Free China Trade by S. J. Rozan Page B

long-haired blond girlfriend through the streets of the old neighborhood. Two white men in camel-hair topcoats, their wives in furs behind them, headed down the stairs to a famous restaurant where I’d never eaten. I maneuvered around a mixed group of young teenage boys pawing through a sidewalk vendor’s tray of watches.
    The salty smell of soy sauce and herbs washed out thedoor of a restaurant I passed. I hurried along, hungry for my mother’s cooking. The air was bitterly cold now that the sun had gone down. Everyone, low faan and Chinese and me, wore our hats pulled down to our ears and hunched our shoulders as deeply as we could into our coats.
    Except for the hatless white guy in the open jacket in the doorway across the street.
    I scurried down the block, turned right at the corner, toward home. At the first building, which wasn’t mine, I slipped into the shadow of an alley, and waited.
    A figure sauntered around the corner, didn’t even look in the direction of the shadow I was hiding in. He crossed the street, ambled down the block to the old brick building I live in, stood in front of it for a moment. He looked at his watch, scratched his hatless head, and wandered on.
    I stayed behind him for a block and a half, and I was pretty good at it, too. He shouldn’t have spotted me. But a young woman in high heels tripped off the curb, and the hatless guy—a true gentleman—turned to catch her.
    As he did that he caught sight of me watching him.
    Leaving the high-heeled woman in mid-rescue, he whirled and dashed away. I broke into a run, too, and made Canal Street in time to see him jump into a cab and disappear in the direction of the Manhattan Bridge. I looked around wildly, but on a freezing night at dinnertime in New York a cab is a hard thing to find. By the time the light had changed and a fresh batch of traffic, including two empty cabs, was headed my way, he was halfway to Brooklyn.
    I comforted myself, as I seethed on the way home, with the hope that he hadn’t wanted to go there.
    I was still seething as I stomped up the three flights of stairs to the apartment where I’ve always lived. Seeing the hatless guy in Chinatown, where white people, to Chinese, are visible and not part of the background, had brought him suddenly into focus for me. It made me remember his red-tipped ears thisafternoon crossing the street in the same direction Bill and I did on the Upper East Side, and, yesterday, dashing in front of a Jeep outside a cafe in the Village.
    This guy had been following me. It had taken me two days to make him, and now I’d alerted him and lost him.
    You’re an idiot, Lydia, I pointed out to myself. A total idiot, a complete loss.
    I took a few deep breaths when I got to the door, to try to approach normal before approaching my mother. I stood with my key in my hand, listening to old Mr. Tam’s television across the hall. Old Mr. Tam has lived here since before I was born. He doesn’t speak English, but he watches endless hours of American television. You can hear him cackling to himself over the antics of the white-skinned ghosts any time you walk by.
    When I was calm, I twisted my key in each of the four identical locks on our door in turn. “It takes a thief as long to pick the same lock four times as to pick four locks once,” my mother had declared, standing over the locksmith to insure his competence, as well as his diligence, “And this way my foolish children will have fewer keys to lose.”
    None of us, in my memory, has ever lost a house key, but I’m the youngest so maybe there are things I don’t remember.
    “Hi, Ma,” I called, taking off my shoes in the tiny vestibule, hopping around as I put on my embroidered slippers. “Mmmm, smells great.”
    “Oh, are you here?” my mother grumbled from the kitchen. “Well, I’m so lucky. Hurry now, dinner is almost ready.”
    My mother has been saying this all my life, making it sound as though if I’d been five minutes later