Stealing Time

CHAPTER 10

R

oosevelt Field was a huge place. Milton Hua told his wife, Nanci, it was the largest shopping mall in America. When she'd asked if it was anything like the ugly and foul-smelling shopping mall on Bowery in Chinatown, just at the mouth of the Manhattan Bridge that led out to Brooklyn, he'd laughed. No, no, this was a

Mall,

with a capital M. Big, really big. Bigger than Chinatown and Little Italy and Greenwich Village and SoHo and even Wall Street all put together. It was the mother and father of all malls. He was very proud.

Garden City, Long Island, next to Roosevelt Field, was where Nanci and Milton had moved last winter when it was still bleak and cold, and no green showed on the trees or on the lawns in front of the houses. Now they had a yard full of tulips and jonquils. They had moved to Garden City because a new section of Roosevelt Field was being built, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow had been offered to Milton because he was the smartest son in his family and the first to go out on his own. The pot of gold for him was a house, a car, and a brand-new Chinese restaurant to run in that business Mecca, Roosevelt Field, on the other side of the Queens line in Nassau County. What was in it for Nanci was the loss of the only home she'd ever known, the only job she'd ever wanted, and her independence. Outside, the taxi horn honked.

"You okay with this?" she called to her neighbor, who was reading a magazine in her kitchen and who had promised to stay until her return.

"No problem," Emmie called.

Nonetheless, Nanci was deeply troubled as she slammed the door of the brick house that was Milton's dream come true. The door was solid wood and the heavy thud it made shut out everything in her life she'd valued.

Everything was beautiful, from the little peaked roof over the front door, painted red for luck, to the pale tiles in the kitchen painted with all the herbs and vegetables prized in an Italian kitchen, to the stone fireplace in the living room, which Nanci would never use because of the fire that had killed her father in Chinatown when she was fifteen. It had everything; it was comfortable; and it was far, far from the apartment where she and Milton used to live, which also happened to be close enough for her to walk to her job at the Chatham Square Library even in the rain and snow. It was far from her cousin, too, and Nanci knew that her neglect was responsible for the problem she had now.

"Hey, lady, don't keep me waiting," the taxi driver yelled out the window.

She took a last look at the house, where her neighbor was keeping watch, and she hurried out to the car, which was the kind of wreck Milton would not want her riding in. Milton had a brand-new BMW. Nanci didn't know how to drive it, but even if she had, he wouldn't have let her take it into the city on this mission. He was angry; he'd told her to stay where she was. But Nanci's cousin Lin, difficult from the moment she'd arrived from China, had to be located immediately. Nanci kept replaying the events of yesterday in her mind: Lin calling her early in the morning and asking Nanci to come and get her; Nanci driving in with Milton and seeing Lin sitting on the curb in Chinatown like a homeless person, waiting for them with her possessions in a cheap plastic laundry basket; Lin putting the basket in the car without a word, then refusing to get in herself. And finally, Lin turning her back and hurrying away down the street.

"Oh, let her go," Milton had said, furious at the inconvenience and bad manners. "I have to get back to work." So she'd let him turn around and drive back to Garden City without a clue what had just happened, or why.

"Where to?" The driver was a big angry man with a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead.

"The station," Nanci told him.

"Which station?"

"Penn Station."

"I ain't goin' all the way into Manhattan."

"No, no. I want to take the train into Manhattan."

"Okay, little girl, what line?"

Nanci Hua was twenty-five. Nobody had called her a little girl in a long time. "Does it make a difference?" she asked angrily.

"Yeah, it does. Three stations, three fares. The trains go different times from each one and some you gotta change in Jamaica. So make up your mind, I can't sit here all day."

They were in Garden City, so she said, "Garden City station." She was in a hurry; she didn't have time for this.

He didn't say anything, just drove in a jerky stop-start way that made her feel carsick after the first block. In seven minutes he pulled up and braked hard at a station clearly marked "Mineola." She had no idea where Mineola was.

"That will be nine dollars," he demanded.

