Now the women were gone, and so was his father. And Francis had his own car, the obnoxious red one.

Now it was just him and Mon Gor. Bossy and driver.

MON GOR HEADED back to the kitchen entrance for another box. Provisions for the condo Bossy’d agreed to try out, on the edge of Sunset Park. A two-week free trial run, fully furnished. The two weeks allowed him to scout the rest of waterfront Brooklyn, near the East River bridges. Extra time to consider other condominium developments, funded by Triad money behind barely legit front corporations.

He was relieved not to go back to Edgewater. And happy to be so close to Manhattan.

Mon Gor waited by the doorway for one of the da jop from the kitchen. His friends and associates had twisted his name Mak Mon Gaw into Mon Gor, a nickname, which in Cantonese sounded like “night brother.”

Because he usually worked at night, driving the denizens of the dark hours.

Nobody ever saw him in daylight, except Bossy and occasionally the family. It was like he was invisible in daylight, this barroom avenger, who was rumored to be a Triad man himself. He’d supposedly intervened in three near fights in the Hip Ching gambling basements, resulting beneficially to the Pell Street tong.

But in daylight he was invisible.

MON GOR TOOK a box from the puzzled kitchen worker and came back to the car trunk. A big box of roast duck and for yook and see yow gay. Fast food snacks would suffice until he had a chance to check out the takeout counters in Sunset Park Chinatown. Bossy straightened as Mon Gor slammed the trunk shut.

“Gau dim,” Mon Gor said in his slang Cantonese, “all done.” It was the same answer he’d given the Triad elders when asked if he’d washed the first matter, of the traitorous deliveryman. All done.

Snow flurries began falling from the slate Bronx sky.

“Gau dim,” Mon Gor repeated almost to himself as he slid behind the wheel and glanced at the rearview mirror.

“Good,” Bossy said. “Now drop me off in Brooklyn and you’re done.”

“Mo mun tay, Bossee,” Mon Gor answered. “No problem.” He fired up the engine and pulled the car away from the curb, turning for the FDR drive south.

Sunset Park and then home to Pell Street.

Mo mun tay at all.

Mak the Knife

THE SNOWFLAKES GOT thick and heavy, and Jack left a trail of dark footprints in the thin layer of white that covered the way back to Pell Street.

Number 8 Pell, Mak Mon Gaw’s address, was an old four-story, redbrick building that dominated the north corner of Pell and Bowery. The storefronts along Pell included a Chinatown gift shop, a China travel agency, and a Buddhist temple, but on the Bowery side the building was anchored by Bamboo Garden restaurant, a Chinese grocery store, and a small bakery.

In big block letters, the word ORIENTAL was still visible, high up on the faded green façade that overlooked the boulevard.

Jack noticed there were two sets of fire escapes on the Pell Street side, but just one set above the Bowery side, which led him to believe the main exit for the building’s tenants was number 8.

He went through the unlocked street door, a bad habit from an earlier time when Chinatown people didn’t bother to lock their front doors, when crime was almost nonexistent.

Times had changed.

Jack looked at the mailboxes. Unlike some of the older Chinatown tenements where the tenants all had their own scattering of mismatched metal boxes screwed into the wall, number 8 Pell had an old but standard split panel of metal mailboxes, recessed into the wall. The mail carrier keyed open the top panel, folded it down, and inserted the mail. Then he relocked it.

Each individual mailbox was vented so the tenants could see if they’d had mail delivered. There were three vertical rows of six mailboxes each, meaning there were eighteen apartments in the building.

These mailboxes meant that the building had been renovated over the decades and now had more new families than the old flow of transient single men. A few of the tenants’ names had been neatly typed and inserted into the little slot at the top of each mailbox. Newer tenants, figured Jack. Some of the tags had been whited-out, with the new tenant’s name in black marker staking a claim over it. A newcomer tagging over another immigrant’s story.

Most of the mailbox name tags were old, meaning the tenants had lived here a long time, over generations of the same family, the apartment passed down. The name Jack was looking for, Mak Mon Gaw, was one of the old ones. It was just a crude lettering, MAK/GAW, that barely fit into the name slot.

MAK/GAW handwritten on yellowed paper, not touched in twenty years.

There wasn’t any mail in his box.

Jack looked down at the baseboards, the floor, any tiles that might seem loose. He scanned the areas around both door frames, ran his fingers along the edges. He didn’t find the spare key that top-floor tenants sometimes secreted downstairs just in case they got locked out. Men, whipped at having to call lo por, and having their wifeys come down four flights to chide them before letting them back into the building.

It didn’t matter to Jack.

Chinatown was smaller then, he remembered, and he and his teenage pals had explored all the Chinatown rooftops, traveling across the heights the way immigrants did in the previous century. Across the rooftops. The rooftops ran evenly on both sides of the street until halfway down the block, near Doyer, where they butted up against taller buildings on the Bloody Angle. Still, someone could run across the rooftops on Pell and descend, emerging on Bayard or Bowery or Doyers or Mott. It was how the Hip Chings had defended their turf so well through the decades.

But only the people who had to went up and down.

Jack knew the rooftops here and how the apartments were situated. Mostly straight railroad flats and a mix of L-shaped, one-bedroom setups. People who really had money combined two apartments into one and occupied the entire floor.

Rent control ruled, but fong day, or key money, a codicil, gave landlords a cash trump card.

Along the way, Chinatown learned to play by its own insular set of rules.

THE STREET WAS a fresh layer of white. See gay drivers would keep their cars indoors during off-hours, saving themselves the trouble of scraping off eight inches of snow and ice before the next job, especially if they were working a wedding or driving out to a freezing Chinese burial at one of the cemeteries in Brooklyn or Queens.

There were only two indoor commercial parking garages in Chinatown. One was Municipal Parking, which was five blocks away on Pearl Street. A lot of local folks parked there. The other was more expensive, the Rickshaw Garage, which was just around the corner, a block and a half from Pell.

Jack decided to try Rickshaw first. Keep the car close to home. Always good to go, ready to roll.

AT RICKSHAW, JACK badged the garage manager, telling him a lie about investigating a stolen-car ring and requesting a list of long-term customers. He didn’t want his real inquiries leaking out in case an attendant had a cozy relationship with a driver.

The manager called up the annual accounts listing on the computer screen and showed Jack where to scroll the file. Jack quickly found the plate numbers he was hoping to find, numbers belonging to Mak Mon Gaw’s Lincoln Town Car.

“Can you check the key log and tell me which of these vehicles is presently in the garage?” Jack asked.

“Most of our long-term customers use their cars to get to work,” the manager offered. “Early birds, out at seven in the morning, back by seven at night.” He took a quick key inventory, checked off the garaged cars for Jack.