The distinction didn’t impress him. He looked from the back door to the kitchen one. “Well, so, a change of plans. Take them.” He waved the Glock at Wong Pan, C. D. Zhang, and Bill. He grabbed my elbow, to escort me personally.

“What are you talk about, Deng dai lo?” Wong Pan sputtered. “I don’t going!”

“Oh, you do so going, old man.” Fishface changed his grip on me to a choke hold and pressed the gun to my temple. I heard chairs scrape and had to assume similar things were going on behind me. As he steered me to the kitchen door, my brain juggled three thoughts.

I hope the NYPD has better control of its adrenaline than I do.

Old man? Fishface, you punk, Wong Pan’s not even sixty.

And How does Wong Pan, fugitive from Shanghai, know a Chinatown gangbanger’s title and name?

I had to stop thinking for a minute as Fishface barked in my ear, “Open the door.”

In the vacated kitchen a cauldron steamed and greens sat in a wok getting soggy. Congealing chow fun, scattered chopsticks, and pots of tea dotted the empty dining room tables. New Day Noodle looked like a restaurant that had just sailed into the Bermuda Triangle.

Outside, things were different. Red and white lights flashed. Traffic on Canal was blocked by cop cars parked at all kinds of angles. Behind the cars, cops in blue and cops in streetclothes wore Kevlar, held guns, shouldered rifles. I thought about the overtime and almost laughed. Through the window I spotted Inspector Wei, wearing an NYPD vest and the rapt glow of a runner at the starting line. Next to her crouched the Fifth’s big, mustached captain, Dick Mentzinger. Beside him I saw Mary, and caught the dismay in her eyes when the first person to lurch out of the restaurant, with Fishface Deng’s arm wrapped around my neck, was me.

“We’re leaving,” Fishface shouted. “We have four people. Let us through or we’ll shoot them right here.”

Mentzinger took the bullhorn. “I can’t do that.”

“Do it!”

“If this ends here it’s not so bad. No one’s hurt. You and your boys can-”

“Shut the fuck up! I don’t want to hear any bullshit cop promises.” Or more likely, I thought, you don’t want your boys to hear them. He squashed the muzzle harder against my head. “Put down your fucking guns!”

Mentzinger, after a moment, gestured to his cops. Rifles lowered slowly.

“Now back off. Back off! First shot we hear, or if anyone follows us, we’re gonna make a bloody mess of all these people. This cute one first.”

Mary took the horn. “You have no place to go, Deng dai lo,” she said in Cantonese.

Fishface laughed. In English he answered, “Lady, in case you haven’t heard, there’s Chinese people in every country on the fucking earth! An hour from now you’ll never find me.” He tightened his arm against my windpipe. It’s getting near time to do something, my pounding heart suggested to my brain. It would be good to make a move before these gangsters started hustling us through Chinatown and realized what trouble we were to hold on to, and how we’d messed up their lives.

So a few steps down the sidewalk, between the empty storefronts and abandoned vendor’s trays, I stumbled. Fishface yanked me up with the arm around my neck. Expecting that, I went with it, throwing my weight back into him. After an eternal thrashing moment he thudded heavily down, extra heavily because I landed on top of him. I dove for the gun. We writhed, scraping flesh on concrete. He punched me in the head. I saw blinding colors but by then I had hold of the pinkie on his gun hand. His adrenaline might be high enough to mask the pain but he couldn’t pull the trigger with his finger bent to his wrist. He yanked at my shirt, my hair. When I felt his finger snap, I almost lost my grip. He yowled. I yanked at the gun; it skidded along the sidewalk. I rolled, grabbed it, and heard the roar of a gunshot. More roars, and the whine of bullets. I flattened and looked around. And was once again reminded I wasn’t the center of the universe.

The sidewalk churned with cops, White Eagles, guns, and silver handcuffs. Two uniforms had slammed onto Fishface as soon as I’d rolled away. Shouts and grunts punctuated the honking of traffic probably backed up to New Jersey. A White Eagle made a break, dashing halfway across Canal before he was downed by a flying tackle so long and accurate it would be cop legend before the cop who made it got back to the precinct. Two more White Eagles lay on the sidewalk, hands on their heads, faces pressed into a glittering scatter of Rolex knockoffs. Straddling a third, yanking his hands behind to snap on cuffs, was a flushed and glowing Inspector Wei. Just beyond her, Mary had Wong Pan bent over the hood of a car. I hoped it had been parked in the sun all day and was damn hot.

I scanned the ruckus, looking for Bill. My heart lurched when I saw him doubled over in a doorway, but then he started to stand. Before I reached him he was on his feet, breathing heavily above Fishface’s lieutenant. “You okay?” I asked. He grinned and flexed his hand like a man who’d just punched a White Eagle’s lights out.

I heard more sirens, wondered why, since the action was pretty much over, and then, looking around, realized it wasn’t more cops, it was ambulances.

C. D. Zhang lay on the sidewalk, a red hole in his chest.

Interview One, my home away from home.

I’d been here for an hour. Bill, last I’d heard, was in Two. In widely separated nooks and crannies, handcuffed White Eagles waited their turns to rotate through Three and Four. I didn’t know where Wong Pan was, and it clearly wasn’t on anyone’s to-do list to tell me.

Leaving a suspect alone to sweat is standard NYPD procedure, and though I didn’t get the idea anybody actually considered me a suspect in the day’s proceedings, Mary was probably mad enough to let me sit here until I grew moss.

I could, of course, make a stink, demand to be charged or released. But that would make my best and oldest friend even more furious. And completely blow my chances of finding out, from anyone’s point of view but my own, what had gone on since we’d all been piled into cop cars outside New Day Noodle.

Besides, I had hope: the backup of White Eagles. The NYPD couldn’t keep me here forever; they needed the room.

After another ten minutes my hope panned out. The door opened and Mary came in, her face one big, dark scowl. Following her was Wei De-xu. Behind Mary’s back the Shanghai inspector gave me a quick grin, then went pokerfaced again as they rattled out chairs.

“How’s C. D. Zhang?” I asked before Mary had a chance to yell at me.

“Luckily for you,” she said icily, “not too bad. A clean through-and-through. Chen and Zhang are at St. Vincent’s with him. He’s sewn up and conscious and not talking.”

“Why would he? He was buying stolen jewelry.”

Mary exchanged a look with Inspector Wei.

“What?” I said. “Are you charging him?”

“Not right now.” She added, unnecessarily, I thought, “He’s an old man.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I doubt it.”

“No, I-”

“Lydia!” She cut me off. “Can you just tell me what you idiots thought you were doing?”

“I called you!” I protested. “And I called nine-one-one. But Wong Pan was dangerous, and we didn’t know if C.D. Zhang knew who he was. We couldn’t just leave him in there with him. And we didn’t know the White Eagles were coming!”

“Bill says you were pretty sure C. D. Zhang knew exactly who Wong Pan was.”

“You talked to Bill already?”

“And every White Eagle we took up. And some of the witnesses. And I tried Chen and Zhang at the hospital, even though I got nowhere. Captain Mentzinger finally said if I didn’t come in here and interview you I’d have to cut you loose. Which I don’t want to do. What I want is to throw you and your idiot partner into a cell way out at the end of Brooklyn for a few months. For being hopelessly stupid.”