I looked to his men for guidance. They only shrugged. I wondered if there was something wrong with him. He acted like a crazy man.
They led me to a room in the back. As soon as I stepped through the door, someone threw a net over me.
I never learned to grapple, so any one of the men could have wrestled me down. Especially since I was caught in a net and had been taken by surprise. But the Xie Liangs went in for overkill. Four or five men dragged me to the floor and held me there. A man held each arm and each leg, and a fifth man squatted on my hips. I struggled but it was useless under all their weight.
I felt terror come over me. I wanted to run but I couldn’t even move. I heard myself whimper in the net.
Bok Choy stood about six feet away, tapping his feet. He was wearing white American shoes. I watched from the ground, from inside the net, as another man walked close to me. He lowered his foot toward my face, and I turned my head to the side.
Apparently that was what he had wanted. His foot pinned my head in place, facing Bok Choy. I felt my teeth clench together, a feral expression. My muscles were tight all along my body, pressing hard against the weight that held me pinned.
Bok Choy lit a cigar. “I lost two dollars thanks to you,” he said in a nasal tone. “Everyone knew you were setting me up. My men Chicken and Locomotive—” he gestured to two of the men near him—“said you’d come here tonight, but I thought you would wait a day. We made a bet, and I lost.”
“What are you”—it isn’t easy to speak with a foot on your ear—“talking about?”
Bok Choy squatted down near me. “Mr. Wong sent you to kill me,” he said.
I groaned. People could be so stupid. Nothing made sense but the Dao.
“As soon as I heard that a girl beat up his son, I knew I was being set up.” He puffed on his cigar. “So you could get close enough to kill me.”
The stupidity of the accusation made me angry, but underneath the anger I felt so weary. By coming here to speak with the Xie Liang tong, I had betrayed my own people. And even the Xie Liangs considered me an enemy.
I felt the men tie my ankles together, winding the rope in and out of the netting, and then they tied my knees. “I didn’t,” I said, struggling to breathe, “come here … to kill you.”
Bok Choy laughed, and it was a shrill, deranged laugh. He gestured to his men and I felt them pull my arms in front of me, inside the net. They tied my wrists together, the rope weaving in and out of the mesh.
Cigar in hand, he leaned over and reached his arm out to me. “Would you like a puff?” he asked.
It was a nightmare. I was pinned to the floor and a madman was trying to get me to smoke his cigar. “What are you saying?” I asked.
“Come on, now,” he said, and gold glinted in his smile. “Just take one puff on my cigar.”
“Maybe later,” I said, to be polite. What kind of game was he playing?
He waited a few moments and then withdrew the cigar. He took a puff himself. “It’s a pity,” he said.
The door opened and someone came in. I heard a woman’s voice. “You wanted to see me?”
Bok Choy straightened up and said, “I always want to see you, darling dove,” he said. “But it would help me if you would search this girl for weapons.”
I heard footsteps, and felt a new pair of hands on me. A gentler touch moved down my arms, squeezing every inch of my sleeves. It was Bok Choy’s wife, whose beauty had astonished me. Her hands brushed down the front of my body. The men shifted positions to accommodate her. She removed the peachwood sword from my belt and the rope dart from my pocket. Her hands lingered over my thighs, where people commonly conceal knives. Her touch was thorough, careful, and businesslike. Then the men rolled me over onto my stomach and held me down so she could continue searching me. She started at my feet, frisking up along my body. She removed the bagua mirror from my back.
When she reached my head, she leaned over and whispered in my ear. “If he offers you a cigar, smoke it,” she said, soft as breathing, and then she withdrew.
“She couldn’t have said so before?” I muttered, glaring at her back as she walked out of the room.
The men pushed me onto my back again. They climbed onto me, keeping me pinned down with their weight. The man’s foot came down over my face again. I turned my head to the side and he pressed down, immobilizing me.
They were skillful. Experienced. They didn’t let me have control of any part of my body—not even my head.
