Boston Noir

She took their glasses and went into the kitchen. She returned with a gin and tonic for herself.

“When’d you quit drinking?” she asked, handing him his iced tea.

“The first time?” Toua said. “After college.”

“There must be a story there.”

“Long story. I’ll tell it to you some other time, maybe.”

“I’m interested.”

“It’s not very interesting.”

“Come on. Start at the beginning. Where’d you grow up?”

She kept pressing, and finally he told her the story, not bothering to disguise it. When he was three, his family had fled Laos to the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, where they spent three years before being shipped off to White Bear, Minnesota. He worked hard in school and was accepted to M.I.T., but once there he felt overwhelmed, afraid he couldn’t cut it, and he started drinking. In his sophomore year, he flunked out. He enlisted in the army and served as an MP in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, then returned to the States and joined the Cambridge Police, going to night school at Suffolk for years and finally getting his degree. Eventually he made detective, staying sober until two years ago, after which he quit the force.

“What happened?” she asked.

“It wasn’t one thing. It was everything. I burned out.” He was working on a new task force. A gang called MOD, Methods of Destruction, made up of Hmong teenagers, had moved into Area 4, and Toua was given the assignment because everyone assumed he spoke Hmong. Drive-bys, home invasions, extortion, drugs, firearms, prostitution-MOD was into it all, even sending notices to cops that they’d been “green-lighted” for execution. Toua received one, emblazoned with MOD’s slogan, Cant Stop, Wont Stop. But the real menace was to victims picked at random. A couple coming out of a restaurant was robbed and macheted to death. A college coed was kidnapped and gang-raped for days. A family was tied up and tortured with pliers and a car battery, their baby scalded with boiling water. Senseless. Toua didn’t want to see it anymore.

“Jesus. Are these guys still around?”

“Some. I heard most of them have moved on.”

“I had no idea. I’ve always thought Cambridge was so safe. What have you been doing since?”

“Not a lot,” Toua said. He had revealed too much. He didn’t know why. Perhaps because he hadn’t talked to anyone in quite a while. “What about you? What do you do?”

“I’m a poet,” she told him.

He was an idiot. A lazy idiot. He had taken the client’s word for granted, when a simple Google search would have revealed the truth.

“You lied to me,” Toua said to Marcella Ahn at her house.

“Lying is a relative term,” she replied, once again decked out as an Edwardian whore: a corset and bodice, miniskirt and high heels, full makeup, hair glistening. “I might have omitted a few things. Maybe it was a test, to see how competent you are.”

“She has every reason to hate you.”

“Oh? Is that what she told you? I’m the one at fault for her being such a failure?”

For several years, the two women had been the best of friends-inseparable, really. But then their first books came out at the same time, Marcella Ahn’s from a major New York publisher, Caroline Yip’s from a small, albeit respected press. Both had very similar jacket photos, the two women looking solemn and precious, hair flowing in full regalia. An unfortunate coincidence. Critics couldn’t resist reviewing them together, mocking the pair as “The Oriental Hair Poets,” “The Braids of the East,” and “The New Asian Poetresses.”

But Marcella Ahn came away from these barbs relatively unscathed. Her book, Speak to Desire, was taken seriously, compared to Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson. Her poetry was highly erudite, usually beginning with mundane observations about birds or plant life, then slipping into long, abstract meditations on entropy and inertia, the Bible, evolution, and death, punctuated by the briefest mention of personal deprivations-anorexia, depression, abandonment. Or so the critics said. Toua couldn’t make heads or tails of the poems he found online.

In contrast, Caroline Yip’s book, Chicks of Chinese Descent, was skewered. She wrote in a slangy, contemporary voice, full of topical pop culture allusions. She wrote about masturbation and Marilyn Monroe, about tampons and moo goo gai pan, about alien babies and chickens possessed by the devil. She was roundly dispatched as a mediocre talent.