Henry Chang - Year of the Dog

The sixteen-story mirrored glass office building at Two Mott Street was the tallest building in the area, anchored at street level by a Citibank branch and a tourist-trade gift shop. The On Yee Merchants Consortium was rumored to be one of the landlords, and they occupied the entire third floor, as well as the penthouse level. The tong made their arrangements in the penthouse, Lucky remembered, as he strode through the lobby.

It was the Ecstasy that was powering him through the nights, but now in the daylight, it kept him from the sleep he needed.

Lucky rode the closet-sized freight elevator to the roof landing and went to the far end. He took a deep gulp of the cold morning air, exhaled, and torched up a sensimilla joint, sucking deeply so that the tip burned a bright orange. The smoke settled him, allowed him to slow down, to see the bigger picture of the forces circling around him. When he looked out over the jumbled patchwork of rooftops, the expanse of Chinatown reached for the horizon. To the east, across the square, he saw the growing enclave of Fukienese Chinese immigrants, their Fuk Chow Native Association building flying the red flag of the People’s Republic high above its tiled pagoda balcony.

Lucky remembered a childhood time when mainland supporters, the commies, would never dare fly the crimson flag for fear of being attacked and having their businesses vandalized or torched. Men wearing masks would come around, guns in their waistbands, to administer a beat down or a stabbing.

Times had changed.

While the old men of the tongs dithered with their deals, the young men who contested the streets had considerations of their own: controling the dirty money flowing through their rackets.

Lucky sucked heartily on the jay, scanning the view of old Chinatown, the core streets that the long ago Chinese bachelors first called home, eking out small lives under the heels of the whites, who didn’t like them and didn’t want them here. Still, the community grew. Now, the Fukienese were driving the boundaries north and east, their numbers swelling into the tenements that had housed the WASPs, the Irish, Italians, and Jews, and the Toishanese and Cantonese before them.

The windy rooftop refreshed him, and the marijuana brought him back down. His thoughts were still scattered from the Ecstasy, but he was beginning to see a pattern forming. As street boss of the Ghost Legion, Lucky was no student of history, but he was an admirer of the Romans, and before them, of the Mongolian hordes. He’d seen the videotapes Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, with Chinese subtitles, and The Great Khan, both movies left behind by some loser in Number Seventeen gambling basement.

He’d learned that the Roman Empire collapsed because it became too large to manage, and corruption from within ate at it like a cancer. This is what he feared would happen to the Ghosts. Already his lieutenants in the Boston and Philadelphia Chinatowns were complaining that new bar clubs and card parlors had opened up, but away from the main streets. These new operators were members of village and fraternal organizations that were defiant when challenged. To help these upstarts, other groups like the Ma Ching-Malaysian gangsters- had arrived from the West Coast.

The New York Ghosts had gotten fat and comfortable, the complaint went, and they were reluctant to travel the interstate to muscle up their ranks. Lucky also knew that trouble was brewing in Chicago, with rumors that a splinter group of Ghosts was threatening to break away. More locally, the threat was Fukienese, challenging all comers to the long stretch of East Broadway and the side streets that ran like tentacles from it. Prostitution rackets from the snakehead sex slaves complemented gambling spots and the white powder of the China-based groups.

The more defiance there was at the fringes, the more face Lucky would lose and then more ambitious factions would question his leadership.

The Mongols were a different history. They conquered all, but were eventually swallowed up, becoming one with the peoples they’d overwhelmed. Like the Mongols, the big threat to Lucky lay to the East: China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Would the old-line tongs, and the Hong Kong triads fall in step and sacrifice the Legion for more powerful paramilitary alliances from overseas?

Lucky sucked off the last of the joint, and flicked the burnt roach off the roof. He didn’t like the thoughts of being sacrificed or swallowed up. Trust no one was the one motto he believed in. But like the Romans and the Mongols, wasn’t it all jing deng, destiny? If so, was there a way out for him? Take his fat accounts and run? Change his identity? Disappear?

He laughed at his own momentary fear.

No need to panic, he thought. There was plenty of time yet . A pair of Chinese tour buses swung through Chatham Square below, bound for Atlantic City.

Lucky imagined cases of pills in the belly-holds of the coach buses stealing down I-95, a million tabs of Ecstasy rolling south from Montreal, party pills bound for clubs and dance joints all along the eastern seaboard. Tons of tax-free cigarettes from the Indian reservations. Let the Fuks ride shotgun on the deliveries. Fuckin’ A, he thought, the Ghosts could skip the muleing altogether, and just pick up the pills at the scheduled stops. They could spend more time on distribution. The volume would increase and the Legion would lessen its exposure and risk . If the system worked well, Lucky could see alcohol, fireworks, AK-47s, and China White, all flowing down the pipeline.

Ka-ching ka-ching, already counting the money.

Lucky had heard other stories from the streets. Rumor had it, the Hung Huen-Red Circle Triad-had some unsatisfactory dealings with the Hip Chings.

Lucky considered his new grudging respect for the Hung Huen. Green Circle, yellow circle, fuckin’ pink circle, it was all the same to him; Chinese secret societies. He saw it all as Fu Manchu bullshit that the whitey gwailos played, impressed by that crap with the candles and incense and chicken blood with the zombie chanting. In reality though, Lucky knew the triads were huge, sophisticated Chinese gangs that were major criminal players in Europe, and in Central and South America. More recently, they’d made inroads into North America by way of Canada.

Lucky knew he needed to be careful the Ghosts wouldn’t be swallowed or sacrificed, yet he felt it was too early to set up a sit-down deal with the triads. See how the bus routes worked out first, Lucky figured. Besides, a partnership of the On Yee and the Bak Bamboo triad controlled the buses that carried junkets to casinos in Atlantic City and to Foxwoods in Connecticut. The Bak Bamboo was considering expansion of their routes to include Chinatowns within the tri-state area. He wanted to see what arrangements surfaced before he made his move.

See what happens, Lucky smirked, slowly remembering the value of patience in the face of change. He saw the red flag in the distance, and turned away from the cold wind that whipped in from East Broadway.

Sai Go awoke on his sofa bed, still fully clothed except for his shoes, groggy and unsure how he’d gotten there. He had no idea what time it was, but in the somber light that crept in along the edges of the window blinds, he could make out the closet wall and the mirror above his dresser. Also, the two boxes of summer clothes he’d taken out in case he decided to go somewhere sunny and warm. It was early afternoon, but with a twilight sky outside his window. When he rolled out of the bed, he felt a twinge of pain in his shoulder and was reminded that he needed a haircut, which included a massage.