Flood

“Yes.”

“Can you wait in the lobby downstairs? Move out when you see the car?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t sound so depressed, kid. It’s coming soon.”

“Okay,” as flat as ever.

“Later, Flood.” I hung up.

I cruised over to Mama’s in the Plymouth, parked around the back, and went through the kitchen to look through the glass. The place was empty except for some dregs from the late lunchtime crowd. Stepping through the kitchen door sideways I entered the restaurant from the back like I’d been in the bathroom. I sat down at the last booth in the rear, the one with the half-eaten food standing around on the plates, and one of Mama’s waiters approached. “Will there be anything else?” I don’t know how Mama trained them, but they were good-I’d obviously been here for the past hour or so. I told the waiter I was satisfied and lit an after-lunch cigarette.

When the rest of the crowd moved out Mama left her place by the cash register in front and came over to sit with me. The waiter cleared off the table and I ordered some eggdrop soup and Mongolian beef with fried rice. Mama told the waiter to bring her some tea. “What is happening, Burke?”

“The usual stuff, Mama.”

“Those men on the phone-bad men, right?”

“Not bad like dangerous, Mama-just bad like lousy, you know?”

“Yes, I know, I hear in their voice, okay? Could be very bad people if you afraid of them, right?”

“Oh yeah, fear would make them tough for sure.”

“Max help you?”

“Sometimes.”

“I mean with those men, okay?”

“Max is my friend, Mama. He would help me and I would help him, understand?”

“I understand. Beef good?”

“The beef is perfect.”

“Not too hot?”

“Just right.”

“Cook very old. Sometimes you do thing long time you get very good, right? Some things you do too long, not so good.”

“Like me?”

“You not so old yet, Burke.” Max suddenly materialized at Mama’s elbow. She slid over in the booth to make room for him and signaled for more tea. Mama thought tea was important to Max’s continued growth and development. Max seemed indifferent to the entire issue. “Do all Chinese people believe in tea?” I asked her.

“All Chinese people not same, Burke. You know this, right?”

“I just meant, is it a cultural thing, Mama? Like when the Irish drink beer even when they don’t like it?”

“I don’t know. But Max like tea too. Very good for him.” I looked at Max. He made a face to say the stuff wouldn’t hurt him so what the hell. He reads lips so well that sometimes I think he only pretends not to hear.

“Well, that’s kind of what I meant. You’re Chinese, Max is Chinese, you both like tea…”

Mama giggled like I’d said something funny. “You think Max Chinese?”

“Sure.”

“You think all people from Far East Chinese?”

“Mama, don’t be-”

“Maybe you think Max Japanese?” Mama giggled again. Don’t ask me why, but Chinese people don’t like Japanese people. In fact, the only subject on which I’ve seen Orientals agree is that none of them seem to like Koreans.

“I know Max isn’t Japanese.”

“How do you know?”

I knew because one night Max and I were talking about being a warrior and what it meant, and I mentioned the samurai tradition and Max said he had nothing to do with that. He told me a samurai must fight for his lord and Max had no lord. I didn’t get all of it, but I knew he wasn’t Japanese. It made sense to me-if you’re going to do crime for a living, the only way is to be self-employed. But I just told Mama, “I know.”

Max looked over at Mama, bowed his head to show great respect for all things Chinese, and then made great mountain peaks with his hands and pointed at his chest. Mama and I said “Tibet” at the same time and Max nodded. What the hell, Max wasn’t any more of a citizen than I was.

Mama said she had to get back to business, and Max stood up to let her out of the booth, bowing and sitting back to face me again all in one motion. Mama looked at me, then at Max, and spread her hands in a gesture of frustration. Max nodded sharply to tell her that I would be all right, and she seemed satisfied. Then he put twenty fifty-dollar bills on the table next to my copy of the racing form. I pocketed eighteen of them, left the remaining two for him-ten percent is his usual transportation fee.

Max wasn’t going for that. He crooked the first two fingers of his right hand in a come-here gesture and I put my money back on the table. Then he extracted another two bills from my pile and motioned I was free to pocket the rest. Okay, so we each had a hundred on the table. So what?

Picking up the racing form, Max indicated that I should pick out a horse for that evening and we’d both invest. I made a variety of gestures to show him that I couldn’t always be expected to pick winners, but Max put his hands together in a prayerful attitude, pointed at me, and tapped his pocket. He was saying that I must be especially skillful since, after all, I’d won all this money.

The last thing I needed was Max’s silent sarcasm. Thus challenged, I whipped out a felt-tip pen and went to work on the form. Max sat down next to me and we spent the next hour or so going over the charts. I used some blank paper to demonstrate that although Yonkers and Roosevelt were both half-mile oval tracks, Yonkers had a much shorter stretch run. So a horse that fired late but lost at Yonkers because he just ran out of racetrack would have a shot at Roosevelt. Then I showed him the bloodlines of certain animals that seemed to run better in cooler weather. (You have to look for Down Under horses, from Australia or New Zealand-their biological clock is different from American horses because their summer is our winter.) I told him about high humidity making horses go faster, and the importance of post position. For pure guts, I told Max, all other things being equal, you have to go with a mare rather than a male horse.

When I finally checked my watch, hours had flown by. Max was as intent as ever. Finally we found a horse that had been running strong at Rockingham, up in New Hampshire, and was shipping in for the first time. A three- year-old that hadn’t been heavily staked, he was trying the older horses in a $27,000 claimer. He had a good driver, decent but not spectacular breeding, and he looked tough as nails. And Rockingham was a couple of seconds slower than Roosevelt, track for track. Looked good to me-I thought he was maybe in a little cheap, and leaving from an inside post to boot. The horse was named Honor Bright, but I don’t bet on names. Max took our two hundred and used my pen to circle the horse on the racing form. Then he nodded at me, bowed, smiled, and split.

It was about time to meet Flood, so I did the same.

28

IT WAS ALMOST seven when I poked the Plymouth’s nose down Flood’s block the way a ferret sticks his nose down a hole before taking the plunge. Everything seemed quiet, so I rolled down my window and snaked out the hand-held spotlight so it was pointed across the windshield directly at Flood’s door. When I flicked the switch the night turned into day-nothing happened, nobody jumped from the shadows. Flood walked out the door wearing an ankle-length maxicoat with a big pocketbook slung over one shoulder. She climbed in the car without a word and I set it rolling downtown.

As soon as we straightened out, Flood started pulling pieces of paper out of her bag and talking at the same time. “I did exactly what you told me. I looked through everything. There’s no name even like his anywhere. I even asked the clerk to help me and he did and we still couldn’t find anything.”

“Just calm down, Flood. It’s no tragedy. Did you write down all the docket numbers from the days I told you to