John Dobbyn - Neon Dragon

“Mrs. Lee says that Mr. Bradley sat at the table you were at. She served him, since there were not enough waitresses. He watched through the window. When he left, she saw him go into the street. He had a gun. When the lion approached Mr. Chen’s store, he fired at Mr. Chen in the window above.”

I watched her during the translation. Those stoic eyes seemed to moisten when Mr. Chen’s name was mentioned. I asked him directly.

“Was she related to Mr. Chen?”

He leaned back in his chair and took a moment.

“I’ll tell you something, Mr. Knight. You may not understand, but I’ll tell you. We’re an alien people in this country. Even those of us who are citizens. We cling to our customs, our language. Our whole culture gives us a place where we’re accepted. Unlike your culture, we revere our elderly. They are our rock. Sometimes that reverence is indistinguishable from love. That was particularly true of Mr. Chen. He was like the root of our soul. When your Mr. Bradley killed Mr. Chen, he sent us into the very deepest mourning. Not just relatives, all of us.”

The half of me that was Puerto Rican understood, particularly the emotion of loss. Fortunately, my other half was dispassionate enough to press on.

“Would you ask her this? If the restaurant was busy, why did she take the time to watch Bradley after he left?”

He spoke the Chinese in a low tone of voice, being very gentle with this woman whose locked hands were beginning to tremble. I looked away to avoid embarrassing her. As I looked back toward the kitchen, I caught sight of the red shoes in the small gap between the door and the floor. They didn’t move.

There were several exchanges in Chinese between Mrs. Lee and my interpreter before he turned back to me.

“Mrs. Lee says she became alarmed when she saw the handle of a gun in his belt under his jacket when he got up to leave. She was afraid of what he might do with the gun, so she watched through the window. When he got to the street, he took the gun out and…” He finished the sentence with a clear gesture.

I was beginning to feel my nose bleed from running into a brick wall. I thought I’d take one more run at it to see if there was an inch of flexibility.

“Would you ask her if it could possibly have been someone besides Bradley who fired the shot? The street was pretty crowded yesterday.”

He sang a few Chinese syllables that sent her head into a motion that told me I had just dug Bradley’s grave a foot deeper. She went ramrod stiff. Her head shook out “no,” while her little staccato voice rose half an octave. She held her hand above her head as if she were holding a gun. So much for flexibility.

Dick Clark stood up for this one.

“Mrs. Lee says that she saw the black hand of Mr. Bradley aiming the gun.” He demonstrated. “No mistake. And now I think we should let Mrs. Lee compose herself.”

I looked at the tiny, clenched hands of that frail woman, and my heart tightened. I wanted to tell her in soft terms that I wouldn’t hurt her. Just two problems-she wouldn’t have understood the words if I tried, and worse, I might not be able to deliver on the promise. If it came to saving our client, we might have to do whatever was necessary to destroy her as a witness.

I just stood in agreement. As I turned back to Dick Clark, I caught another glimpse of the red shoes under the door.

“Thanks for your help. Please tell her I’m sorry for her grief.”

He nodded.

“If I have any more questions, I’ll be back.”

“I don’t think so.”

The engineer was smiling, but the train had just run over my legs. My expression must have registered the jolt.

“I don’t mean to be discourteous, Mr. Knight. Mrs. Lee has been badly shaken by Mr. Chen’s death. It was an imposition to speak to her tonight, but I allowed it. No more.”

I stood beside him and matched him smile for smile.

“I believe my client is innocent. That doesn’t mean he won’t be convicted on the basis of mistaken testimony. That’s my idea of an imposition. If I have any more questions, I’ll be back.”

I walked back to the table. The waitress in the red shoes padded over with the check and a fortune cookie. I dropped enough money to cover the check and a tip on the tray. I had no desire to prolong it, but I couldn’t resist cracking open the fortune cookie. They’re always upbeat, and I needed some good news.

When I peeled it open, a second slip fell on the floor. I bent down to pick it up and caught a look of abject terror in the frozen face of Red Shoes. It softened when I slipped the paper into my pocket. I couldn’t tell who else noticed. I busied myself with pulling on my topcoat while I read the fortune-cookie missive:

“Success cannot long exceed your grasp.”

God bless the chef.

Tyler street was taking on a new face when I left the Ming Tree. The black frozen slush was freshly coated with a new white dusting of the kind of snow you get when the bottom has dropped out of the thermometer-dry and squeaky to the walk. The wind had fallen off, though, and a full stomach was better insulation against the cold than another layer of clothing.

I turned right and walked the half block to Beach Street. A left and one more block brought me to a well-lit coffee shop with no name on the right-hand corner of Beach and Harrison. It was smoky and heavy with the drone of mumbled Chinese coming from the clutches of both young and old sitting around the bare wooden tables.

I found a corner under a fluorescent light and took out the slip of paper that had fallen out of the fortune cookie. The way my day had been running, it was no surprise that the writing was Chinese.

I was surrounded by people who could probably translate, assuming, of course, that they could speak English. Somehow it did not seem like a good idea to ask. I tucked the note away in an inside pocket and braced for the walk outside.

I stayed in the nook of the entranceway to be out of earshot and out of the wind at the same time. I tapped a familiar array of numbers into my cell phone, and my mind ran back ten years or so.

Harry Wong was one of the best memories I had from my days at Harvard College. He was the grandson of a woman who left China to start a string of the first Chinese restaurants seen in the suburbs of Boston in the early twenties. She was a maverick with nerve and a keen sense of demography. Harry told me that she noticed that most of the non-Chinese customers of the Chinatown restaurants were Jewish. She picked her locations by cruising the neighborhoods and checking the names on the mailboxes. Whenever she found a cluster of middle-class Cohens or Goldsteins, or better yet, a synagogue, she’d plant a restaurant. In ten years she went back to China with enough money to rule a southern province.

Harry’s family migrated back to Boston around the time that Mao Tse-tung’s army made capitalistic wealth a scourge to be cleansed. The family transferred its prominence from a southern province of China to the province of Brookline, west of Boston.

Harry and I met as freshmen at the tryouts for an intermural wrestling team at Holworthy House. He was tall for a seventeen-year-old Chinese American, but somehow he came equipped with more speed and strength than you’d expect from his beanpole build. He not only made the team, he managed to embarrass most of the beefy Caucasians at practice-and one particular half Puerto Rican-by pinning us like butterflies while we were still counting his ribs.

One of his victims once asked him what kind of trick he was using. He had a gentle smile and a soft voice with just enough of a trace of his parents’ accent to be eligible for racial prejudice from the preppy blue bloods who made up 90 percent of the team. It was a smart-aleck question, but he gave it a courteous answer. Unfortunately, when he said that everything he did stemmed from an ancient Chinese discipline called tai chi, which he had practiced since he was three years old, he was permanently branded as some kind of mystic freak by those who finally had a means of satisfying their need to feel superior to him.