Laura Resnick - The Misfortune Cookie

We had so far endured more than a week of Danny’s daily visits to the set, and it looked like things would be this way for a while.

Being none too bright, Danny wasn’t quite able to process the information that I was an actress, not a reporter—as he had assumed at Benny’s wake. So now he vaguely seemed to think I was an investigative journalist who was performing in Ted’s film in my copious spare time. I didn’t try to clear up this misunderstanding, since it sometimes meant I could get rid of Danny by asking him for personal quotes about his life of crime for my “newspaper.”

This evening, alas, Ted and I had Danny all to ourselves. Earlier in the day, we had been filming on Hester Street with the regular crew and several cast members. But since tomorrow was the firecracker festival, the first day of the Chinese New Year, this was a busy time for everyone in the production except me. It was sort of like Christmas Eve was for gentiles, I supposed—and me, once again, spared the frantic bustle by virtue of being Jewish. (So at least there’s some advantage, once in a while, in being one of the Chosen People.) Ted had halted work shortly before dark and let everyone else go.

John and Bill went off for their final practice before tomorrow’s big day of dancing in the streets in their elaborate lion costume, surrounded by firecrackers and dense crowds. Others went off to do their final grocery shopping for the holiday, prepare a family feast, or finish cleaning and decorating their homes in time to welcome in the New Year.

And Ted and I walked over to his mother’s store, accompanied by Danny, to choose Alicia’s costume for the scene in which she would show up at a family event dressed in an inappropriately tiny cheongsam (so I was probably destined to wear this chilly dress for that scene, since it certainly suited the script), in a doomed attempt to prove to her Chinese-American boyfriend how “ethnic” she could be. Or something. By contrast, Mei would be dressed with simple elegance and good taste, behaving with modest dignity and grace while Alicia got progressively drunker, louder, and ruder.

Although it was a pretty silly scene, with Alicia being more socially tone-deaf than a rock (or, to give another example, than Danny Teng), I was starting to look forward to doing it. One of the fun things about acting is the chance to do things you’d never get to do in reality (such as fight to the death with a rapier, rule England, or win an international chess tournament) and to behave in ways that you’d never dream of behaving in your own life—and to do it without consequences, either. Alicia would humiliate herself and lose her boyfriend for behaving like a gauche, drunken idiot in that scene; but I’d have fun being outrageously rude and clueless, get paid for it, and maybe go out for a pleasant meal with my colleagues afterward.

Looking at my reflection again now, I asked Ted, “So this is the dress you like best?”

Ted walked around me, a frown of concentration on his face and his hand on his chin, studying me as if I were an abstract sculpture. While waiting for his verdict, I ignored the icky kissing noises that Danny was making. Finally Ted said, “Yeah. I think it looks good on Alicia, and it’ll look good on camera. Are you okay with it, Esther?”

“I guess so. But I’m a little worried about how high these side slits go.”

“Hmm.” Ted examined one of them. “We could have about an inch of it sewn together, if that would make you more comfortable.”

Ignoring Danny’s protests, I said, “That would work.”

To my relief, Danny’s cell phone rang, taking his attention off me. He answered the call while Ted said to me, “How does it feel apart from the side—”

“Holy fuck! ” Danny shouted, leaping to his feet.

We both flinched and looked at him.

“No fucking way!” Danny screamed.

I grabbed Ted’s arm and started slowly backing away from Danny, heading for a long aisle down which we could escape this area. I found Lily’s store as disorienting as I had last time, but I didn’t care if I got lost now—I just cared about getting away from Danny. He was obviously a dangerous man to be around when something made him angry—and it was clear that something had just enraged him.

Danny switched to Chinese and was talking rapidly now.

“My Cantonese isn’t that good,” Ted said, “but I think he’s saying, ‘Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t go anywhere.’”

“I don’t care what he’s saying,” I whispered. “Let’s get out of here before he takes it out on us, whatever ‘it’ is.”

“Now he’s saying he’ll be right there,” Ted whispered to me as I continued slowly tugging him toward that long aisle nearby. “He says he’s leaving right away.”

Oh, thank God, I thought.

“You two! Don’t move!”

We froze when Danny pointed at us. He had ended his call and was shoving his phone into his pocket, his movements angry and clumsy. His eyes were wild and his face was flushed. Something big had obviously happened.

I had no intention of asking what it was . I didn’t want to know. Given his mood, I just wanted him to leave.

“I gotta go,” Danny said roughly. “How the fuck do I get out of here? This place is like a puzzle!”

“Oh. Well, uh . . .” Ted scratched his head. “You go back down that aisle behind you, turn left, then keep walking until you come to—”

“Just fucking show me!” Danny shouted. “Now! Take me to the goddamn front door!”

“Okay,” said Ted. “Okay. I’ll show you. Calm down and I’ll—” He flinched when Danny started screaming at him in Chinese. I had a feeling the gist of it was, Don’t tell me to calm down, probably accompanied by some choice epithets.

“Okay. Sorry,” said Ted. “Esther, you stay here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I nodded and said nothing, not wanting to attract Danny’s attention by speaking. I held my breath until he and Ted disappeared from view, then let it out in a rush and sank into a chair, wondering what had happened to set Danny off like that.

After my nerves stopped vibrating, I considered changing back into my own clothes, but decided I’d wait for Ted to return. He seemed satisfied with this costume, but I was pretty tired of changing clothes by now; so in case he wanted to take one more look at this dress before settling on it, I decided to leave it on until I was sure we were done here. And since I was a little chilly, I slipped on my coat while I waited.

I checked the time and was surprised to discover how late it was. No wonder I was feeling hungry. I decided I’d pick up some food and go to Max’s place after I left here. Now that I had deposited some of my modest movie salary into my bank account, it seemed like it should be my turn to buy dinner. And I wanted to confer with Manhattan’s resident mage.

I was starting to think we’d been wrong about Evil’s voracious appetite on this occasion. If there had been any mystical murders in Chinatown since Benny Yee’s death more than two weeks ago, we hadn’t heard about them; and between the three of us, we’d been doing our best to follow events closely in this neighborhood. But no one connected to Uncle Six or Benny Yee had died, and there seemed to be no local gossip about mysterious mojo, death curses, or fresh corpses found clutching broken gourmet cookies.

Maybe we had overlooked the fact that killing Benny Yee was just business to someone like Uncle Six. If he had found a clever way to do it, a mystical means that wouldn’t be detected as murder, it didn’t necessarily mean that such a cool-headed man was going to go off the deep end and start sending misfortune cookies to other enemies, too. If Benny had been a high-profile problem for him, then maybe Uncle Six had just wanted a one-time low-profile solution, a method he didn’t intend to use twice.