Ed McBain - Another Part of the City

“Benny Wong,” Reardon said.

The man behind the counter said something in Chinese to the departing waitress. The waitress nodded. He turned to Reardon again, and in clipped English, said, “Who you, please?”

“Detective Reardon.”

“Mr. Wong know you?” the counterman asked.

“He knows me.”

The counterman picked up a telephone and dialed a single number. Into the phone, he said something in Chinese. He listened, and then spoke again. Reardon heard his name in an otherwise unintelligible rush of Chinese words. “Okay,” the counterman said in English, and then put the receiver back on its cradle. “Someone be here,” he said. “You wait.”

Reardon nodded, reached into his pocket for a package of cigarettes, and was about to light one when the counterman said, “No smoke, please. Mr. Wong no smoke.”

Reardon dropped the unlighted cigarette into a bowl on the countertop. A door opened at the far end of the room, to the right of the kitchen. A small Chinese man wearing dark trousers and a black tunic came to where Reardon was standing near the door.

“Mr. Reardon?” he said in virtually unaccented English. “I’m Gilbert Chan. This way, please.”

Reardon followed him to the rear of the restaurant. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and as he sniffed the savory aromas from the kitchen, closer now, he realized all at once just how hungry he was. Chan opened the same door through which he’d entered the restaurant, and allowed Reardon to precede him into a small unfurnished anteroom. Another door was at the far end of this room. He opened it, and with a slight bow, said. “Please.”

The room beyond would have come as a mild surprise to anyone who hadn’t been in it before. It was furnished in what Reardon would have called British Barrister — book-lined walls, a leather-topped desk, two leather armchairs, one behind the desk, one in front of it. Benny Wong sat in the chair behind the desk. With one fluid motion of his right hand, he offered the other chair to Reardon and dismissed Chan. Wong was, Reardon guessed, a man in his late sixties, looking much younger, though — the way affluent Chinese tended to — and dressed in a dark blue business suit, gold cuff links showing at his wrists. Black mustache over his lip. Slightly balding. No smile on his face. Deadly as a cobra.

He waited until Chan closed the door behind him.

“Don’t tell me,” he said to Reardon, “let me guess.” Voice slightly singsong, but no pidgin English here, not for a man who’d been in America since 1926. “The restaurant on Mulberry, right? Last night, right?”

“You’ve got it,” Reardon said.

“So naturally, you think back to 1982.”

“Naturally.”

“The Golden Star,” Wong said. “Fifty-one East Broadway. Two, three o’clock in the morning. They march in with ski masks, stockings, paper bags over their heads, kill three people and wound eight others, including a very dear friend of mine,” Wong said, and clucked his tongue. “This is not the same thing, Reardon.”

“It’s not, huh?”

“Positively not. That was gang shit back then. There were Free Masons and White Tigers in the bar. It was a fight over turf, that’s all.”

“How about now? Were any of the gangs putting the muscle on Ralph D’Annunzio?”

“How would I know?” Wong said.

“I think you would know.” Reardon said.

There were two principal tongs in Chinatown. Originally offshoots of the secret societies in Guangdong Province, they now called themselves “businessmen’s associations,” but Reardon knew that between them the An Liang Shang Tsung Hui and the Hip Sing T’ang controlled all of the area’s gambling parlors. The youth gangs, like sucker fish hanging on the underbellies of sharks, protected the parlors from hoods who might one fine night decide to hold them up. In addition, the gangs extorted protection money from the honest merchants in Chinatown — the Ghost Shadows working Mott Street, the Flying Dragons working Pell — for a reputed $5,000–510,000 weekly take. If one of the gangs had decided to spill over onto Mulberry Street...

“You‘re thinking wrong,” Wong said. “Believe me, you’re thinking wrong. This was not Chinese.”

“Ask around, will you?” Reardon said.

“Do I owe you something?” Wong asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

“No, just do me the favor, Benny.”

“I’ll ask,” Wong said, “but believe me, I already know the answer. These were not Chinese.”

Robert Sargent Kidd did not awaken until noon that Tuesday. The waiter who brought him his breakfast at the Park Lane Hotel advised him that the temperature outside was twenty-two degrees, and then told him to have a nice day. A copy of the New York Times was on the breakfast tray. The two-column story in the lower right-hand corner of the front page immediately caught his eye. The headline read:

Sipping at his coffee. Sarge read the story.

A hundred and one paintings in all had gone under the hammer at Sotheby’s last night, bringing prices ranging from $55,000 for an admittedly minor Monet to $4,600,000 for a truly superb Modigliani nude. A collection that had taken him years to assemble — Matisse, Van Gogh, Renoir. Seurat, Cezanne, Degas, Braque. Corot — gone in what now seemed an instant, though last night in that crowded room it had taken a painful eternity.

Sarge, you’ve got to get rid of those pictures.

His father talking.

I need the money they’ll bring.

Andrew Kidd. They called him “The Captain.” And, of course, the Captain had given his Sargent — or more appropriately his sergeant — an order. No simple request, this, oh no. an order. And when the Captain barked an order, you snapped to. by Christ, or there’d be hell to pay.

All of them gone now.

For thirty-six million and some change.

Gone.

For money.

To earn yet more money if the Captain’s scheme worked. It would work, of course. His schemes always worked. And the Kidds would be richer. Much richer. All of them but Sarge, who would forever consider himself poverty-stricken now that his precious paintings were no longer in his possession.

He sipped at his coffee.

He looked out the window to the naked branches of the trees in Central Park.

Someday, he thought, I’d like to...

He did not know what he would like to do someday.

He knew only that his paintings were gone.

The D’Annunzio apartment was on Broome Street, in a redbrick building next door to the Arfi & Mazzola Pharmacy. Directly across the street was the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix, which advised on a sign to the left of the entrance door that masses were given in English and in Spanish. To the right of the church, the Chia Sheung Food Products Company had set up shop. To Reardon, the ethnic mix on this single short street was representative of what was happening all over the precinct

He took the steps up two at a time — a habit from when he was a teenager — walked down a narrow hallway on the third-floor landing, and knocked on the door to apartment 31. Mark D’Annunzio opened the door.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Reardon said. “Lieutenant Farmer told me you’d called...”

“Yes, come in,” D’Annunzio said.

The front door opened into a small kitchen. Sink, stove, and refrigerator opposite the door. Frost-rimed, curtained window above the sink. Round table with an oilcloth cover nestled in the angle of the corner wall. Dust motes rising in a shaft of wintry sunlight. The house seemed empty and still.

“What I called about,” D’Annunzio said, “sit down, would you like some coffee?”