Downtown

3

One good thing Michael had learned in Vietnam was that a bad situation could only get worse. Either you reacted immediately or you never got a chance to react at all. Only three words came from the man’s mouth, cutting through the wind and the slashing snow, but those words meant trouble. “Hands up, man!” and Michael moved at once, inside the gun hand, knee coming up into the man’s groin, head rising swiftly to butt the ski-masked chin as the man doubled over in pain. There was the click of teeth hitting teeth. The man lurched, his hands flailing the air as he twisted partly away from Michael, who reached out for the collar of the leather jacket, caught it, twisted his hand into it, and yanked back on it. He might have been in the jungle again, this could have been Vietnam again. But there was snow underfoot and not the damp rot of vegetation, and the man was wearing black leather instead of black pajamas. Nor was this a slight and slender Oriental who you sometimes felt you could break in half with your bare hands, this was a giant who measured perhaps six-feet two-inches tall and weighed two hundred pounds, and he wasn’t about to be yanked over on his back by someone who was shorter by four inches and lighter by thirty pounds. Michael hadn’t done this kind of work for a long time now. You got fat living in Florida. Eating oranges and watching the sun go down. You forgot there were such things as people wanting to hurt you. You forget there were such things as sometimes getting killed.

In the old days, there’d have been a knife in his hands, and he’d have gone for the throat. But that was then, and this was now, and Michael was working very hard and breathing very hard as the man turned and swung the gun at the same time, slamming the butt into the side of Michael’s head, knocking the subway map out of his hand and knocking Michael himself to the sidewalk. He immediately rolled away in the snow, because jungle fighting had taught him yet another thing: if one man is holding a gun and the other man is on the ground and the first man doesn’t fire, then the gun is empty and the next thing that’s coming is a kick.

Michael didn’t know how the gun could be empty since not a single shot had been fired, but the kick came right on schedule, aimed straight for the spot on his head where the gun had already hit him. His head wasn’t there anymore, though. His head was perhaps six inches from where the kick sliced the air, eight inches now because he was still rolling away from the kick, a foot away now, rolling, rolling, and then scrambling to his knees and bracing himself because the man was coming at him again, bellowing in what seemed to be genuine rage although Michael hadn’t done a damn thing to him but kick him in the balls and butt him under the chin a little.

“Freeze!” a woman’s voice shouted, but nobody froze anything. Michael kept coming up off his knees because being on your knees was a bad position when a gorilla was charging you, and the gorilla kept right on charging and bellowing but not firing the gun, which caused Michael to think yet another time that the gun was empty.

“I said freeze, police!” the woman shouted again, which wasn’t at all what she’d said the first time, and which this time caused the gorilla to hesitate for just the slightest bit of an instant, but that was all the time Michael needed. He feinted at the masked man’s head with a right jab, and then kicked sideways and hard at his ankles, hoping the snow underfoot would help the maneuver, which it did. The man’s feet slid out from under him and he went crashing down in the opposite direction, the gun flying out of his hand. This time Michael was on him in a wink, straddling him, and chopping the flat of his hand across the bridge of where the nose should have been under the mask. The man screamed. Michael hoped he’d broken the nose. The woman screamed, too.

“Police, police, break it up, goddamn it!”

She was standing at the top of the steps leading down to the subway.

She didn’t look like any cop Michael had ever seen in his life.

She was, in fact, a very fat woman in her late thirties, he guessed, wearing a short black monkey-fur jacket over a red garter belt, red panties, red seamed silk stockings, and red high-heeled boots.

At first, Michael thought she was a mirage. Coming up out of the subway that way. Half-naked. In a snowstorm no less.

Flaming red hair to match the lingerie and boots. Blazing green eyes, five-feet four-inches tall and weighing at least a hundred and fifty pounds.

Michael picked up the gun and pointed it at the man in the snow.

“Up!” he said. “On your feet!”

“Drop the gun,” the fat redhead said. Michael had no intention of dropping the gun. Not while the man sitting in the snow was still breathing.

“You hurt me,” the man said.

High, piping, frightened voice.

“No kidding?” Michael said, and reached down for the ski mask, pulling it off his head, wanting to see just how much he’d hurt him.

The man was Chinese.

Or Japanese.

Or, for all Michael knew, Vietnamese.

Everything seemed suddenly like a dream. He was back in the jungle again, where everyone had slanted eyes, and where day and night he dreamed of naked redheaded women materializing in the mist, though not as short or as fat as this one was. Back then the women who materialized were very slender, but they were all carrying hand grenades in their armpits. The bad guys were slender, too. And very small. This bad guy was very large.

