Dragonfire

Eight

There was a long line of cars waiting to enter the Portsmouth Square garage, as there always was during the noon hour; it took me twenty-five minutes to get inside and deposit my car. The square itself was jammed with people, most of them elderly Chinese sitting on benches or playing cards or Oriental versions of checkers and dominoes on permanent concrete tables. I threaded my way through them, huddled inside my overcoat, and went up Washington to Grant Avenue.

The tourists were out in droves, despite the weather; there were more white faces along Grant than Chinese. The street, Chinatown’s main thoroughfare, had undergone a cosmetic facelift in recent years. Everywhere you looked there was what the younger generation of Chinese referred to derisively as “pigtail architecture” — pagoda-style building facades, streetlamps, even public telephone booths, designed to give the tourists an “authentic” Chinese atmosphere. But Grant Avenue wasn’t the real Chinatown; it was glitter and sham, a Disneyish version of Hong Kong or Canton, a visitors’ enclave of souvenir shops, Chinese art and jade merchants, fancy restaurants, dark little bars. The real Chinatown was along Stockton and Kearny streets, in the back alleys and narrow streets on both sides of Grant. That was where you found the bundle shops, where seamstresses worked fourteen-hour days at their sewing machines for starvation wages; the tenements and projects; the social clubs and gambling parlors and dingy Chinese theaters; the joss houses, the herb shops, the exotic groceries, the Chinese-language newspapers; the Chung Fat Sausage Company and the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory and the First Chinese Baptist Church and the Chinese Cemetary Association and the ironically named Hang On Realty and Insurance. That was where you found the poverty, attitudes, and way of life that had changed remarkably little in over a century.

The address I had copied down for Kam Fong turned out to be on the block between Grant and Kearny, at the end of an alley not quite wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Six numbers, large enough to be read from the alley mouth on Jackson, were painted like graffiti on a board fence where the passage dead-ended. When I got to the fence I found a closed door in the right-hand wall, and when I opened that I was in another alley flanked on one side by doorways. The second doorway was the one I wanted. A pair of mailboxes were racked up beside the door; neither of them bore a name. Under the boxes were doorbells, and I laid my thumb against each of them in turn.

Nothing happened inside. It was gloomy in the passage; not much light penetrated from above. It made me think of the old myth about a honeycomb of underground passageways beneath the streets of Chinatown, where sinister Orientals lurked and opium dens provided celestial dreams; even Hammett and his Continental Op had been guilty of perpetuating it. The myth had been born because a number of hidden, above-ground alleys like this one did exist, and in the days of the tong wars highbinders and hatchetmen had used them as escape routes from the police; the ignorant and the fanciful among the Caucasian population had reasoned, by illogical extension, that there was a similar subterranean network. The legend had been debunked decades ago, but myths, like dreams, die hard. There were still some, here and there, who believed it to this day.

I pressed the doorbells again. Pretty soon a window slid up above me, releasing a wave of cooking odors and the faint singsong of Chinese music from a radio or phonograph. I peered up past the metal framework of a fire escape at an elderly woman with a face like a wrinkled yellow grape.

She said something in Chinese, realized I was not of her race, and switched to heavily accented English. “What you want?”

“I’m looking for Kam Fong.”

“Not here. Never here, noontime.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“Restaurant, maybe.”

“Which restaurant?”

“Mandarin Café. You try there.”

“Where is it?”

“Kearny Street. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

The wrinkled face withdrew and the window banged shut.

I went back out to Jackson, down to Kearny. It did not take me long to find the Mandarin Café; it was in the same block, over near Pacific — a hole-in-the-wall sandwiched between a barbershop and a Chinese dance studio. Inside was a long, narrow room crowded with tables and people, nearly all of them Chinese. They had the heat turned up in there, and combined with stove heat from the kitchen and body heat from the patrons, it gave the room an unpleasant tropical atmosphere spiced with the odors of mandarin cooking. The heat made sweat pop out on my forehead, made me feel vaguely nauseous. Nobody else seemed to mind it, but then none of them had just spent six days in the hospital recovering from a bullet wound.

I opened the buttons on my overcoat. While I was doing that, a Chinese waiter came up and shook his head at me. “Sorry, no tables now. You wait?”

“I’m not here for lunch,” I said. “I’m looking for a man named Kam Fong. You know him?”

“Kam Fong?”

“He lives around the corner on Jackson.”

The waiter hesitated, and then shrugged and pointed toward the back of the restaurant.

“Which table?” I said. “I don’t know what he looks like.”

“Far corner. By kitchen door.”

He went away. I squinted through the miasma of heat, picked up the table near the kitchen door, and made my way back there. It was a table for two, but Kam Fong was eating alone. He was a wizened little guy of indeterminate age, with a wispy mustache and glossy black hair and skin the color and appearance of tallow. He had a plate of fried pork and cabbage in front of him, and a big dish of rice and a pot of tea, and he was sitting hunched forward, working on his food with a pair of chopsticks and plenty of appetite. The meal had all of his attention; he didn’t see me coming and he didn’t look up until I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.

“Kam Fong?” I said.

He looked blankly startled at first, but when he focused on me, saw the arm sling inside my open coat, his reaction was sudden and surprising. His mouth popped open, his eyes bulged, he made an odd little noise in his throat; one of the chopsticks slipped out of his fingers and clattered against the teapot. Fear, bright and shiny, spread like a flush ever his waxy face.

“You,” he said, and it came out half-strangled, like a belch.

I frowned at him. “You know who I am?”

“How you find me? How you know?”

I got it then. It was his voice; I’d heard it before. A spasm went through my left arm and I could feel the fingers twitch. In the space of a second I was as tense as he was.

