Red Jade (6 page)

Easy Pass

The bilingual Chinatown directory from Seattle’s Chinatown Community Center proved to be very useful. Mona quickly located Ping Wong Beautician Supplies and purchased a medium-length gray wig. The booklet offered listings for local discount stores and thrift shops where she bought a drab sweater, black slacks, and a cheap down jacket, all made in China. She found plastic magnifier eyeglasses, looped on a beaded chain, at a Chinese pharmacy. She wore no makeup, and the clothing and accessories helped her appear more matronly: an aging spinster.

Mona easily blended into the rear of the group of
wah
kue
, overseas senior citizens, as they boarded the bus to Vancouver. Avoiding the mentholated scent of
mon gum yao
, tiger balm, she made her way to the back.

She enjoyed the view from the window seat as the Seniors Weekend Junket rolled north out of Seattle’s Chinatown through the cold city morning.

The charter bus gained speed once it reached the highway. She noticed the number ninety-nine on many signs,
nine
being a yang number, an auspicious place in the
fung
shui
. In the system of I Ching trigrams, nine was the element of gold. She thought about her cache of jewelry, the gold Panda coins she’d hidden.

The city blurred past outside the window as she caressed a jade charm nestled in her right palm, closing her eyes to find a quiet space.

She was stroking the contours of the arrangements of raised lines and sharp etchings like a rosary, feeling above and below the surface of the jade talisman.

The white jade octagon, a
bot kwa
I Ching talisman, was the size of a fat nickel. It was not Shan or Ming dynasty; it was quality jade but not rare. The charm had been a gift from her mother, her only memento, and had touched three generations of the women of her family. It was her mother’s
soul
.

On its flat sides, in bas-relief, were symbols of the Eight Trigrams.
Yin
and
Yang
together representing the eight elements of the universe: heaven, earth, wind, fire, water, thunder, mountain, lake. The center of the charm was carved into two embryonic snakes chasing one another’s tails, forming the forever changing symbol of the
Yin Yang
, harmony of the cosmic breath.

Mona had learned to read the symbols, Braille-like, in a single passing of her finger, feeling the lines of the hexagrams. She pondered the prophecies in her mind. Dragging her thumbnail across the etched series of lines, she sought guidance and direction, a prophecy from the
I Ching
, the
Book of Changes
.

The combination of lines and broken lines kept coming back to the hexagrams
Thunder over Wind
and
Heaven over
Wind
: the sky roars, the wind howls. All regret is gone. Go forward over the Great Mountain.

She measured her breathing.

Wind over Heaven
read the hexagrams: a new career, opportunity—but also, conflict, misfortune. Opening her eyes she saw a darkening sky with heavy clouds promising rain. She felt anxiety in the air, an impending storm.

In the face of violence, one must withdraw
.

The vistas changed as they left behind the skyline of highrises, rolling toward the grim mountains in the far distance. She saw rugged bedrock ridges, steep-walled valleys, pristine wilderness, a lake, and a section of river. They came through rolling uplands, the far-off jagged peaks towering above them. Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of the ocean, beyond a stretch of bays that were dotted with green-brown islands.

The natural vistas reminded her of her journey across America, on a one-way train from New York to
Saam Fansi
, San Francisco. It did not seem that long ago. Now she was hundreds of miles farther north, evidenced by the colder weather and the unrelenting rain. From her next destination, Vancouver, once she moved there, she could head south to Chinese communities in Peru, or east to Toronto or Montreal, or even farther east to Europe, England or France perhaps.

The world of the
wah kue
, overseas Chinese, seemed boundless.

An hour into the tour, she smelled the aroma of
po nai
, tea,
cha siew baos
, roast pork buns, and assorted
dim sum
that the other old women produced from their nylon shoulder bags and plastic thermoses.

But they were finished with breakfast by the time the tour bus crossed into the checkpoint.

An immigration agent came aboard and checked the driver’s papers. He looked over the group of elderly Chinese women, and silently took a head count, matching the total against the manifest. He glanced at his watch, looked around cursorilly, and stepped off the bus.

