young men in their matching black coats also had matching black semi-autos, each one aimed at a different part of his body, as professional as it gets. He moved his hands away from his sides, the nightstick dangling loose and useless, eyes only on me.
One of the young men stayed with him, the other two came along as I moved down a passage so narrow it was more like a tunnel than a hall.
The basement was divided into wire-mesh cages, Bowery flophousestyle. Maybe thirty, forty illegals slept there. One toilet, one shower—just a rusty nozzle poking out of the wall with a drain underneath. A hundred bucks a month apiece. Overheated from human cargo, it stank like the hold of a slave ship.
I swept my eye through the cages. Third from left, lowest tier, Mama had said. Her description of the nephew was photo-perfect. I pointed at his face. One of the young men showed him his pistol, said something to him in bad-accent Cantonese. The nephew said something back. The gunman chopped at his face with the pistol. The nephew came along, hands at his sides, head down.
We walked out into the afternoon. The gunman shoved the nephew into the back seat of a Chinatown war wagon, an old Buick four-door sedan with welded-up fake plates. The other two piled in right behind him. The car took off. The squat doorman poked his head outside. Max came up behind him and did something to his neck. The doorman crumpled to the ground. I stepped into a fog-gray Lincoln that had pulled to the curb. One of Mama’s cooks was at the wheel.
The street vibrated the way it always did, no change.
“Not like old ways,” Mama told me back in the restaurant. “Tigers not with the Tongs. Nephew go someplace else, they never find.”
“They’re supposed to think I had a beef with him, hired those other guys to take him out of there?”
“Yes, maybe think so.” Mama shrugged.
“Won’t the Tigers look for their money from the guys who took him?”
“What guys?” Mama smiled.
“The Chinese guys. The young ones in the jackets.”
“Not Chinese,” Mama said. “Cambodia. How old you think?”
“Twenty, twenty-five?”
“Fifteen,” Mama said. “Oldest, fifteen. Khmer not kill, Tigers not kill either.”
“Jesus. They’re operating down here now too?”
“Sure,” Mama said.
I played cards with Max until early the next morning. We used to play gin rummy, a life- sentence game we’d started years ago—keeping score, but agreeing that we wouldn’t settle up until we both crossed over. Figuring that, if it was divided up like people say it is, we’d both end up on the same side of the line.
Max had owed me a fortune until he’d tapped into that perfect vein of gold all gamblers dream of—the Prime Roll. It only lasted a few hours, but Max was unbelievably unbeatable. Every card fell for him. He was a rampaging tsunami—I was a balsa-wood beach house. I survived, but I was barely on the plus side when the wave passed. Ever since, he’d refused to return to gin, knowing he’d never see a run like that again in life. So we switched to casino. He doesn’t play that game any better, and I had his debt back into six figures.
Mama continued to monitor just about every hand in her self-appointed role as Max’s adviser. She was lousy at it. Even worse than at gin—at least she knew how to play gin, casino was a total mystery to her. Mama speaks a half-dozen languages, including math, but any form of gambling got her blood up and made her forget the odds, so she never indulged. Didn’t mind helping Max out, though.
She tapped Max’s shoulder, nodded her head, grinned as he tossed the four of clubs on the four of hearts, building eights against the one he held in his hand instead of just taking one four with another. I slapped the deuce of spades on top of his build, against the ten of diamonds I held. I knew Max didn’t hold any tens—the other three had already been played. The diamond card is the Big Ten in casino—the only one worth two points. The deuce of spades was another point card. . . . A lovely score. Max scowled. Mama’s face indicated that the whole thing was his own fault.
The pay phone in the back rang. I looked at my watch—it was just past two in the morning. Mama got up, walked to the back, grabbed the receiver, said something . . . listened. Then she came back to our booth.
“Girl. Name Vyra.”
“Tell her I’m not here,” I said.
Mama nodded, nothing on her face.
I went back to my office, let Pansy use her roof, watched some early-morning TV with her after she polished off a quart of some stuff Mama put together—mostly beef chunks in oyster sauce.
Then I slept.
Once I got up, I started rolling. Spent the next twenty-four checking on leads, just in case Pryce went for what I was going to offer him. But the paths were too twisted—I couldn’t pipeline down to a core truth strong enough to bank on. The White Night underground is a poisonous brew, fed by rumors and driven by psychos. American-born Nazis working as mercenaries in Croatia, slaughtering Serbs, cleansing the ethnic cleansers, the whole operation set up by fascist groups in Germany who had fond World War II memories of the Croats helping out; a range war between two Hitler-loving crews—mostly a talk war over the shortwave bands—one leader saying the head of the rival crew was gay, that guy saying his opposite number was a crypto-Jew; the tax resisters and the do-it-yourself litigation clubs; virulent anti-Semites calling themselves the true Israelites; one-member fascist organizations blindly cyber-groping with anti-IRA skinheads in England and transplanted American biker gangs in Denmark. . . all riddled with undercover agents and free-lance informants and ready-to-roll rats.
Not a network, threads. Some of them as unanchored as the lunatics who tried to grab on and pull themselves up to the Fourth Reich. Just outside Chicago, one of those deadly defectives gunned down a plastic surgeon, convinced the doctor was giving non-whites an “Aryan” look. Maybe he was following the footprints of the white supremacist on the coast who blew away a beautician years ago because he heard she was bleaching Jewess hair.
More Fuhrers than storm troopers, sure. But any one of them strong enough to lift a suitcase can level a building now.
The reason the media never gets it right is that the media lives on spokesman interviews, and nobody could ever speak for that collection. How do you speak for a congregation that screams the Holocaust never happened while it prays for it to happen again? You think if you assembled a hundred rapists they’d all tell you they rape for the same reason? “Their rap don’t mean crap, honeyboy,” the Prof had told me once. “Their trail always tells the tale.” On the prison yard, a hundred years ago. I was full of questions then.
I’ve been dealing with the hyper-whites for years, selling and scamming. They’ve got no loyalty, so they’re easy. But mining their ranks for truth is like looking for a congressman’s ethics.
But I asked around anyway. Working the edges, careful like always. Keeping a flat face as they flashed their self-awarded decorations, tattoos: the “88”—for “Heil Hitler,” the eighth letter of the alphabet being “H,” borrowed from the way the bikers used to wear the number “13” on their denims . . . “M” for “marijuana.” And the spiderwebs on their elbows, meaning they killed for the race . . . although most of them upgraded any two-bit assault to that status. Skinhead sheep with red laces on their Doc Martens and Iron Crosses around their necks, certain they were the vanguard to Valhalla. A Mafia don’s
I heard all about how only the NRA was standing up to ZOG—Zionist Occupation Government in Nazi-speak —and how gun control was just the prelude to registration of all citizens. Saw enough copies of
