ROBERT K. TANENBAUM.

ACT OF REVENGE.

Dedication.

To those most special, Rachael, Roger, Billy, and Patti and in memory of our friend, Homicide Detective Don Baeszler.

Chapter 1.

IN AND OUT, WAS HIS THOUGHT AS HE stood in the dusty storeroom of the Asia Mall. The targets would be there, and I'll be here, and the Vietnamese guy would come in through the rear entrance, off of Howard Street, down that little hallway, and do it. Then the Vietnamese guy would leave the way he came in, and I'll walk out through the store. The man strolled back and forth, pacing off the distances, humming softly. He was a slight Chinese man in a cheap blue suit and a white nylon short-sleeved shirt b.u.t.toned to the top. On his feet he wore twelve-dollar Kinney loafers over white cotton socks. n.o.body would have looked twice at him on any street in Chinatown, which was one of the things he now counted on. Walking out through the mall, through the throngs of Asian people buying cheap clothes, household items, and fabrics, and out into Ca.n.a.l Street. No one would ever have seen him with the men from Hong Kong.

A rattle announced a stock clerk coming in from the store with a hand truck. The man in the blue suit stayed where he was, and the stock clerk looked right through him, hoisted a carton of woks onto his truck, and departed. The stock clerk had seen the man any number of times, on the street or in the mall talking to the boss, and he had also never seen him before in his life, depending on who was asking.

After the stock clerk left, the man clapped his hands hard, three times, as they do before a shrine to frighten the demons who tend to lurk by shrines, and listened carefully after each clap. This section of the stockroom was composed largely of ceiling-high shelves made of steel pipes, rough planks, and chicken wire, stuffed plump with pillows and beanbag chairs, making effective baffles for loud, sharp sounds. It was likely that no one in the mall would hear anything out of the ordinary. Smiling a vague and modest smile, the man in the blue suit came out of the storeroom. He asked the girl at the front counter for a pack of Salems, and she gave it to him. She did not ask him for any money, nor did he offer any. She was another of the very many people who did not recall ever seeing this man while doing him various favors. He walked out onto Ca.n.a.l Street, crowded with shoppers on this sunny Friday in early June, crowded by American standards, near empty by the standards the man had grown up with in China. This afternoon, in the back room of the Asia Mall, he would complete a plan five years in the making, a tower of mahjong tiles that required the delicate placing of a last exquisitely balanced piece to hold it together. With that last ivory click, his life would change.

The man walked down Ca.n.a.l toward Lafayette, smoking, his mind calm. He knew he was good at this, that his plan was sound and would bring forth the results he desired. Of course, the men from Hong Kong might not come at all, but that could not be helped. Everything else had been considered and accounted for, and it all would have worked exactly as planned, except for the little girl. And who could have imagined such a girl?

The girl, at about that moment, was up at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons getting her head examined. Dr. Morris Shadkin, a small, youngish, plump man with a friendly pop-eyed look and unfashionable black sideburns, was doing the examining. The girl said, in an exaggerated nervous voice, "Okay, doc, don't beat around the bush. Am I . . . am I . . . going to make it?"

Shadkin looked up from the sonogram strips he was studying and adopted a grave mien. "I'm afraid not, Lucy," he intoned in a good replication of the voice used by the elderly scientists in fifties monster movies. "I'm afraid your brain will have to be removed for further study. I'm sorry."

"Oh, no problem, doc," said the girl. "Could I say good-bye to my dollies first?"

He laughed. "Yes, but be quick about it! This is big science. What do you think of this?" He handed her a couple of sonogram strips stapled together. "Check out 102 and 102b."

The girl looked at the patterns. "They look the same," she said.

"Yeah. Those are phoneme prints corrected for pitch and timbre. One of them is a native Cantonese speaker, and the other is you."

"So I speak perfect Cantonese. We knew that already."

"Hey, who's the doctor here? Now look at these, wise guy."

"What's this, the Russian?"

"Yeah, which you don't speak at all. Look at the sequence down the page." He pointed with a pencil. "This is the tape, this is you. See: rough at first, but you got a learning curve like a rocket, kid. Down there on the bottom it's nearly a perfect match."

