Jack O'Connell - Wireless

Hannah sees Dr. Cheng as a classic example of the neighborhood mayor, a man never officially elected to a position of authority, but who controls the flow of money down his block, who can secure jobs and housing, who can keep the peace and take care of the helpless.

On his tax forms, Dr. Cheng is listed as a merchant, and it’s true that for the past half-century he’s owned and overseen the operation of Dr. Cheng’s Herbarium, a tiny hole in the wall on the corner of Verlin Ave, that continues to offer exotic balms and oils and medicinal teas to the consumers of Little Asia. He’s always lived in the small apartment above the business, alone except for a long line of valets that are all rumored to come from the same family.

Dr. Cheng has no immediate family of his own. He never married and has no children that anyone knows of. But he’s filled his upper management positions with various distant cousins and loosely adopted kin. Today the doctor is diversified into everything from frozen yogurt franchises to a controlling interest in WOXS, New England’s only all-Asian radio station. But Hannah knows that it’s an empire forged long ago in the bowels of a dozen or more early Bangkok Park tenements. And that the doctor’s only overhead costs were thin mattresses, bamboo pipes, and the importation costs on the best opium run out of Shanghai.

Hannah gets a kick out of their relationship, a bond between a white female narcotics cop and the granddaddy of the biggest ring of classic opium dens in the Northeast. She finds a similarity to their brain patterns. She finds they share parallel notions of will and power. She thinks that possibly they both war against radical egos that could obscure their judgment and rationality.

Dr. Cheng has lived a life pretty much unconnected to the surface brand of hypocritical ethics and morality they peddle in the City Council chambers. He’s so much wiser than the hack pols who’ve seemingly charted the course of this city. He’s allowed them to think they’ve controlled his destiny. Three generations of Quinsigamond ruling class have pocketed the doctor’s kickbacks and gone to sleep assured of their stability and superiority, all the while oblivious to another hidden but enormous picture, a wildly complex system of covert economics that slowly carved a secret face on the surface of the city, and more important, that excavated raw earth until there came to exist an underground more intricate and enigmatic than anything on the outer skin of the municipality.

Every ethnic group in Quinsigamond has its own neighborhood mayor. Some are cut-and-dried wise guys from a long line of mob families. Others appear to run a cleaner show than the City Council and control their streets like a closely held corporation. But every one of them understands the basic, primal facts that supply and demand is God’s own rule and there’s more darkness in the human heart than light.

The Italians have the legendary Gennaro Pecci. The blacks have the Reverend Hartley James, longtime king of the north-side projects. The Jews have always had the Singer brothers, first Shel and now Meyer. The Irish still have “the Mortician,” Willy “Bud” Loftus. The Latinos, until recently, had the mysterious Mr. Cortez. The new arrivals — the Haitians, the Jamaicans, the small pocket of Turks over on Smyrna — all have candidates jockeying for position, sorting each other out with cut throats and car bombs. But no one has ruled longer, with more foresight or discretion or financial brilliance, than the ancient Dr. Cheng.

Hannah gets up and follows the old man to the railing. There’s still a heavy smell in the air — charred wood and flesh. She puts a hand on the doctor’s shoulder and says, “Things have been a little crazy for a couple of years. It’ll get back to normal soon.”

Dr. Cheng seems to be having trouble breathing tonight. It bothers Hannah that he’s starting to look his age. Just a year ago, when she first set out to know him, when she started buying ginseng twice a week down at the Herbarium, he still seemed like he was in his prime.

Without looking at her, he says quietly, “In the past, Hannah, I always found a way to enforce a balance, to make the neighborhood work for all. You can’t imagine what had to be overcome. There was a mentality to reshape.”

He turns and leans his backside against the railing, which makes Hannah nervous.

“I had to will a radical notion into every individual head. That we were now a new breed, that we were collective Asians rather than separate, nationalist tribes. History had to be obliterated in the name of survival, and then in the name of progress. I hated doing this, but there was no other way. And I was never completely successful — I never thought I would be — but I managed, always, to give the appearance of unity. The image. And often, this was enough.”

“I’ve always thought what you managed was stunning,” Hannah says.

Dr. Cheng reaches out, squeezes her hand again. “You have no shame, flattering an old man with lies.” He pauses and looks down to his feet. “Six months ago, Chak, the Cambodian, eliminates Mo, the Laotian. War among the tribes. We’re spilling our own blood now. The Singer brothers once told me an old Yiddish saying. It translates roughly, but the point survives: One stupid person can throw a stone so deep into the river that ten wise men will never find it .”

Hannah lets a moment pass and then says, “Anything you can tell me about the priest, Doc?”

He acts as if he hasn’t heard her.

“What I’ve accomplished,” he says, “is unraveling week by week. No one knows better than you what’s happening to Bangkok. My control is eroding. Agreements are not being honored. Treaties are not being acknowledged. Tribes are battling over nickel-and-dime nonsense. Territories challenged for the sake of an additional street, another half-block of fire-bombed tenements …”

“Doctor,” Hannah tries.

“Gennaro Pecci wouldn’t take my call last week, Hannah. What am I to think? There are rumors about the Loftus family.”

Hannah stays quiet, stares down at the floor.

“And among my own … They’re all thinking of themselves as villagers again. The Cambodians have let it be known they have no confidence in the doctor. The gangs are loose cannons ready to plow the old way into the ground.”

He struggles up from the railing and half turns, extends his thin arms outward as if to present himself to Hannah.

“What can this old man do for you?”

Hannah stands, and before she can control herself, she steps into him, gives him a full, long hug, feels, even through the Burberry, how frail he’s gotten.

Then she releases him and before either can signify embarrassment, she head-motions to the floor beneath the choir loft and says, “Did the gangs do that, Doctor? Did the Hyenas set fire to the priest?”

He raises his thin eyebrows and says, “Do you think so?”

Hannah bites on her lip. “Todorov has been grabbing a lot of press by nosing into the gangs. He’s spent time in Bangkok lately. You just said how loose these kids are. Todorov says the wrong word to a couple of seventeen-year-old Hyenas juiced on PCP and meth. He ends up in the middle of a bilingual argument. Next thing you know, the poor bastard is toast.”

Dr. Cheng takes air in through his nose and says, “Keep going.”

Hannah stares at him, then nods. “Okay. We’ve got a precedent for the benzine. We know that three months back, the Hyenas blew a bodega in a raid on the Popes. Our lab guys were drooling telling us it was benzine.”

“Yes.”

“But no matter how juiced they are, the Hyenas have to answer to your boy Uncle Chak—”

Dr. Cheng shakes his head. “He’s not my boy, Hannah. Chak doesn’t even come to the monthly summits anymore. He’s preaching a sermon of Cambodian purity.”