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

In perfect English.

“Nice talk,” the fat redhead said. “You,” she said to Michael. “I told you to drop the gun.”

“Where’s your badge?” Michael said.

“Here’s my badge,” she said, and took from her handbag a shield that looked very much like the one Cahill had flashed in the bar, gold with blue enameling. “Detective O’Brien,” she said, “First Squad.”

“Officer,” the Oriental man said at once, “this person broke my nose.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Michael said.

“Get up,” Detective O’Brien said. “I think he broke some of my teeth, too.”

He was on his feet now, tongue searching his teeth for chips, hand rubbing his nose at the same time. Michael knew the nose wasn’t broken.

He’d have jumped out of his skin just touching it. The teeth were another matter. He’d butted the man pretty hard.

“What are you doing sticking up people?” he asked. He had the idea that Chinese guys—if he was Chinese—didn’t go around sticking up people. Japanese guys, neither. He wasn’t so sure about Vietnamese.

“What are you doing trying to kill people?” the man said.

“I was defending myself,” Michael said.

“From what? A fake gun?”

Michael looked at the gun in his hand. It had the weight and heft of a real gun, but it was nonetheless plastic. By now, the man had decided that nothing was broken. Teeth all okay, nose still intact. Which put Michael in a dangerous position in that the gun in his hand was plastic and the man standing before him was beginning to look bigger and bigger every minute. Michael had never seen such a large Oriental in his life. He wondered if perhaps the man was a fake Oriental, the way Cahill had been a fake detective and the way the plastic gun in his hand was a fake Colt .45 automatic.

The gun Detective O’Brien pulled out of her handbag looked very real.

“I’ll shoot the first one of you fucks who moves,” she said.

Which sounded like authentic cop talk, too.

“You,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Charlie Wong.”

“Chinese, huh?” she asked.

“No, Jewish,” Wong said sarcastically, which Michael figured was the wrong way to sound when a fat lady in only her underwear and a monkey-fur jacket was standing in the shivering cold with a pistol in her hand.

“And you?” she said to Michael.

“Presbyterian,” he said.

“Your name,” she said impatiently, and wagged the gun at him.

“A cop,” Wong said, shaking his head, “I can’t believe it. I thought you were a hooker.”

“Why, thank you,” Detective O’Brien said.

“That’s the way the hookers dress down here,” Wong explained to Michael. “Even in cold weather like this. All year round, in fact.”

“If you two gentlemen don’t mind,” Detective O’Brien said, sounding as sarcastic as Wong had earlier sounded, “what we’re gonna do now is march to the station house, ‘cause quite frankly I don’t appreciate disorderly conduct on my …”

Wong shoved out at Michael, who in turn lost his footing and crashed into Detective O’Brien, who fell over backward onto her almost-naked behind, her silk-stockinged legs flying into the air, her gun going off. Michael figured that what he had here was a fat lady who was a real cop with a real badge and a real gun, but who thought he was a two-bit brawler instead of a two-bit victim. He decided he did not want to spend the rest of the night explaining that Wong had tried to hold him up. Especially since Detective O’Brien was now sitting up in the snow at the top of the steps leading down to the subway, her elbows on her knees, the pistol in both hands, taking very careful aim at him.

He had learned another thing in Vietnam. “Aiiii-eeeeeee!” he yelled.

When you heard this in the jungle, your blood ran cold.

It worked here in downtown Manhattan, too.

Detective O’Brien screamed back at him in terror. Her gun went off wildly, and so did Michael, in the same direction Wong had gone, running back toward Moore, and crossing the street, and seeing Wong up ahead going a hundred miles an hour.

Michael took a quick look at his watch.

8:45.

His plane would be leaving in two hours and twenty minutes.

He could not go down into the subway to catch his A-train to the airport because Detective O’Brien was behind him, sitting between him and his transportation. There was not a taxi anywhere in sight, and besides the ten dollars Bonano had loaned him was not enough for cab fare to Kennedy. He did not know this goddamn city where everyone seemed to be either a cop or a crook and all of them seemed to be crazy. He did not know where there might be another subway station where he could catch a train to the airport, because his map was behind him, too, there on the sidewalk between him and O’Brien. He knew only that when you were lost in the jungle, you followed a native guide.

