sons. Give them room.”
The sons backed off, looking disappointed. Now it was the handsome one who seemed adrift, the machete weighing his arm down. The boys stood in the center of a wide, flat concrete circle. Here and there on the floor threads sparkled, remnants shorn from minimum-wage garments.
Dumbo-Ears raised his machete. One of the men cheered derisively, earning a place on my must-kill list.
Dumbo-Ears struck a slow, sweeping blow that the handsome kid parried easily. Sparks flew off the knives. The handsome kid backed off, shaking his head, and Dumbo-Ears aimed a quick swipe at it, a swipe that would have cleaved a stone. The force of the missed blow swung him all the way around, and for a split second he stood with his back completely turned to his opponent.
Laughter.
The handsome kid backed away, saying something in Vietnamese.
When Dumbo-Ears turned around, he was weeping again. With his eyes closed he advanced and sliced the air with his machete. Its tip made a red line across Handsome's brown chest.
Dumbo-Ears had decided to live.
Now he was off balance, the weight of the machete dragging him down, and Handsome was backing away, staring down at his own sudden blood. Their feet scraped on the concrete, and their breath rasped like fingernails on silk. Dumbo-Ears recovered his balance, still sobbing, and swung the knife again, and this time it split the air above Handsome's skull, and Handsome raised his knife to stop it and then brought the knife down reflexively and cut Dumbo-Ears shallowly from sternum to navel, a diagonal slash that broke the fine brown skin, parted it, and let the red blood escape into the air. It splattered among the remnants, bright red berries in a drab Christmas wreath. Handsome looked startled.
The girl screamed a confusion of words.
“They're only playing,” Charlie Wah complained in English.
But one of them wasn't.
Dumbo-Ears took his knife in both hands and swung it horizontally waist high with a grunt of effort, and Handsome jumped back and just avoided being cut in half at the navel. He stumbled into one of the goons, and the goon grabbed his shoulders and threw him back, into the point of the other boy's upraised knife, which passed through the skin over his right deltoid muscle. Handsome emitted a shrill sound and dropped to his knees, the knife slipping out again, and blood pulsed out of the wound and drenched his chest and stomach.
But the other boy was coming after him now, slicing downward at his head, and Handsome got the machete up in time to parry the blow and then scrambled back between the thugs' legs and out of reach. The men laughed and backed away, and Charlie Wah, laughing too, said, “Give them room.”
The men backed up, widening the circle, and then one of them yelled something sharp and surprised, and Handsome burst into the circle from a new direction, behind Dumbo-Ears, and the machete split the air coming down and cut a flap of red meat from Dumbo-Ears's left arm.
The men applauded.
Dumbo-Ears backed away, staring in disbelief at his arm, and Handsome brought the knife up this time, sharp edge pointed toward the ceiling, in a swipe that missed everything but the point of Dumbo-Ears's chin and the tip of his nose. There was, as Charlie Wah had surmised there would be, a lot of blood.
Now both boys were screaming, not words, just raw red noise, and Dumbo-Ears was running forward at Handsome in a move so devoid of grace and lethal meaning, so obviously planless, that the men laughed again. Handsome retreated quickly, knife pointing up at a forty-five degree angle, at the ready, methodically seeking an opening, and it was obvious to me that Dumbo-Ears would be dead the moment he found it.
And then the harmless-looking little man who'd translated my joke stepped out of the group and stuck out a foot, and Handsome went down on his back, and Dumbo-Ears lunged forward and down and pierced him through the chest, falling over him in his eagerness to drive the knife all the way through and into the floor. His momentum carried him forward and he somersaulted over his friend, losing his grasp on the knife, but the knife wasn't going anywhere. Its handle pointed at the ceiling, the blade held in place by the bone of the other boy's sternum.
Handsome put both hands against the blade of the knife and pulled, either ignoring or not feeling the sharpened edge cutting into his palms. He tugged once and then again, more slowly this time, and then he gargled his own blood and his left hand fell away and landed on the concrete with a slap like a dead fish. He gazed at the ceiling, looking like Charlie Wah seeking an idiom.
“That wasn't fair,” Charlie Wah said mildly. “Someone check the rule book.”
The one who'd tripped the boy translated, and it got a big laugh.
Dumbo-Ears pulled himself to his elbows and turned to look at his friend. Then an anguished wail burst from him, a bright, burnished bubble of sound, and he crawled over and wrapped his arms around Handsome's head.
“Hit him,” Charlie Wah said. “Not too hard.”
The translator leaned over and struck the boy sharply at the base of the skull, and Dumbo-Ears looked up, puzzled by the impact, and then slumped across Handsome's chest. Handsome didn't move.
“How long?” Charlie Wah said impatiently.
“Maybe a couple of hours,” the translator said. He was slender and balding, and cooler than old coffee. “He'll be out of here long before the morning crew arrives.”
Charlie Wah nodded in satisfaction. “Don't bother cleaning up,” he said. “They have to be found somewhere.” He turned to me. “Just so you know we're not kidding,” he said. Then he snapped his fingers twice. “Ying. Kill her.”
Ying approached the girl, knife in hand. He waved it in front of her face once, just trying for a little fun, a little reaction, and he got it. She spat at him again.
“Quickly,” Charlie Wah said, and Ying raised the knife and grinned and cut the girl's throat. Her feet kicked out, mimicking a folk dance, and Ying stepped back to avoid the blood.
Charlie Wah came over to me. “Open your mouth,” he said calmly. I did as I was told, and he put something small and cold into it. “The key to your cuffs,” he continued. “You should be able to work your hands around and spit the key into your right hand so you can use it to set yourself free. This should pose no problem to a resourceful man like you. Once you are free, leave. The stairs will lead you to Hill Street. Go home. Get a new girlfriend. Stop thinking about Chinese matters. Do you understand?”
I nodded. I couldn't have spoken if my life depended on it.
“I like to think I have a certain flair for these things,” Charlie Wah said. “I will exert it to the fullest if I have to kill you. But I won't have to kill you, will I?”
I lowered my gaze. Blood roared in my ears.
He smiled. “I didn't think so,” he said. Then he patted me on the arm and said, “it's been nice discussing English with you.” The translator got another laugh.
On his way out, Ying gave me a mean little jellyfish sting of a glance and snapped out the lights.
I waited at least half an hour, partly to regain my strength and partly to make sure they'd really left. I was fully appreciative of Charlie Wah's flair.
As he'd predicted, it was relatively easy to get the cuffs undone. I simply followed the scenario he'd outlined, found the keyhole, and listened to the snap. It was a musical sound.
I would have left there and then if my legs had worked, but luckily for me they didn't. I had to sit on the floor in the dark and flex them for a few minutes before I could trust them to bear my weight, and by then I knew that I had to take something with me.
First I felt my way to the light switch and snapped it on, waiting as the fluorescents flickered into a chalky glow. Then I checked the girl and Handsome and found both of them cooling rapidly. I touched my pants pockets and discovered my car keys right where they should have been.
Charlie Wah knew his man. I'd been properly cowed. I was a sensible man, no threat. It was a perfectly reasonable scenario: I'd unlock my cuffs like a scared puppy chewing through his leash and drive home with my tail between my legs, and Dumbo-Ears would wake up around five in the company of a couple of dead friends and head for a hole to nurse his wounds before the police came and gave him a new set of problems. And he'd carry the news to the members of his gang, and there wouldn't be any unwanted displays of initiative for a while. Why take us anywhere? The soldiers might be spotted as they dropped the living and the dead into alleys and ashcans. Let the dead be discovered where they died, the living having sensibly scattered.
