Graffiti Palace Page 8

  Then a fat Chinese man in a disheveled plum robe stands before Monk: Fu Manchu mustache, clutching a clay pipe, red pupils shrunk like fiery pinheads, looks like that Keye Luke after some booze- and pill-fueled Lionel Atwill party … “I’m Shen Shen. Don’t worry, it’s cool,” untying the rope from his wrists. “You don’t have to smoke, unless?” offering the smoldering pipe.

  “No thanks.” Monk rubs his wrists, stands on wobbly legs: drugged eyes gleam with disinterest from their shadowed cubbyholes. “What the fuck’s he saying, lotus-eaters?”

  “The lotus, the flower of dreams … of myths…” His Fu Manchu crinkles into a grin. “You’re a wanderer, blown off course by ill winds, as it were.”

  “More like uptown by a fucked-up tricycle. What the fuck is goin’ on, man?” Angry, glaring at the door, waiting for those two jive-ass Chinamen to come back in so he can throw a punch.

  “Don’t worry, he’s a little nuts. That’s Yin, the one in the yellow suit? He owns the restaurant below.”

  “Below?” Monk rubs his numb wrists as he calms down.

  “Yeah, this is the third floor, ye olde opium den. Pull up your chair, Yin’ll spring you in an hour or two when he comes to his senses. He’s a devotee of the seed too,” tapping the clay pipe. “Makes him a tad paranoid. This is a dangerous year for Yin. The Chinese calendar declares this is a yin year, not a yang year, therefore it is a year when Yin may be able to prosper or advance his objectives. The heavenly sign this year is wood, very lucky for Yin, considering his superstitious devotion to the sacred tree that grows through the center of this restaurant. But the zodiac’s earthly sign is the snake, treachery, a foreboding omen for Mr. Yin.”

  Monk pulls the chair closer to the bunk, rubbing his temples: no time to think, only confusion; where is his grace or luck? There is only a dull flicker that he should do something, but then this thought too fades into a bewildered inertia. “What’s this spy shit?”

  “Old Yin says he invented the fortune cookie.” Shen laughs, inhaling smoke. “At the turn of the century, Yin arrived in San Francisco with the usual wave of Yellow Peril. He set up a bakery in Chinatown and was struggling like everyone else. One day, to surprise his girlfriend, he got the idea to write her a tiny love note and he folded it in a sugar cookie and baked it. The fortune cookie was born, or so Yin says. The cookie catches on and he’s selling ’em like crazy in his little bakery, he and his girl staying up all night, writing good-luck slogans that soon turn to simple little fortunes. Yin calls them Lucky Cookies. The bakery expands, Yin gets a little money. He hires a couple of people to fold cookies and write fortunes. Things are great, Yin and girlfriend are engaged. One day, this cook named Yang strolls into Yin’s shop and eats a fortune cookie. Soon Yang opens a restaurant down the block called the Fortune Cookie. He serves the little cookies free for dessert and business booms. Of course Yin is pissed off. They become enemies, competing to make faster, cheaper, tastier cookies, each one jealously guarding any breakthroughs that come.”

  “So he thinks I’m a spy for Yang?” Monk shakes his head.

  “They’re still going at it.” Shen laughs, lighting his pipe. “In those early years, around ’04 or ’05, they start experimenting with machines. Yin installs this great steam cookie machine in a secret room behind the bakery, pledging his staff of Fortunists and dough folders to secrecy. Yang has his own secret apparatus of pneumatic pumps that suck the cookie dough down slots that fold them. Later, Yang’s spies smuggle diagrams that reveal Yin can superheat cookies and fold them with steam-driven blades in seconds. The two men are locked in a battle to produce the fastest cookies. Fortunists are hired for amazing handwriting speeds … wood-and-ink stamps are introduced, then printing presses. Buddhist monks are hired with secret copying techniques from China … adepts are found that can write ambidextrously. Then, in ’06, Yin’s machine is mysteriously blown up … dough covers the streets and horrifies passersby, a cloud of confetti fortunes floats down over Chinatown. Yin’s bakery burns to the ground—but everything is wood back then, and Chinatown burns to the fucking ground, as does half of the city.”

  “You’re talking about the great quake?”