She gave him the money. At the station, there was an automatic ticket machine. She had to figure out the number of the station where she was going and the time of day she was traveling. It cost $6.50. At Penn Station, she had to go up a flight of stairs and find the subway. Another $1.50 for the token. She didn't know what subway to take, but the Canal Street stop was where she was going. Seven minutes after arriving in Manhattan, she got off there and climbed out of the tunnel into the light. It had cost her seventeen dollars to get home.

In the warming spring air, the Lower East Side was teeming with people. Nanci didn't have to get her bearings. The Bowery was on one side of Chatham Square; on the other side were East Broadway, Allen Street, Delancey, Orchard, Ludlow, and the rest of the Lower East Side that used to be all Jewish, then became Puerto Rican, and now more and more was Asian. The factory where Lin had worked when she arrived in America was on Allen Street. Nanci rushed past the library at 33 East Broadway, where she'd met Milton when she was twenty and they'd fallen in love. She wasn't thinking about that now. When she hit Allen, her heart started pounding. Soon she would have some answers.

Almost no one started out on top in New York. Everybody coming in worked in a restaurant or a factory, or cleaned houses. Nanci herself had come as a child and learned English within a matter of months. She'd never had to make bean curd or dumplings, wait on tables, sell things on the street, clean other people's houses, wash dishes, or sew in a noisy factory. Lin was older and not so lucky. Nanci and Milton wanted to place Lin in a store, but she couldn't read or change American money. She couldn't sell things on the street for the same reason, and she had no experience with flowers or dry cleaning or laundry. She knew nothing but how to sew. Nanci had been frustrated, trying to explain to her that she had to learn to read and speak English to get ahead in America. She had to go to school. But Lin had refused to speak the language of get-ahead ambition. Lin had refused to move in any direction. It turned out that her cousin, whom Nanci had tried so hard to help, did not like her, would not live with her. They had nothing in common, and now she'd entangled Nanci in real trouble. Nanci's stomach knotted with anxiety and fear. All the way into the city she had wondered how she, who had known and helped so many Italian, Latino, and Chinese children, could have been so helpless when it came to her own cousin.

At the address of the factory there was no name on the door. Nanci rang the bell. After a while a scratchy, heavily accented voice asked her through the old intercom what she wanted. She gave her married name, Hua, and asked if she could come up.

The voice switched to Chinese and screamed through the intercom that no one was there.

Nanci replied in Chinese that she was no one official, wasn't there to make trouble, she was just looking for someone. After that there was no more argument. The lock clicked, and she pushed the door open to a very small space with an unmarked door leading to the back of the first floor and a dark stairwell going up to another unmarked door on the second floor. The second-floor door opened just a crack. A pair of keen eyes in a wrinkled face looked down at her.

"Ni hao, zumu, wo shi Lin Tsing Hua,"

she said politely.

"Okeydokey, come upstairs," said the voice behind the eyes.

It was an old building with a steep staircase. The steps sagged so badly they almost seemed to be tipping over on themselves. Nanci wondered how many times her cousin Lin had climbed these stairs and disappeared behind that door. She wondered if Lin was in there now. Nanci was used to climbing stairs. There had been three flights of stairs to her apartment. Still, these stairs were very steep, and she was short of breath when she hit the top. The old woman opened the door just wide enough for her to slip inside.

"Hello, Grandmother," Nanci said again. "I'm sorry to bother you in the middle of your important work."

The woman made a humphing sound that was not hard to interpret even over the roar of many sewing machines. Inside the door was a big room with more than a dozen machines and heads bent over them. Some heads still had the black hair of youth, and some were peppered with gray. Two heads of curly hair were pure white; the skin of those women was the color of butterscotch. And there were no men anywhere. A high chair with a rickety table, a chipped teapot, and a small cup marked the place of this woman, the woman with the sharp eyes.

For a second Nanci took in the cracked beams in the unfinished ceiling, the fat black-and-orange extension cords looping from one makeshift outlet to another high above, slats of some unidentifiable building material on the walls between a few patches of old plaster. By the windows were radiators, but not many. In May the room was already broiling with so many lungs sucking at the stale air and so many machines using electricity and acting as little furnaces.