"Oh, yes, I'm this big prodigy," said Lucy in affected boredom, "but will it bring me true happiness?"

Shadkin twiddled an imaginary cigar and bounced his eyebrows Groucho-like.

"Stick with me, kid, you'll be wearing diamonds. Want to see the EEG results?"

"From the thing with the green shower cap and the wires?"

"Yo, that." He tapped with the pencil at various places on a life-size plaster model of a human brain. "You seem to have an unusually active Wernicke's area. That's the chunk of brain we think is responsible for comprehension of language. Same with Heschl's gyri, which is right here. Now, we're no longer strict localizers, that is, we no longer think that there's a little smidgen of brain meat with 'car' on it and another with 'sa.s.safras,' but it's pretty clear there are, even at this gross level, some differences between your EEG output and those of ordinary mortals. It's hard to explain right now. It's not a simple bilingualism. But as I understand it, you've always been bilingual in Cantonese."

"As far back as I can remember."

"This was a child-care worker-the one who taught you?"

"Sort of. It's a little more complicated. My mother dumped me on the Chen family starting at about six weeks. She's very career-oriented, my mother."

"And why did the Chen family take you in? I bet that's an interesting story."

She shrugged. "One of my mother's heroic deeds. She was running the rape and s.e.x crimes unit at the D.A. Mrs. Chen's younger sister came over from China, and she was in the country about ten days when some guys s.n.a.t.c.hed her off the street and gang-raped her. The next day she jumped in front of a train."

"Jesus!"

"Yeah. Chinese people don't like to mess with the cops, and the Chens didn't tell anybody about the rape, or even report it. But my mother figured it for a rape and found the guys and put them away. It was a big case."

"How did she . . . ?"

"The vic had bite marks on her," said Lucy shortly. She changed the subject. "So my brain is different, huh?"

Shadkin took the hint and picked up a sheaf of EEG printouts, and began to point out what the various peaks and flats meant about the busy neurons beneath the electrodes. After a bit, the girl found out more than she wanted to know. It was good that Shadkin treated her like an adult, but there were limits to her interest in neurophysiology, even that of her own brain. Her attention wandered as he went on summarizing what was known about the neural substrate of language formation (not a h.e.l.l of a lot, apparently) and the importance of studying someone who had preserved so late in life something close to the language-absorptive capacities of very young children.

Her gaze drifted around the small office, a typical academic's rat hole-papers and journals piled on every available surface, strips of EEG and sonogram paper hanging from the ceiling, odd bits of handmade machinery, posters from drug companies on the walls, along with diplomas and framed awards.

"Are you married or anything?" she asked abruptly, catching him in the middle of a trip down the Fissure of Rolando.

He said, "No, I'm not. Why do you ask?"

"Just nosy. How come? Are you, like, gay?"

"Nope. I guess I was just waiting for someone like you to come along."

She rolled her eyes and blushed charmingly. "You know, you could get arrested for stuff like that," she said primly.

"Hey, I can wait. Listen, it'll be great. After I describe your brain and make you famous and win the n.o.bel prize, you can push me around in a wheelchair for twenty years. Trust me, you'll love it."

At that point the phone rang. Shadkin picked it up and said, "h.e.l.lo. Yeah, it went great. Yeah, we're just about finished for today. Uh-huh. Yeah, here she is."

He handed the receiver across the desk. "Your mom."

While Lucy spoke on the phone, Shadkin took the opportunity to study his electroencephalograms, but his eyes kept sliding over to study the girl. This was their first session, and already he was making plans to write up a major grant, with her as its chief object of study. Ronnie Chau, his post-doc, had found her; apparently she was quite a figure in Chinatown, where a lot of Chau's relatives still lived. Even from the scant data he had already, he could see that she was a true linguistic prodigy, possibly the rarest quirk of which the human brain was capable, far rarer than math whizzes or plain vanilla geniuses. It really seemed as though in Lucy Karp's head the hard-wired apparatus that enables babies to learn their native tongues, and which switches off in most people at about age five, had stayed on. She claimed that she had learned French in a couple of weeks and, from what Shadkin had already heard, she was perfectly fluent.