I looked up at Bok Choy. His feet were tapping. A man’s foot pinned my head to the floor. Bok Choy shook his head and sighed. “You just cost me another dollar. I bet Chicken you’d be carrying knives.”
He lay down on his side and faced me. Bok Choy lounged in a mockery of my posture. I scowled at him.
He took a slow puff on his cigar, and then he blurred into a stream of movement.
I stared into dark, blurry circles. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at.
Guns.
Bok Choy was aiming two pistols at my eyes.
I hate guns.
“I like you,” he told me. “I really like you. Normally you’d be dead by now. But I like you a lot. Do you know why I like you so much?”
Looking into the barrels of his guns, pinned in place, I felt small and frightened. I thought about men like Mr. Wong and his son, and I knew the answer to Bok Choy’s question.
“You like me because I’m powerless,” I said.
“Wrong!” he shouted, shaking the pistols in front of my eyes. “I like you because you remind me of my daughter.”
I reminded him of his daughter, and he was pointing guns in my eyes? I was baffled.
“A sorcerer is going to destroy your part of Chinatown,” I said.
The guns shook again. He giggled once more. The foot pressed down harder. I winced, my cheekbone forced to the wood floor.
It was too much. The foot in my face made me boil with rage. There’s only so much I can tolerate before I snap. “You,” I said, “the one with the foot in my face. I’m going to beat you to a pulp.”
The men laughed. The pistols withdrew. Bok Choy said, “Do you think you could?”
“What do you mean?” I said, staring into the gangster’s eager face. This man’s behavior had baffled me since the moment I met him.
“Do you think you could beat my man Chicken in a fight?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he looked like, I didn’t know what training he might have had, and I didn’t know how young or old or good or fast he was. But fury had taken over and I wasn’t thinking. I was a bundle of anger. In the last few days I’d been tricked, attacked, pushed around, held down, tied up. And now I had a man’s foot in my face and I wanted to beat him until he wept and bled.
“Yes,” I said.
Bok Choy held out the cigar again. “A puff?” he asked.
Remembering what his wife had whispered, I said yes. He placed his cigar between my lips. I closed my mouth and puffed on his cigar.
I had expected the room to erupt in raunchy laughter, but there was silence.
Bok Choy withdrew his cigar and rose up to his feet again. “Let her go,” he told his men, “untie her.”
All at once the weight came off me. The rope was pulled free next, and then the net was removed. I sat up. It was nearly dizzying,
to be free to move again. I rubbed my wrists where the rope had bound them.
“A dollar on the girl,” said Bok Choy.
“You’re on a losing streak, Boss,” one of his men said. “You might be the whore tomorrow. I’ll take that bet.”
“Good,” said Bok Choy. “What are you waiting for? Fight!”
20
I shot to my feet in time to duck below a powerful punch. Staggering back, I tried to regain my balance, but my leg hit a chair and I stumbled to the floor. The man kicked at my face. I dodged his kick, rolled to the side, grabbed the chair by its leg, and yanked it in front of me in time to block anot
her kick. I turned the chair and caught his ankle between the chair’s legs, then I pushed it away from me, knocking him off balance. I sprang back up to my feet.
His side was facing me. I chambered my leg. Short, hard kicks to his ribs. One kick, two kicks, three. He groaned and stifled a cough.
Men were shouting all around us. They were cheering. A fierce joy surged through me, an elation. I wasn’t even sure what my opponent looked like, but it didn’t matter to me. I was free and swift, and fighting, and I wanted to pound somebody.
I began another series of sharp kicks to his midsection. He brought his elbow down on my ankle. It connected. Pain shot up my leg. I took a few steps back and he advanced toward me. There was an opening: his stance was slightly too wide; his left knee was defenseless. I roundhoused the knee, striking it with the heel of my left foot. He bent over to clutch it and I brought an elbow down at the base of his skull.
Crying out in pain, he stepped forward and grabbed hold of my robe. Grappling isn’t a strength of mine. If he got me down to the floor, he’d beat me.
But he’d already had me on the floor. His foot in my face. I aimed a stomp-kick at the same knee. My kick landed with a clapping sound, and I pushed off, out of the man’s grasp.
