Act of Revenge Read online

  Lucy stepped out of the subway station, blinked in the bright June sunlight, took a left, and walked into Asia. The outposts of Chinatown had taken over much of Canal Street in her own lifetime, pushing up from the south via Mott and Mulberry streets and spreading east and west on the broad thoroughfare. Lucy knew Chinatown. She was practically a native, having been born a few streets north on Crosby Street, where Little Italy meets Soho, and had from an early age been a presence on its streets, gadding about with the four Chen children and their parents, cousins, in-laws, and associates. And Chinatown knew Lucy. Hardly a merchant on its streets had not done a double-take when the gwailo infant had addressed him or her in the clanging accents of Guangdong. For when Lucy’s mother had unexpectedly rescued the Chen family’s honor, she had created an enormous burden of bao, a debt of reciprocity owed to her not only by the Chen family proper, but by the Chen name association, its allied name associations, the tong to which the family belonged, and, to a lesser extent, the county and village associations of the fifty-millionfold Chens. That Lucy’s mother had only been doing her job was a laughable concept to the old-country Chinese, to whom life was largely a meshwork of unspoken obligations. Thus it happened that Lucy Karp, being first her mother’s daughter, and second, the foster daughter of the Chen clan, and thirdly a miraculous and rather spooky speaker of perfect Cantonese (and arguably not less than a reincarnation of Chen Renmi, the dead sister), had achieved a status that few Caucasians are ever granted in that community: she had become a real person, someone with mihnhai, with face, and no longer merely a white ghost.

  She had emerged into a fine New York summer evening, Canal Street packed with trucks and cars going to the tunnel or the bridges, sending up a fine stink of fumes to the sky, which was just going slatey blue, the stink mixing with the higher notes of fried fat, starch, spice, and decay to make the true Chinatown perfume. The wide sidewalks teemed with shoppers just out of work, enough of them Asians of various tribes to make the gwailo among them stand out. Lucy threaded through the crowd and into the Asia Mall, a wide double storefront on the north side of Canal, and a typical enterprise of the district. Its show-windows were nearly covered with hand-lettered ads on white butcher paper, Chinese characters in red paint touting shoes, clothing, fabric, drugstore items, and food specialties of the Orient. It was a great success and the result of over twenty years of backbreaking labor by the Chen family.

  As she passed through the Asia Mall, she greeted the checkout ladies in Cantonese, assured them she had eaten, inquired after their families, and they about hers (their hands never stopping to punch in and stuff bags, never pausing in the accumulation of wealth), and she moved on to the back of the store, and through the swinging door to the storeroom. She made her way down the aisles of the cavernous space, treading familiar pathways until she came to the pillow section. She scampered up the pipe scaffolding like a young monkey, crawled through a space in the chicken wire, and wriggled through fake-fur passages until she came to a void, a cave about ten feet on a side, entirely surrounded by fluffy beanbags dyed colors so garish that they were hardly salable, even to Filipinos. A space had been left above, like a hairy skylight, through which a sickly fluorescent glow penetrated, enough to read by. It was a perfect hideout, if you ignored the stink of cheap plastic, and here she found, as she had expected, Janice Chen and Mary Ma.

  They say that two boys is half a boy and three boys is no boy at all; it is as true of girls. Janice Chen was supposed to be “helping” in the stockroom and had asked Mary Ma to share the burden and goof off. The two—Lucy’s closest friends, Janice as good as a sister—might have stood in a pattern book for the two most familiar types of Chinese girls. Mary had the flat moon face, rosebud mouth, cheeks like peaches, and the bowl cut with bangs, while Janice was slender and golden as a flute, with high cheekbones, a sharp small nose, and forty inches of black hair running down her back in a braid like a python.

  “Lucy!” the other girls both cried, but not too loudly. “We thought you were getting your brains scrambled at Columbia,” Janice added.

  “I was, but I got out early and took the train.”

  “What did he make you do?”

  “Strip naked and walk around on my hands. He’s really a little bit of a sex maniac.”

  “No, really!” Mary insisted.