Behind him, Detective O’Brien fired her gun. Into the air, he hoped. He ran like hell after Wong. They ran for what seemed like miles. Wong was a good runner. Michael was out of shape and out of breath. His shoes were sodden and his socks were wet and his feet were cold and his eyeglasses kept caking with snow, which he repeatedly cleared as he followed Wong, both of them padding silently over fields of white, the curbs gone now, no difference now between sidewalk and street, just block after block of white after white after white in a part of the city that was totally alien to him. But at last he turned a corner behind Wong and saw him ducking into a doorway with Chinese lettering over it. Michael looked at his watch again. 8:57. Wong disappeared into the doorway. Michael followed him.

He wiped off his glasses and put them back on again.

He was inside a Chinese fortune-cookie factory.

A Chinese man in white pants, a white shirt, a long white apron, and a white chef’s hat stood behind a stainless steel counter stuffing fortune cookies with little slips of paper.

“Which way did he go?” Michael asked.

“True ecstasy is a golden lute on a purple night,” the fortune-cookie stuffer said. There was a door at the far end of the room. Michael pointed to it.

“Did he go in there?” he asked.

“He who rages at fate rages at barking dogs,” the man said, and stuffed another cookie.

“Thank you,” Michael said, and went immediately toward the door.

Behind him, the fortune-cookie stuffer said, “Dancers have wings but pigs cannot fly.”

Michael opened the door.

He was suddenly in a downtown-Saigon gambling den.

In Saigon, there were only three things to do: get drunk, get laid, or get lucky. There were a great many gambling dens lining the teeming side streets of Saigon, and he had gambled in most of them and had never got lucky in any of them. Nor had he ever seen anyone playing Russian roulette in any of them. That was for the movies. He had told Arthur Crandall—or whatever his real name was—that Platoon was a pretty realistic movie, but the operative word in that observation was “movie.” Because however realistic it might have been, it was still only and merely a movie, and everyone sitting in that theater knew that he was watching flickering images on a beaded screen and that the guns going off and the blood spurting were fake. In the jungle, the guns going off and the blood spurting were real.

You could never show in a movie the feel of a friend’s hot blood spilling onto your hands when he took a hit from a frag grenade. Never. You could never explain in the most realistic of war films that you had shit your pants the first time a mortar shell exploded six feet from where you were lying on your belly in the jungle mud. In war movies, nobody ever shit his pants. You could never explain the terror and revulsion you’d felt the first time you saw a dead soldier lying on his back with his cock cut off and stuffed into his mouth. In war movies, guys compensated for their terror and revulsion by playing Russian roulette in Saigon gambling dens. In real life, what you did in Saigon gambling dens was you bet on the roll of the dice, the turn of the card, or— occasionally—the courage and skill of a rooster.

Cockfights in Saigon were as common as severed cocks in the jungle, but you never saw a cockfight in the same building where people were shooting crap or playing poker.

Here and now, in this section of the fortune-cookie factory, there were no cockfights. There were stainless steel ovens, and there were two crap games on blankets against one of the walls, and two poker games at tables, and a mah-jongg game at yet another table. The mah-jongg table was occupied entirely by Chinese men who looked as if they had stepped full blown out of the Ming Dynasty. This was by far the noisiest table in the room, the Chinese men slamming down tiles and shouting what sounded like orders to behead someone, and the men standing around the table shouting either encouragement or disparagement, it was difficult to tell. There was some noise, but not as much, coming from the two crap games on the blankets, where—as had been the case in Saigon—there were Orientals playing with white guys, black guys, and Hispanics. A television set on a shelf high on the wall was turned up to its full volume, and Andy Williams had just come on in a Christmas special that contributed mightily to the overall din. In contrast to the television jubilance, the poker players were virtually solemn. A pall of smoke hung over the entire room. Charlie Wong was nowhere in sight.

Michael looked at his watch. 9:05. He had to get out of here and find a way to get to Kennedy by subway. His plane would be leaving in exactly two hours, the last plane to Boston tonight. He wandered over to one of the crap games, thinking he’d ask one of the players how to get to a subway stop that would connect with the Kennedy train. A short Hispanic—who looked remarkably like the young man who’d asked him not to lean on his car—picked up the dice, blew on them, said, “Mama necesita un par de zapatos nuevos!” and promptly rolled snake eyes. “Mierda!” he shouted, and immediately walked away from the blanket. On the television screen, Andy Williams was singing “Jingle Bells.”

Michael stepped into the space the little Hispanic had vacated.

Taxi fare would be nice, he thought.