“Well, well,” I said. “You’re the one who called yesterday to tell me about Mau Yee.”

The mention of Mau Yee made him jerk as if I had slapped him. His fear flared up brighter; he looked around a little wildly, made a motion to get on his feet. I caught hold of his wrist with my good hand, put enough pressure on it to keep him sitting still.

“You’re not going anywhere, Fong,” I told him. “We’re going to have a little talk, you and me.”

“No, please...”

“Yes, please. Just take it easy, don’t lose your head, and we’ll get along fine.”

He was wired up so tight you could almost see him quiver. I watched him struggle with his panic, try to get it under control. His eyes rolled around for three or four seconds; then he blinked, let out a heavy breath, and used his free hand to paw his mouth out of shape. He was all right, then. He wasn’t going to make a scene.

“How you know?” he said again.

“I didn’t know, not until you opened your mouth and I recognized your voice. I got your name from a mutual acquaintance.”

“Who?”

“Inspector Richard Loo. He said you’d had some contact with Lieutenant Eberhardt in the past, given him information on certain matters. So I thought I’d look you up.”

Fong wet his lips, slumped back a little in his chair. I still had hold of his wrist; when I released it he put both hands in his lap and glanced around again, furtively. But nobody was looking at us. They were all too busy eating and chattering among themselves.

“You telling them?” he asked. “Police?”

“About your call? No. I’m looking into things on my own.”

That seemed to relieve him a little. “You not telling anyone? Not police, nobody in Chinatown?”

“That depends,” I said. “On how cooperative you are, for one thing. Why did you call me?”

“Lieutenant, he...” The sentence dribbled off.

“What about the lieutenant?”

“He treat me okay. Not like other police.”

“Paid you well, never hassled you?”

“Yes.”

“And you called me because I’m his friend, because I was shot too.”

“Yes.”

“And because you heard he’d taken a bribe.”

“Not want police to know,” he said. “Maybe not true. I think maybe you find out.”

“What do you know about this bribe?”

“Nothing. Only what I telling you before.”

“No idea who’s supposed to have given it?”

“No.”

“But you know it wasn’t a Chinese.”

“No Chinese. Nobody in Chinatown.”

“Where did you hear about the bribe?”

“I listen, hearing many things.”

“Sure you do. Where did you hear this one?”

“Not remembering.”

“You’d better start remembering, my friend. And quick.”

He wet his lips again. “I think... Lee Chuck.”

“Who would Lee Chuck be?”

“Herb seller. Important man.”

“Yes? Does he have a shop?”

“Ross Alley.”

“How did he know about the bribe?”

“He not telling me.”

“What else does he do besides sell herbs?”

“Do?”

“Come on, Fong, you know what I mean.”

Hesitation. Then he said, “Gambling.”

“You mean he runs a parlor?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“Mah-Jongg, fan-tan, poker.”

“High stakes?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Room above his shop.”

“In Ross Alley?”

“Yes.”

“Does the bribe have anything to do with gambling?”

“No.”

“Then how does Chuck know about it?”

“He not telling me.”

“Who told you about Mau Yee? Was it Chuck?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

Fong cast another furtive glance at the nearby tables. Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice a couple of octaves. “He saying Mau Yee try to eat two white pies. One big, one little.”

“Meaning he tried to kill a couple of Caucasians.”

“Yes. You and lieutenant.”

“Why? What motive?”

“Something to do with bribe.”

“But Chuck didn’t say what.”

“No.”

“Did he have any idea who hired Mau Yee?”

“He saying no.”

“Or why an outsider would want a Chinese gunman?”

“No.”

“Why did Chuck tell you as much as he did?”

“We talk sometimes. Friends.”

Some friends, I thought. “Does he belong to Hui Sip?”

“Yes. You know Hui Sip?”

“I’ve heard of them. What else do they control besides gambling? Drugs, maybe?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-huh. Where can I find Mau Yee?”

“You go after him now?”

“I haven’t decided that yet. Where does he live?”

“Hang Ah Street.”

“What number?”

“Sixteen.”

“Does he live there alone?”

“No. He having woman. Not married.”

“All right,” I said. I got my wallet out, took one of my business cards from inside. The telephone listed on it was my office number; I scratched that out with a pen and wrote my home number in its place. Then I slid the card over in front of him, next to his cold plate of fried pork and cabbage. “I need more information, Fong,” I said. “I need to know who hired Mau Yee and why, what that bribe business is all about. See what else you can find out. You turn up anything positive, there’ll be a hundred bucks in it for you.”

He hesitated, finally picked up the card and put it into his shirt pocket. “Hearing nothing else,” he said. “Only what Lee Chuck telling me.”

“Nose around anyway. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

“Yes.” He leaned forward again. “You know Mau Yee carry puppy all time?”

“Puppy?”

“Pistol. All time different one — many puppies. You being careful, yes? Mau Yee very dangerous.”

“So am I right now,” I said.

The heat and the heavy cooking odors were making me a little dizzy. I pushed back my chair, got on my feet, told Fong I’d be in touch, and left him mopping his face with a linen napkin. When I got outside I leaned against a parking meter for a time, to let the wind cool me and chase away the dizziness.

Up on California, the bells were ringing in the steeple of Old St. Mary’s. A wedding, probably. Or a funeral. The bells reminded me of the sign over the church entrance, underneath the big clock — a Biblical quote from Ecclesiastes. “Son,” it said, “observe the time and fly from evil.”

Good advice for most people, I thought, but not for me. Not now.

I had observed the time, all right, but I wasn’t flying from evil; I was flying straight at it.