  “Quake! That’s all white-man crap.” Shen, exhaling smoke, cackles like a disturbing Buddha. “Once Chinatown was burning, they had the excuse they were waiting for and smashed every ghetto in the city … Chinks, Japs, Mexicans, blacks, everything was burned out and knocked down. The cops, all Micks back then, right? The cops, the best they could come up with was burn down old drunk Mother O’Leary’s barn and blame it on a fucking cow … That riot out there now, they’re trying to clean out the city again.”

  Monk stares at Shen Shen’s face cloaked in sweet smoke. “How come you know so much about it?”

  Shen’s shrunken eyes twinkle. “Because I am the most wretched and lost of men, I am a writer. I was once employed by Yin. I was his greatest Fortunist, until I too, like all who become ruled by the damned cookie, was cursed by madness. You see, Yin and Yang not only jealously guarded their cookie machines. They also developed a stable of writers whose identities and talents became as coveted as the great cookie engines. Fortunists would duel in the streets, murder, poison each other over stolen styles and insulting aphorisms and purloined epigrams. Much of history’s reports of Chinatown tong wars were in fact the secret mayhem between Yin and Yang.” Shen sucks thoughtfully on his pipe. “For a year or two haiku became the rage, Yin and Yang both employing great poets from Japan and the motherland. Finally, Yin had the master Ibuki, and Yang secured the rising haiku genius Bo Gong. An epic battle of haiku kept Chinatown mesmerized for months. Then, one rainy night, on Gin Ling Way in the center of town, the two versifiers faced each other in a kind of sonnet showdown … Crowds of fortune-cookie enthusiasts lined the clapboard sidewalks, gowns and slippers sunk in torrents of mud. Zabatsu, the young rebel, volleyed the first haiku:

  Spring, I strive to see

  Your view but can’t get my head

  That far up my ass.

  “The crowd is silent in awe. It is a great haiku, complete with the kigo, the season word. Now all eyes turn to master Ibuki, whose voice thunders out in the rain:

  Verse blinds like winter

  No answer but question: were—

  “Silence, the crowd waits. Has the master stumbled? Zabatsu sneers, sensing ignominious defeat for the old poet. Then:

  Your parents siblings?

  “Zabatsu grows pale. In his arrogance, he’d forgotten the crucial kireji, the pause for righteous contemplation in the haiku’s second line. His humiliation is complete, he’s lost the contest. His knife gleams under the strung paper lanterns as he slices his throat, red geyser spurting into the muddy rain.”

  Monk’s head is beginning to spin: far too much of this cloying smoke—a sound, muffled scratching, seems to be coming from somewhere beyond the peeling walls.

  “I am blessed—rather, cursed—with a gift of clairvoyance that this mystic flower,” tapping his clay pipe, stubbing a white substance into the bowl with his big dirty thumb, “seems to precipitate. I began writing fortunes for Yin that often came true for his customers: You will acquire a sum of money … You will fall in love next week … Your pain will stop soon. Yin’s business skyrocketed. As always, Yang was spying, hiring his own psychics from China, and another secret war was fought by the two archenemies. A battle of psychic Fortunists, each smuggling misfortune cookies into the other’s shops: You will go blind … Your brother will die … Your sister will be raped.” Shen lights the bowl, closes his eyes, inhales deeply. “Yang brought in a mysterious hired gun from Peking who wrote curses that came true and Yin almost died. Only through the agency of May Tip, Yin’s first wife, the girlfriend who inspired the invention of the cookie itself—you’ve met her, she’s the old woman downstairs in the laundry—was Yin’s life saved. We answered by developing a secret message that upon reading the victim dies instantly … but Yang, nearsighted, had an assistant read it; he collaps
ed and the assassination attempt failed. Cryptic fortunes passed from Yin to Yang and Yang to Yin, driving both men to the edge of sanity: Be at the south window at four o’clock … Beware of May ninth … Chang is the one you suspect … Is it in the green tea?”

  Shen Shen exhales a plume of cobalt smoke, contemplating Monk’s gaze. “You don’t believe me? Mask!” A shadowed lump stirs on a bunk bed, then this effigy draped in blanket shuffles toward them: an old Caucasian man, emaciated face, blind milk-cloud eyes shivering above the stinking blanket’s hem, a skeletal hand gripping near his throat. “The cursed oriental cookie has a mysterious history that is seldom glimpsed by the sane. Even stranger things have happened than my little history. This is Targum Maskull. He was a rich socialite back in the thirties, owned several of those Long Beach oil wells.” Shen Shen removes a small pouch from his robes and extracts a pinch of white paste. “Sing for your supper.” Monk, dizzy, sits on the floorboards as the old man grunts down on the chair. Shen holds the clay pipe in the shaky, bony hand and sparks a match over the bowl. The old man inhales greedily, white orbs rolling back under blood-tinged eyelids.