There were five players in the game now: two blacks, two Chinese, and a white man. One of the black men was named Harry. Michael discerned this when the dice were handed to him and one of the Chinese men said, “Come on, Hally, ketchum up hot,” sounding like the cook in an old movie about the Gold Rush. At the mah-jongg table, one of the Chinese men there shouted something that sounded fierce and warlike, but everyone at the table laughed. Here at the blanket, Harry laughed, too. Michael figured he was laughing not because he spoke or understood Chinese but because it was now his turn to roll the dice, and a man holding a pair of dice in his hand is—for the moment, at least—in control of his own destiny.

Harry did indeed look like a man with the world on a string. Tall and wiry and chocolate-colored, he possessed in addition to his good looks a dirty Eddie Murphy laugh, a mischievous Bill Cosby twinkle, and the calm, confident air of a man about to make a fortune. Michael would have bet all the oranges on every tree in his groves on the roll of the dice this man held in his hand. But he had only the ten dollars Charlie Bonano had loaned him.

“Bet a hundred,” Harry said, and put five twenty-dollar bills on the blanket. The hundred was covered in thirty seconds flat; apparently most of these players had seen Harry roll before and the air of confidence he exuded impressed them not a bit. The only man at the blanket who seemed to have any faith in him at all was the Chinese man who’d earlier urged him to ketchem up hot. He now said, “Twenny say Hally light.”

“Ten says he’s wrong,” the other black man at the blanket said.

“Me, too, hassa ten long,” the other Chinese man said, sounding like a stoker on an American gunboat during the Boxer Rebellion.

“Ten more says he’s right,” Michael said, and tossed onto the blanket all the money he had in the world.

The white guy—a burly man wearing a blue sweater and a blue watch cap, and looking like a seaman off a cargo ship—said, “Ten says he’s wrong,” and tossed his money onto the blanket.

On the television screen, Andy Williams and what appeared to be the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir began bellowing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.”

“Come on, sugah,” Harry whispered, and shook the dice gently, and let them roll easily off the pink palm of his hand and onto the blanket. The dice rolled and rolled and rolled, and hit the wall, and bounced off the wall, and one of them flew to the right and came up with a six-spot, and the other one flew to the left and came up with a five-spot, for a total of eleven, which was a winner.

Michael now had twenty dollars.

Was twenty enough for a taxi to Kennedy?

He looked at his watch.

9:15.

His heart almost stopped.

The girl walking toward the blanket was tall.

Five-nine, he supposed.

Much taller than the girls who’d worked the Saigon bars.

But every bit as beautiful. So achingly beautiful, those Vietnamese girls. Girls, yes, some of them were barely in their teens. That long glossy black hair and the slanted loam-colored eyes, the complexion as pale as a dipper of cream, a faint tint to it, not yellow, you could not call any Oriental on earth yellow, any more than you could call anyone black, or red for that matter, or even white, it was pointless to try to identify people by color because the colors simply didn’t match. Here and now she came gliding sleekly out of the din and the smoke, a sinuous glide unique to Orientals, a green silk dress slit high on her right thigh, a red rose in her black hair, green satin high heeled pumps, the colors of Christmas, fa-la-la-la-la, Andy Williams sang, and Michael wondered how many Saigon hookers he had fallen in love with. And later killed their sisters in the jungle.

“Hello, Harry,” she said, “are you winning?”

“Jus’ rolled me a ‘leven,” Harry said. Michael smiled at her. She did not smile back.

An hour and fifty minutes to plane time.

“Let the twenty ride,” he said, and realized he was showing off for her, big spender betting all his money without batting an eyelash.

Harry picked up the dice, winked at him, and said, “Man knows a winner. Bet the two hunnerd.”

“I’ll take it all,” the other black man said.

“You facin’ disaster, Slam,” Harry told him and laughed his dirty Eddie Murphy laugh.

“I’m facin’ a man got lucky one time,” Slam said.

“Oh, my my my,” Harry said to the dice, “you hear this man runnin’ his mouth?”

“Who wanna fiffy more?” the first Chinese man asked.

“I’ll take thirty of that,” the seaman with the watch cap said.

“I hassa twenny,” the second Chinese man said.

Harry brought the dice up close to his mouth. “Sugah,” he whispered, “we don’t wanna disappoint our friends here, now do we?”

He was talking to the dice as if he were talking to a woman. How could they possibly fail a man who speaks so gently and persuasively? Michael thought, and realized he was smiling. The girl thought he was smiling at her. Maybe he was. But she still did not smile back. Oh well, he thought.

