Ed McBain - Downtown (5 page)

"Your _name," she said impatiently, and wagged the gun at him.

"A cop," Wong said, shaking his head, "I can't believe it. I thought you were a hooker."

"Why, thank you," Detective O'Brien said.

"That's the way the hookers dress down here," Wong explained to Michael. "Even in cold weather like this. All year round, in fact." "If you two _gentlemen don't mind," Detective O'Brien said, sounding as sarcastic as Wong had earlier sounded, "what we're gonna do now is march to the station house, 'cause quite frankly I don't appreciate disorderly conduct on my ..."

Wong shoved out at Michael, who in turn lost his footing and crashed into Detective O'Brien, who fell over backward onto her almost-naked behind, her silk-stockinged legs flying

into the air, her gun going off. Michael

61 figured that what he had here was a fat lady who was a real cop with a real badge and a real gun, but who thought he was a two-bit brawler instead of a two-bit victim. He decided he did not want to spend the rest of the night explaining that Wong had tried to hold him up. Especially since Detective O'Brien was now sitting up in the snow at the top of the steps leading down to the subway, her elbows on her knees, the pistol in both hands, taking very careful aim at him.

He had learned another thing in Vietnam. "Aiiii-eeeeeee!" he yelled.

When you heard this in the jungle, your blood ran cold.

It worked here in downtown Manhattan, too.

Detective O'Brien screamed back at him in terror. Her gun went off wildly, and so did Michael, in the same direction Wong had gone, running back toward Moore, and crossing the street, and seeing Wong up ahead going a hundred miles an hour.

Michael took a quick look at his watch. 8:45. His plane would be leaving in two hours and twenty minutes.

He could not go down into the subway to catch his A-train to the airport because Detective O'Brien was behind him, sitting between him and his transportation. There was not a taxi anywhere in sight, and besides the ten dollars Bonano had loaned him was not enough for cab fare to Kennedy. He did not know this goddamn city where everyone seemed to be either a cop or a crook and all of them seemed to be crazy. He did not know where there might be _another subway station where he could catch a train to the airport, because his map was behind him, too, there on the sidewalk between him and O'Brien. He knew only that when you were lost in the jungle, you followed a native guide.

Behind him, Detective O'Brien fired her gun. Into the air, he hoped. He ran like hell after Wong. They ran for what seemed like miles. Wong was a good runner. Michael was out of shape and out of breath. His shoes were sodden and his socks were wet and his feet were cold and his eyeglasses kept caking with snow, which he repeatedly cleared as he followed Wong, both of

them padding silently over fields of

63 white, the curbs gone now, no difference now between sidewalk and street, just block after block of white after white after white in a part of the city that was totally alien to him. But at last he turned a corner behind Wong and saw him ducking into a doorway with Chinese lettering over it. Michael looked at his watch again. 8:57. Wong disappeared into the doorway. Michael followed him.

He wiped off his glasses and put them back on again.

He was inside a Chinese fortune-cookie factory.

A Chinese man in white pants, a white shirt, a long white apron, and a white chef's hat stood behind a stainless steel counter stuffing fortune cookies with little slips of paper. "Which way did he go?" Michael asked.

"True ecstasy is a golden lute on a purple night," the fortune-cookie stuffer said. There was a door at the far end of the room. Michael pointed to it. "Did he go in there?" he asked.

"He who rages at fate rages at barking dogs," the man said, and stuffed another cookie.

"Thank you," Michael said, and went immediately toward the door. Behind him, the fortune-cookie stuffer said, "Dancers have wings but pigs cannot fly." Michael opened the door. He was suddenly in a downtown-Saigon gambling den.

In Saigon, there were only three things to do: get drunk, get laid, or get lucky. There were a great many gambling dens lining the teeming side streets of Saigon, and he had gambled in most of them and had never got lucky in any of them. Nor had he ever seen anyone playing Russian roulette in any of them. That was for the movies. He had told Arthur Crandall--or whatever his real name was--that _Platoon was a pretty realistic movie, but the operative word in that observation was "movie." Because however realistic it might have been, it was still only and merely a movie, and everyone sitting in that theater knew that he was watching flickering images on a beaded screen and that the guns going off and the blood spurting were fake. In the jungle, the guns going off and the blood spurting were real.