  “Oh, just science stuff. I had to wear this like old-fashioned bathing cap with wires coming out of it and translate from Guóndùngwá and guoyu and French and Vietnamese, back and forth. Totally boring. But he’s going to pay me. A lot.”

  “Really?” asked Janice. “Are you going to keep it?” In her world earnings were the property of the family.

  “Of course,” said Lucy, “and don’t tell anyone, okay? What’re you guys doing?”

  “We’re supposed to be breaking boxes,” answered Janice. “My brother’s being a total dork about it. He loves to give orders—big deal, he’s in charge of us. So we’re hiding.”

  Mary added responsibly, “We should go back. He’ll tell your dad.”

  “Oh, let him wait,” said Lucy. “Later we’ll all do it together and get it finished. You want me to read you more Claudine?”

  Glittering eyes and giggles. Lucy got out her book and translated the part where the schoolgirls have a fight in a hotel room with their chemises rucking naughtily up around their various interesting parts. The rural dialect in which much of it was written gave her some trouble, but she bulled through, in the process adding some lubricious details omitted by Colette. Like the girls in the novel, the three of them were, in fact, as pure as boiled eggs, but, in the manner of many such children, they very much wished to think of themselves as sexy devils. Of course, they had swiped copies of Playgirl, and they had weathered copies of Zap Comix—they were 1980s rather than 1880s girls, after all—but still the lush and sensuous language of a ninety-year-old French novel provided them with the required combination of secrecy and salaciousness. The three of them lay stretched out, belly down on the fur, with Lucy in the center, their bodies touching, and Lucy toyed with Janice’s long rope of hair as she read. Each would remember this span of time—it could not have been more than forty minutes—with regret and a certain longing, as the pinnacle of something sweet and absolutely lost. So intent were they on what they were doing, so deliciously close and intimate was the atmosphere of the furry cave they had made, that it took some little time for it to register that strange voices were rising through the beanbags from directly below them. Lucy stopped reading, and they all listened.

  “Sssh! Listen!” Janet interrupted in a hoarse whisper.

  “Your brother?” asked Mary.

  “No, dummy! It’s two people, right below us.” They all listened.

  “That’s not your dad, is it?” Lucy asked Janice in a low voice.

  “No, it’s strangers,” whispered Janice.

  Lucy said, “Let’s go and see who they are.” With that, she stashed her book and wriggled away through the bags, but not the way she had come in. Instead, she pushed her way to the face of the bin that overlooked the main aisle of the stockroom. Shortly, Janice followed, and then Mary, their three faces pressing against the wire mesh through a narrow slit between a pair of beanbags.

  Looking down, they saw three men, two youthful and one elderly, all Chinese. One of the young men and the older man were standing together, and were dressed in cream silk suits. The other young man, clad in a blue suit, was addressing them in Cantonese, in the accents of rural Guangzhou. He was using extremely courteous language, flattering words, something about staying, about others who would arrive soon. The older man replied in the same tongue, but with a Hong Kong accent, a heated reply to the effect that he had come a long way, and did not appreciate the waste of time. His younger companion concurred, but more vigorously. The blue-suited man resumed his appeals. From their high angle, the girls could not see the faces of the men below, but it was clear from the body language of the two Hong Kong men that they were not m
ollified.

  What happened next happened so fast that for a stunned instant the girls could not believe what they had witnessed. A slightly built man, wearing a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and tied in place, walked around the corner from an adjoining aisle and, holding a pistol stiffly at arm’s length, shot the two Hong Kong men in the back, and when they fell down he shot them both in the head. Pop-pop. Pop-pop. Then he was gone.

  Lucy heard Mary Ma take a sharp breath, and knew that in another half second a scream would burst out and so she twisted like a fish and clapped a hand over the other girl’s mouth. This quick motion made the beanbags shift, and the man in the blue suit lifted his head up and looked right at them. Hours seemed to pass. Lucy could feel Mary’s rapid, boiling-hot breath swish past her hand. Her palm was soaked with drool, and Mary’s breathing was starting to make a nasty bubbling sound against it, which Lucy was sure could be heard across Canal Street.