The line of vehicles had backed up along the highway, idling well beyond the checkpoint, the air thick with exhaust and the smell of rubber.

The agent waved the charter tour bus through.

No passport needed, Mona noted, an easy pass.

The brief stop had allowed the winter cold aboard. Mona felt the chill and was glad to have worn the cheap down jacket.

Back on the road, she noticed that some of the signs were in French. The highway led them to a bridge over a river, and abruptly to a big city spread below them—steel and glass towers, a modern metropolis set against a backdrop of dark but majestic mountains.

She squeezed the jade, pressed out
Fire over Mountain
. Auspicious for the traveler. There is promise in the journey.

Soon enough they were passing under a huge Chinatown gate in
Won Kor Wah
, Vancouver, tall concrete columns supporting a facade of yellow ceramic dragonheads in a classic pagoda motif. She saw buildings and parks bearing Chinese names, and Chinese words on the street signs.

There were old, narrow buildings, many of which were rundown, showing an older traditional Chinatown. They visited a classical Chinese garden dedicated to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, father of modern China.

She purchased a souvenir letter opener from a gift shop. It resembled a dagger and its metal handle was embossed with a colorful dragon design over the word C
HINATOWN
. Weighing its heft in her hand reminded Mona of Fa Mulan, the woman warrior.

She put the souvenir dagger into her handbag. Then something red caught her eye; it was a red jade bangle. A simple jadeite bangle that was colored dark red, like chicken blood. Real red jade was rare, and she knew this bangle was only a gift-shop trinket, but she wanted to add to her luck. Red jade was especially lucky, and also brought longevity. It inspired courage.

She purchased it as well, and while slipping it onto her unadorned left wrist, she stepped back into the Vancouver Chinatown afternoon. Walking along the streets she heard Toishanese and Cantonese dialects, and even Spanish. Chinese from Peru, she guessed, from Mexico, perhaps Panama.

The tour guide announced they were scheduled for dinner at the Good Fortune Restaurant.

The bus wound its way through the city. She saw British signs that reminded her of Hong Kong places: Queen Elizabeth Theatre, King George Place, Stanley Park.

They passed through a Japantown. The Japanese maple and cherry trees were pretty, she thought, but the history of hatred made her feel sad.

The dinner at Good Fortune was very tasty, but inferior to the Chinese feasts she’d attended in New York. Gone now, she remembered, for good.

Afterward, the old women checked into their rooms at the Budget Inn, where the Chinese staff made everyone feel at home. They were expecting an eventful day tomorrow so most of the seniors retired early. On the second day, the tour bus brought them to a different part of the city, to a different Chinatown where the buildings were new and tall, where the streets were clean, and the Chinese signs barely noticeable.

The community didn’t look like a Chinatown, more like the modern Golden Village that it was called. The seniors enjoyed lunch at one of the many fine restaurants inside a huge luxury shopping mall. Most of the businesses were Chinese-owned, and the shoppers appeared more affluent, stylish, and exuded a fresh young energy.

Mona imagined that she could start anew here.

The tour group was allowed to roam the streets for an hour. Mona purchased two daily newspapers,
Ming Pao
and
Sing Tao
, to read on the trip back, thinking about local news and listings. She bought a Chinatown tourist map from a newsstand, and tried to memorize the streets as she walked, taking business cards from tea shops, clothing stores, Chinese supermarkets, and banks. New destinations, she thought.

She overheard conversations in mainland-inflected Mandarin and Taiwanese.

There was an international airport nearby.

The afternoon turned to evening as they returned to the older Chinatown, to a buffet dinner at a banquet-style restaurant. The Budget Inn was within walking distance, and she finished the night going over the Chinese newspapers and watching the Chinese-language satellite TV news.

It began to snow the next morning, and after a
dim sum
breakfast they returned south along the Interstate. The sky had turned to slate as Mona gently fingered the charm.

