Mike glanced at me.
“My father was recruited by the Green Dragons,” Kwan said. “I wasn’t even ten years old at the time, so I don’t remember much. Except I have a pretty vivid recollection of the first time I saw him with a gun.”
“I imagine that’s hard to forget,” I said.
“My mother left, Ms. Cooper,” Kwan said. “That was devastating to me. It was more than the gun, of course; it was my father’s transition to racketeering and to murder, but to me it was always symbolized by the gun.”
“Where did she go?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I only saw her once again after that day.”
“When was that?” Mike asked.
“You were too young to be a cop back then, so perhaps you don’t know what the situation was,” Kwan said. “The only mistake an Asian gang member could make in those days was to victimize someone who wasn’t one of us. To kill a Caucasian, Detective. To kill a white man.”
Kwan stared at me to make sure I was listening.
“That’s the only time the police ever came after any of us,” he said.
Mike held his tongue. He knew his own father’s integrity. He knew Kwan wasn’t right.
“Your father killed someone?” I asked.
“That’s unclear, Ms. Cooper,” Kwan said. “He was part of a group of Green Dragons who kidnapped several rival gang members—”
“Which gang?” Mike asked.
“The Ghost Shadows, Detective, if that means anything to you.”
Mike’s expression didn’t change.
“There was a shootout in a Chinese restaurant in Queens,” Kwan said. “The Ghosts came looking for revenge, but in too public a place. They sprayed the front of the restaurant with gunfire, killing six or seven people inside. One of the dead men was simply picking up takeout for his family on a Thursday night. A white man.”
“That brought the NYPD down on the Dragons and the Ghost Shadows, I guess,” I said. “Did your father get caught up in the police action?”
“He didn’t, Ms. Cooper,” Kwan said. “But that’s only because he was one of the other people left on the restaurant floor. Ko-Lin Kwan—my father—didn’t get quite the investigative attention the white man’s murder did, but he was every bit as dead.”
FORTY-ONE
“Both gangs tried to recruit me, even though I was so young,” Kwan said. “The Green Dragons considered me family, and the Ghosts wanted me even more, so they could indoctrinate me and make me forget my past.”
“You went with the Dragons, I assume,” I said.
“Actually not. I was more afraid of the Ghost Shadows, because they had killed my father. I was foolish enough to think I could get inside their fold and, when I got older, pay them back for what they had done.”
“Bad story. Tired plot. I think you can stream that movie right now on Netflix,” Mike said.
“Who were you living with?” I asked.
“Neighbors, mostly,” Kwan said. “That’s when my mother reappeared, just for a day. Perhaps the happiest day of my life, but short-lived happiness it was.”
“Why?” I said. “Was she hurt too?”
“No. But she had come back to send me away—far away, to China—when she got word of my father’s murder,” he said. “To the good relatives, as she liked to call them.”
“The same day?”
“She had a fake passport made for me on Forty-Second Street—you could do that for twenty dollars back before 9/11, if you remember that. She took me to JFK in a taxi and loaded me on a flight to Hong Kong,” Kwan said. “My grandfather had his driver pick me up at the airport on that end and take me to his house—more accurate to call it a mansion. It was my introduction to Kwan Enterprises.”
“That must have been culture shock,” Mike said.
“You cannot imagine it, Detective. The first thing my grandfather did was ground me for three months. He had me cleaned up, bought me fine clothes, taught me table manners, and had me tutored in languages—Chinese dialects, English, French, and Japanese.”
“You had no problem adjusting?”
“I spent five years adjusting, Mr. Chapman, to the finest luxuries and experiences that life offered,” Kwan said. “I left my youth behind. I took my grandfather’s name—George—and I can’t say that I never looked back, but I didn’t do it very often.”
Maybe Kwan had cleaned up his life. Maybe Mike was seeing ghosts where there were none. The gangs had lived out their short, violent lives in two decades. Neither one of them existed today.
“Was your father ever locked up?” Mike asked.
“I’m sure he was. There were times he’d disappear for days, and neighbors had to take me in,” Kwan said, repeating his father’s name and date of birth. “You’ll find out more about him in police files than I know; that’s for sure.”
“How about you?” Mike asked.
“I was just a kid.”
“Kids get locked up too.”
“I guess I was just lucky, Detective. I got out of town in time.”
The room looked like a museum-quality collection of antiques and stuffed heads. The mahogany paneling and shelves spoke to Kwan’s wealth. The leopard-skin rugs, the taxidermied grizzly bear in one corner, and the horned creatures mounted on the walls spoke to his deadly obsession with the hunt.
“What’s your mother’s name?” Mike asked.
“My late mother, Mr. Chapman,” Kwan said. “Her name was Alvarez. Maria Alvarez. Now, what else do you want from this visit?”
“Where did you learn how to shoot?” Mike said.
“Long guns, Detective? In China. It’s become a destination for game hunting,” Kwan said, shifting positions in his chair. “My adoptive father—my grandfather, but I called him my father—insisted I learn how to shoot.”
“Why’s that?” Mike said. “I would have thought you’d seen enough of guns when you were a kid.”
“Quite a different thing, pistols and rifles. My father took me to hunt in Mongolia,” Kwan said. “By the time he sent me away to boarding school, rifle practice was a mandatory part of the curriculum.”
“When you’re in the States,” Mike said, “when you’re home, where do you hunt?”
“Back to the Paul Battaglia connection, are you?”
“Where do you hunt?”
“Anywhere I please, Mr. Chapman. I’ve been all over the country.”
“That preserve where Justice Scalia died?” Mike asked.
“I’m not in the Order of Saint Hubertus, if that’s where you’re going,” Kwan said. “No Asians need apply, as they used to say of the Irish. I’ve been other places in Texas—there are so many of them—that don’t require membership.”
“Have you ever hunted with Battaglia?”
“No. No, I haven’t. I actually didn’t believe the hunting stories were real,” Kwan said. “He liked prosecuting those rhino-horn traffickers so much, I wasn’t sure what he was up to with Hubertus.”
“Talk to us about Chidra Persaud,” Mike said.
Kwan smiled and let go of his collar. “You may think you’re in a business that requires fortitude and strength, Ms. Cooper, but that Persaud is one tough broad.”
“You know her?” I asked.
“Not personally, no.”