The talent seemed to have affected the rest of her personality, too. Shadkin liked children and, as a student of the development of language, he naturally had much to do with them. He could tell that there was something odd about Lucy Karp, fascinating-odd, not annoying-odd. The body language: straight in the chair, hands folded and still on her lap, none of the extravagant slumps, tics, and gestures normally a.s.sociated with American kids. Her look was direct, remarkably so, as if she had contrived to let a thirty-year-old woman peer out from her twelve-year-old eyes. Funny eyes, too, the color of cigarette tobacco and set slightly aslant in the face, richly lashed above prominent cheekbones. But aside from those eyes and the good cheekbones, an unlovely child, unnaturally thin and dull of complexion, with a nose and mouth too large for the pointed little face. Not what he would have called a cute girl in his own dimly recalled adolescence, no, nothing cute about Lucy Karp. There was also a certain air of neglect about her. She wore baggy black cotton trousers, cheap black high-top Asian sneakers, a red T-shirt with Chinese characters in white on the front, and a worn black velvet vest over it, covered on the front with ragged embroidery. Her hair, which was dark, neck-length, thick and curly, and not terribly clean, was parted severely in the middle and drawn back over her broad forehead by two barrettes, green plastic alligators, a little remnant of childhood there, Shadkin thought, and thought further, this kid has something negative going with the mom. Lucy was answering whatever her mother had to say in tense monosyllables, and a sharp, deep line had appeared between her brows. Another short volley of uh-huhs and yes, moms, and she hung up the phone, looking pinched around the nostrils.

"A problem?" Shadkin asked.

Her expression resumed its neutrality. "Oh, not really. She's involved in a case and can't come to pick me up. She wants me to take a cab home."

"Do you have cab fare? I'd be glad to-"

"No, thank you, I have enough," she replied quickly. "So, what now? Do you want to examine me some more?"

"Oh, yeah. In fact, I was just thinking about writing a grant, just for you. How would that be? A couple, three times a week? I mean, you'd have to check with your parents . . ."

"They won't mind. Is there folding money involved?"

Shadkin let out a startled laugh. "For you? Yeah, I guess. What did you have in mind?"

"How about twenty-five an hour? Plus expenses."

He whistled. "That's pretty steep for a kid."

"A unique kid. You said it." She looked at him coolly.

I wonder where she learned that look, he thought, and then he agreed, and they shook hands. Her grip was firm and strangely hot. A metabolism like a vole, he thought. No wonder she can't put on any weight.

She said good-bye and left. Shadkin let out a long breath, laughed, and sang "Sank heav-ahn for leetle gurrls . . ." and the rest of the verse in the same stupid accent. Then he rummaged out a lined pad and a pen from the clutter and began the process of asking the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for an enormous s.h.i.tload of cash.

Lucy Karp had no intention of taking a cab, although a slow cab caught in midtown traffic was going to be part of the cover story. Instead she slipped into the subway at 168th Street and took the A train downtown. She would pocket the cab fare, of course. Money had lately become more significant. She was a.s.sembling a trove, for what purpose she could not quite articulate, but it had something to do with her mother, with breaking away. At some level, of course, she understood that she was twelve, that she was not, in fact, going to light out for the territory anytime soon, even that her lot was not in the least comparable to that of kids with serious problems, but still there was that itch to have a little secret pile. Shadkin's money, which would remain a private matter to the extent possible, would make a nice addition.

When the train came roaring in, she boarded the first car and settled herself in the corner seat across from the motorman's booth. She amused herself by memorizing the appearances of the other people in the car, closing her eyes and describing them to herself, then checking to see if she'd got it right. She was pretty good at it by now. She had learned it a year or so ago from a middle-aged Vietnamese gentleman with an interesting past, an employee of her mother's. It was an art useful if one is liable to be followed by people of evil intent. Lucy had not to her knowledge ever been so followed, but given her mother's activities, it was not excessively paranoid to think that she might one day be on some psychopath's list.

