Chapter Twenty-two
San Francisco, present day
Of the countless Chinese restaurants with
Located in the middle of Grant Street, Freddie Wang’s restaurant was a known haunt for criminals, but since Freddie routinely swept the place for bugs and never handled transactions on the premises, he managed to keep the place open despite its questionable clientele. The trick was convincing law-abiding citizens to clear out before the conversations in the dining room turned to drugs, gambling, and prostitution.
So Freddie started giving away fortune cookies with very special fortunes inside. The cooks and waiters studied each table, then ran back to an old man crouched in the kitchen who wrote custom fortunes. A young girl on a date might get a fortune warning her that the young man sitting across the table was in the midst of an outbreak of genital herpes, while a family of nervous tourists from the Midwest might open their cookies to find a prophecy of an impending earthquake. There were no lucky numbers or promises of wealth and happiness at Freddie Wang’s place.
Cape took a seat in a corner booth, where he waited for almost an hour, watching the tourists clear out one table at a time, some engaged in heated arguments about what they’d just read about each other. By nine o’clock he was alone in the dining room, sipping Tsingtao from a bottle and watching the waiters clear the tables. When the last of the tablecloths had been removed, a lone waiter walked across the room and set a small plate in front of Cape, a single fortune cookie resting on its plain white surface. Cape cracked open the cookie and let the crumbs fall out of his hand as he read the small slip of paper.
Cape suppressed a smile as he made his way to a narrow stairway beside the entrance to the kitchen. His last time here, he had been with Sally, and his fortune was part threat and part insult. He was moving up in the world, now rating a simple invitation laced with disdain. The call from Harold Yan had done the trick. Freddie may not like Cape, but at least he’d talk to him.
At the top of the stairs, a thick-waisted man named Park waited impassively next to a door, wearing dark glasses and a suit that cost more than Cape’s car. Park spent all day, every day searching people, and he was getting sick of it. His name meant cypress tree, and recently he’d been having dreams that roots were growing from his feet from standing around so much. With a brusque gesture, he indicated Cape should raise his arms, then pushed him roughly against the wall and patted him down. When he got to Cape’s waist he hesitated, feeling a strange bulge on his right side. Reaching under the tail of Cape’s sport coat, he pulled a wad of yellow rubber from beneath Cape’s waistband. He took off his sunglasses and screwed up his face as the thing unfolded in his hand.
It was a rubber chicken.
“I brought that as a present to Freddie,” said Cape over his shoulder. “Figured the guys in the kitchen could do wonders with it, especially with the right sauce.”
The guard threw the chicken back at Cape but caught himself before following through with his fist. He’d clearly been given orders.
“Should I have brought cat instead?”
The guard grabbed him by the collar and turned him to face the door, then twisted the knob and shoved him forward. Cape raised his hands in time to avoid opening the door with his face.
It was dark inside, the only light coming from an old lamp with a green shade sitting on a desk. The cloying smell of incense filled the room, and thick tendrils of smoke curled in the subdued light. Behind the desk sat Freddie Wang, his long gray hair sprouting from a high forehead, his dark eyes squinting through the smoke as Cape stepped forward.
“I hear you died last year,” said Freddie, his voice like dry reeds cracking in the wind.
Cape shrugged. “I heard that, too,” he said. “Turns out I just had a bad case of food poisoning….I think I got it at this restaurant, as a matter of fact.”
Freddie cackled, which quickly turned into a wracking cough. A gnarled right hand moved into the pool of light and snatched a lit cigarette from a carved wooden ashtray, then scuttled back out of sight like a cockroach. As the tip of the cigarette glowed red in the darkness, Freddie’s cough subsided.
“If you got food poisoning here,” he said slowly, “you’d stay dead.”
Cape nodded but didn’t say anything, moving to sit in one of the two straight-backed chairs in front of Freddie’s desk. As he turned to sit, Cape noticed a stolid-looking man lurking in the shadows behind him and to the right. He had long black hair pulled tight into a ponytail and hands that looked too big for his body, jutting out from the sleeves of his suit like oven mitts. Although they came in all shapes and sizes, Freddie always had protection.
“So what you want?” asked Freddie testily.
Cape noticed Freddie’s accent came and went depending on his mood and realized taking a seat without being asked had irked his host. Freddie didn’t like visitors.
“I want your wisdom,” said Cape pleasantly.
“Fuck you,” said Freddie. “You think you kiss my ass, tell a joke, I tell you stories?”
“Nah,” said Cape. “I think that if you tell me stories, then I leave you alone.”
“You make threat?” Freddie leaned into the light. His face stretched painfully as he stared at Cape, the wrinkles unfolding like a broken accordion. His left eye was droopy and faint, its inner light all but extinguished, but his right eye glowed like a black sun. Cape caught himself leaning forward unconsciously, as if he were getting sucked into Freddie’s gravitational pull.
“I want to know about the refugees on that ship,” said Cape evenly.
“
“I have,” said Cape, “but I won’t talk to them about you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Freddie’s half-lit face contorted again, revealing a mole on his right cheek sprouting three prominent hairs. “I look worried,
Cape shook his head, smiling. “No, Freddie. You look great-you look like a lingerie model. They say aberrant facial hair is all the rage this year.”
Freddie coughed violently in response, then gagged before summoning a wad of phlegm from the back of his throat. Leaning forward, he spat it expertly into the center of his ashtray. Running the back of his right hand across his mouth, he took another drag on his cigarette before his breathing returned to normal. Cape sensed the bodyguard moving closer, but Freddie waved the man off. When he spoke again, his voice crackled as if a fire had started somewhere deep in his chest.
“You talk to cops about me,” he wheezed menacingly, “I eat your eyeballs.”
“So that’s what’s in hot-n-sour soup.”
Freddie squinted through the smoke, his baleful right eye unblinking.
Cape shrugged. “Deal.”
“You know what’s on boat?” asked Freddie. “Besides dead Chinese?”
“Nope.” Cape shook his head. “You?”
Freddie shrugged but didn’t answer, looking from Cape to the bodyguard, then back again. Freddie loved playing the part of the Asian gangster, and Cape sensed this was one of those obtuse conversations in which Freddie spoke in half-truths and riddles, as if the constant threat of surveillance hung over him like so much cigarette smoke. Few professional crooks had stayed in power and public view for so long, so maybe the paranoia was justified.
“You think that’s important?” asked Cape, trying to keep the conversation going. “The cargo?”
“Not to me,” replied Freddie. “But many people lose money when ship crash.”
“On the cargo, or the passengers?” asked Cape.
“Cargo insured,” replied Freddie. “Passengers, maybe not.”