There was no space for cutting tables here. The stacks of legs waiting to be sewn together suggested it was a pants factory. Some women were sewing the curve of the crotch, some just the zippers, some the waistbands. One older woman covered with thread was just cutting the threads from the finished garments. And in the farthest back corner clouds of steam were belching from the presser. All the activities, the noise, and so little air made Nanci dizzy; so did the dishonorable fact that she was so poorly acquainted with her cousin that she didn't even know what part of the garment Lin worked on. Rust and burgundy were the colors of the wool fabrics the women were putting together now. That meant they must already be sewing for fall.

Nanci felt that empty place of sorrows burn in her gut. It had taken her six years to save enough to bring her little cousin here, and now that Lin was here Nanci still could not reach her. She looked around and did not see her cousin.

"Everybody's here, and everybody's legal," the woman said in Chinese. "So who are you looking for?"

"Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I am looking for my cousin, Lin Tsing."

The woman's eyes showed nothing as she shook her head quickly.

"What does that mean, Grandmother? I know she works here," Nanci said.

"No work here."

Nanci looked carefully at the bent heads again. "Maybe not now, this minute. But she did work here. If there's something wrong with her, please tell me."

The woman shook her head. "Never work here."

"Maybe she didn't give her right name."

"Know nothing."

"I have only one cousin. No one else. She may not be a good cousin, but she is all I have. She is my father's brother's child. My mother and my father and my uncle are gone. They would want me to take care of her. I need to find her. I have her things. It's very urgent."

"Bad luck," the woman said, but the shrewdness didn't leave her eyes. "What things do you have—in case I hear of her?"

"Maybe you remember her. She's young, pretty, has short hair. She worked here for many months, you don't have so many people you could forget so fast."

"Boo hao

." The woman coughed up some phlegm.

Nanci ignored the disapproval. She guessed what was no good, but Lin had been sulky and secretive ever since her arrival, wouldn't even see Nanci, much less share her troubles with her cousin.

"I'd like to talk to the boss," Nanci said firmly.

"I boss."

"The owner, then."

"No here."

"When will he be back?"

The woman shook her head. Grandmother wasn't saying. Nanci paused at the table with the teapot on it. "If you see my cousin, tell her I have her things. I'm sure she wants them back."

"What things, in case I hear?" the woman asked a second time.

"Would you ask around and call me?" Nanci didn't want to tell her.

The old woman's hard eyes traveled to Nanci's purse. Nanci had never bribed anyone before. The idea of having to do so now made her nervous. She groped around in her purse, trying to count her money without appearing to do so. It would cost her another fifteen dollars, at least, to get back to Long Island. How much could she afford to offer? She gave the woman a ten. Was that enough? Apparently it was. A glimmer of recognition showed in the woman's eye.

"Maybe I'll look around for you," the woman suggested. "Maybe she has important things? Maybe you'll give a reward for her?"

Nanci's mouth went dry. "Yes," she said. "I have a reward."

"My name Annie Lee. How much?" she demanded.

Nanci frowned. How much was enough to get results? Now she was really frightened. Milton would be so angry about all this. She closed her eyes. She asked herself how much she'd pay.

"A thousand dollars," she said finally. "A thousand dollars if you can tell me where my cousin is."

The grandma nodded. "I'll ask around. What's your number?"

Nanci gave her the number. Then she walked back, crossed Bowery, and cut around to Elizabeth. On Elizabeth she walked back and forth in front of the police station a dozen times, asking herself if she should go to the police. What if Lin had done something criminal? What if Nanci were now an accessory to some crime? What should she do? The police were so dangerous. Her old friend, April Woo, the only representative of the police she'd ever liked and respected, wasn't there anymore. Nanci had seen her only twice since April started working uptown—it now seemed like a hundred years ago—and they never spoke on the phone or had lunch anymore. In the end she was too frightened to go into the station house and ask for April's current work telephone number.