AJA

He walked briskly toward Chrystie Slip, where the street turned left and ran into NoHo. He exhaled puffs of steam as he went, saw that the cold prevented all but the hardy and unfortunate from walking the streets. Once past the junkie parks, he came to a storefront that was once a bodega, but now flew a big yellow banner that read ASIAN AMERICAN JUSTICE ADVOCACY.

The AJA, pronounced Asia, was a grassroots activist organization staffed by lawyers giving back to the community in pro bono time.

Inside the open storefront was a jumble of desks and office machines. There was no receptionist at reception out front, so he went directly toward Alex’s little office in the corner.

He saw her through the small pane of glass in the wooden door. Alexandra Lee-Chow, late twenties but could still pass for an undergrad, going through the beginning of a divorce, at the start of what was looking like a bad day.

She was in a foul mood as he walked in. He hesitated. She waved him on, putting up a palm to silence him.

Jack put the plastic containers of bok tong go on the part of her desk that wasn’t cluttered with files and legal documents. He said quickly and quietly, “Just wanted to say thanks for Hawaii. And they told me you were out all morning.”

Alex turned away, stating into the phone, “That’s unacceptable. Shen Ping bled out waiting for the ambulance.” She sat down, flashed Jack a disgusted look, and quietly hung up the phone.

“The Shen Ping killing.” She rubbed her eyes. “You know, it’s all over the news, with the protests and everything. Anyway, the family wants to sue the city, EMS, the criminal justice system.” She paused. “And the NYPD, and anyone else connected to the killing.”

Listening to her, Jack had already anticipated the complaint.

“EMS took more than twenty-five minutes to respond to the location,” she began. “Out past Allen Street. The paramedics claim that commercial traffic, gridlock, boxed them in.”

Jack listened patiently.

“Now, understand, local merchants have been complaining for months that law enforcement—cops, court officers, and other city personnel—abuse their parking permits by using Chinatown streets as their personal, long-term parking lot. DOT turns a blind eye to police parking but issues tickets to Chinese truckers who can’t get to the curb and are forced to unload in the middle of the street.”

Jack shook his head in sympathy.

She paused, only to say, “I’m sorry to blow this out on you, Jack.”

“It’s a rough day,” he said. “I had a couple bad ones myself—”

“So my parents tossed you a luau ?” Alex interjected, jerking the conversation another way.

Alex had hooked him up, he recalled, with the Hawaiian vacation package, when he’d needed the break badly, after his troubles in the Fifth. He’d been wounded, but still brought back a perp from San Francisco to cap the murder of Chinatown tong godfather Uncle Four. There had been a promotion at the end of it all.

“Yeah.” Jack smiled, remembering. “Roast pig, poi, mahi-mahi, the works.”

She nodded, smiled, then the hardness came back into her face.

“The kid who was the shooter,” she said sourly, “had three outstanding warrants, and should have never been released from juvie. He had a history of violence and somebody screwed up.”

The phone jangled again.

Jack could see it was important and started to leave.

I’ll call you, he mimed with his index and pinky fingers, pausing at the door.

In turn, Alex pointed at the plastic containers. “Thanks for the bok tong go,” she said quietly, smiling a sad smile as Jack backed away.

Day for Night

The sixteen-story mirrored glass office building at Two Mott Street was the tallest building in the area, anchored at street level by a Citibank branch and a tourist-trade gift shop. The On Yee Merchants Consortium was rumored to be one of the landlords, and they occupied the entire third floor, as well as the penthouse level. The tong made their arrangements in the penthouse, Lucky remembered, as he strode through the lobby.

It was the Ecstasy that was powering him through the nights, but now in the daylight, it kept him from the sleep he needed.

Lucky rode the closet-sized freight elevator to the roof landing and went to the far end. He took a deep gulp of the cold morning air, exhaled, and torched up a sensimilla joint, sucking deeply so that the tip burned a bright orange. The smoke settled him, allowed him to slow down, to see the bigger picture of the forces circling around him. When he looked out over the jumbled patchwork of rooftops, the expanse of Chinatown reached for the horizon. To the east, across the square, he saw the growing enclave of Fukienese Chinese immigrants, their Fuk Chow Native Association building flying the red flag of the People’s Republic high above its tiled pagoda balcony.

Lucky remembered a childhood time when mainland supporters, the commies, would never dare fly the crimson flag for fear of being attacked and having their businesses vandalized or torched. Men wearing masks would come around, guns in their waistbands, to administer a beat down or a stabbing.

Times had changed.

While the old men of the tongs dithered with their deals, the young men who contested the streets had considerations of their own: controling the dirty money flowing through their rackets.

Lucky sucked heartily on the jay, scanning the view of old Chinatown, the core streets that the long ago Chinese bachelors first called home, eking out small lives under the heels of the whites, who didn’t like them and didn’t want them here. Still, the community grew. Now, the Fukienese were driving the boundaries north and east, their numbers swelling into the tenements that had housed the WASPs, the Irish, Italians, and Jews, and the Toishanese and Cantonese before them.

The windy rooftop refreshed him, and the marijuana brought him back down. His thoughts were still scattered from the Ecstasy, but he was beginning to see a pattern forming. As street boss of the Ghost Legion, Lucky was no student of history, but he was an admirer of the Romans, and before them, of the Mongolian hordes. He’d seen the videotapes Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, with Chinese subtitles, and The Great Khan, both movies left behind by some loser in Number Seventeen gambling basement.

He’d learned that the Roman Empire collapsed because it became too large to manage, and corruption from within ate at it like a cancer. This is what he feared would happen to the Ghosts. Already his lieutenants in the Boston and Philadelphia Chinatowns were complaining that new bar clubs and card parlors had opened up, but away from the main streets. These new operators were members of village and fraternal organizations that were defiant when challenged. To help these upstarts, other groups like the Ma Ching—Malaysian gangsters— had arrived from the West Coast.

The New York Ghosts had gotten fat and comfortable, the complaint went, and they were reluctant to travel the interstate to muscle up their ranks. Lucky also knew that trouble was brewing in Chicago, with rumors that a splinter group of Ghosts was threatening to break away. More locally, the threat was Fukienese, challenging all comers to the long stretch of East Broadway and the side streets that ran like tentacles from it. Prostitution rackets from the snakehead sex slaves complemented gambling spots and the white powder of the China-based groups.

The more defiance there was at the fringes, the more face Lucky would lose and then more ambitious factions would question his leadership.

The Mongols were a different history. They conquered all, but were eventually swallowed up, becoming one with the peoples they’d overwhelmed. Like the Mongols, the big threat to Lucky lay to the East: China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Would the old-line tongs, and the Hong Kong triads fall in step and sacrifice the Legion for more powerful paramilitary alliances from overseas?