Flood

I threw the bundle of posters in my trunk and bought a paper-nothing on Goldor yet, so I went to a pay phone and called Toby Ringer. I told him that I’d heard Wilson had snuffed Goldor so I was giving up my search for him. The harsh intake of breath at Toby’s end told me that he knew Goldor was dead. My phone call would make sure there’d be an APB out on Wilson.

Over to another phone, where I called my preppie reporter pal and gave him the hot scoop on a genuine mercenary recruiting operation right in the middle of Manhattan-putting together a string of soldiers of fortune to fight in Rhodesia and South Africa. A terrible scandal and an affront to black people everywhere, he agreed. I promised to call him back in another day or so with names and locations and he said he would go in there undercover and expose the situation for his readers. Christ.

It was getting into the late afternoon by then, so I rolled the Plymouth back toward the warehouse looking for Max before I made the call to the phony gunrunners. I pulled in, killed the engine, and waited. Before I was halfway through the first cigarette Max dropped onto the hood. I vacated the front seat and we went into the back room to talk.

I pulled the lapels of my jacket to show Max I was talking about clothes, made the sign of something falling softly through the air, bowed deeply to show my appreciation of the robes he had given to Flood.

Max dropped his own head in the briefest of bows, flowed into his own version of Flood’s crazy kata and ended with a two-finger strike, his hand darting in and out so quickly that only the rush of the silk sleeve ripping through dead air alerted me. He looked the question at me-could Flood do that? Could she finish the job, or was she just a dancer? So I told him about Goldor and the Cobra and what I wanted to do, how I wanted it all to end-a hiss came from Max. He was warming up.

He followed me to the workbench where we cooked up another stencil out of some cardboard we kept lying around. I found a dozen or so of the little spray cans and pointed toward the car, made signs to show all the doors opening at once and people jumping out, walking down the street looking straight ahead-walking like warriors. I explained what the spray cans were for as Max smiled.

It was still about a half hour before six so Max and I got out the cards and we played gin until it was time. My mind was on other things but I still beat him-Max is too superstitious to count cards like I had showed him. I hooked up the on-line phone set and dialed the gunrunners. James answered on the first ring-I guess he does all the public speaking for the two. “Yes?”

“It’s me. I have a proposition for you. I’ll pick you up in two hours, right where you are, and we’ll talk, okay?”

“Certainly,” he said, and I rang off.

I gestured to Max that we were going to meet the same characters who had been in the warehouse before. He made the sign of a man reaching for a gun and I told him no-it wasn’t going to be a duel, just more talk. Seated at the table, I reached for an imaginary steering wheel and turned it a few times as if I were peering through a windshield. I looked a question at Max, pointing first at him then out into the street. He nodded, he would get us a car. I pointed at my watch and Max held up one finger-it would take him about an hour.

Max faded out the door and I hooked up the phone again and called Flood. “Hi, baby.”

“Hi. Are you working?”

“Working hard.”

“Anything yet?”

“I got most of the ingredients, but… uh… the cake’s not in the oven yet.”

“That’s good-I’m very hungry.”

“Me too. I’ll be working late tonight. Okay to come by when I’m finished?”

“Yes, call first. How late?”

“After midnight.”

“I love you, Burke.”

“You don’t have to motivate me-I told you I was on the job.”

“Don’t be a coward-you can say you love me too.”

“Later,” I said, and hung up. I disconnected the phone, went back inside, and looked through the paper Max had left. I couldn’t even concentrate on the race results. Stupid Flood.

45

THE ASHTRAY WAS filling up by the time Max roared into the warehouse at the wheel of a Blood Shadows war-wagon-a huge black Buick Electra four-door sedan. The Chinese street gangs prefer the four-door models so the maximum number of shooters can hit the street at the same time. The Blood Shadows all come from Hong Kong with burning ambitions and psychopathic personalities as standard equipment. Thirty years ago a Chinese street gang was about as common as a forgiving loan shark. But in one quantum leap the Hong Kong kids overtook their ethnic counterparts all over the city, passing up territorial warfare and gang rape for the more practical activities of extortion and homicide. Shaking down their elders with complete disregard for the consequences, these kids made the old Tong Wars look like a polite debate-the intensity of their disputes was always measured in body counts. The only time they killed Caucasians was by accident, so they weren’t considered a major law-enforcement problem.

Chinatown was their base, but they were moving into Queens and Brooklyn, and they linked up nationally with gangs in Boston and D.C. and on the Coast. A few years ago they had made the mistake of asking Mama for a contribution. Since then Max the Silent had been their hero, especially after four members of their hit squad had been released from the hospital-the other one stayed in the morgue. The survivors told the police they had been hit by a train. When they weren’t spending their extorted cash on fingertip leather jackets or silk shirts or 9-mm automatics they haunted the kung fu movies. And when they moved out of the moviehouses into the darkness of Chinatown’s streets they would argue among themselves about who was the greater-the celluloid warriors on the screen or Max the Silent.

Max flipped the lever into reverse and we backed out of the warehouse. As he drove up the East Side Drive toward the Thirty-fourth Street exit I began a systematic search of the car-in the glove compartment, behind the sun visors, under the seats. I felt a tug on my hand, looked at Max and he shook his head to indicate the car was already clean. Good. The war-wagon moved over the potholes like a rusty tank-the gang kids didn’t maintain their cars, just their guns.

We found the block where the gunrunners would be waiting and Max drove carefully up to them-in his world, the insult Gunther had given demanded revenge. I couldn’t explain to him that in their world there was no such thing as an insult, just profit and loss. James and Gunther were standing where they were supposed to be. I opened the front door, let them have a look at me. They climbed into the backseat without a word and the war-wagon rolled toward the Hudson River. We were silent in the car-Gunther and James because they were acting like they were afraid of microphones, me because I had nothing to say to them.

When we got to the pier Max pulled the Buick in, turning it so it was parallel to the river about twenty feet from the pier’s end. The place was deserted. Gunther and James followed me out of the car. I reached in my pocket for a smoke, watching their faces. They didn’t react. They were relaxed-greedy, not frightened. Good.

“You said you had a proposition for us?” James opened.

“Yes.”

“Is this a good place to talk?”

“Why not?”

“What if someone comes by?”

I looked over to where Max was standing by the Buick, arms folded across his chest. They got the message.

“Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’ll be honest with you. I need some of the guns for myself, okay? And I need some men, about twenty experienced men who want to make some money. Short-term work.”

“Out of the country?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It’s just if you need them to go international there are items like obtaining good passports-”