John Dobbyn - Neon Dragon

“You tell me when raid. Then I call girl.”

“You’ve got that in reverse, Mother. You call the girl first. We want to see her in private. Right here. But not like last time. This time she comes with orders from you to tell the truth. I know half the story. If she gets it wrong or holds out, no deal.”

As Harry talked, I could see her getting squinty and cool. I was afraid Harry was losing her. The worst thing for us was for her to have time to think.

“Maybe no deal anyway. If I yell, boys come. They make you tell for nothing.”

Harry peeled around from the door. He grabbed the telephone on the desk and drilled in ten numbers. I knew it was for show, but it had even me on edge. Big Mama just stared. Harry held the receiver out to her while it rang.

“Ask the man who answers what I told him to do if I’m not back in an hour. The message goes out that you betrayed the tong. When the raid occurs, there won’t be a hole big enough to hide you in Chinatown. Go ahead. Ask!”

She stared at the thing that was making “hello” noises in front of her. She pushed it away. “All right, I do it.”

Harry said into the phone, “The same plan is still on. One hour.” He hung up.

“That’s it, Mother. Call Mei-Li.”

Harry had the momentum back. She hustled through the door in the back of the room. I moved close enough to Harry to whisper.

“Did you set that up with someone?”

He whispered back. “That was my research assistant. I intended to tell him this morning. It skipped my mind. It’ll give him something to think about.”

In a few minutes, Mei-Li came through the back door. She was still beautiful, even in slacks and a blouse, but she was less perfectly composed than previously.

She looked from one of us to the other without knowing which of us to please or how to do it. It was my turn at bat. I stepped over to her, took her hand, and brought her to a chair. I pulled a chair over to sit in front of her.

“I don’t want to frighten you, Mei-Li. I just want the truth. Did the woman tell you to tell us the truth?”

“Yes.” It was meek.

“Did she tell you to answer our questions?”

She looked over at Harry, but she said “yes” to me.

“Then listen carefully. The girl who worked in the restaurant, the one who gave me the note I showed you, did you know her?”

She looked confused by the question, and I realized it could have been the past tense. “I saw her yesterday in the morgue. They killed her.”

The little gasp was the first sincere thing I had heard out of her.

“She was killed, Mei-Li, because she gave me the note to help you. Now tell me the truth. Why did she think you needed help?”

First the tears started, and then her face was buried in her hands. I took her as gently as I could by the shoulders and lifted her to look at me.

“Why did she want me to help you?”

There was gentle sobbing that almost muffled the words. “I don’t know.”

“Mei-Li, I have to know…”

“I am not Mei-Li.”

I heard it clearly, but it took a second to sink in.

“I don’t understand.”

“They brought me here two days ago. I saw her then.”

“Mei-Li?”

“Yes. They were sending her away. When you came two nights ago, they told me to pretend to be Mei-Li, but to tell you nothing wrong.”

“When you saw her, before they sent her away, did you speak to her?”

“Only a little. She was crying. Very frightened.”

“Frightened of what?”

“She did not say.”

“Did you ask her?”

“It would do no good. She would not know she could trust me.”

Harry and I exchanged a look that said frustration. I had little or no hope for the next question.

“Do you have any idea where they sent her?”

She shook her head. Harry touched my shoulder, and I leaned back to give him room. He squatted down to catch her eyes.

“What is your name?”

“I called Xiao-Wen.”

“Xiao-Wen, where did they bring you from when you came here?”

“It is place like this in a different country. In Toronto.”

“Do you know the address?”

“Yes. It is on Columbia Street. It is above grocery store in middle of block.”

Harry looked at me and we were in sync. The easiest way they could get Mei-Li out of reach would be to exchange her for a girl from another brothel out of the country. That made it likely that Mei-Li was Xiao-Wen’s replacement in Toronto.

I didn’t like the question that raised. Wouldn’t it be easier still to simply kill her? Like Red Shoes? The answer was so clearly “yes” that my heart froze at the prospect of seeing another mutilated victim in the morgue. Why go to the trouble of a double alien-smuggling just to keep her alive? On the other hand-and this was the only hand I wanted to consider-maybe, if Mei-Li was still alive, it had to do with the dollar value of an exceptional prostitute. Maybe more.

Before we left, Harry took a piece of paper from the desk and wrote, “Raid-this Friday-9:00 PM ” He showed it to me and handed it to the girl.

“Give this to the old lady. She’ll be waiting for it.”

In the hallway downstairs we bundled against the cold, as well as recognition, before going out into the street. I pulled Harry’s earflap up for a question before leaving.

“What was that you asked the old lady? Did she know ‘ Fu ’-something or other? Then you showed her three numbers.”

“The Fu Shan Chu. I was asking if she knew the second in command of the tong. The big boy. These tongs and triads are crazy about numbers and symbols. Every officer has a code number. The number for the Fu Shan Chu is 438. She got the point that I was not an outsider.”

“Why the number two man? Why not number one?”

“Nobody in the tong knows who he is. They call him the Dragon Head. Only the number two man knows who he is.”

He started out the door, but I had one last point. “Harry, I’ve got one more stop to make. You can come with me or wait for me.”

“What stop?”

“There’s one more witness to the shooting. He’s the old man who runs the Chinese herbal medicine shop on Tyler Street. I’ve got to talk to him. This is as good a time as there’s going to be. I don’t want to have to come back here. We’re getting too well known.”

I could have predicted his decision. He pulled down his earflap.

“Let’s go.”

Tucked away down six worn, stone steps beside the Ming Tree restaurant on Tyler Street, we found the anomaly of the twenty-first century. It was a time warp. Those steps carried Harry and me out of the age of laser surgery into the middle ages of Chinese medicine.

This was no tourist haunt. The sign over the door was in untranslated Chinese. I would bet that mine were the first white feet to cross that threshold in a century. Dangling from a black, cloth-covered cord, a single weak bulb that wouldn’t have passed inspection in a chicken coop created shadows out of blackness.

I was aware of bundles of unidentifiable somethings or other piled up on both sides of the narrow shop. Faded Chinese newspapers were stacked intermittently with nearly biodegraded cardboard cartons that seemed to hold old Chinese magazines.

When we came in, I saw a shadow move in the back. It approached until I could make out an elderly Chinese man, somewhat stooped with age, but not emaciated as I would have predicted from the surroundings.

Thin, wispy strands of white face hair, which were about as close as the old gentleman could come to a full beard, sprouted below an otherwise hairless head. He wore Chinese-style pants and top which were sewn out of coarse black material. They had long since taken the permanent press of his natural folds and bends. He padded along on black cloth Chinese slippers. I was overwhelmingly grateful to have Harry along to translate for me.