“No. I mean, I met him. Once. But . . .”
“. . . you have all the information about him?”
“Yes.”
“And you just want the problem solved, right? Not the details?”
“Yes. I thought it best to leave that to . . . professionals.”
“Professionals get paid,” I reminded her.
“I grok that. I don’t ask strangers for favors. And I’m guessing you don’t work on a sliding scale either.”
“Right. I don’t. But I’m sure I can fix whatever your . . . cousin’s problem is.”
“Yes? And how much would it cost to do that?”
“Depends on how . . . permanently you want the problem solved.”
“You mean . . . what?”
“I mean, for some people, it’s personal, you know? They get it into their heads that a certain person belongs to them, and they won’t let go unless . . . Other people, they’re just bullies.”
“Bullies are easier?” she asked, leaning closer to me across the table.
“Bullies are very easy,” I said, holding her eyes. Or maybe hers were holding mine.
“The bigger they are . . .”
“. . . the more they cost to fix,” I finished for her.
She looked at the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the tabletop, raised her eyebrows in a question. I lifted it up, held it out to her. She took one. I fired a wooden match. She didn’t bring her face down to the flame like I’d expected. Just sat there watching my hand from under her long dark lashes. The flame burned, slow and steady in the musty joint’s dead air. I stayed on her eyes, feeling the increasing heat against my fingers. She leaned forward and blew out the flame, her breath so gentle it barely got the job done.
“Your hand is very steady,” she said.
“A jeweler needs good eyesight.” I shrugged. “You changed your mind about the cigarette?”
“Sometimes, if I really want something, I make myself wait. Then it’s sweeter when I finally have it. You understand?”
“I understand the waiting part.”
“You’re good at waiting?”
“I’m the best,” I told her. “It’s my specialty.”
“You’re not like . . . the others.” It was a flat statement. Her judgment, not a question.
“The others?”
“I’ve talked to a . . . number of people. About my cousin. You’re different from them.”
“You try any of them?” I asked.
“Try?”
“On your cousin’s problem?”
“No. Not yet. It’s a delicate thing. My cousin wants it to be over, that’s true. But she wants magic, you know? Wants it all to . . . disappear. And that’s hard.”
“That’s real hard. Real expensive too.”
“How expensive?”
“Depends.”
She glanced at her wristwatch: big black-and-white dial on a thick black rubber band. “This is taking longer than I thought,” she said. “I have to meet somebody. But I want to . . . talk to you again. Is there a way . . . ?”
“Sure,” I told her. “I could give you a number to call.”
“That would be great,” she said, flashing another quick smile.
I gave her a number in Brooklyn. It’s on permanent bounce—the only place it would ring aloud would be one of the pay phones at Mama’s. The woman didn’t write it down, repeating it a couple of times just under her breath. The dark streak at her jawline moved along with her lips. She nodded, like she was agreeing with herself, and started to get up. I didn’t move. She sat down again, put her hands flat on the table. “Can I do something with you? Just an old hippie thing. It would make me feel better . . . even if you laugh.”
“What?”
“Can I read your palm?”
I put my hands on the table between us, palms up. “I don’t know. Can you?”
“Watch,” she said softly, taking my right hand in both of hers, bending her face forward to study.
I let my hand go limp as she turned it in hers. A couple of minutes passed. “Can you strike a match with one hand?” she asked, holding on to my right hand, making the message clear.
I took out a wooden match with my left hand, snapped it along my jaw. It flared right up. When I was a kid, that used to impress girls. That was a long time ago—on both counts. “Hold it close,” she said.
I held the match just over my open palm, lighting her way. It only took her another couple of seconds after that. She blew the match out for me, closed my palm into a fist, squeezed it quick and then let go. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
I gave her a good thirty-minute start, just in case she was hanging around outside, planning on the same thing I was. When I finally walked through the exit, the sky was clear and the air was sharp. But the ground was wet, like there’d been a light rainfall during the past couple of hours.
Clarence’s Rover was missing. So was the Prof. I cranked the Plymouth over and pulled out of the pitch-black parking lot, heading for Mama’s. On the drive over, I used the vibrating pager to call Max back in.
The Chinatown alleys are never really deserted, but they get quiet in the late-late hours. I docked the Plymouth under the white rectangle with Max’s chop painted inside and slapped my hand against the slab-faced steel door at the back of the restaurant; one of Mama’s so-called waiters let me in. After he scanned my face close. And put the pistol back inside his white coat.
It was almost three in the morning, but Mama was at the register in the front like she was expecting customers any minute. A tureen of hot-and-sour soup was at my elbow even before she made her way to my booth in the back. I surprised her by standing up and reaching for the tureen to serve her a bowl, but she waved me back down, an impatient look on her face. Then she ladled out a small bowl for me, the way she’d done it for years. To Mama, progress is a crack in the wall of civilization.
I sipped the soup, making the required sounds of deep appreciation. Mama nodded acceptance, played with her soup while I finished the first small bowl, and then filled it up again. Once, I’d asked her why I had to have at least three bowls at every sitting. “Bowl small,” is all she said, and I haven’t questioned her since.
“Max around?” I finally asked her.
“Basement,” she said. “You find girl?”
So Max had brought her up to date. No surprise. Even the Chinaboy gangsters, with their merciless eyes and ready guns, who dot the viper-twisted back streets around the restaurant like clots in the community’s bloodstream, step aside when Max walks . . . but he obeys Mama like a dutiful son.
Nobody knows why. Nobody ever asks.
“I think so, Mama,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”
“Girl Chinese?”
“No. But she’d look Chinese if you didn’t know, maybe.”
Mama grunted, letting it pass. Years ago, she would have called a woman like Crystal Beth a bar girl, her shorthand for half-breed. But Immaculata had cured that. Immaculata was Max’s woman, part Vietnamese, part American soldier–whatever. And when their baby, Flower, was born, Mama proclaimed the newborn both her grandchild and pure hundred-generation Mandarin Chinese in the same breath.
Nobody argued with her.
I was halfway through a dish of braised beef tips on a bed of fluffy brown rice with scallions and shiitake mushrooms when Max came upstairs. He sat quietly with Mama until I was finished, then I hand-signaled what had happened with the woman between sips of ice water as the silent warrior watched.
His turn: He took me through Porkpie’s night—mimed putting quarters in pay-phone slots, cupped one hand over the side of his mouth to show whispered conversations. Grubbing, hustling—no scores. Porkpie had never gone