At 125th Street the first wave of rush hour boarded the car, ending her game, and she took a worn yellow-covered paperback book from her backpack. One of her great disappointments had been the discovery that facility in learning to speak foreign languages did not mean that she could automatically read them as easily. She had to learn to read French and Chinese and Arabic with sweat, just as little French and Chinese and Arab children did. Most pedagogues would not have started a young girl off with Claudine l'ecole, Colette's racy account of s.e.xual silliness at a girls' school circa 1890, but Lucy had rifled it from her mother's bookshelf, attracted by the t.i.tle, and had thereafter fallen under its spell. The book had immediately become her favorite, alongside Kim, for it supplied the girl-specific material in which the Kipling novel was lamentably void. Lucy had consigned Catcher in the Rye, her favorite of the previous year, to the closet bottom; compared to Claudine and Kim, Holden was a gormless d.i.c.khead. The problem was how to combine the two into a model for life. It was rather easier to imagine a turbaned, filthy Claudine slipping through the alleys of Lah.o.r.e, speaking all the languages of the bazaar, the Little Friend of All the World, than it was to imagine Kim having thrills in the washroom in the Montigny school, but the problem remained. That her own mother had confronted the same quandary at about the same age and had solved it, after a fashion, was an idea that did not occur to Lucy, for her relations with that woman had degenerated into a series of border skirmishes, with the prospect of a major battle to come.

Lost in the story and struggling with the antiquated provincial slang of the French, she almost missed her stop, and had to shove her narrow body through a dense ma.s.s of strap hangers to the almost closing doors. Lucy did not mind the subway in the least, and rode it at most hours, especially enjoying those rides when, as now, her mother thought she was safe in a stuffy cab. None of the things that were supposed to happen to lone young girls on subways had yet happened to her. No one had even pinched her, but then, she admitted to herself, she had little enough yet that was pinchable. She caught a glimpse of herself in the gla.s.s of a wall ad and grimaced. This was something the lovely Claudine had no reason to worry about, and Lucy was of two minds about it. Boys ignored her, which was good, because she certainly didn't want them nosing after her as they were starting to do to her friend, Janice Chen. On the other hand . . . on the other hand, what? She couldn't fully articulate it, not yet, but the thing was there, beneath her conscious mind, fueled by the menace of hormones coiled in ambush: s.e.xual rivalry, the ever ignored issue in the lives of mothers and daughters. It did not help that she looked like a geeky boy, and her mother looked like a baroque saint as imagined by Bernini.

Lucy stepped out of the subway station, blinked in the bright June sunlight, took a left, and walked into Asia. The outposts of Chinatown had taken over much of Ca.n.a.l Street in her own lifetime, pushing up from the south via Mott and Mulberry streets and spreading east and west on the broad thoroughfare. Lucy knew Chinatown. She was practically a native, having been born a few streets north on Crosby Street, where Little Italy meets Soho, and had from an early age been a presence on its streets, gadding about with the four Chen children and their parents, cousins, in-laws, and a.s.sociates. And Chinatown knew Lucy. Hardly a merchant on its streets had not done a double-take when the gwailo infant had addressed him or her in the clanging accents of Guangdong. For when Lucy's mother had unexpectedly rescued the Chen family's honor, she had created an enormous burden of bao, a debt of reciprocity owed to her not only by the Chen family proper, but by the Chen name a.s.sociation, its allied name a.s.sociations, the tong to which the family belonged, and, to a lesser extent, the county and village a.s.sociations of the fifty-millionfold Chens. That Lucy's mother had only been doing her job was a laughable concept to the old-country Chinese, to whom life was largely a meshwork of unspoken obligations. Thus it happened that Lucy Karp, being first her mother's daughter, and second, the foster daughter of the Chen clan, and thirdly a miraculous and rather spooky speaker of perfect Cantonese (and arguably not less than a reincarnation of Chen Renmi, the dead sister), had achieved a status that few Caucasians are ever granted in that community: she had become a real person, someone with mihnhai, with face, and no longer merely a white ghost.

