Dan O'Shea - Penance

Lynch waved down the waiter.

“If we could get our check please? Thanks.”

The waiter smiled. “No check tonight, sir, compliments of Mr Wang.”

Lynch looked back over his shoulder. Paddy Fucking Wang. Must have been in the private room in the back. Lynch hadn’t seen him on the way in.

Johnson’s eyebrows went up. “You know Paddy Wang?”

“Everybody knows Paddy Wang,” said Lynch. “Thing is, he knows me. We better go say hi.”

Paddy Wang looked like an understuffed children’s toy. Chinese, though he claimed to be part Irish, barely five feet tall, shaved head, wispy white goatee, always dressed in green, sort of a Mao suit this time, but only if Mao had had his handmade from a couple grand worth of watermarked silk. What looked like brocaded scarlet slippers on feet about the right size for a Barbie. Two of his interchangeable minions with him, Chinese guys in black suits, white shirts, black ties.

“Paddy,” Lynch said, putting out his hand.

“Johnny,” said Wang, a broad smile. “Too long. Too long. You never come see me.”

“I know you’re a busy man, Paddy.”

“A man so rich in business as to be poor in friends is a poor man indeed,” said Wang. Wang looked expectantly at Johnson.

“Paddy, this is Liz Johnson. She’s a reporter with the Tribune .”

“Intimate dinners with the press, Johnny? You are full of surprises.”

“John and I are also friends, Mr Wang,” said Johnson, putting out her hand.

Wang took it, bowed, kissed it gently, then covered it with his other hand. “Then you have been twice blessed by the gods, my dear. First with this celestial beauty, and then with Mr Lynch’s friendship. Neither are gifts to be taken lightly.”

A smile from Johnson. “Mr Wang, I see your reputation for charm is well-deserved.”

“Christ, Paddy,” said Lynch. “A little thick isn’t it, even for you?”

Wang with his inscrutable smile.

“Johnny,” said Wang. “You will come to the ball this year.” The Connemara Ball, Paddy’s annual St Patrick’s Day shindig. Lynch got his invite every year, but he’d only gone twice, couldn’t even say why, except that the air there just never felt right in his lungs.

“I dunno, Paddy. You know I’m not really part of that crowd.”

Wang shook his head. “I’m afraid I must insist, Johnny. It is the year of the horse. Your sign, and your father’s as well. And please do bring Ms Johnson. She shall be a new star in our firmament.” A short bow from Wang, then his minions formed up at his sides.

“Jesus,” said Johnson as they set out in step through the restaurant and out the door. “Paddy Wang.”

“Long story,” said Lynch. And then he told her.

Anybody used to the Newtonian physics of democracy, even the rough and tumble kind, found out the normal rules didn’t apply in the Windy City. There was the usual interlocking web of favors and debts and racial algebra and ethnic loyalty and clout, but everything was relative and relatives. Chicago politics was a world unto itself. And Paddy Wang was the big ball of magma at the center of that world.

You didn’t see him. He didn’t loom over the landscape like the Hurleys — Senior, Junior, or the Third — the divine right of kings by way of the Chicago mayor’s office. But Paddy Wang made the Hurleys. He moved all the continents around.

Lynch’s first memory of Paddy Wang went back to his eleventh birthday, his first after his father was killed. Uncle Rusty coming to the house, loading the family into his car. Lynch’s birthday falling on Chinese New Year, Uncle Rusty taking them down to Chinatown for the parade, telling Lynch he had a surprise for him.

Not real cold for February, sunny day, lots of people on sidewalks. Rusty driving right down Wentworth, past the police barricades, pulling up to the parking lot next to the Emerald Pagoda, Wang’s restaurant that soared over Chinatown on the east side of the street at 23rd Place. The entrance to the lot was blocked by a line of young Chinese men in period costumes, green silk mandarin jackets and black pants. Rusty leaning out the window, waving to them, the line of men parting, letting the Impala through, a simultaneous slight bow.

Outside the restaurant’s front door was a line half a block long of people hoping to get in. Rusty marched Lynch’s family right to the front of it and in the door, another bow from the young Chinese woman there, the one with the fine black hair down to her ass and the green Suzy Wong dress.

The inside of the Emerald Pagoda completely redefined young Lynch’s sense of the possible. Reds, greens, yellows, seemingly no straight line in the place, everything curving away, always the sense of something fantastic just out of sight. Lanterns everywhere. Silk banners a hundred feet long and hand-painted with fantastic scenes hanging from the ceiling in the central atrium. A two-story waterfall tumbling into a stone pond full of large, colorful fish with billowing fins. What seemed like a thousand tables on a thousand levels, the place looking like a cross between an Escher drawing and something by Dali.

Lynch grabbed the tail of Rusty’s jacket as Rusty waded right into the room, Lynch feeling like he was following an explorer into an unknown world. He was afraid to let go, afraid that, if he lost sight of his uncle here, he would be lost forever.

And then Paddy Wang was striding out to meet them, two retainers in black suits a step back on either side.

Wang was wearing a green robe that went down to his feet. The front of the robe was decorated with an intricate dragon rendered in more colors than Lynch knew existed, rubies sewn to the robe as the dragon’s eyes and a line of emeralds as big as lima beans running down its spine. A palpable sense of awe, like the pressure wave and wake of a boat, surrounded Wang as he walked toward them. Wang walked right up to Lynch, not even looking at his uncle, stopped, and made a deep bow.

“Young Master Lynch, you grace us at last.” Wang’s face opened in a radiant smile, he took Lynch’s hand.

“Come, come.” Wang led him off, Lynch looking back over his shoulder, Rusty giving him a nod and a grin and a thumbs up, receding back into the riot of colors that was like camouflage, that gave you so much to see you couldn’t see anything at all.

Wang led Lynch through the main floor of the restaurant, then through a set of huge red lacquered doors. The hall in the back was not as dazzling but almost more opulent in its way. The walls were lined with elaborately carved wooden screens in front of rich silk panels, the parquet floor lined with a succession of deep oriental rugs. Finally, Wang turned Lynch into a small room where two young women, seeming duplicates of the woman at the door to the restaurant, waited. Wang said something to them in Chinese, and they turned to Lynch, smiled, and bowed. Wang squeezing him on the shoulder then, saying, “I will see you soon, young Lynch,” and disappearing into the hall.

One of the women opened a large armoire and removed a green silk robe Lynch’s size, adorned with the same dragon as Wang’s, though without the jewels. Together, the two women raised the robe over Lynch’s head and lowered it onto him. Lynch stuck his arm through the belled sleeves. The women took off his penny loafers and slid on a pair of black slippers. Then, each taking a hand, they led him back into the hallway and farther into the building.

Wang, the two Chinese men in the black suits, and at least a dozen Chinese men in the green and black outfits the men in the parking lot had worn waited by a door in the back.

“Excellent, excellent, young Lynch. Come.” Again Wang took Lynch’s hand, the entire retinue falling in behind them.

The doors opened before them, and Wang and Lynch stepped into a narrow alley behind the restaurant. In the alley was a parade float in the shape of the dragon on the two green robes. Two of the men in the green and black outfits rolled a wheeled set of stairs like those to an airplane up against the side of the dragon. Wang led Lynch up the stairs. At the top of the dragon was a hollowed out area with a sunken floor, and in the middle of the floor were two gold chairs with red cushions. Lynch thought they looked like thrones. Wang motioned to the chair on the right, and Lynch sat down. Wang sat to his left. The two women who had dressed Lynch in the robe climbed up the stairs and stood behind the chairs.