“Sort of.”
He smiled. It didn't raise the temperature any. “Pardon?”
“I'm curious,” I said. “That's my job, to be curious.”
“Yes. You're a detective. It says so in your wallet. But not a policeman.”
“Not,” I said. “Not a policeman.”
“Lo must have taken something,” Charlie Wah said persuasively.
“That's what I thought, too. But they say not.”
“Where is your girlfriend's father?”
“Dead.”
“Chinese?”
“Yes.”
Charlie Wah thought for a moment. “Of Lo's age?”
“Yes. I think they were friends.”
“In China.”
“I guess so.”
“But he came here before he died. The father.”
“No, He died in China.”
Charlie Wah looked at me for a very long time. “Think about your nose,” he said at last.
“He died in China. The Cultural Revolution got him.”
“You have no doubt about that.”
“It's one of the first things my girlfriend ever told me.”
“And when was this?”
“Years ago.” My nose was beginning to itch.
“Years ago,” Charlie Wah repeated. “How old was your girlfriend then?”
“You mean when she told me?”
“No,” he said impatiently. “When her father died.”
“Two,” I said.
“Nothing was taken,” Charlie Wah said. He sounded puzzled.
“Not that I know. Not from either house.”
“How odd,” Charlie Wah said distantly. Then he called something out without turning around. I heard 'Lo' twice, and one of the men left the room. Charlie Wah drew in the corners of his mouth and stared at the floor for a moment, and then looked up at me.
“You are remarkably lucky,” he said.
I immediately felt better. “Well, whoopee.”
“Yes, whoopee. If you were Chinese, you'd be dead. Instead, you're going to live to be an old man and have many grandchildren.”
“I can't wait.”
“Unless you get in Charlie Wah's way again. If you do that, you'll be as dead as any Chinese. And we're going to persuade you not to get in Charlie Wah's way again. We're going to kill two birds with one stone. Ying,” he said without turning his head, “her bleeding has stopped by now.”
“Yes, Ah-Wah,” Ying said, stepping back.
“Bring in her friends.”
Ying hurried off like a good little wounded soldier. He still hadn't mopped the blood from his own face.
“She's pretty, as Ying said.” Charlie Wah sounded faintly regretful. “But trash. All Vietnamese are trash.”
“Whatever,” I said. He needed response to keep his rhythm going.
“Still, trash has its uses. In the old days, before things started to break down, you could use trash without worrying about it.”
“You can't touch pitch,” I said, “without being defiled.”
“Yes?” he said. “What is that?”
“I think it's the Bible.”
“And the meaning. Pitch is something in baseball, isn't it?”
“It's like tar, dirt. But sticky.”
“Dirt sticks to your fingers,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Bingo,” he said. Then he smiled again. “English is an exhilarating language.”
“Glad you like it.”
“Shakespeare,” he said irrelevantly.
“Cao Xueqin,” I said.
He looked startled.
“It's my favorite book.”
“You'-he paused for a moment-'you are pulling my leg.”
I couldn't help it. I laughed.
His face darkened, but then he smiled. “Who do you like,” he asked, “Bao-Chai or Dai-Yu?” It wasn't an idle question; it was a pop quiz.
“Bao-Chai,” I said. “Dai-Yu cries too much.”
Behind him, three beefy Chinese pulled the Vietnamese boys into the room. They'd been stripped to the waist. Two of the men carried long machetes.
“She cries always,” Charlie Wah said, relaxing slightly, “but such sentiment.”
“Coughs a lot, too,” I said, watching the two boys. The one with the Dumbo ears looked terrified.
“She was dying,” Charlie Wah said. “Don't you think that's sad?”
“Death is always sad.”
He saw me looking past him and turned to regard the boys. “But sometimes necessary.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
“Jesus?” Charlie Wah asked, swiveling back to me. “My least favorite god.”
10
“In the good days,” Charlie Wah was proclaiming from one end of the room, “we had respect. We had natural order.” He paused, and the mild-looking translator who'd gotten the laugh at Ying's expense turned it into Chinese. Charlie had one hand in the pocket of his blue, double-pleated suit trousers, jingling enough change to choke a parking meter. He liked making speeches.
The girl sagged drunkenly against her pillar. The cut on her cheek had scabbed into a rusty thread, border- straight. I'd decided to kill Ying if I got a chance.
The boys had been stood back to back in the center of the floor.
“The man who enjoyed respect was the oldest man,” Charlie Wah said comfortably. “As it should be. The wisest man, the grandfather, the one richest in experience. This was Chinese. This was proper and right. This was Confucian.”
One of the Vietnamese boys, the handsome one, snickered. The man nearest him slapped him in the face, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to snap his head around. Hard enough to humiliate.
The boy looked straight forward, his cheek scarlet. Dumbo-Ears blinked rapidly, as though he'd been the one who'd been hit. He looked childishly small, childishly young.
“Now the man who gets respect is the man with the gun,” Charlie Wah continued, shaking his head sadly. Fluorescent light gleamed on his high forehead, and change clinked and jingled. 'He can be a thug, he can be the most stupid man in the room, but if he has the gun he becomes the leader. Why is this?