She had emerged into a fine New York summer evening, Ca.n.a.l Street packed with trucks and cars going to the tunnel or the bridges, sending up a fine stink of fumes to the sky, which was just going slatey blue, the stink mixing with the higher notes of fried fat, starch, spice, and decay to make the true Chinatown perfume. The wide sidewalks teemed with shoppers just out of work, enough of them Asians of various tribes to make the gwailo among them stand out. Lucy threaded through the crowd and into the Asia Mall, a wide double storefront on the north side of Ca.n.a.l, and a typical enterprise of the district. Its show-windows were nearly covered with hand-lettered ads on white butcher paper, Chinese characters in red paint touting shoes, clothing, fabric, drugstore items, and food specialties of the Orient. It was a great success and the result of over twenty years of backbreaking labor by the Chen family.

As she pa.s.sed through the Asia Mall, she greeted the checkout ladies in Cantonese, a.s.sured them she had eaten, inquired after their families, and they about hers (their hands never stopping to punch in and stuff bags, never pausing in the acc.u.mulation of wealth), and she moved on to the back of the store, and through the swinging door to the storeroom. She made her way down the aisles of the cavernous s.p.a.ce, treading familiar pathways until she came to the pillow section. She scampered up the pipe scaffolding like a young monkey, crawled through a s.p.a.ce in the chicken wire, and wriggled through fake-fur pa.s.sages until she came to a void, a cave about ten feet on a side, entirely surrounded by fluffy beanbags dyed colors so garish that they were hardly salable, even to Filipinos. A s.p.a.ce had been left above, like a hairy skylight, through which a sickly fluorescent glow penetrated, enough to read by. It was a perfect hideout, if you ignored the stink of cheap plastic, and here she found, as she had expected, Janice Chen and Mary Ma.

They say that two boys is half a boy and three boys is no boy at all; it is as true of girls. Janice Chen was supposed to be "helping" in the stockroom and had asked Mary Ma to share the burden and goof off. The two-Lucy's closest friends, Janice as good as a sister-might have stood in a pattern book for the two most familiar types of Chinese girls. Mary had the flat moon face, rosebud mouth, cheeks like peaches, and the bowl cut with bangs, while Janice was slender and golden as a flute, with high cheekbones, a sharp small nose, and forty inches of black hair running down her back in a braid like a python.

"Lucy!" the other girls both cried, but not too loudly. "We thought you were getting your brains scrambled at Columbia," Janice added.

"I was, but I got out early and took the train."

"What did he make you do?"

"Strip naked and walk around on my hands. He's really a little bit of a s.e.x maniac."

"No, really!" Mary insisted.

"Oh, just science stuff. I had to wear this like old-fashioned bathing cap with wires coming out of it and translate from Gundngw and guoyu and French and Vietnamese, back and forth. Totally boring. But he's going to pay me. A lot."

"Really?" asked Janice. "Are you going to keep it?" In her world earnings were the property of the family.

"Of course," said Lucy, "and don't tell anyone, okay? What're you guys doing?"

"We're supposed to be breaking boxes," answered Janice. "My brother's being a total dork about it. He loves to give orders-big deal, he's in charge of us. So we're hiding."

Mary added responsibly, "We should go back. He'll tell your dad."

"Oh, let him wait," said Lucy. "Later we'll all do it together and get it finished. You want me to read you more Claudine?"

Glittering eyes and giggles. Lucy got out her book and translated the part where the schoolgirls have a fight in a hotel room with their chemises rucking naughtily up around their various interesting parts. The rural dialect in which much of it was written gave her some trouble, but she bulled through, in the process adding some lubricious details omitted by Colette. Like the girls in the novel, the three of them were, in fact, as pure as boiled eggs, but, in the manner of many such children, they very much wished to think of themselves as s.e.xy devils. Of course, they had swiped copies of Playgirl, and they had weathered copies of Zap Comix-they were 1980s rather than 1880s girls, after all-but still the lush and sensuous language of a ninety-year-old French novel provided them with the required combination of secrecy and salaciousness. The three of them lay stretched out, belly down on the fur, with Lucy in the center, their bodies touching, and Lucy toyed with Janice's long rope of hair as she read. Each would remember this span of time-it could not have been more than forty minutes-with regret and a certain longing, as the pinnacle of something sweet and absolutely lost. So intent were they on what they were doing, so deliciously close and intimate was the atmosphere of the furry cave they had made, that it took some little time for it to register that strange voices were rising through the beanbags from directly below them. Lucy stopped reading, and they all listened.

