I shook my head.
“There’s more. It says literally, ‘You help her, I help you.’”
Harry looked at me in the mirror over the bar. “Help you what?”
I took another sip of beer to sort out my own questions before answering Harry’s. It was an attractive quid pro quo. The quid was whatever in the world I could do for someone named Ku Mei-Li. The quo was particularly inviting if it meant that my little Red Shoes would give us a counter to Mrs. Lee’s damning identification.
I took Harry by the arm and escorted him out the door and down Harrison. I’d given him a brief replay of the day’s events by the time we reached the corner of Beach Street.
“So it comes down to this, Harry old pal. We find the address on Beach Street, and either I go in by myself with nothing but hand signals to communicate with heaven-knows-who, or you come with me, and we make sense of this little game.”
We stopped. He pulled me into a doorway. I thought at the time he was taking us out of the cold, but he could have been avoiding the eyes of those who were standing in the window of the coffee shop across the street.
“Michael, you have no conception of what goes on in Chinatown. You’re like everyone else who comes down here. You have dinner, buy some noodles, whatever, and breeze right back out to Caucasianville. You can’t see it, because you don’t know what to look for.”
“See what, Harry? I’m willing to look. Tell me.”
He looked at me and just shook his head.
“It’s too much to tell, and too cold to do it here. What can I say, Mike? You want me to wade into a net of organized crime so effective that it has this community almost paralyzed with fear. It’s so effective that you don’t even know it exists.”
I pulled the collar of my coat up around the back of my neck.
“Suppose it exists, Harry…”
“It exists.”
“Like I said. Suppose it exists. I don’t have a lot of choice. I got a name, I got an address. That’s a hell of lot more than I had going for me before I came down here. I’ve got to follow it up. I don’t think time is on my side. The question is, do you go with me?”
“This place you’re going is a brothel, Mike. For Chinese. Not outsiders. It’s protected by a youth gang that could write the book on violence. You could at least pick a better time than the middle of the night. Alone.”
“I didn’t pick the time, Harry. And maybe I’m not alone.”
I forced a goofy smile and stepped out into the street. I was walking, but I was listening hard. My heart came down out of my throat when I heard Harry’s footsteps catching up.
7
Harry said nothing. I could tell by the set of his chin that the wrong word from me could break the momentum, and any word was the wrong word.
He took the lead as we passed five doorways. The sixth was chipped and grimy and hung at an angle that only time and neglect could effect. The glass was caked with decades of pollution. There was not a clue as to what was on the other side. That would not ordinarily raise the hair on the back of my neck, but that combined with Harry’s gripping the doorknob for the duration of an interminable deep breath gave me the galloping creeps.
When he was mentally set, Harry stiffened his posture, gave me a nod, and pushed open the door. I could see that it led to a hallway the width of the door and just as decrepit. Straight ahead about ten feet the rutted floor bent upward in a flight of well-worn wooden stairs. The light inside was dimmer than the neon glare in the street. Harry held the door open for a second and looked back.
We caught sight of them at almost the same moment. Three of the young stone faces I had seen in the window of the coffee shop on the corner were moving down the sidewalk in our direction. Harry gave me a “you couldn’t listen” look. There are times, however, when the only way to retreat is to go forward. We moved inside and closed the door.
About the time we hit the first step, I looked up to see the top landing consumed with the bulk of the first Chinese I’d ever seen who topped six feet four and a conservative two hundred fifty pounds. Whatever notion I had of making it past the top of the stairs died in a lump that I couldn’t swallow.
Harry never lost a beat. He trudged up the stairs as if he were coming home from a day’s work. I felt a cold draft from behind and turned around. The three faces glared up at us from the bottom of the steps behind us. They were well under twenty, and closer to the Chinese proportions I expected, but the bulges under their coats in the neighborhood of their right arm sockets kept me close to Harry’s heels where the odds were better.
I stuck, in fact, close enough to Harry to be able to whisper.
“You were always a friend, Harry, but right now you’re my life insurance.”
Harry’s eyes never left the top of the stairs, but I could hear the whisper.
“It’s the other way, Michael. You’re my life insurance.”
I neither understood that nor found it comforting.
Harry kept climbing. I took it that the ploy was bluff, rather than fight or even cut and run. Considering that they had us boxed in like a runner between first and second base, it was the only option that might possibly not involve suffering.
I think I jumped when a burst of guttural Chinese came out of the hulk at the top of the stairs. Harry took three more steps without acknowledging the temper tantrum. He was two steps from the top, and close enough to make it possible for one swipe of the side of beef our host used for a right arm to send us both to the bottom of the stairs. Fortunately, he chose to listen instead.
Harry’s nose came up to about his navel. To his credit, Harry never succumbed to the indignity of looking up. His voice was calm, deliberate, and pure business.
I couldn’t imagine what he was saying in his native tongue. The three of us seemed to hang in suspended animation. I saw those lethal arms poised for a strike that would have decapitated Harry and sent me halfway to Chelsea. I said a few words to the Lord and braced for whatever came in my direction.
When Harry finished, there was a pause for a few electric seconds that seemed longer than the bar examination while King Kong looked at me like something he could put in an egg roll. I had no idea what Harry was saying with astounding composure, but it had a most desired defusing influence. When Kong spoke again, it was with deference, and it sounded like a question. Harry gave him a few clipped words, and he backed out of our way. I heard the door behind us open, and when I looked back, the gang of three had vacated.
With Kong receding into the passageway, I could see a short, plump Chinese woman of what I guessed to be something over fifty years standing by the first door to the right. She was decked out in a green silk-brocade sheath that did not need a lengthy slit to reach her hips. Fifty pounds and thirty years previously it might have been becoming. At this point, her wearing of the uniform of the profession seemed as pointless as a baseball manager wearing cleats.
I assume she had followed the exchange, because she was all grins and welcome in English, more or less.
“You most welcome. Come in. Come in.”
Harry and I finished the last few stairs and followed her into a room that would have worked as a sumptuously decorated living room in any home in Brookline. Chinese red was the predominant color in fabrics that could have adorned a silkworm’s museum. The lighting was dim, the music was lush, and the aroma would make a water buffalo amorous.
She spoke in a tinny voice, strained through a grin that suggested that she was at our service.
“How we please you, gentlemen?”
Introductions seemed out of place. Since Harry had accomplished the impossible in getting us this far, I took it from there. The object of the moment seemed to be to get alone in a room with Mei-Li with as little explanation as possible. I came directly to the point.
“Mei-Li.”
