Choice of Evil

“Hard to miss,” I said.

“Look good to you?”

“I’m not that old.” I laughed.

“I didn’t mean you were. . . old. You’re older than me, sure. But I can see you’re not too old to. . .”

“No, you can’t see anything,” I told her. And it was the truth. Her eyes were on my crotch, but it was about as active as the Vanilla Ice fan club.

“How come?”

“What?”

“How come I can’t see anything? You can see everything. And I know you like girls.”

“You scare me, Nadine,” I told her, letting her see the truth if she wanted it. “And nothing turns me off more than fear.”

“It doesn’t everybody,” she said in a throaty whisper. “Some people get very excited by fear. Do you know what it’s like to be wearing a mask? A leather mask with only a zipper for your mouth and two little holes to breathe through? To be chained. And waiting. Not knowing what you’re going to get?”

“You know what?” I told her, my voice quiet, but harder than any silly leather games she liked to play. “I do know. Not about your little masks and whips. But I know exactly what it’s like to be chained. And to not know what’s coming next. But knowing it’s going to hurt. Hurt real bad. And not being able to do a thing about it.”

“You mean for real?” she asked, leaning forward, listening now, not on display.

“Oh yes,” I promised.

“When you were in. . . prison?”

“Prison? Prison was a fucking joke by the time I got there. For me, it was like going to college after prep school. No. Not in prison. When I was a kid. A little kid.”

“You mean your parents—”

“I didn’t have parents. I had the State. That was my mother and my father and my jailer. I served time in POW camps before I was old enough to go to school. You like to play around in your little ‘dungeons,’ wear your costumes. . . . You try it sometime without mercy-words, try it when you can’t pick your partners, you stupid little game-playing bitch—see how much fun it is.”

She gasped, swallowed some words. Sat back on the ottoman and looked at me like I was whatever had crashed at Roswell that the government wasn’t talking about.

I took out a cigarette and lit it, hating myself for losing control. I bit deep into the filter, feeling the pain lance through my jaw, ready to grind the butt out on her pretty carpet when I was done.

She didn’t move, a piece of white stone in the rosy light.

I blew a jet of smoke into her face.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You are fucking sorry,” I told her. Then I stood up. She started to do it at the same time and we bumped. She fell to the carpet. I didn’t look back.

“Can you get word to. . . your friend?” I asked Lorraine over the phone.

“Same place?”

“Yeah. Whenever’s convenient for. . . your friend.”

“I’ll reach out. When I link up, should I. . .?”

“Just leave word. Whenever the meet’s made for at your end is okay—I’ll be here.”

“All right,” she said.

“Crazy, yes?” Mama challenged the minute I sat back down in my booth.

“Yeah, Mama. Crazy. You’re right.”

“So?”

“So I’m going to see it through,” I told her. “And I’m going to get Max to help me,” challenging her now.

“Good,” she said, surprising me. “Balance. Good.”

Sure. I got it. At least Max wasn’t crazy. Thanks.

I went back to my hot-and-sour soup. Mama disappeared. I don’t know how she reaches out for Max. There’s a lot of ways to get messages to deaf people, but Mama was a techno-phobe. She’d use an abacus to work percentages on six-figure scores without missing a beat, but she didn’t trust anything electronic, doling out words on the phone like they were her life savings.

I went out the back door.

Pansy was glad to see me. Always was, no matter what. If she thought I was crazy, she kept it to herself. I dumped the entire quart of beef in oyster sauce I’d taken from Mama’s into her steel bowl, waiting the thirty seconds it took her to make it disappear, then let her out onto the roof to do some dumping of her own.

When she came back down, she stood next to me, both of us looking into the night. I wondered what she saw.

I didn’t like what I did.

When I got to Davidson’s office, he had the cash waiting. I asked him if he’d heard anything from the cops. It took him about ten minutes to say “No.”

I got on the drums and sent word out to the Prof. I couldn’t get him to pack a cellular except when we were working a job, but I had years of experience finding him even when he was homeless-by-choice, so I wasn’t worried—he’d connect up sooner or later.

No point calling Wolfe. When she had the stuff, she’d get it to me.

So I drove back over to Mama’s to wait for word from Lorraine.

When I came through the back door and saw Mama wasn’t at her register, I knew Max was around someplace, probably in the basement. One of the waiters brought me a covered tureen of hot-and-sour soup, not saying a word. I know most of them by face, and that’s enough to get me through the door even if Mama isn’t there to vouch for me, but they treat me like I’m invisible anyway. I was getting the soup because they knew Mama believed I had to have some every time I entered the joint, but I could fucking well serve myself. . . . At least that’s how I translated the Cantonese he mumbled as he put the stuff in front of me.

Fine. I was on my third bowl—the house minimum—when Mama and Max came upstairs. I bowed a greeting to each of them. Mama sat down beside me as Max took the opposite bench.

I signed as much as I knew of what was going on to Max. I spoke the words too—I know Max can read lips, I just never know how much he’s getting.

Max looked pointedly at Mama. She snapped her fingers and barked something. Could have been Mandarin, Lao, Vietnamese, Tagalog—she speaks a ton of Asian languages I can’t even distinguish, and pretty good French and Spanish as well. A pair of her so-called waiters popped out of the back to clear the table. Then they wiped it down scrupulously, not the way they usually do. One of them brought out a black linen tablecloth and snapped it out over the surface. Then they vanished.

From inside his coat, Max took a small metal bowl with a faint yellowish tinge. He placed it carefully on the table between us. Next, he took a thick wooden stick shaped something like a pestle and struck the edge of the bowl as if it was a gong. Then he whisked the stick around the perimeter. A sound like I’d never heard vibrated in the air. It. . . stayed there, drawing me into it. The only way I can describe it, it was like I got when I looked into the red dot I had painted on my mirror. Outside myself. Away. Dissociating the way I’d learned to when I was a kid. When I couldn’t run from the pain. Where I go is the place where I think. About things I couldn’t if I was. . . here.

I pointed at the bowl, made a “What is this?” gesture.

Max held up both his hands, one spread out full, the other with just two fingers showing. Seven. Then he took out a quarter and tapped it, making the sign for “seven” again.

Then he made a hand-washing gesture. The sign for mixing, melding, blending. . .

“It’s made up of seven different metals?” I asked aloud.

“Yes,” Mama said. “Called ‘singing bowl.’ Very sacred. From. . .” She hesitated, catching a warning look from Max. “Tibet,” she finished.

I understood that part. Mama’s Chinese. Mandarin Chinese. She can trace her ancestors back to way before