"Sssh! Listen!" Janet interrupted in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

"Your brother?" asked Mary.

"No, dummy! It's two people, right below us." They all listened.

"That's not your dad, is it?" Lucy asked Janice in a low voice.

"No, it's strangers," whispered Janice.

Lucy said, "Let's go and see who they are." With that, she stashed her book and wriggled away through the bags, but not the way she had come in. Instead, she pushed her way to the face of the bin that overlooked the main aisle of the stockroom. Shortly, Janice followed, and then Mary, their three faces pressing against the wire mesh through a narrow slit between a pair of beanbags.

Looking down, they saw three men, two youthful and one elderly, all Chinese. One of the young men and the older man were standing together, and were dressed in cream silk suits. The other young man, clad in a blue suit, was addressing them in Cantonese, in the accents of rural Guangzhou. He was using extremely courteous language, flattering words, something about staying, about others who would arrive soon. The older man replied in the same tongue, but with a Hong Kong accent, a heated reply to the effect that he had come a long way, and did not appreciate the waste of time. His younger companion concurred, but more vigorously. The blue-suited man resumed his appeals. From their high angle, the girls could not see the faces of the men below, but it was clear from the body language of the two Hong Kong men that they were not mollified.

What happened next happened so fast that for a stunned instant the girls could not believe what they had witnessed. A slightly built man, wearing a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and tied in place, walked around the corner from an adjoining aisle and, holding a pistol stiffly at arm's length, shot the two Hong Kong men in the back, and when they fell down he shot them both in the head. Pop-pop. Pop-pop. Then he was gone.

Lucy heard Mary Ma take a sharp breath, and knew that in another half second a scream would burst out and so she twisted like a fish and clapped a hand over the other girl's mouth. This quick motion made the beanbags shift, and the man in the blue suit lifted his head up and looked right at them. Hours seemed to pa.s.s. Lucy could feel Mary's rapid, boiling-hot breath swish past her hand. Her palm was soaked with drool, and Mary's breathing was starting to make a nasty bubbling sound against it, which Lucy was sure could be heard across Ca.n.a.l Street.

"Be quiet!" she hissed into Mary's ear. The other girl took one long, shuddering breath and was still. The man stared for a little longer, then turned on his heel and walked away. The two Hong Kong men stayed where they had fallen, the runnels of blood from their heads joining into one round, ghastly pool, black as tar under the harsh fluorescent lights.

Janice Chen was the first to move, sliding backward through the sticky, clinging vinyl and the whispering fake fur. Back in the hideout, Mary Ma burst into blubbering tears, and the two other girls threw themselves on her to get her to stop, Lucy going so far as to grab a handful of Day-Glo pink fur and hold it over her mouth. In a minute or so, Mary had regained control and they got off her.

"Oh, G.o.d, what are we going to do?" she whimpered.

"I know that guy," said Janice, ignoring this. The other two stared at her.

"What guy?" Lucy asked.

"The guy in the blue suit, the guy who walked away. I don't know his name, but he's always hanging around with my father."

"A tong guy?"

Janice nodded, eyes dropping. Lucy understood Chinatown well enough to understand this. No important Chinatown businessman, especially not a first-generation Chinese immigrant like Louie Chen, was unconnected to the tongs. The Chens' tong was the Hap Tai a.s.sociation, but Lucy had never heard a breath that they might be involved in murder, at least not recently. The tongs worked their wills far more subtly nowadays. On the other hand, there were certainly gangs in Chinatown, and gangs killed people, and nearly every gang had some affiliation with a tong.

"What are we going to do, Luhs?"