You could never show in a movie the _feel

65 of a friend's hot blood spilling onto your hands when he took a hit from a frag grenade. Never. You could never explain in the most realistic of war films that you had shit your pants the first time a mortar shell exploded six feet from where you were lying on your belly in the jungle mud. In war movies, nobody ever shit his pants. You could never explain the terror and revulsion you'd felt the first time you saw a dead soldier lying on his back with his cock cut off and stuffed into his mouth. In war movies, guys compensated for their terror and revulsion by playing Russian roulette in Saigon gambling dens. In real life, what you did in Saigon gambling dens was you bet on the roll of the dice, the turn of the card, or-- occasionally--the courage and skill of a rooster. Cockfights in Saigon were as common as severed cocks in the jungle, but you never saw a cockfight in the same building where people were shooting crap or playing poker.

Here and now, in this section of the fortune-cookie factory, there were no cockfights. There were stainless steel ovens, and there were two crap games on blankets against one of the walls, and two poker games at tables, and a mah-jongg game at yet another table. The mah-jongg table was occupied entirely by Chinese men who looked as if they had stepped full blown out of the Ming Dynasty. This was by far the noisiest table in the room, the Chinese men slamming down tiles and shouting what sounded like orders to behead someone, and the men standing around the table shouting either encouragement or disparagement, it was difficult to tell. There was some noise, but not as much, coming from the two crap games on the blankets, where--as had been the case in Saigon--there were Orientals playing with white guys, black guys, and Hispanics. A television set on a shelf high on the wall was turned up to its full volume, and Andy Williams had just come on in a Christmas special that contributed mightily to the overall din. In contrast to the television jubilance, the poker players were virtually solemn. A pall of smoke hung over the entire room. Charlie Wong was nowhere in sight.

Michael looked at his watch. 9:05. He had to get out of here and find a way to get to Kennedy by subway. His plane would be leaving in exactly two hours, the last plane to Boston

tonight. He wandered over to one of the crap

67 games, thinking he'd ask one of the players how to get to a subway stop that would connect with the Kennedy train. A short Hispanic--who looked remarkably like the young man who'd asked him not to lean on his car--picked up the dice, blew on them, said, "__Mama necesita un par de zapatos _nuevos!" and promptly rolled snake eyes. "_Mierda!" he shouted, and immediately walked away from the blanket. On the television screen, Andy Williams was singing "Jingle Bells." Michael stepped into the space the little Hispanic had vacated. Taxi fare would be nice, he thought.

There were five players in the game now: two blacks, two Chinese, and a white man. One of the black men was named Harry. Michael discerned this when the dice were handed to him and one of the Chinese men said, "Come on, Hally, ketchum up hot," sounding like the cook in an old movie about the Gold Rush. At the mah-jongg table, one of the Chinese men there shouted something that sounded fierce and warlike, but everyone at the table laughed. Here at the blanket, Harry laughed, too. Michael figured he was laughing not because he spoke or understood Chinese but because it was now his turn to roll the dice, and a man holding a pair of dice in his hand is--for the moment, at least--in control of his own destiny. Harry did indeed look like a man with the world on a string. Tall and wiry and chocolate-colored, he possessed in addition to his good looks a dirty Eddie Murphy laugh, a mischievous Bill Cosby twinkle, and the calm, confident air of a man about to make a fortune. Michael would have bet all the oranges on every tree in his groves on the roll of the dice this man held in his hand. But he had only the ten dollars Charlie Bonano had loaned him. "Bet a hundred," Harry said, and put five twenty-dollar bills on the blanket. The hundred was covered in thirty seconds flat; apparently most of these players had seen Harry roll before and the air of confidence he exuded impressed them not a bit. The only man at the blanket who seemed to have any faith in him at all was the Chinese man who'd earlier urged him to ketchem up hot. He now said, "Twenny say Hally light."

"Ten says he's wrong," the other

69 black man at the blanket said. "Me, too, hassa ten long," the other Chinese man said, sounding like a stoker on an American gunboat during the Boxer Rebellion.

"Ten more says he's right," Michael said, and tossed onto the blanket all the money he had in the world. The white guy--a burly man wearing a blue sweater and a blue watch cap, and looking like a seaman off a cargo ship--said, "Ten says he's wrong," and tossed his money onto the blanket.