I didn’t waste any time. I came back hitting. A blizzard of fists and kicks. He held up his arms in front of his body for protection and I hit him some more. He backed away and I pursued, continuing to hit him. He backed up against the wall. Eventually he stopped holding his arms up, and I kept on pounding away at his chest.
I became aware of voices. “You can stop,” the voices were saying, “you won.”
I landed punch after punch on the chest of the man who had put his foot in my face. Men grabbed at me and I blocked, dodged, weaved to the side and continued to pummel this man. I wasn’t going to let anyone treat me like that. I was tired of it, tired of the cuts in my stomach, the feet in my face.
They managed to pull the unconscious man away from me but I wasn’t ready to stop fighting. I turned and attacked the gangsters with a flurry of strikes. I was a blur of violence. Men grabbed chairs and held them up as weapons. Or maybe to protect themselves. I kicked a chair and it slammed into the man holding it, knocking him over backward. I advanced to the next man. Hardly more than a boy, he held a chair up in front of him. He looked frightened. I yanked the chair and he held onto it, stupidly, and tipped forward. I landed a fist on his throat. He made a gurgling noise and dropped to the floor.
The men circled me, wielding chairs and knives. I didn’t care. Rage drove my pulses, rage and a kind of predatory ecstasy.
A little girl’s voice came from the side of the room. “What’s happening, Papa?” she said. At the sound of her voice, all the men in the room dropped their chairs and took casual poses.
It was bizarre enough to snap me out of my blood-rage. What was going on? I stood in a haze, like a waking dream. I felt the anger begin to drain from my body, and my own behavior bewildered me.
At the other end of the room, Bok Choy squatted on his haunches, facing a little girl. She was about five years old. “There’s nothing to worry about, little one,” he said. “A new friend is showing us some of her kung fu skills.”
The girl clapped her hands together and jumped up and down. “I want to see! I want to see!”
Bok Choy reached out his arms and drew her into a hug. He lifted her up in his arms and twirled around. He was grinning. His gold tooth glinted in his smile, a genuine smile. Bok Choy seemed delighted to have this little girl in his arms. It was as strange as seeing the gangsters sitting nervously in the chairs they’d been holding moments earlier to defend themselves against my onslaught.
Still holding the girl tight, Bok Choy turned to me. “My daughter wants to see you do some kung fu maneuvers,” he said. “Will you give her a demonstration?”
The world had gone mad. My pulses were still pounding from the pummeling I gave that man, everyone in the room was pretending to be relaxed, at ease, while the gang leader was doting on a little girl. I had never seen a man show such affection toward a daughter.
“A demonstration for my daughter,” he repeated. “You cost me two dollars tonight. A little show is the least you could do.”
The girl’s eyes met mine. She seemed so innocent, so full of hope, so happy in her father’s arms. She was what I was here for. She was naïve and open-hearted, in need of protection. I could remember it, almost, the innocence. For someone like her I would fight men and monsters. For someone like her I would hop around like a trained monkey.
In that madhouse, I decided to show off my martial arts skills. I pushed two chairs together. From a standing position I jumped over the chairs, kicked out with both feet, and executed a three-point landing. I retrieved my rope dart and spun it around, showing the girl how I can wrap the line around my calf to speed it up, and disengage it to shoot it out. I put the rope dart back in my pocket and ran to the wall; when I reached the wall, I ran two steps up and pushed myself off in a backflip. I went through the first third of the rounded motions of taiji, the twelve animal forms of xing yi, the stepping pattern of bagua.
The girl clapped and squealed with delight. “Teach me!” she shouted. “I want to learn.”
Bok Choy, the madman, the killer, tickled her under the chin and said, “Hua, our guest just put on a show for you. Isn’t there something you should say?”
The girl turned to face me. I had to wonder if my eyes had ever looked so bright and eager. Her name was Hua, Flower. Of course it was. “Thank you!” she said.
