triads. Also, twenty-one is the big three times lucky seven.”
I must have looked at him a bit doubtfully. “Are you by chance pulling this straight out of your ass?”
“Michael, those three digits could be the only thing standing between us and the kind of death I’m not even going to tell you about. Believe me, I’m not making it up.”
We had a window and an aisle seat. Fortunately there was no one between us. I unbuckled and slipped over to the middle seat.
“Harry, when you put it that way, I’ve got to ask you a personal question. If this stuff is so secret, how do you know about it?”
Harry looked out the window as the pilot announced that we were passing Niagra Falls on our right. He was still looking after we passed the falls. I knew he hadn’t forgotten the question.
We’ve been close friends since we were seventeen, but obviously there was a gap in my knowledge of his background.
When he turned back, he leaned closer. I could just hear him over the drone of the engines.
“I guess you need to know this, Mike. You’re putting a lot of trust in what must sound like Dungeons and Dragons.”
He took a breath before saying something I think he had never told another soul.
“My father was drafted into the Chinese Red Army just before my mother came to this country. My mother and grandmother and I lived in Chinatown in Boston before we moved to Brookline. They both worked twelve, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week at their restaurants in the suburbs. I never really saw them. I was twelve years old. I resented it. I was too dumb to realize they were earning money for me to go to Harvard and MIT. I was the hope of the family for something better.
“I used to spend time with a bunch of kids in Chinatown. We started hanging around a martial arts school. They’d let us work out with the mats. It’s actually the tong’s recruitment place for the youth gangs. I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know much.
“I knew I couldn’t afford the classes. I couldn’t ask my mother for the money. She wouldn’t have wanted me to hang around there anyway. One of the older kids saw that I was catching onto kung fu pretty fast. He said he’d pay for my lessons. I was dumb enough to let him. I guess I was getting back at my mother and grandmother. The older kid always said not to worry about the money. Someday he’d ask me a favor.
“The favor came when I was thirteen. It was the turning point in my life. I hated it, but I did it. I was afraid of losing face with the other kids. I’ve been ashamed of it every day since.”
He looked me in the eyes and saw something that made him keep going.
“There was an old man on Tyler Street. He ran a grocery store. It was a dismal sort of place. I don’t think there was anything in his life that wasn’t drudgery. Except he had one thing in the shop. It was a tank of exotic goldfish. It was the prize of his life.
“The older boy who paid for my lessons told me the old man kept servants in the basement and he beat and tortured them. He said he and his friends were vigilantes. They were going to teach the old man a lesson.
“I went with a couple of sixteen-year-olds to the grocery shop one day after school. We ransacked the store. When we finished, they gave me a rock and told me to break the glass fish tank. The old man was looking at me while the others held him. He was pleading with me. I can still see it in his eyes. It was like he was pleading for his life. The other boys were yelling at me to do what I promised.
“In all my life, I wish I had that one moment back. I smashed the tank. The old man crumbled. I could hear him sobbing when I ran out of the store. I cried all the way home.
“The next day, the boy who’d paid for my lessons told me I was going to join the gang. I told him I couldn’t. He said they’d tell my mother what I’d done. I couldn’t do that to her, so I joined the youth gang.
“Every time I passed the old man on the street, he got older, more feeble. Of course I knew by that time that it wasn’t true about the servants in the cellar. He was just an old man who wouldn’t pay lomo — “lucky money”-to the tong.
“They started having me go on other jobs. I did it because of my shame before my mother.
“Six months later, the old man died. I knew I had killed him. He started dying the instant I smashed that tank of fish. I took away the only thing in his life that gave him pleasure.
“I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to get out. Actually, I was lucky. The number two man in the tong had noticed me. I think it was because I was the only one in the gang in a college-prep course in a decent high school. It was unusual. Most of the kids in the gangs don’t get educated beyond high school.
“He seemed to like me. I became almost like a son. He’d take me along to meetings that none of the other gang members went to. He told me things that were part of the tong. Secret things. I think he was grooming me to move up in the organization.
“When the old man died, I couldn’t live with myself. I went to him for the supreme favor. I wanted out. It had never been done as far as I know. He wasn’t happy about it, but he said he’d plead for me to the Shan Chu.
“A week later, he sent for me. He seemed very sad. He said that I was released from my oaths. I have no idea what he had to do to pay for my freedom. I never saw him again. He just disappeared. He might have been sent back to Hong Kong. I know he forfeited something.
“The other gang members froze me out completely. That was all right. It wasn’t long before we moved to Brookline. The way they move around, none of the gang that I knew back then is left in Chinatown.”
Harry looked at me directly. He looked more stricken than relieved.
“That’s a part of my life I’m not proud of, Michael. I live with it every day. I’m only telling you so you’ll know I’m not guessing about the tong.”
He turned back to the window. I nudged his elbow.
“Harry, you remember what Jesus said about letting the one who is without sin cast the first stone?”
He looked around at me. I looked him in the eye when I said, “I’m in no position to cast any stones, brother.”
He waited in case I had more to tell him. Somehow I wasn’t up to filling in the details. Maybe another time. I thought, God grant there’d be another time.
24
By two in the afternoon, Harry and I were in a taxi, weaving our way through the streets of Toronto’s Chinatown. The driver found Columbia Street, and we walked from there. We spotted a grocery shop in the middle of a block that fit Xiao-Wen’s description.
Two Chinese boys, in the range of about sixteen to seventeen years, bracketed the doorway beside the grocery shop. I’d never have given them a second look, but now I noticed the lean, muscular builds and the eyes that scanned everyone and seemed to take in more than I’d expect from a couple of kids just hanging out.
I felt a slight nudge and barely heard Harry whisper, “That’s the place, Mike. From here on, it’s my show. We don’t panic, no matter what happens. Believe the bluff. We’ve got friends in the tong so powerful these bozos don’t dare to mess with us.”
We picked up the pace, like a couple of businessmen on a mission. Harry breezed past the two at the door without dignifying their existence with so much as a nod. I realized that there is a lot of implied power in looking like you know where you’re going.
Both of them turned around. One of them started to speak, but the other one grabbed his arm. I noticed he also touched a button beside the door.
The outside door led to an inside flight of stairs that ran beside the grocery store. At the top, there was a door with an opaque glass center and Chinese embossed figures in the glass. While the layout was similar to that of the brothel on Beach Street in Boston, the approach looked far more sterile and bright. It could have been the entryway to a good orthodontist.
We climbed the stairs without haste or hesitation, and Harry knocked on the door at the top.
A slender woman of about fifty opened the door. She wore a sheath dress of emerald silk that bespoke feminine allure and dignity at the same time. I got the impression that she was one of the few survivors of the trade who went on to rise as far as a woman could go in management.