  “Be quiet!” she hissed into Mary’s ear. The other girl took one long, shuddering breath and was still. The man stared for a little longer, then turned on his heel and walked away. The two Hong Kong men stayed where they had fallen, the runnels of blood from their heads joining into one round, ghastly pool, black as tar under the harsh fluorescent lights.

  Janice Chen was the first to move, sliding backward through the sticky, clinging vinyl and the whispering fake fur. Back in the hideout, Mary Ma burst into blubbering tears, and the two other girls threw themselves on her to get her to stop, Lucy going so far as to grab a handful of Day-Glo pink fur and hold it over her mouth. In a minute or so, Mary had regained control and they got off her.

  “Oh, God, what are we going to do?” she whimpered.

  “I know that guy,” said Janice, ignoring this. The other two stared at her.

  “What guy?” Lucy asked.

  “The guy in the blue suit, the guy who walked away. I don’t know his name, but he’s always hanging around with my father.”

  “A tong guy?”

  Janice nodded, eyes dropping. Lucy understood Chinatown well enough to understand this. No important Chinatown businessman, especially not a first-generation Chinese immigrant like Louie Chen, was unconnected to the tongs. The Chens’ tong was the Hap Tai Association, but Lucy had never heard a breath that they might be involved in murder, at least not recently. The tongs worked their wills far more subtly nowadays. On the other hand, there were certainly gangs in Chinatown, and gangs killed people, and nearly every gang had some affiliation with a tong.

  “What are we going to do, Lòuhsì?”

  Lucy became aware that both of her friends were watching her expectantly. She expected this. The word for “teacher” in Cantonese is lòuhsì, and Lucy had been called that, as a joke, by the Chens and by every other Cantonese speaker she had met from an early age. At first it had been amusing to give a little mite (and a female at that) such a name. Later, as Lucy’s personality developed, it seemed more appropriate, sometimes disturbingly so. Lucy was, in fact, the leader of the little band, both of the inner circle here assembled and of a satellite clique of a half dozen girls at school. There was nothing racial in this; Lucy would have been a leader anywhere, and added to that there was the thing with the languages, and also (although no one mentioned this to her) she was the daughter of the legendary Shenpei Meilin, the one-eyed, who shot people, and crushed evildoers without mercy, like a warrior woman from the old tales. So they looked at her to see what she would do.

  “Well, so first of all, we’re not going to tell anyone about this,” Lucy said firmly, and she detected tiny sighs of relief from her companions. No explanation of this was necessary, but she gave one anyway, to make sure the reasons were fixed in both their minds. “Mr. Chen didn’t know what was going down here” (this to save Janice’s face), “but if the cops know about Janice seeing this guy with him, he’s going to be in big trouble. Big trouble.” She meant with the tong, not the police. There was no question in any of their minds about this.

  “And, of course, Mary can’t say anything either,” said Lucy, and they all knew what that meant, too, because they knew that Mary and her family were ren she, smuggled illegals, with phony papers that would not survive any official inspection.

  There was a long pause after this, a silence broken only by Mary’s snuffling. Lucy felt the eyes. “Oh, right!” she said indignantly to the silence. “I’m really going to rat you out. Cào dàn! Fàng gou pì! . . .” and more of the same, for although in English Lucy was as clean-mouthed as could be wished, in either Cantonese or Mandarin she could strip the chrome off a trailer hitch. “If you think that,” she continued, switching from Mandarin to Cantonese and moderating her tone, “the pair of you are dumb as wooden chickens. Do you think I would get my foster father in trouble? Or get Mary’s family kicked out?”

  Shamefaced, the other girls agreed that this was not to be thought of.

  “Okay, then, we have to swear never to tell anyone about this. Not your family or anyone. And believe me, they’re going to come after you.”

  “What! How!”

  “Silly turtles! When they find the bodies, they’ll want to talk to everyone who was back here, and Janice’s parents know you both were back here. Nobody knows I’m here, and I want you to keep it that way. Now, swear it! Give me your hands!”

  The three clasped their hands in a knot. Lucy felt imbued with a rich excitement, as the situation combined the best aspects of Claudine and Kim, girlish intimacy and deadly danger. She thought briefly of pulling her little pocket knife and extracting a blood oath, but her natural practicality and her apprehension that, confronted with additional gore, Mary Ma would lose it again, decided her in favor of a purely verbal ritual. In Chinese, of course.