Bok Choy was teaching his daughter American customs, not Chinese. Everything here was unpredictable, bizarre. Deciding to offer both worlds of manners, I bowed and said, “You’re welcome.”
Bok Choy looked at me, sizing me up with his quick eyes. “Was that bagua you were doing at the end?”
I nodded.
“That’s bodyguard training,” he said to Hua. Bok Choy kissed his daughter’s forehead and said, “Papa will tuck you in soon. Ask Mama to tell you a story, and remember to say thank-you when she’s done. I need to have a grown-up talk with these people.”
He let her stand on her own feet and shooed her off through a door. Before she left, she turned and said, “I love you, Papa!”
“I love you too, Hua! Tell your Mama I love her more than diamonds.”
As soon as the girl was gone, Bok Choy said, “Get Chicken to the infirmary.” He turned to face me. “If you didn’t come here to kill me, what do you want?”
*
Sitting at a table like civilized people, I told him what was happening. Finishing, I said, “Every merchant who pays you instead of the Ansheng tong is going to die. Every building you own is going to be destroyed. This will happen tonight, in just a few hours. I can’t stop it alone.”
Bok Choy mulled it all over. His eyes flicked back and forth, up and down, like a gambler calculating the odds. Moments passed that felt like hours. Finally he looked at me again and said, “I’m not a Daoist, Li-lin.”
It felt like I suddenly deflated. So that was that, then. He thought everything I was telling him was bunk and nonsense, superstitions left behind in the old country. I let out a tired breath. I had endured so much here tonight, for nothing.
“The only gods I believe in are the gods of gambling,” he said, his gold tooth shining in his smile. “So. Thirty men.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I told him.
“Thirty men. They will come armed with knives and hatchets.”
I watched him, waiting to hear the catch. He couldn’t just be offering them to me.
“Thirty men is an army in Chinatown. Thirty men means tong war,” Bok Choy said. “Thirty men means the Xie Liang tong is committed to making war against the Anshengs.”
I started to smile. I had no idea the Xie Liang tong had grown so powerful. The well-established Ansheng tong could rouse at most forty fighting men.
“I am willing to commit a force of thirty men,??
? Bok Choy continued, “and all you have to do is beat me in a game of pai jiu. We leave the decision in the hands of the gods of gambling.”
My arms dropped to my sides in mute surprise.
“Hundreds of people will die if you don’t do something,” I insisted. “Hundreds of your people.”
Bok Choy shook his head. “I don’t know if I believe you. Even if I do believe you, I don’t know if I’m willing to start fighting the tong wars again. This is why I’m going to let the gods of gambling make my decision.”
I took a breath. “And what will happen if I lose?”
“Well then you’ll work for me,” he said. His smile gleamed like a knife. “On a three-year contract.”
I stared at Bok Choy. I imagined my life as a contract girl. A sick sensation coursed through me.
My husband and I made love, frequently. We shared such an intense bond. We were passionate in our hunger for each other. I couldn’t imagine putting that kind of intimacy on sale. Two bits to see me, four bits to touch me, six bits to …
I stared at the grinning man who wanted to turn me into a whore. His gold tooth gleamed. A feeling of horror moved from my gut out to the rest of my body. If I accepted this challenge, if I played his game and lost, I would be committed to years of misery and degradation.
But I had spent years watching my father play pai jiu with Dr. Wei. Both were brilliant men. I knew all the strategies. Bok Choy was certain to underestimate me. Half of Chinatown needed to be protected, and I needed to avenge myself on Liu Qiang. I couldn’t imagine how bad things would be if Liu Qiang managed to raise a Kulou-Yuanling. A whole town would be screaming.
And I’d heard a whole town scream once before.
“Let’s play pai jiu,” I said to Bok Choy, and my guts turned upside down.
21
The tiles clinked on the table. He had played za jiu, a mismatched pair of dominoes with nine pips each. It was a good play, worth nine points, but I was still a point ahead. Just barely, I was winning.
Holding my cigar between two fingers, I studied my tiles. I needed to win. The consequences of losing were beyond belief.