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his boyhood tag. Onset dementia , Jack thought, before she added, “You are your father’s son.” She hesitated a moment when Jack pressed the folded five-dollar bill into her hand.
    “What now , this time?” she asked, a quiet sadness in her eyes.
    He took out the plastic-bagged scraps of evidence first, slipped them onto the table in front of her.
    “These numbers mean anything?” Jack asked.
    “The plastic blocks my old fingers.”
    Jack unzipped the baggies, allowed her to touch the damp scraps of paper with her fingertips. Her breathing got shallower as she lightly ran her fingers over the phone numbers, over the Chinese words on the produce receipt.
    “The numbers are looking for money,” she said, “won cheen.” Won cheen also meant “looking for work,” Jack knew. Or it could mean “collecting on a debt.”
    “There is a dai lo baan ,” she added, falling into a breathy exclaiming cadence. A big boss? wondered Jack. Organized crime or Bruce Lee movies? There was a pause, and Ah Por glanced up at the TV monitor, distracted.
    He quickly slipped her another folded five, took the baggies back, and passed her the keys.
    She took a couple of long breaths, feeling the cuts and edges of the different keys.
    “There is a very small closet,” she began. A locker, storage , Jack thought.
    “ Bo, see ,” she added. Precious and a key? Jack wondered. A safe, or safe deposit?
    “ Mo yung ,” she said as she flipped another key. “Useless.” Its use had expired? A transient key, a changed lock cylinder?
    She handed back the keys as Jack slipped her one of the snapshots of the deceased. A face reading. She held the photo with both hands, seeing the river-wet face with dripping hair falling back from it, caressing the image of the dead man with her thumbs, murmuring like she was comforting a grandchildwith a fever. Don’t worry. It was all just a nightmare, this journey to the West .
    “What?” Jack wondered aloud.
    “North,” she said. “He came from the north.” Yeah, north Manhattan , Jack remembered. Maybe the Bronx? Or even farther north? The routes of human smugglers .
    “He’s always moving,” she continued. Immigrants on the move? Like migrant workers? he pondered. Or moving, like on a bike? A deliveryman? A student with a part-time job?
    Ah Por closed her eyes, switched to the Toishanese dialect, saying, “Money is the root of all evil.” She placed the snapshot gently on the table and pushed it back to Jack. He took a moment to absorb her last statement before giving her the five-dollar tip he had ready. The root of all evil .
    She pocketed the five and smiled, dismissing Jack with a wave of her gnarled hand. She resumed watching the Hong Kong movie as if Jack had never been there. He knew it was a wrap, finished, gave her a small bow, and left the table.
    He went back through the elderly crowd toward the front door, where the winter wind seeped in and reminded him of death in the cold and uncaring city.
    O UTSIDE, THE DAY was still steel gray as the wind had blown itself out.
    North , Jack was thinking, Ah Por’s word.
    He dropped down to the Brooklyn Bridge station and caught another subway northbound, with the South Bronx addresses rattling like dice in his head. He was seeing snake eyes, but what was clear to him: a dead Asian with forty-four cents in his pockets had put him on this 4 train to visit four Chinese restaurants, all situated in the confines of theForty-Fourth Precinct. He didn’t like the way the numbers lined up, four being the number that the Chinese hated the most, say in Cantonese, sounding phonetically like death . In this case, death times six.
    He heard Ah Por’s words of yellow witchcraft in his head. Not that he was superstitious, just wary of what destiny might hold.
    The train rattled, rumbled its way out of Manhattan.
    The restaurant locations clustered around the subway lines, with the Lexington and the West Side lines pushing across the Harlem River to the