Earth over Thunder
, it sang. Return. No troubles at home. All is well.

She took a deep breath. Welcome help. Time is on your side.

She was keeping faith, in the
yin
and
yang
.

In the balance of the universe.

Fan and Sandal

He watched the stick of incense burn down beside the figurine of Kwan Kung, God of War.

“We’ll see how clever the little whore is,” said Gee Sin, the
bok ji sin
, White Paper Fan, sipping at his tumbler of XO cognac. He huffed into the cell phone to Tsai, the
cho
hai
, Grass Sandal, his liaison at the other end of the longdistance line.

Outside the high-rise picture windows, the Hong Kong night covered the panoramic sweep of Victoria Harbour, its neon lights and colors dancing off the dark water toward the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. Stretching out on the Kowloon side were the city lights of Yau Ma Tei and Mongkok, sparkling in the distance like a scattering of diamonds. A full moon was overhead.

Down to his right, to the mean streets of Wan Chai, and then sweeping all around, was the power and money of the waterfront districts.

Gee Sin was pleased with the information. Chinese jewelry stores. After all, she couldn’t
eat
the one-ounce gold Panda coins she’d stolen from Uncle Four, or the fistfuls of diamonds. She’d have to sell or trade them at some point. Then the underground money traders would expose her.

He resolved to be patient, studying his reflection in the mirror wall of the Mid-Levels condominium: a bald pate with bushy brows flecked with gray, oversaggy eyes. An old face. At sixty-three years of age, he was the triad’s number three in command, holding a 415 rank, which was a magic Chinese number. Only the
hung kwun
, enforcer, and the
Shan Chu
,
Lung Tau
, the Red Circle Dragon Head himself, were above him.

The
Hung Huen
, Red Circle Triad, had devolved from their long past nationalism and noble resolve to overthrow the corrupt Ching dynasty, and to restore the Ming era. Patriotic honor had given way, in a matter of decades, to the greed, power, and bloodlust of the modern world. The Red Circle had more than a hundred thousand members, half of them in Hong Kong and China, the others operating in overseas Chinatowns scattered across the globe. This triad organization was only one of dozens of powerful secret societies that controlled the world’s heroin trade and a cycle of dirty money, billions of dollars feeding into and out of gambling, prostitution, stock manipulation, and financial fraud that crossed the oceans and touched every continent.

In the near corner stood a life-sized terra-cotta Chinese warrior, a dusty veneer covering his armor, the sword in his hand. One of the many from the thousands of clay warriors taken from Sian by the Red Circle.

Guarding the emperor.

Guarding Paper Fan.

He remembered the first of the Thirty-six Strategies of the society:
Cross the ocean without letting the sky know.
He was lost in memories of his initiation until more information came over the phone.

“Her mother may have been Buddhist,” Tsai, the
cho hai
, continued. “She died long ago.”

Yet another direction to follow, thought Gee Sin, but well worth consideration. “Have the members check the temples,” he advised, “but do not add more people to the search. Keep to the chosen few, your discreet men. Women are even better. The monks are clever and will see through lies. But Buddha is merciful, compassionate. Tell your comrades to plead with the monks; convince them that Mona is a beloved relative who has been diagnosed with cancer. Say that she is afraid but if she doesn’t get treatment she will surely die. Your sandal ranks need to be extremely diligent. When we find her, everyone will be well compensated.”

Gee Sin didn’t want to use the 49s, the
say gow jai
, the dog soldiers. They’d surely muck things up, spook the prey. They were good enough as street muscle, but lacked the sophistication to carry out a quiet search for the whore. Paper Fan had dispatched only the Grass Sandal ranks to conduct the search and pursuit. She can run, he mused, but she cannot hide forever.

“It is simply a function of time,” he said to Tsai. He didn’t think she was still in
Mei Kwok
, the United States, but Chinese communities in the various far-flung cities of the world were connected through the secret societies, and she’d surface sooner or later.