  “Mary, you go first!” she ordered.

  Mary, quavering, said, “I swear.”

  Janice said, “I swear to the sky.”

  Lucy said, “I swear, and if I go back on my word, let me be executed by heaven and destroyed by earth!”

  Under this profound doom, Lucy led the way out of the secret nest and out the rear door onto Crosby Street.

  “Go around to the front entrance and get lost in the store. Find something to do—like, grab some cartons and move them around until somebody notices you. Then you say, if they ask you, you were in the front the whole time. You didn’t see anything. They might not believe you, but if you stick to the story, they can’t do anything. And look, they’ll get each of you alone and they’ll say, like, ‘Janice, Mary told us the whole story, why don’t you tell us what went down.’ They always do that trick. Just keep saying you didn’t see anything. And cry a lot, and have to go pee every ten minutes.”

  With this good advice, they dashed off. Lucy walked the two short blocks to her home. The Karp family lived in a fifth-floor floor-through loft on Crosby at Grand, which Lucy’s mother had occupied since the late sixties, when Soho was barely a gleam in some speculator’s eye and regular people (not to mention rich ones) did not dwell in disused factory space. It had been beautifully modified some years back as a result of a parental windfall: Swedish finish on the floor, track lighting on the ceiling, a kitchen out of a magazine spread, climate control, and a hot tub. The building had gone condo and put in an elevator entered from the street with a special key. Lucy wore hers around her neck. She twisted this, waited, ascended, and emerged. There she was greeted by, in order, her twin four-year-old brothers, Giancarlo and Isaac (called, in a deplorable excess of cute, Zik and Zak), their so-called nanny, a retired street person in her early twenties (Posie), and her father, Roger Karp (called Butch), the chief assistant district attorney for the County of New York.

  All these save the last she disposed of with dispatch: a sloppy kiss and a couple of tickle rhymes for the boys, a how-was-your-day and a critical note on the Violent Femmes with Posie. Then she sidled up to her dad and clutched him about the waist, rather harder than was her habit. He looked down at her.

  “Something wrong?”


  “No, not really. Just need a hug.”

  This was supplied, with enthusiasm. He asked, “How did the brain thing go?”

  “All right, I guess. He seemed pretty excited about me. Apparently, I’m a total freak show.”

  “How would you like a hit in the head?”

  “Well, I am.”

  Karp aimed a mock back-hander at his daughter’s head, which she ducked, and then they sparred around a little, a familiar game and one that Karp knew did not have long to run. He was glad to get in as many bouts of affectionate roughhousing as time and biology would allow.

  When he, after many shifting moves, had her in a clinch and had tormented her in the usual way by rubbing his five o’clock shadow across her tender cheek, to the usual howls, he said, “You want to know a secret? Everybody thinks they’re a freak. Everybody thinks people are staring at them. Everybody thinks everybody else is better off or happier, especially kids. You want me to give you a pep talk? You want me to make a list of all your good points?”

  “Not really,” she said, her gaze sliding away from his.

  “Anything go wrong today, Luce?” asked Karp, his fatherly antennae vibrating.

  “No, just the usual,” Lucy lied, and then changed the subject to “Are you going to cook those?”

  She pointed at the counter in the gleaming kitchen where sat a pair of icy brownish Tupperware oblongs.

  “Yeah, we have a choice of lamb stew or lasagna.”

  “Com’é ripugnanti,” said Lucy, wrinkling her nose. “Where’s Mom?”

  “She said she was tied up. Didn’t she call you? She said she was going to tell you to take a cab home.”

  “Yeah, she did.”

  “You got a cab all right?”

  Lucy felt her face flush. Another lie in the offing, and Lucy tried as hard as ever she could not to lie to her father. The scrupulous honesty of this man was one of the foundation stones of her moral universe. In contrast, her mother had a more fluid relationship with veracity. As Lucy herself did, she had to admit. “I never lie, never, but the truth is not for everyone,” was one of her mother’s sayings, delivered always in Italian.