  “It was back in ’37. I was young, rich, single, so happy,” his voice rasps, exhaling smoke. “One evening I dined in this cursed house, in the Lotus Palace Restaurant. After dinner I opened the fortune cookie. It said Love Gate red umbrella. Love Gate is the east gate of Chinatown. It is carved with the symbols of maternal bliss and motherly love. In those days it was where lovers often met. I knew the area well because my grandfather, so I was told as a young lad, had several importing businesses there. I was a young turk on a lark, so from the restaurant I walked the blocks to the gate. A woman appeared dressed in black with a crimson paper parasol. I introduced myself, showed her the fortune. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” a tear rolling from his blind eye, “a Chinese goddess, long raven hair, skin like snow, full red lips, cyan eyes that twinkled with veiled promises. Qiao was her name. We laughed at the coincidence and she agreed to meet me for dinner the next night.” Maskull lights the pipe with a palsied claw. “We became lovers. Her lust was insatiable. Soon our lovemaking became more and more adventurous. We coupled in a feverish dream in sedans, in alleyways, in parks, under bridges, behind the market booths on Old Arcadia Street, everywhere, every night, she was like a beautiful demon that sucked all the energy, all clear thought from me, until I could think of nothing but the heat of her pried-open legs. One night, we met for drinks not far from the East Gate and she was terrified and began to cry. She told me her landlord was foreclosing on her. He had mysterious, dangerous men and she begged me not to interfere. I must do something, I roared. Reluctantly she said if I were to cosign a loan paper she could escape the disaster. I signed the papers and melted one last time into the intoxication of her embrace.” The old man exhales sweet smoke that envelops Monk in a reeling cloud. “A few nights later we met at our usual assignation beneath the willow trees on the benches by the East Gate. Two men accosted her, shouting, clutching papers in their fists. Of course, I knew who they were. Qiao begged me to leave. I was a white man, an outsider, and should not dare to interfere. A fight ensued and I was knocked unconscious. I awoke on a bamboo mat in a barren bleached room, racked with fever, deathly sick. In the room’s center was a red plate with a single fortune cookie. My trembling hands cracked open the baked crescent. I unfolded a black-and-white photograph. It showed a cute little Chinese girl, perhaps six or seven, smiling, posing between two young teenage boys—it was Qiao and the two men who had accosted her. On the reverse of the photograph, a cryptic message neatly scripted in a feminine hand: Ninghongs 1922, K7-954.22. Of course, all my money was gone, those papers I’d signed, my house emptied and sold, even the oil wells were transferred to some mysterious entity in China. I found out qiao means skillful; oh, she was brilliant. I almost died from the sickness. Doctors found needle marks on my arm and ran tests. Those bastards had injected me with pure opium, and I was hopelessly addicted. Withdrawing from the drug would kill me. I began to haunt opium dens, the pipe was my only refuge from the nightmare my life had become. I staggered through the city in the night, that faded photograph clutched in my hand, searching for her, for an answer, for death. Sometimes I would see a glimpse of cherry parasol turning a corner, or raven hair through a window, but she had vanished like the succubus she was. Finally I showed the photograph to a young man on the sidewalk and he pointed to a building down on Flower Street: the Chinese Library. Staggering among the rows of books, I realized the mysterious figures were subject numbers. K7 is Chinese History. I found the other numbers on the worn spine of an old book and slumped at a table. Chinese-American Genealogy and History, 1890–1925. My finger feverishly traced up and down the columns of pages. Qiao Ninghong had been born in 1915, her two brothers in 1909 and 1910. Her father, Tan Ninghong, married her mother, Jia Liou, in 1907. The father’s history revealed nothing. But the mother, Liou, had been born in Chinatown in 1890. I can still quote you those terrible words: Liou, Jia, remitted to Chinese-American Orphanage 1890, mother, unknown … Many of the women who immigrated to Los Angeles from the Liou clan regions were sold into white slavery. In the notorious pleasure houses of the East or Love Gate sections of China Town, women were forced into opium addiction by their brutal white masters, the most notorious of whom were Captain Jack Sullivan and Big John Maskull…”

  Shen Shen tamps the blind old man’s pipe with another pinch of dreams. Maskull’s milky eyes seem to bore into Monk’s as the old man wheezes, shuffling back toward the shadows of his bunk, mumbling: “So the son shall know the sins of the father.”

