The Stone Monkey

English, “Canal Street.” The rain was letting up and there were many people on the sidewalks, which were lined with hundreds of grocery and souvenir shops, fish markets, jewelry stores, bakeries.
    “Where should we go?” William asked.
    “Park there,” Chang instructed and William pulled the van to a curb. Chang and Wu climbed out. They walked into a store and asked the clerk about the neighborhood associations—tongs. These organizations were usually made up of people from common geographic areas in China. Chang was seeking a Fujianese tong, since the two families were from the province of Fujian. They would not, Chang assumed, be welcomed in a tong with roots in Canton, where most of the early Chinese immigrants had come from. But he was surprised to learn that much of Manhattan’s Chinatown was now heavily populated with people from Fujian and many of the Cantonese had moved away. There was a major Fujianese tong only a few blocks away.
    Chang and Wu left the families in the stolen van and walked through the crowded streets until they found the place. Painted red and sporting a classic Chinese bird-wing roof, the dingy three-story building might have been transported here directly from the shabby neighborhood near the North Bus Station in Fuzhou.
    The men stepped inside the tong headquarters quickly, with their heads down, as if the people lounging about in the lobby of the building were about to pull out cell phones and call the INS—or the Ghost—to report their arrival.
    •   •   •
    Jimmy Mah, wearing a gray suit dusted with cigarette ash and about to burst at the seams, greeted them and invited them into his upstairs office.
    President of the East Broadway Fujianese Society, Mah was the de facto mayor of this portion of Chinatown.
    His office was a large but plain room, containing two desks and a half-dozen mismatched chairs, piles of paper, a fancy computer and a television set. A hundred or so Chinese books sat on a lopsided bookcase. On the wall were faded and fly-blown posters of Chinese landscapes. Chang wasn’t fooled by the run-down appearance of the place, however; he suspected that Mah was a millionaire several times over.
    “Sit, please,” Mah said in Chinese. The broad-faced man with black hair slicked straight back offered them cigarettes. Wu took one. Chang shook his head no. He’d stopped smoking after he lost his teaching job and money grew scarce.
    Mah looked over their filthy clothes, their mussed hair. “Ha, you two look like you have a story to tell. Do you have an interesting story? A compelling story? What would it be? I bet I would like very much to hear it.”
    Chang indeed did have a story. Whether it was interesting or compelling he couldn’t have said but one thing he did know: it was fictional. He had decided not to tell any strangers that they’d been on the Fuzhou Dragon and that the Ghost might be searching for them. He said to Mah, “We’ve just come into the port on a Honduran ship.”
    “Who was your snakehead?”
    “We never learned his name. He called himself Moxige.”
    “Mexican?” Mah shook his head. “I don’t work with Latino snakeheads.” Mah’s dialect was tainted with an American accent.
    “He took our money,” Chang said bitterly, “but then he just left us on the dock. He was going to get us papers and transportation. He vanished.”
    With curiosity Wu watched him spin this tale. Chang hadtold the man to keep quiet and let him talk to Mah. On the Dragon Wu drank too much and grew impulsive. He’d been careless about what he’d told the immigrants and crew in the hold.
    “Don’t they do that sometimes?” Mah said jovially. “Why do they cheat people? Isn’t it bad for business? Fuck Mexicans. Where are you from?”
    “Fuzhou,” Wu offered. Chang stirred. He was going to mention a different city in Fujian—to minimize any connection between the immigrants and the Ghost.
    Chang continued, feigning anger. “I have two children and a baby. My father too. He’s old. And my friend here, his wife is sick. We need help.”
    “Ah, help. Well, that is an interesting story, isn’t it? But what kind of help do you want? I can do some things. Other things I can’t do. Am I one of the Eight Immortals? No, of course I’m not. What do you need?”
    “Papers. ID papers. For myself, my wife and my oldest son.”
    “Sure, sure, I can do some of them. Drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, some old company ID cards—