It was almost the period of
Yuen Siu
, the Lantern Festival, and soon the lanterns would be hung up at Wong Tai Sin Temple and a thousand lesser temples worldwide.

The cadre of Red Circle hunters would surely find her then.

He took another sip of the cognac, feeling safe in the luxury of his condo refuge, his fortress and lair, advising Grass Sandal over the secure digital cell-phone connection. He knew it was mid-morning in Tsai’s location in New York City and took pleasure in knowing that all the Red Circle’s investments in Manhattan properties had been successful, and prices of their real estate remained steady. He commended Tsai before terminating the call.

He poured more cognac and let his mind drift to the society’s successes. The Circle had refined forgery, fraudulent credit, and identity theft into an art
and
a science. He reflected again on the Thirty-six Strategies and how he’d added a twist to Number Seven: Create something out of nothing, to use false information effectively. The Grass Sandals were creating false identities, welding real account numbers to paper names, breeding phantoms who would bring millions to the Red Circle.

To steal the dragon and replace it with the phoenix meant stealing account numbers and matching them with new faces. They’d manufactured bogus driver’s licenses for picture identification. The fake licenses were computer-generated and virtually indistinguishable from the real deal. Any of the mobile mills, with portable laptops and rented laser printers, could turn out acceptable forged passports and visas as well.

He took another swallow from his glass of cognac, caught his breath, and closed his eyes. He had learned quickly from past operations in Canada. Instead of selling the cards to amateurs who would get caught and call attention to their operation, he’d decided to use selected Chinese people in order to impose control and improve communication. The idea of using storage locations and closed warehouses was his way of adding mobility and volume for the operators. They would fence the scam’s products through the triad’s legitimate businesses.

Gee Sin, the senior adviser, had taken advantage of the Americans’ holiday preoccupation with gift-giving, the annual buying frenzy that overwhelmed what was originally a religious holiday. Paper Fan had quickly realized how important these several weeks were to merchants hoping to rake in sales, which, in the crazed crush of business, made them careless and blind to credit-card fraud.

They’d focused on high-end electronics that the Red Circle could sell easily through its network of merchants, expensive items like video camcorders, digital cameras, and laptop computers. Diamond jewelry and expensive watches. They’d expected to steal tens of millions of dollars’ worth of merchan-dise over the holidays. The legitimate cardholder and the card-issuing company wouldn’t detect anything amiss until weeks after the holidays, when the monthly statements arrived in the mail. By then, Paper Fan and his operatives would be long gone, leaving only a trail of smoke and shadows.

His thoughts changed again as he felt a slow throbbing at his left wrist. Occasionally, he’d feel sharp pain there, but this occurred mostly in cold climates like Vancouver or Toronto.

Time to take it off, he thought.

The psychiatric member of the rehabilitation and physical therapy team at Kowloon had suggested to him the idea of residual pain, the severed nerves remembering the moment of the chop. “It’s all in the brain,” she’d said. “You think you feel pain so you do feel pain.” Mostly it was chafing, or too much pressure at the new joint, where scar-sealed bone and muscle bumped against the silicone-padded socket of the prosthesis.

He could remove the prosthesis to relieve the discomfort. Painkiller medication was prescribed if necessary.

Dew keuih
, fuck, he cursed quietly. He knew it wasn’t the hand. After all, it fit well and he’d trained with it, had
willed
it to work well. It wasn’t the hand.

It was the attack that he remembered, hazy now but still horrific even after twenty-five years; the pain of a young man revived in the stump arm of an old man. The glint of light from his left. Raising his
bow arm
reflexively. It wasn’t the hand, marvelously sculpted and engineered. He’d been knocked down. When he braced to get up, he saw that he had no left hand. It was the memory.

And he had survived the attack. The chop had been intended for his neck.

Gee Sin detached the elastic and Velcro band that wrapped around his elbow and slipped the hand off. He imagined it as a weapon, nestled in the sling, its holster. He set it down on the black glass coffee table.

The throbbing in the stump ebbed.