Rick shook his head, not replying.
'Rick, I know you don't want to think about this right now, but you never know which way these things are going to jump. It's a madhouse out there.'
'What do you mean 'jump'?'
Christopher looked apologetic. 'You know how Tor was. Who knows what sort of garbage these fucks will come up with?'
'What do you mean jump?'
Chris jerked his chin, irritated. 'Don't make me spell it out for you, Rick.'
'I'm slow,' Rick said evenly. 'Spell it out for me.'
'You're a celebrity.'
'So?' He knew what they were getting at and still he couldn't help pushing.
'So, you've lived with publicity. You have to manage the situation all the time, present your own image. They see what you tell them to see. You have to do that now big-time, you know that. You're an expert.' Chris scowled at Dan, prompting him to pitch in.
'Yeah.' Dan finally opened his mouth. 'You've always been great at managing them.'
'So what does managing the press have to do with getting a lawyer?'
Mel shifted his stomach. 'You know how we feel about you. We want you protected in every way. We don't want you getting hurt.'
Rick stared at the three men, his partners. He was already hurt. 'Are you worried about the firm?' he asked softly. 'Are you scared I'll taint the firm?'
'No, no,' Dan shot back angrily. 'You don't get it, do you? The vultures are going to tear at your life, pick at your bones—schadenfreude. You know what that means?'
Rick shook his head, but he got the picture.
'It means taking pleasure from other people's troubles. Joy and pleasure from eating you alive,' Dan persisted. 'This is going to happen. It's guaranteed to happen, and we want to control it.'
Mel threw his two cents in. 'We don't want to see it get out of control here, you know what I mean?' '
Rick clenched his jaw. 'They won't find anything to pin on me, if that's what you mean.'
Dan shook his head. 'Don't be a stupid fuck, Rick. They always find something. You—'
Abruptly he stopped as Patrice pushed open the door and bore down on them with a tray of rich pastries and a sullen expression. Rick turned to him, frowning, and their eyes locked.
12
What you doing?' Sai Woo screamed at her daughter.
April stopped so short she almost felt as if she'd been halted by a bullet. What she'd been doing was trying to sneak up the stairs to her part of the house without an encounter with her mother. Mike told her she always worried about the wrong things, like her mother's feelings and not her own. Almost thirty years old, and she was still so worried about what her mother had to say that every little verbal foray felt like the beginning of another battle in a long and bloody war that April could never win. Hearing her mother scream now, April held in a deep sigh.
The snow and sleet had stopped that morning. The temperature had held at around freezing all through the day, but started dropping again in the early evening. The streets were so icy that the mayor had gone on the radio warning people to keep their cars off the streets and particularly to stay out of Manhattan. April had heard his voice give the same command repeatedly on her hazardous trip home in the white Chrysler Le Baron that she sometimes felt she would still be paying for at the turn of the century. The last thing she wanted was the confrontation her mother had clearly been waiting for all day.
'Where you shreep rast night? Where you been aww day?' Sai Woo demanded.
Reluctantly, April turned around and made eye contact with Skinny Dragon Mother whose eyes had narrowed into slits of war.
'At work, where do you think, Ma?'
Long ago Sai Woo told April about the meaning of dragons and April knew her mother was one. Dragons had demon eyes, the ears of a cow, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam. On its camel head is a lump, a 'gas bag' that allows the dragon to fly through the air swooping in from the sky to bring rain and snow and all manner of storms to undeserving human worms, exactly like April. Of its 117 scales, 81 are good-influence scales (yang) and 36 are bad-influence scales (yin). Sai said there were several hundred different kinds of dragons, but they all had the same kind of power and ruthless personality. When one of them swooped down out of a golden cloud, it was anybody's guess whether the good-influence or the bad-influence scales were going to be dominant.
Tonight, as usual, this particular dragon was in disguise as her mother, now beautifully dressed in black peasant pants and a thick silk padded jacket, turquoise, sprigged with cherry blossoms. The dragon lump on her head was hidden under two inches of freeze-dried seaweed that looked like, but was not, in fact, a wig.
April stared at the jacket, wondering where it had come from. 'Nice jacket, Ma. Is it new?'
Sai shook her head and the hair didn't move. 'Owd,' she announced. 'Velly owd.' She stroked the sleeve, stroked the tiny French poodle that was sitting on her lap. The dog, Dim Sum, did not lift her head at April, though her apricot fuzzball of a tail made a feeble attempt at a wag. 'Where you shreep, no rie. I can terr.'
'I worked all night,' April said, glad that it was true.
'No bereave.'
'Well, it's true.' And she had worked through the day, too, except for a few minutes at lunchtime when, exhausted, she'd broken her own rule by sacking out on a bunk in the detective dorm. With Mike camped out across the hall in the office marked SPECIAL CASES, and everybody on edge because of the unusual aggressiveness of the press, it had been a strange day.
'What can I tell you, Ma?' April could not break the force field that insisted on contact with the demon eyes of her mother.
And there was no way to avoid it. The house was set up so that April had to come through the front door to get to the stairway leading to her apartment. There was an arch in the wall dividing the hall from the living room. Skinny Dragon Mother was in her command post in the living room, framed by the arch and looking like the photo of the all-powerful nineteenth-century dowager empress she wished she could be in Queens, New York.
Skinny Dragon Mother sat on one of the carved hardwood Chinese chairs that was a copy of the kind noble families had in old China. There were two of these black chairs in the living room, one for her father and one for her mother. They had no cushions on them and were the symbol of the classless society of America to which Ja Fa Woo and Sai Yuan Woo had fled half their lifetime ago. They had come to a place where anybody could become rich, buy a brick house in Astoria, Queens, and sit in a throne with a thousand-dollar French poodle on her lap that no hungry neighbor would ever be able to get his hands on and eat.
Despite the paper label under the seat that said MADE IN TAIWAN, Sai should have been a happy woman. She had almost everything she wanted. She believed that the chair in her living room had once belonged to a great silk merchant with many wives. And this illustrious, best-quality chair that she now called her own had been the seat of power of the first and most important of his wives, which was now her.
The truth was Sai was the descendant of peasants so poor they routinely abandoned their female infants to the elements, or sold young daughters as slaves and concubines to those who could better afford to feed them. This fate had nearly been hers. But instead, she had some other unspeakably terrible experiences before coming to America. These she referred to frequently (without actually revealing what they were) to shame her daughter into some semblance of obedience.
Sai was not the happy woman she could be because her daughter refused to come up in the world in the same proportion she had. Her shame was that April had not turned out to be the kind of daughter a Chinese mother would want. April was a policeman, stayed out all night chasing the worst kind of human scum, occasionally going so far as to wrestle with them in the street. Sometimes she came home smelling of death. The rest of the time she spent with men of questionable character—oh yes, she knew all about corruption in the police department from TV and stories in the Chinese newspaper.
She thought April had no shame and had no honor, for if worm daughter had either, she would quit her terrible job, marry a Chinese doctor, and produce many children for her to brag about and properly discipline. This
