cigarette, the orange line turning an inch of paper to ash in a breath, telling me time’s almost up.
“Let me rephrase that: Did you see, hear, or smell anything unusual before or after you found the remains?” I’m thinking of the traces of incense Joe mentioned.
“No. And I wouldn’t tell no fuckin gwailo if I did.” He tosses the butt at my feet.
“You’ll tell this white devil, my friend, or you’ll find yourself in Hell.”
He scoffs. “You’re not even a cop. Why you think I’m gonna tell you more than I tell them?”
“Because the cops don’t know about your black market cigarette racket with the kids.”
His face blanches a little at that, but he keeps up the tough facade. “Ooh, you’re gonna tell the cops on me. Like they care about that with all the gambling and killing going on. Ain’t like I’m slinging horse.”
“No, you’re just trying to graduate to that.” I flash him a nice white predatory smile. “And who said anything about telling the cops? See, what I’m thinking of doing while you finish washing the dishes, is taking a leisurely stroll up Mott Street to that pretty pagoda with the red lanterns. The On Leong Chinese Businessman’s Association? Because the gentlemen up in that castle might be very interested in learning about your side business. See, those cigs might not be taxed by Governor Cuomo, but they sure as hell would be taxed by the local Chinese king if he knew about ‘em. If he knew one of his Ghosts was cutting him out of the action.”
Sammy looks cold again, in spite of the sweatshirt.
“I bet when they summoned you after the cops released you, they didn’t mention your side racket, so you figured you were in the clear. Your big brother was gonna talk to you about it that night, tell you to drop it before the bosses found out. Only he got butchered first.”
“You don’t know jack.”
“Well, I’ll let you get back to work, Sammy. Scrubbing dishes is good thinking work. A man’s mind can really ponder things while his hands are busy. I’m gonna go have a coffee across the street and do some thinking of my own, about whether or not to take that walk.”
I touch the brim of my hat and, turning to leave, hear him mutter, “Molla Focka.”
***
I settle into a seat facing the door at a corner table in a busy little teahouse. I take out my copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and try to focus on it while keeping one ear peeled for the chimes tied to the door, wondering how long it will take before Sammy Fong comes in singing a different tune.
They don’t have coffee so I settle for tea, hoping it has enough caffeine to help me plough through the rest of the introduction. From what I can glean, the book is unique among religious guides to the afterlife. Meant to be read to a dying person, the prayers in its pages are designed to wake the untethered consciousness up and remind it that the visions it’s experiencing of the peaceful and wrathful deities are actually illusions with no inherent existence. If the dying person can recall this lesson, and if he can remember that even his own soul or self is equally empty of absolute reality, then he may attain enlightenment and escape the otherwise endless cycle of birth, death, and suffering.
It’s fascinating stuff, but it requires a different level of focus than the horror paperbacks I tend to favor. I find my mind wandering, so I flip through the pages randomly, taking in the poetry and imagery, seeing if anything jumps out at me. The words are getting fuzzy and I have to reread even these fragments to comprehend them. It’s too warm in the teahouse, and my head starts to nod.
Animal-headed gods and demons dance on lotus flowers in the sky and drag the wandering soul around by a noose, telling him that he cannot escape the consequences of his karma. I guess this green tea is pretty weak compared to black java. I catch myself dozing and snap to with a start. A glance at my watch tells me that Sammy is one ballsy little fledgling gangbanger who probably isn’t gonna show if he hasn’t already.
The next thing I know a knockout redhead is leaning over me, shaking my shoulder—her sky-blue eyes are dazzling, even behind glasses. She has my book in her hand, offering it to me. “You dropped this. You don’t want a holy book like that touching the floor.” She says it with a smile, so it doesn’t come across as preachy, but I’m embarrassed just the same.
“Thanks,” I tell her, straightening up and taking the book, “but I’m not a Buddhist.”
She nods. “Somehow I guessed that.”
I sit up and check my tie to make sure I haven’t been drooling on it. It’s beaded with mist, but my teacup is no longer steaming. I push the cup aside and gesture at the empty seat across from me, offering it to her. “And are you? A Buddhist?”
Her pink mouth does a little twist. “Mmm . . . I’m about seventy-five percent Buddhist on a good day.”
I like her already. “What’s the other twenty-five?”
“Maybe pagan or agnostic, but, then again, Buddhism might be twenty-five percent pagan and agnostic, too.”
“So you have commitment issues. Me too. Can I buy you a cup of tea for saving my book from the floor?”
