wide, straight mouth. Two semifinalists from the Mr. Chinese Universe contest stood possessively behind him. They would have been identical except that one of them had two eyebrows and the other had one, a straight line of hair that joined over his nose like a furrow of corn.
“We will speak English,” the man in blue said in a mild voice. “To be polite.” Then he pointed at Highpockets and said, “Ying. Cut yourself.”
Highpockets looked at his friends on the floor, but no one moved. Most of them seemed to be fascinated by the unfinished garments in the cartons at their feet. One of them actually picked up a sleeve and gave it an experimental stretch.
Highpockets swallowed and then looked an appeal at the man in blue. The man in blue took whatever it was out of his mouth and lifted his eyebrows expectantly. Highpockets immediately put the blade against his own face and sliced downward. Blood flowed.
“Face the girl,” the man in the blue said. Highpockets did as told, bleeding face to bleeding face.
“You may spit on him,” the man in the blue suit said.
The girl spat on him.
“Ying,” the man in the blue suit said. “Take one of those pieces of cloth and clean her face.”
Highpockets-or Ying, I guessed-took a sleeve or something from a carton and mopped her face with it.
“Press it against the cut to stop the bleeding,” the man in the blue suit said.His eyes were calm, almost uninterested.
Ying did as told, very gently. Blood from his own cut stained his white shirt. The man in blue turned to face me.
“It's always wise,” he said, “to demonstrate control at the outset. People think it's easy to be the bad guy. They don't take into account the kind of help you have to hire. Does your head hurt?”
“Yes,” I said this time.
“Good,” he said, nodding. “There's no reason you should escape Scotch-free.”
“Scot-free,” I said without thinking.
His eyebrows went up and he smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “Idioms give me some trouble. So many of them make no sense. The first time someone said 'How do you do' to me, I asked him how I did what.” He paused.
“How about that?” I said, since he obviously expected me to say something.
“You are in the way,” he said, apparently fascinated by the sound of the words. “Is that what you say, 'in the way'?”
Was he kidding? “That's what we say.”
“I thought so. It's not your fault, exactly. Or, rather, it is, because you are a persistent soul. But it's not your fault that the Confucian ethic is breaking down.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said, not having the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“Everywhere you look,” he said, “old values are failing. Your country is certainly not immune.”
“I guess not.”
“Look at the work ethic,” he said, settling in for a chat. “Americans used to like to work. Now they're as lazy as fleas on a dog.” He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
“That's a new one to me,” I said.
“ 'As lazy as fleas on a dog'?” he asked. “This is not something you say?”
“Well, it's not something I say.”
“The flea,” he said quite seriously, thinking things through, “is not an industrious animal.”
“Hungry, though,” I said, equally seriously.
“Hungry?” He put the thing back in his mouth, and I saw it was a gold toothpick. “ 'As hungry as fleas on a dog,' perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
“That may be the trouble with Americans. They're not hungry anymore.” He seemed to be waiting for applause.
“I think that's something we're proud of.”
“Ah, yes, but it takes the edge off.” He smiled in triumph at the idiom, the gold toothpick protruding from one corner of his smile. Something gurgled.
“Excuse me,” he said, the model of politeness. He pulled one lapel of his suit aside to display a holster, and my stomach did a sudden flipflop. The holster gurgled again, and he pulled a cellular telephone from it, turning away from me as he did so. Highpockets-Ying-watched him, his shirt soaked with blood, not daring to remove the cloth from the girl's face. The girl seemed to be concentrating on something taking place in the Andromeda Galaxy.
“Yes?” Mr. Blue demanded. He listened for a moment, and then snapped his fingers, twice. One of the Mr. Universe contestants, the one with the single eyebrow, leaped forward, pad and pen in hand. He handed them to the boss and turned submissively away, offering a back as broad as the Mississippi Delta as a writing surface.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Blue said into the phone. Then he said, “San Pedro,” and followed it with a couple of very fast paragraphs in Chinese, but it didn't sound like Cantonese. He took the phone from his ear and punched a button, turning back to me and holding out the pad and pen in one smooth gesture. Mr. Universe took them, and Mr. Blue holstered the phone.
“You understand Mandarin?” he demanded.
“No.”
He snapped something at me, watching me closely, and then flung a few syllables at his bodyguards. They started to move toward me, and Mr. Blue gave me the big calm eye for a moment and then snapped his fingers. The muscle twins froze.
“I told them to remove and eat your liver.”
“I'd rather they didn't,” I said, hoping my knees didn't decide to fold again.
“So I see. And I see you didn't understand when I said it.” He gave me a forgiving smile. “I am Charlie Wah,” he announced. “You see, I tell you my name. Do you know anything about Charlie Wah?”
“I'm learning.”
He laughed softly, a precisely measured and tightly controlled little ha-ha-ha, and then stopped, cutting the laugh off in mid-ha. “Well,” he said, “that's probably good. I would like you to tell me everything you know.”
I tried to think of something I could tell him, and failed. “I don't know much of anything.”
Charlie Wah smiled at me, one reasonable man to another. “And yet you are here.”
I said, “I was looking for Little Tokyo.”
“Please,” he said, “don't mess with my head.”
“That's a little dated,” I said.
He nodded. “And what would you say?”
“I don't-” I began.
“Would you say 'Help'?” Charlie Wah snapped, stepping closer. The two bodybuilders came with him in perfect lockstep. “Would you say 'Oh, don't' if Ying here was told to cut your nose off? You can live without your nose, but many veins supply it and a lot of blood would be involved. And then, of course, you wouldn't be exactly a fashion model when it was over,”
“I don't know anything,” I said, on the edge of pleading. “It's true.”
“Let me be the judge of that. Just tell me why you're here. Start at the beginning, please. Everything you know.”
“I know that my girlfriend's uncle showed up unexpectedly-”
Charlie Wah held up a finger. “Lo.”
“Lo. And he kidnapped my girlfriend's niece and nephew and then returned them without taking anything.”
He pulled the gold toothpick from his mouth. “Without taking anything from where?”
“From my girlfriend's brother's house.”
“In Los Angeles.” He was watching me very closely.
“And Las Vegas,” I added quickly. “Her mother lives in Las Vegas.”
Charlie Wah nodded, one short jerk of the smooth chin. “What was he looking for?”
“I have no idea.”
“And this is why you're here? To ask him what he was looking for?”
