John Dobbyn - Neon Dragon

He turned his head three degrees. “Terrific. You want to wrestle?”

I sat there looking at him. “This is crazy.”

“Just drive, Mike. It’s early. I get better as the morning goes on. Drive to Chinatown. Come at it from the South Station side. Just park as close as you can. I want to get to that place on Beach Street without walking past the no-name coffee shop.”

I put the car in gear and looked for a way to make a U-turn on Memorial Drive.

“Harry, what’s with the outfit? Is it that cold? You look like Na-nook of the North End.”

He squinted crosswise at me. “You’re saying I look Italian?”

I took another look and had the first good laugh I’d had since I gave up laughing-around the time this case began. He was referring to the fact that the North End of Boston is the domain primarily of people with more vowels in their names than Harry could buy on Wheel of Fortune.

“What you look like is Outer Mongolian.”

“It’s partly disguise. The idea is to get through to the Dragon Lady for five minutes before the boys come out to play. Actually, three minutes would do it. Do you have a hat with you?”

“In the back. I only wear it if it’s below zero.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes me look like Henry Osterwald, Harvard, class of ’94. You remember our classmate, the king of hats?”

He managed to look at me sideways. His neck had loosened up a good ten degrees. “Is it that bad?”

“I don’t wear it until everyone else’s eyelids are frozen shut.”

“How about when a Chinese street gang would like to separate your ears by about six feet?”

“Then, too. Tell me the plan.”

Harry didn’t start right away. He seemed to be checking the extent of ice that rimmed the sides of the Charles River.

“I think it’s time you knew a little more about the culture you’re invading, Mike. This goes back a ways. You’ve heard of the tongs.”

“Sure.”

“You know much about them?”

“No.”

“A tong was like a club, an association. The word ‘tong’ means ‘hall,’ ‘gathering place.’ They were first set up in San Francisco. There was a wave of immigrants that came over to work on the railroads and the gold mines. They were pretty close to slave labor. They had to look to each other for protection. Some of the large families banded together for mutual support. Anyone with a name like ‘Lee’ or ‘Liu’ had plenty of relatives to form a family association. But the ones who didn’t belong to a large family were out of luck. They formed the first tongs. They grew pretty fast, because they could recruit anyone, regardless of family name. You’ve heard of the tong wars.”

“Long time ago.”

“Right. Originally, the purpose of the tongs was pretty good. Mutual protection and help. And heaven knows they needed it. They were in a strange country, and not exactly embraced with open arms.

“Then some years later there came a time when the tongs were taken over by leaders who got them almost exclusively into organized crime. The biggest moneymaker was gambling. Probably second was prostitution. Everything from shacks to ‘parlors’ were supplied by the open buying of girls from age two to twenty. They were smuggled in from China, usually through Canada first. Then, of course, there were drugs-opium being the big one. This goes back to the late nineteenth century.”

“Is this what we’re playing with in Boston?”

“Bear with me, Mike. I want you to know it all. You have to know where it came from. You drive, I’ll talk. At different times, there were wars among the tongs, especially in San Francisco and New York. Sometimes it was over a killing, sometimes over control of territories, particularly in New York and San Francisco. The warriors were usually the professional hit men of the tong called the boo how doy. In the early days they used to use ceremonial hatchets to split skulls. That’s where we got the word ‘hatchetmen.’

“There were so many killings over the fifty or so years of the wars that the tongs got a bad name. You almost never hear the name used by the Chinese. That doesn’t mean the organizations are gone.

“Many of the tongs are controlled by leaders from triads back in Hong Kong. Some of them are actually American branches of triads.”

“You’ve got a new word there, Harry. By the way, do you want the heat on, or would you fry in that get-up?”

“I’m fine. Just drive and listen.”

Harry shifted his position with meticulous care. I wondered if his plan for the brothel involved a lot of broken-field running.

“The triads go back into Chinese history. It’s an interesting story. After the Manchus conquered China, they set up the Ch’ing dynasty. They ruled China for over three hundred years. In 1672, the Ch’ing emperor, Kang Xi, got help from the monks in a monastery called Shaolin in Fukien. They were experts in the martial arts. Did you ever watch reruns of the television series called Kung Fu? ”

“Sometimes. In my high-school days.”

“Then you understand something about the idea of Shaolin. The emperor needed help to drive off the invading Xi Lu barbarians. There were only 108 Shaolin monks, but they repelled the Xi Lu barbarians. The emperor rewarded the monks, and they went back to the Shaolin monastery.

“Two of the senior officials in the emperor’s court wanted to overthrow him, but they were afraid of the Shaolin monks, who were obviously loyal to the emperor. So they convinced the emperor that the Shaolin could be dangerous to him as revolutionaries. The emperor fell for it. He had the monastery burned, and all but five of the monks were killed. Those five are supposed to be the ‘Five Ancestors’ who created the first triad. They called the triad ‘ Hung ’-‘red’-because of a red light that appeared in the sky during their first ceremony. It was later called a ‘triad’ from their idea of the relationship between heaven, earth, and man. By adopting heaven as their father and earth as their mother, they were free to ignore the bonds of their real families and country and give their loyalty to each other as brothers and to the organization.

“The Chinese officials from the old Ming dynasty who were thrown out by the Ch’ings and even the poor classes joined into triads patterned after that first ‘red’ society. They used secret oaths and ceremonies and all the trappings. The whole purpose of the triad was patriotic-the overthrow of the Ch’ing dynasty.

“Then in 1912, Sun Yat-Sen’s revolution finally overthrew the Ch’ings and established the Republic of China. Most of the old triad leaders who weren’t absorbed into the new government stayed with the triads for the status and power. The problem was that there was no patriotic cause left. So they turned to organized criminal activity. The old triad values of patriotism, brotherhood, and righteousness of the last three centuries got warped into pure loyalty to the triad. And the triads became purely criminal organizations.

“After the communists took over in China, most of the triads moved to Hong Kong. There were about thirty of them there when the mainland took back Hong Kong, in spite of the fact that a Hong Kong statute makes it a crime to belong to a triad. They’re probably mostly still intact.”

We were passing the Museum of Science, heading in the direction of the once and former Boston Garden and North Station to come into Chinatown from the North End.

“Interesting, Harry. What does it have to do with the Dragon Lady’s brothel?”

“I’m getting to that. Listen to me. There are thirty-six oaths of loyalty that every new member swears on the night he’s inducted. Like, they promise not to disclose any of the secrets of the Hung family to anyone, parents, brothers and spouses included. If they do, they agree to be killed by many swords. They also swear that if a brother goes away or is arrested or killed, they will help his wife and children. They agree to be killed by thunderbolts if they don’t do this.