Noble Truths

“Fuhgeddaboudit,” Captain Marino said. “There’s already a cap on overtime. Unless you have something solid, like extradition, or taking custody and bringing him back, the department’s not paying for a fishing trip to the West Coast.”

No way. Not on the department’s dime.

Jack left the captain’s office and exited the Chinatown station house. He turned west on Bayard, following the scent of death and the distant sounds of grief in his head. He walked inside Columbus Park until he came to the rundown asphalt ball fields, the hard-scrabble playground of his Chinatown youth. Across the way, he could see the black cars jockeying for position on the street of funeral parlors.

The other merchants of death were known to be charitable toward the more tragic losses of life. The Chin brothers of Kingdom Caskets would discount the no-frills metal veneer boxes, and Peaceful Florist would charge wholesale for the floral wreaths. The headstone cutter might donate the engraving of the carved Chinese characters. The Family Associations would contribute toward the rest of the funeral expenses. A small group of black-clad mourners burned paper items in a tin bucket, offering up small colorful gifts for the afterlife: a lady’s slippers, a man’s tie.

Jack smelled the odor of jasmine, incense drifting in the winter air as the black Town Cars and Continentals lined up behind the DeVille flower wagon filled with wreaths of carnations and mums.

The Wah Fook Parlor had six death notices posted on their doors. May Lon Fong’s funeral was the next one. Outside the Wah Fook, eight Chinese musicians had assembled, all wearing full-length min-nop coats of brown silk with black fedoras, watching the mourners from behind dark sunglasses as they tuned their instruments: four Chinese suona horns, two mournful erhu, string violins, a bamboo folk drum, and a small harp.

Jack hadn’t seen such a large funeral band before. They tuned up to a big symphonic sound as the procession began. Normally, Jack would have attended the wakes, paid his respects, but this murder-suicide was doubly tragic, and he decided to get his closure from a distance.

Farther down the street, Harry Gong’s funeral continued behind the closed doors of the Wing Ching Parlor. The families had decided on separate funerals, unable to reconcile the memories of killer and victim. Their hands rigidly clasped together at the end of life, they were now bound for different cemeteries.

The Chinese band began playing their dirge as the pallbearers brought May Lon’s casket out, stepping in cadence toward the black Cadillac DeVille with her black-and-white photograph braced atop. A small crowd murmured their sadness in the frozen morning air as her family and relatives followed the casket. Suddenly, a harrowing cry burst from the group as May Lon’s mother ran past the pallbearers loading the DeVille and threw herself across the coffin. “Aayaaa!!” she screamed, the veins in her neck standing out as she beat her chest and tore at her hair. Other relatives rushed in, lifting her away from the coffin. She fell to the pavement, kicking, pounding the asphalt with her heels, on the edge of madness in her despair.

May Lon’s father stood speechless, ready to collapse.

They carried the mother into the lead Lincoln Town Car as the other funeral drivers pulled up along the curb, loading up the family and gently moving the procession along. The band played louder as the dark DeVille led the way toward Canal Street. The six-car procession then turned left toward the Holland Tunnel, bound for the Chinese cemetery at Sacred Oaks in New Jersey.

Jack took a few deep shaolin breaths through his nose, allowing the sadness to ease. Farther down the block, the doors of the Wing Ching swung open. With no band, no mournful dirge, the pallbearers shouldered Harry Gong’s casket as three Lincolns and a black minivan pulled up along the street.

The father wore a grim frown, carrying a smoking baton of mustard-colored incense. He narrowed his eyes as he followed the body of his only son, as if searching in a dark distant realm. Everyone loaded in quickly, quietly, eager to bring the deceased to the serenity of his final resting place. The large stick of incense poked out of the window of the first car as the Town Car led the way.

The procession turned east on Bayard, south on Mott, and paused near the Wong Sing Restaurant on Pell, where the day shift bowed their heads, then proceeded to the Bowery, where it held up Lower East Side traffic, pausing for eight seconds at the Nom San Bok Hoy Benevolent Association, before rolling onward.

The black caravan made its way through the icy daylight and took the Williamsburg Bridge on the way to the Chinese section of Heaven’s Pavilion Cemetery.

The funerals had cast a pall over Jack’s mood and he exited the park to get away from the street of mourning, unsure whether any closure had come for him.

Golden Star

Feeling hungry and thirsty, Jack sat in the last booth in Grampa’s, watching the television above the bar while waiting for his order of onion-smothered steak. He took a long pull from his bottle of Heineken and considered jetting out to Seattle for a long weekend, subtracting a few NYPD vacation days. He’d hang out with Alex, there to receive her ORCA award. He could touch base with Seattle PD and check the layout of Seattle’s Chinatown and the International District area.

The television displayed a press conference featuring the new Italian-American mayor, who was pitching the idea of banning fireworks in Chinatown, especially Chinese New Year celebrations. The mayor was citing fire safety concerns. It hadn’t been a concern for a hundred and twenty-five years, thought Jack, but suddenly, it was a problem. All the Chinese knew that it was the mayor covering his ass after resolving to go after the mob at the Fulton Fish Market, and the Mafia’s defiant display of July Fourth fireworks in Brooklyn and Staten Island’s Italian enclaves.

With contempt, Jack took another swallow of beer. No firewoiks for the paisans, no Chinese New Year celebration for the Chinks. Non-Chinese citizens didn’t realize the banning of fireworks in Chinatown would allow evil spirits to creep back in, into the Lower East Side and all of New York City as well.

Jack wondered if fireworks would become just a loud smoky memory, as they had in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major Chinatowns in America.

He could smell the onions from the kitchen, the aroma pulling at his nose, spiking his appetite. The bar was almost empty except for a couple of suit-and-tie business types in the far booth near the entrance. They reminded Jack of the CADS, Alex’s legal friends, the Chinese-American Defense Squad.

Jack wondered if ADA Bang Sing was a member of their little club, if he had a connection to Alex that was other than professional. CADS? He wondered why it mattered. Was he jealous? Or was it just leftover romantic uneasiness from his party dream, the one that had featured Alex, on the night he’d gotten pulled into the murder-suicide?

CADS? They were an activist group, self-starters and true believers, the kind Alex liked to run with, out to wreak havoc on a cumbersome, misguided justice system. One of the judges who was known to lean toward the Radical Left had railed about discriminatory hiring practices and police brutality toward minorities. Jack had heard that two of the lawyers were trust-fund brats, but legal warriors nonetheless. And why did any of it matter to him?

He wondered if Alex’s impending divorce was reinforcing her involvement with CADS, as she seemed to bloom when fighting controversial cases.

He remembered Alex at the pistol range. Combat stance. Firing in short bursts. She really was an Annie Oakley, but was she relishing the feel of actually shooting someone, symbolically? In the wake of the cop killing of the Chinese honor student, were her emotions feeding her dead-eye accuracy?