“You know jus’ what we need,” Harry told the dice, “so I’m jus’ goan let you do yo’ own thing,” and he shook the dice gently, and opened his hand again, and the dice rolled off his palm and strutted across the blanket, and kissed the wall, and skidded off the wall to land with a five-spot and a six-spot showing for a total of eleven again, which was another winner.

Michael now had forty dollars, certainly enough to get him to Kennedy by cab.

“How’s that, James?” Harry asked.

“Good,” the first Chinese man said, beaming.

“No good,” the second Chinese man said sourly.

“Bet the four hundred,” Harry said.

Michael looked at the girl one last time. She seemed not to know he existed. He pocketed his forty bucks and started moving away from the blanket.

“Don’t go, man,” Harry said softly. Michael looked at him.

“You my luck, man.”

In Vietnam—ah, Jesus, in Nam—too many young men had said those words to too many other young men. Over there, you needed something to believe in other than yourself, you needed a charm, a rabbit’s foot, a buddy to stand beside you, to be your luck when it looked as though your luck might run out at any moment.

Michael looked at his watch.

9:30.

If he could get out of the city in the next half hour or so, he’d be okay. The roads to Kennedy would surely be clear of snow by now, it would be a quick half-hour run by taxi, walk directly to the gate, no luggage—thanks to Crandall—and off he’d go.

“You with me or not?” Harry asked.

There was something almost desperate in his eyes.

“I’ve got forty says you’re good,” Michael said, and tossed the money onto the blanket and smiled at the girl. This time, she smiled back.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Michael,” he said.

“How do you do?” she said.

“We shootin’ dice here?” Slam asked, “or we chattin’ up Miss Shanghai?”

“Miss Mott Street, you mean,” the seaman with the watch cap said.

“Miss China Doll,” the second Chinese man said.

“Are you really all those things?” Michael asked.

“No, I’m Connie,” she said.

“Willya please roll ‘em?” Slam said.

Grinning from ear to ear, Harry picked up the dice.

He was good for the next pass, and three more passes after that, by which time Michael’s initial ten bucks had grown to six hundred and forty dollars. He looked at his watch again—9:45 —and decided to let all of it ride on Harry’s phenomenal luck. He wondered if he was risking the money just so he could stay here by Connie’s side. All at once, the plane to Boston didn’t seem too very important. Missing a plane to Boston wasn’t the end of the world. On the television screen, Andy Williams began singing “Silent Night.”

Harry rolled a ten, a tough point to make.

Then Harry rolled a four …

And a nine …

And a six …

And an eight …

And Michael began wondering how many numbers he could roll before a seven came up and killed them both dead? Michael had never in his life won a nickel in a Saigon gambling house, but he’d kept rolling number after number out there in the jungle, never sevening out while everywhere around him brief good friends were dying.

“Tough point,” he said.

“Very,” Connie said, and smiled. He smiled back.

Harry was whispering to the dice again. This time I buy the farm, Michael thought.

“Sugah, we need a six and a four,” Harry whispered.

It was almost ten o’clock.

On the television set, Andy Williams was saying good night to everyone, wishing everyone in America a Merry Christmas. Michael paid no attention to him. His eyes were on Connie and his six hundred and forty bucks were on the blanket.

“Two fives, baby,” Harry whispered to the dice, and shook them gently in his fist, and opened his hand and said, “Ten the hard way, sugah,” and the dice rolled out and away toward the wall.

On the television screen, the news came on. The headline story was a bombing in Dublin, but no one was listening to it.

One of the dice bounced off the wall.

A three.

The second die hit the wall.

Bounced off it.

A four.

Shit, Michael thought, there goes my taxi.

“In downtown Manhattan tonight,” the male anchor said, “motion-picture director Arthur Crandall …”

Michael looked up at the screen. “… was found shot to death in a rented automobile. Police report finding a wallet in the car, possibly dropped by Crandall’s murderer. It contained …”

Everyone around the blanket was looking up at the screen.

“… sixty-three dollars in cash, several credit cards, and a driver’s license identifying …”

“Good night,” Michael said, “thank you,” and began walking toward the door across the room.

“… a man named Michael Barnes, who the Hertz company confirms rented the car at Kennedy last Fri …”

Michael closed the door behind him.

The same man was still behind the stainless steel table, stuffing fortune cookies.

“Have a nice holiday,” Michael said.

“The down of white geese shall float upon your dreams,” the man said.

The door opened again.

“Wait for me,” Connie said.