On the television screen, Andy Williams and what appeared to be the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir began bellowing "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." "Come on, sugah," Harry whispered, and shook the dice gently, and let them roll easily off the pink palm of his hand and onto the blanket. The dice rolled and rolled and rolled, and hit the wall, and bounced off the wall, and one of them flew to the right and came up with a six-spot, and the other one flew to the left and came up with a five-spot, for a total of eleven, which was a winner. Michael now had twenty dollars. Was twenty enough for a taxi to Kennedy? He looked at his watch. 9:15. His heart almost stopped. The girl walking toward the blanket was tall. Five-nine, he supposed. Much taller than the girls who'd worked the Saigon bars. But every bit as beautiful. So achingly beautiful, those Vietnamese girls. Girls, yes, some of them were barely in their teens. That long glossy black hair and the slanted loam-colored eyes, the complexion as pale as a dipper of cream, a faint tint to it, not yellow, you could not call any Oriental on earth yellow, any more than you could call anyone black, or red for that matter, or even white, it was pointless to try to identify people by color because the colors simply didn't match. Here and now she came gliding sleekly out of the din and the smoke, a sinuous glide unique to Orientals, a green silk dress slit high on her right thigh, a red

rose in her black hair, green satin

71 high heeled pumps, the colors of Christmas, fa-la-la-la-la, Andy Williams sang, and Michael wondered how many Saigon hookers he had fallen in love with. And later killed their sisters in the jungle. "Hello, Harry," she said, "are you winning?"

"Jus' rolled me a 'leven," Harry said. Michael smiled at her. She did not smile back.

An hour and fifty minutes to plane time. "Let the twenty ride," he said, and realized he was showing off for her, big spender betting all his money without batting an eyelash. Harry picked up the dice, winked at him, and said, "Man knows a winner. Bet the two hunnerd."

"I'll take it all," the other black man said.

"You facin' disaster, Slam," Harry told him and laughed his dirty Eddie Murphy laugh.

"I'm facin' a man got lucky one time," Slam said.

"Oh, my my my," Harry said to the dice, "you hear this man runnin' his mouth?"

"Who wanna fiffy more?" the first Chinese man asked.

"I'll take thirty of that," the seaman with the watch cap said.

"I hassa twenny," the second Chinese man said. Harry brought the dice up close to his mouth. "Sugah," he whispered, "we don't wanna disappoint our friends here, now do we?"

He was talking to the dice as if he were talking to a woman. How could they possibly fail a man who speaks so gently and persuasively? Michael thought, and realized he was smiling. The girl thought he was smiling at her. Maybe he was. But she still did not smile back. Oh well, he thought.

"You know jus' what we need," Harry told the dice, "so I'm jus' goan let you do yo' own thing," and he shook the dice gently, and opened his hand again, and the dice rolled off his palm and strutted across the blanket, and kissed the wall, and skidded off the wall to land with a five-spot and a six-spot showing for a total of eleven again, which was another winner.

Michael now had forty dollars, certainly enough

to get him to Kennedy by cab.

73 "How's that, James?" Harry asked. "Good," the first Chinese man said, beaming.

"_No good," the second Chinese man said sourly. "Bet the four hundred," Harry said.

Michael looked at the girl one last time. She seemed not to know he existed. He pocketed his forty bucks and started moving away from the blanket. "Don't go, man," Harry said softly. Michael looked at him. "You my luck, man." In Vietnam--ah, Jesus, in Nam--too many young men had said those words to too many other young men. Over there, you needed something to believe in other than yourself, you needed a charm, a rabbit's foot, a buddy to stand beside you, to be your luck when it looked as though your luck might run out at any moment. Michael looked at his watch. 9:30. If he could get out of the city in the next half hour or so, he'd be okay. The roads to Kennedy would surely be clear of snow by now, it would be a quick half-hour run by taxi, walk directly to the gate, no luggage--thanks to Crandall--and off he'd go. "You with me or not?" Harry asked.

There was something almost desperate in his eyes. "I've got forty says you're good," Michael said, and tossed the money onto the blanket and smiled at the girl. This time, she smiled back. "What's your name?" she asked. "Michael," he said. "How do you do?" she said.