  “Well, a few old men, a handful of addicts, soon we’ll all be dead, and the secret histories of the Fortunists will be lost forever.” Shen ruefully stokes his pipe bowl. “The cookie is doomed anyway. Asian groups complain it fosters images of superstitious peasants … grammarians bemoan choppy Charlie Chan syntax … Christians protest heathen sweets with secret prophecies.”

  Footsteps creak outside the door. “They’ve come back.” Monk staggers to his feet, hands curling into fists, almost drowning in the banks of cobalt smoke.

  Shen Shen pulls a strand of red firecrackers from beneath his robes, his pinwheel eyes glinting insanely. “A diversion, then we escape.”

  “We not prisoners here, you stoned asshole,” an old man sighs between rotted teeth clenching a pipe, deep in the shadows of his bunk. “Get fuck out so I sleep.” He’s at the door, which, through shifting clouds of smoke, reveals that the rusty bolt is on the inside.

  Yin and his goon burst through the open door. Behind Monk, firecrackers explode in the air in blinding white puffs of smoke and flying bits of red confetti and Shen Shen’s giggling voice: “Your success will be explosive…”

  Monk stumbles over Yin and falls backward through smoke clouds and out the door.

  He careens down the hallway, Don’t look back. Footsteps chasing him, Yin shouts: “Stop him!” The floor trembles, a low rumble as some great subterranean branch sways below.

  A gold-jacketed waiter, screaming, passes Monk in the opposite direction: “Demons!” Monk can see the great willow trunk now, rising through its aperture here on the third floor, the massive tree disappearing through its hole carved into the mansard rooflines.

  He runs across the arbored foyer, past tendrils of moss webbing from the overhead boughs. Down the staircase, a curving branch above, as if Anna May Wong points the way toward a grease-stained side door.

  He’s in the alley behind the laundry. Ahead, wedged in the prism between steam wafting from wall ventilators and rows of garbage cans, is Gin Ling Way, strung with glittering red lanterns. Monk bolts toward Broadway.

  The gilded Love Gate recedes behind him like the portal of some drug delirium that tempts the pilgrim’s journey home. Monk heads south. The concrete under his shoes is only a patina: beneath are layers of asphalt and tar and sand, stratas of clay and stone where the first alleyway of old Chinatown is buried, the street tha
t long ago was called Calle de Los Negros, the Street of the Dark-Hued Ones. The way that will lead him back into the city, burning now as the descendants of the city’s dark ones rise against summer’s molten anvil.

  8

  Classified: Inter-Department Only

  Volume 6: Emergency Department Directives

  923: When to Take Police Action

  923.20: Use of Force

  During declared emergency actions by the governor, officers are permitted to use any force necessary, in any situation, and shall be indemnified against future review or inquiry.

  Sergeant Armstrong Trench steers the cruiser east on Ninety-second Street, toward Hooper Avenue, smoking a cigarette, eyes scouting tonight’s streets. Riding shotgun is Officer Vicodanz: overlapping teal sevens are tattooed on his right biceps, as they are beneath Trench’s sleeve, for the 77th Street Division.

  Shadowed storefronts roll past, shattered windows, smoke roiling from a deserted alley. Sirens peal in the distance, scattered black men run across Ninety-second Street. The patrol car bumps past Zamora Avenue.

  On the radio, interrupted by squawks from their two-way, the Four Tops croon “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch).” The cruiser screeches to a stop in front of the burning facade of Central Furniture: five or six men and women lug a couch and chairs from its front doors through billowing smoke. The officers jump out, pumping their shotguns above the suspects. The couch and chairs tumble to the sidewalk as the looters run across the street. The cops open the trunk, take out a couple of cold Pabst Blue Ribbons from the cooler, and lean against the fender, sipping.

  “Natives a tad restless tonight.” Vicodanz gulps beer.

  “Better to err on the side of caution,” Trench extracting a sawed-off shotgun from the trunk, checking the pump action.

  “Remember the first time you took that thing to the police range, demolished your target and three others, I believe?” Vicodanz’s grinning face glows in the red lamps of the cruiser’s beacons.