Tim Maleeny - Stealing the Dragon

Even at five, Sally could sense a lie. Not a single official-looking person had come to the house to talk with her, bringing official-looking papers for Li Mei to sign. Li Mei and Sally had simply left Japan, boarding a ferry in Osaka that would take them to Hong Kong. Along the way, no one asked any questions that Li Mei couldn’t answer. Sally didn’t really care one way or the other, so she didn’t say anything about it to Li Mei.

In fact, she had said very little over the past week, and Li Mei noticed that Sally was speaking less each day. She looked at her young charge and wondered what she must be thinking, now that her world had turned black.

Throughout her short life, Sally had generally been a happy child. A week ago, Li Mei would have called her precocious. But she was also strangely intense for a little girl, approaching every game or new activity as if it were a test. While the other girls giggled, Sally would frown in concentration. Only when she mastered the new skill would Sally relax and laugh like the other children. To Li Mei it seemed that Sally was two little girls sharing the same body-one girl full of life and hope and the other experienced beyond her years, earnestly preparing for some hardship yet to come.

Now that hardship had arrived, Li Mei could see the smiling, laughing side of Sally going into hiding. She hoped the two different girls that comprised Sally were friends, and she wondered if the hardened girl sitting next to her would ever share her happy playmate with anyone again. She suspected the smiling, hopeful side of Sally would be jealously guarded for many years, protected from the cruelty of the outside world. Li Mei prayed she was not lost forever.

It was an odd train of thought for the old caretaker, given their destination.

Li Mei had been anxious to return to Hong Kong for her own reasons, but she also had plans for Sally. Several times during the voyage she considered turning back but quickly derailed that line of thought by telling herself there was no better alternative. Sally did not belong in an orphanage-she had talents and potential that only Li Mei and a select few could recognize. And when the time came, when Sally was older, she would have a choice. That was what Li Mei kept saying to herself: I am not giving her away. I am giving her a choice.

If Li Mei wasn’t completely convinced by her own argument, at least it kept her moving closer to their destination.

Hong Kong hadn’t changed much since Li Mei had left, except to grow even bigger and louder, if such a thing were possible. There was no other city in the world that was so alive-not even Tokyo or New York. From the moment they disembarked at Kowloon, their senses were assaulted with the glare of neon, the smells of open cooking stalls, the roar of traffic, and the planes overhead. It was hot that time of year, steam rising off the street and choking the air with humidity. It didn’t take long for Li Mei to get her bearings, and young Sally simply let the crowds buffet her along as she held Li Mei’s hand and tried to keep up.

They spent their first night in a cheap hotel in the Kowloon district, the glare from a neon sign outside their window painting the room a lurid blue. That and the constant buzz of traffic five stories below kept Sally awake well into the night. It was after midnight when she spoke into the darkness, her small voice echoing around the room.

“Is he still alive?” she asked the ceiling. She could tell from the sound of Li Mei’s breathing that she was also awake.

“Who, Sally?” asked Li Mei, though she already knew the answer.

“The man who killed my parents,” said Sally, her voice very flat now. “The man who was drunk.”

Li Mei hesitated, but only briefly.

“Yes, he survived.”

“Will he go to jail?”

Li Mei sighed. “Yes, child, for a little while.”

“But not forever?”

Another sigh as Li Mei struggled to find the words. “The police said he was the nephew of the man who owned the trucking company. His uncle was…is…a very important man. He plays golf with the Finance Minister.”

“What does that mean?” asked Sally, not understanding what golf had to do with losing her parents.

“I’m saying…” Li Mei began, then faltered before finding an answer. “I’m saying that in this world, sometimes it is hard to find justice, Sally.”

Sally thought she knew what justice was, but she wasn’t sure. But if finding it meant the man who killed her parents would suffer, then she would look.

“I will find it,” she said to the shadows and the neon.

Li Mei thought again of their destination and the weight of the little girl’s words, then nodded to herself in the darkness.

“I know you will, child,” she said softly. “I know you will.”

San Francisco, present day

Darkness had taken the city by the time Cape left his office.

The paperwork from Richard Choffer’s case took him longer than anticipated, but he expected an angry call from Richard’s lawyer in the morning and wanted everything to be in order. He called Sally earlier but no one answered. Just as well-he wanted to talk with her face to face.

He walked up Stockton toward North Beach, an uphill climb every step of the way. By the time he crossed Chestnut, he could feel the burn in his calves. Walking even a few blocks in San Francisco was a workout, one of the reasons women in this city had such great legs. It was one of the reasons Cape liked living there.

At Lombard he passed Saints Peter amp; Paul Church where Joe DiMaggio wed Marilyn Monroe, the celebrity marriage of its time. The marriage didn’t last long, and most folks had forgotten it ever took place, if they knew in the first place, and they certainly couldn’t tell you where it happened. But forty years later the church had retained all its beauty, if not its fame. The Gothic spires pierced the night sky, twin monuments of remembrance and hope in a city with an increasingly short attention span.

North Beach was still predominantly Italian, family restaurants lining the length of Columbus Avenue and crowding the side streets, drawing tourists from all over the world. Many families had been there for generations, but many new tenants were kids out of college looking to rent in a neighborhood that had become hip simply by not trying to be.

Cape came to Broadway at Columbus, passing Frank Alessi’s place on the corner. Frank was the local wiseguy, the self-proclaimed “don of North Beach.” Cape had crossed his path a few times over the years, the meetings memorable if not always cordial. Frank was a successful businessman and major political contributor, but Cape knew his main enterprise was narcotics, moving all the product brought into the city by the Chinese tong gangs. Frank bought the bulk of each shipment and spread it across the Bay Area like a poison fog. If someone bought a dime bag off a dealer in the Mission district, a nickel found its way back into Frank’s pocket. He’d built his distribution network as carefully as he’d constructed his facade of public respectability.

Within the borders of Chinatown, the tongs made their own sales. It was their turf and their product, after all. Even Frank’s long arm couldn’t reach across Broadway, the unspoken border between North Beach and Chinatown that Cape was crossing now.

At the corner of Stockton and Broadway, Cape became illiterate. The signs over every storefront, grocery, and restaurant were written in Chinese characters accompanied only occasionally by English.