John Dobbyn - Neon Dragon

I saw a door shut in his eyes when he heard the half-hidden whispers and laughs. I didn’t think I could open it again, but I caught him after practice. I asked if he’d help me. I could feel the defensive refusal in his hesitation. I told him I meant it. I needed help. He was somewhere between anger at all of us and rejection of what he took to be my pity when he snapped out, “I’ll be here at five tomorrow morning. Do what you wish.”

It was painful, but I had my body at the gym at five the next morning, and every day for a year. Harry brought me into the discipline of peace through controlled patterns of body movement that was his version of tai chi. We were matched to wrestle each other at every practice, since nobody else wanted much of either one of us. I worked harder than I had ever worked at anything in my life, and by the end of the spring term, I could pin anyone in Holworthy House-except one.

Three telephone rings, and I was beginning to wonder if I could catch him at home. I hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving. But then I could say that three hundred and sixty-four days a year. After college, I went to play in the law, and Harry started devouring the alphabet. He got an MS degree in biochemistry from MIT, and hung on for a PhD in record time. He picked up a few more initials in London before becoming a resident brainchild back at MIT.

Our lives took us in different directions most of the time, but we met religiously for Thanksgiving dinner at my mother’s house in Newton. She always cooked what I thought from childhood was a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner- pollo con arroz and cornbread.

Six rings, and I decided to try his office. That reached him. He still put an Asian twang on “Hello” and I was mighty glad to hear it.

“Harry, it’s Mike. What’re you up to?”

“Mike, good to hear from you. What’s up?”

“I was hoping we could get together.”

“Is it Thanksgiving already?”

“Not for a little while. It’s February. Actually I need your help. Could we meet?”

“Sure, Mike. How about lunch tomorrow?”

“How about coffee in an hour?”

I think he caught my urgency. If there was a pause, it was a fraction of a second to reorder his schedule.

“You name the place, Mike.”

I looked around. “I’m in Chinatown, corner of Beach and Harrison. There’s some kind of a coffee shop behind me. I don’t see a name. Can you meet me here?”

His voice picked up tension. “No, I can’t, Mike. Listen to me. Don’t hang around there. Hang up the phone and just get the hell out of there.”

“Why? What is this place?”

“Let’s not discuss it at the moment. Walk to the right up Harrison. I’ll meet you in the bar at the China Sea.”

I wanted to tell him he sounded like a character out of an old Fu Manchu movie, but he was gone.

I was the only one at the China Sea bar, sipping Tsing Tao beer until Harry slid onto the next bar stool.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Michael.”

“Happy New Year, Harry.”

I reached in my pocket and handed him the slip of paper that had fallen out of the fortune cookie. He lit a cigarette lighter and held it up to scan the symbols.

“You want a beer, Harry?”

He waved off the suggestion. “Where’d you get this?”

“In a fortune cookie.”

He gave me a look. “Fortune cookies are to make you Caucasians feel good about leaving a tip. Is this note serious?”

“I suspect it is. Could we share the contents?”

He relit the lighter for another look.

“It’s a girl’s name. Ku Mei-Li. And an address on Beach Street. You know her?”

I shook my head.

“There’s more. It says literally, ‘You help her, I help you.’”

Harry looked at me in the mirror over the bar. “Help you what?”

I took another sip of beer to sort out my own questions before answering Harry’s. It was an attractive quid pro quo. The quid was whatever in the world I could do for someone named Ku Mei-Li. The quo was particularly inviting if it meant that my little Red Shoes would give us a counter to Mrs. Lee’s damning identification.

I took Harry by the arm and escorted him out the door and down Harrison. I’d given him a brief replay of the day’s events by the time we reached the corner of Beach Street.

“So it comes down to this, Harry old pal. We find the address on Beach Street, and either I go in by myself with nothing but hand signals to communicate with heaven-knows-who, or you come with me, and we make sense of this little game.”

We stopped. He pulled me into a doorway. I thought at the time he was taking us out of the cold, but he could have been avoiding the eyes of those who were standing in the window of the coffee shop across the street.

“Michael, you have no conception of what goes on in Chinatown. You’re like everyone else who comes down here. You have dinner, buy some noodles, whatever, and breeze right back out to Caucasianville. You can’t see it, because you don’t know what to look for.”

“See what, Harry? I’m willing to look. Tell me.”

He looked at me and just shook his head.

“It’s too much to tell, and too cold to do it here. What can I say, Mike? You want me to wade into a net of organized crime so effective that it has this community almost paralyzed with fear. It’s so effective that you don’t even know it exists.”

I pulled the collar of my coat up around the back of my neck.

“Suppose it exists, Harry…”

“It exists.”

“Like I said. Suppose it exists. I don’t have a lot of choice. I got a name, I got an address. That’s a hell of lot more than I had going for me before I came down here. I’ve got to follow it up. I don’t think time is on my side. The question is, do you go with me?”

“This place you’re going is a brothel, Mike. For Chinese. Not outsiders. It’s protected by a youth gang that could write the book on violence. You could at least pick a better time than the middle of the night. Alone.”

“I didn’t pick the time, Harry. And maybe I’m not alone.”

I forced a goofy smile and stepped out into the street. I was walking, but I was listening hard. My heart came down out of my throat when I heard Harry’s footsteps catching up.

Harry said nothing. I could tell by the set of his chin that the wrong word from me could break the momentum, and any word was the wrong word.

He took the lead as we passed five doorways. The sixth was chipped and grimy and hung at an angle that only time and neglect could effect. The glass was caked with decades of pollution. There was not a clue as to what was on the other side. That would not ordinarily raise the hair on the back of my neck, but that combined with Harry’s gripping the doorknob for the duration of an interminable deep breath gave me the galloping creeps.

When he was mentally set, Harry stiffened his posture, gave me a nod, and pushed open the door. I could see that it led to a hallway the width of the door and just as decrepit. Straight ahead about ten feet the rutted floor bent upward in a flight of well-worn wooden stairs. The light inside was dimmer than the neon glare in the street. Harry held the door open for a second and looked back.

We caught sight of them at almost the same moment. Three of the young stone faces I had seen in the window of the coffee shop on the corner were moving down the sidewalk in our direction. Harry gave me a “you couldn’t listen” look. There are times, however, when the only way to retreat is to go forward. We moved inside and closed the door.

About the time we hit the first step, I looked up to see the top landing consumed with the bulk of the first Chinese I’d ever seen who topped six feet four and a conservative two hundred fifty pounds. Whatever notion I had of making it past the top of the stairs died in a lump that I couldn’t swallow.