“Or saving you from bad karma?” she says with a smile.
“Take your pick.”
“Okay. But only if you tell me what a cop is doing reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
“I’m not a cop.” I stand up and offer my hand. “Miles Landry, PI, at your service.”
She gives it a squeeze. “Gemma Ellison, student, at yours.”
Gemma sits and I signal the waitress for another tea. I ask her where she goes to school. Columbia, majoring in Asian Studies. That explains her familiarity with my reading material and why she’s the only other Caucasian in a Chinese teahouse in the middle of a weekday.
“So what made you pick up the book?” she asks. “Contemplating mortality?”
I consider telling her I’m just curious about other cultures, but my gut tells me lying isn’t the right place to start with her. “I’m trying to help some monks out. Figured I should get a little background.”
“That’s cool. Are you helping them find a reincarnated master?”
I’m pretty good at not wearing my reactions, but that catches me off guard. I cover with a laugh. “If I told you, I’d have to . . . ”
“Yeah, yeah, aren’t you quite the cliché?”
“What? You’ve seen a lot of reincarnation detectives on TV?”
She blows on her hot tea and flashes a thin but genuine smile. “What do you think of it so far?”
“Eh . . . it’s not what I expected. Seems more like psychology than religion.”
“I agree.”
“But it’s also mythical. Like a beautiful dream and a terrible nightmare all in one.”
“Maybe death is like that.”
“Maybe. I’m still on the introduction. I’m sure it’ll lose me when I really get into it.”
She nods and seems to be considering something, then says, “You could always meet me here for tea if you have questions. It is my field of study, after all.”
I have to wonder if our meeting is more than serendipity. Are the monks crafty enough to enlist some pretty young thing to keep tabs on me?
“That’s kind of you. I may do just that.” I slide a couple of business cards out of my wallet and pass them to her with a pen, ask her to write her number on the back of one and keep the other.
She jots the number down while I watch the street through the window. Still no sign of Sammy. I guess I’m not as intimidating as I try to be.
“I was joking about looking for a reincarnation,” she says, “but I am curious about what you’re doing for the monks.”
“So am I.” I put a few bills on the table and slip my book into the bag. Beyond the window, misty rain is gathering, but I’m anxious to check on the dish dog one more time before I head back to the office.
“Are you a security consultant for them?” Gemma asks, gathering her own things.
“Why would monks need security?”
“For His Holiness’s visit to New York.”
“His Holiness?”
“The Dalai Lama.”
“The Dalai Lama is coming to New York City? Funny, they failed to mention that. When?”
“October, I think. He’s been invited to perform the Kalachakra initiation at Madison Square Garden.”
“Huh.”
“You’re feeling a little out of your depth, aren’t you?” Her tone is sympathetic, so I don’t bristle.
I wave the card she wrote on like I’m helping the ink to dry. “I’ll be calling you for sure. Just as soon as I know what my questions are.”
***
The mist is thickening to rain when I come around the corner of the kitchen alley again. Rats scavenging around the dumpster brazenly ignore my approach and go on sniffing at rotting vegetables through the broken slats of wooden crates. One of those crates has been moved, cocked askew beneath the fire escape from which Sammy Fong’s body dangles at the end of a rope, revolving slowly clockwise and back again. His eyes bulge out of his waxy face, staring at me. A wave of nausea swells in my stomach and I focus on the concrete at my feet until it passes.
I approach the body. The rope could be a piece of laundry line from a nearby tenement. Thin enough to almost cut into the flesh of his neck. If he wasn’t such a lightweight, it might have.
There’s only one way in and out of the alley—the way I came from—and I’m hit with the strong urge to retreat before I’m seen. The fire escape is far enough away from the kitchen door that the body can’t be seen from inside, but it’s only a matter of time before someone, probably Sammy’s boss, pokes their head out the door looking for him.
There’s something tucked under the bandanna he’s still wearing—a dash of color, almost concealed by a curtain of sweaty black hair.
I step up onto the crate and pluck it out, knowing that in doing so, I’m making the decision to keep it, to steal and withhold evidence from the scene of a suicide or murder. Joe Navarro’s disapproving face surfaces in my mind and I push it aside, driven by the need to know what I’m looking at.
The rain patters down in earnest now. I shelter the delicate object under the brim of my hat, examining it before tucking it into my pocket. Turns out it’s not the sort of thing that holds fingerprints.
A peacock feather.
