Downtown

8

You usually knew in that first split second whether the other guy was serious.

In Vietnam, lots of guys had to prove they were big macho killers, had to keep telling this to themselves over and over again because otherwise they’d go weak with terror whenever a leaf rattled out there in the jungle. So one way they tried to prove it was to lean on anybody they thought would back down.

Come to think of it, this may have been the origin of all that Russian roulette stuff in The Deer Hunter. Because lots of times out there, weapons came into play during the showdown process.

Now if you were going to lean on somebody, it was usually better not to choose some guy who weighed three hundred pounds and was built like the Chesapeake and Ohio. Because this man would chew up both you and your rifle and then spit out railroad spikes. So you didn’t go bumping on him, you didn’t go waving your weapon around in his face unless you felt it would be patriotic to get killed by a fellow American instead of a gook.

What you tried to do, if you were looking to bolster your own courage and make yourself feel like a great big macho killer, was you tried to pick on somebody who wore eyeglasses and who looked sort of scrawny and whose middle name was Jellicle, was what you tried to do. Shove your rifle in his face, man. See if you could get him to back down. And usually you knew in that first split second whether you had him or not.

And vice versa, if you were the one who was looking into the barrel of the rifle—as had so often been the case with Michael—you knew immediately whether the guy threatening you would really paint the jungle with your blood if you didn’t back off toot sweet, as they all used to say in their bastardized, learned-from-the-gooks French.

Michael had never backed off.

Even when he knew the other guy was dead serious.

The ones who were all bluff and bravado, you dismissed with a wave of the hand, boldly turned your back on them, went back into the hooch to smoke a joint.

But the red-eyed ones …

The ones who’d had too much of the jungle and were no longer capable of telling friend from foe …

The ones who had murder scribbled crookedly on their mouths …

These were the ones it was essential to stare down.

Because if you backed off from them now, if you let the barrel of that automatic rifle force you to turn away, why then one day they would shoot you as soon as look at you. No warning next time. Just pow when the jam was on, in the back, in the face, in the chest, it didn’t matter, they knew you were nothing but dog shit and they could waste you whenever they wanted to, and wasting you would give them the magical power to kill all the gooks in the jungle. It was like eating your testicles or your heart or whatever Long Foot Howell had told him the Indians used to eat after they’d scalped you.

What you did, you said, “Fuck off, okay?”

And if he didn’t choose to do that, you walked right up to him, and you slapped the muzzle of the rifle aside with the palm of your hand.

And if the muzzle refused to be slapped aside, if those little red pig eyes in the man’s head were telling you that he was going to blow you away in the next count of three, why then what you had to do was kick him in the balls the way Michael had kicked Charlie Wong in the balls only several hours ago. And while the man was writhing on the ground in pain, you stepped on his face hard, which Michael guessed he’d have done to Charlie Wong if Detective O’Brien hadn’t shown up in her sexy underwear, braving the cold and all. And once you’d stolen the man’s face, why then you could turn your back on him the way you did with the other kind, just saunter away into the hooch for a little smoke. Maybe ask him to join you if you were feeling generous. And maybe he’d shoot you anyway one fine day, but chances were he wouldn’t.

The situation here was identical to all those showdowns Michael had survived in Vietnam, where he’d sometimes thought he’d rather face a whole platoon of gooks rather than another red-eyed American trying to show he wasn’t scared.

Crandall wasn’t doing such a good job of showing he wasn’t scared. It was Michael’s guess that the man had never held a gun in his hand before this very moment and that the sight of the larger weapon in Michael’s hand was causing him to have some second thoughts about keeping him here until the police showed. Panic was in his eyes. He definitely did not want a gunfight here at the old O.K. Corral.

So Michael did what he would have done in Vietnam when facing a bluff. He dismissed Crandall with a wave of his free hand, turned his back on him, and started for the door.

Which should have worked.

But it didn’t.

Because apparently Michael hadn’t learned a lesson he should have learned many, many years ago, and the lesson was Watch Out For That Harmless Little Vietnamese Woman With Her Gentle Smile And Her Innocent Eyes Because She Is Deadlier Than A Crack Male Regiment.

It was Jessica Wales who hit him.

She hit him very hard on the back of his head with something that sent him staggering forward toward the front door, in which direction he’d been heading anyway. He knew better than to let go of the gun. He also knew enough to roll away, the way he’d rolled away into the snow when Charlie Wong was trying to kick his brains into New Jersey. This time the foot that came at him was wearing an ankle-strapped shoe with a stiletto heel that looked like silver or perhaps stainless steel as it came flashing toward—

The woman was trying to stomp him.

He had seen many black soldiers in Vietnam stomping other soldiers. They had learned this art while growing up in lovely ghettos here and there across the United States. Where lovely Jessica had learned it was anyone’s guess.

But she definitely was trying to stomp him.

Not kick him.

Stomp him.

Kicking and stomping were two different things, although often used in conjunction. When you kicked someone, you were trying to send his head sailing through the goal posts. When you stomped someone, you were trying to break open his head like a melon. Squash it flat into the pavement. The pressure point in the stomping process was the heel. In Vietnam, the heel had been flat and attached to a combat boot. Here in the living room of Jessica Wales’s apartment, it was four inches long and tapered to a narrow point. If that heel connected with his head— Michael kept rolling away.

There were here-again gone-again glimpses of long legs flashing, white thighs winking, the silver robe parting and flapping as Jessica tracked him across the floor, searching for an opportunity to step on him good. He rolled, rolled, rolled blindly into the wall, came to a frightening dead stop, and was scrambling to his feet when he saw Jessica bending her right leg and reaching down for the shoe. Tired of stepping and stomping, she had undoubtedly decided it would be better to wield the shoe like a hammer. And was now in the process of getting the shoe off her foot and into her hot little hand.

Fascinated, he watched her little balancing act.

Blonde Jessica standing on one foot, opposite leg bent backward at the knee, right hand sliding the heel of the shoe off the heel of her foot—

He would never have a better shot.

He lunged forward, ramming his shoulder hard against the leg she was standing on, knocking her off balance. The shoe flew off her foot and out of her hand. As she tumbled over backward, legs splayed, the robe opened disappointingly over a triangular patch of very black hair.

Michael leaped to his feet.

“I warned you!” Crandall shouted.

And fired.

At first, Michael thought he’d made a terrible and perhaps fatal mistake. For the first time in his life, he’d wrongly identified a genuine shooter as a bluffer. But then he saw that Crandall was looking at the smoking gun in his hand as if it had suddenly developed fangs and claws. This thing here in his hand had actually gone off! That’s what his astonished face said. He had pulled the trigger and this thing had exploded in his hand and a bullet had come out of it and had in fact whistled across the room to shatter a mirror on the wall above where Jessica was already getting up off the floor in a tangle of legs and open robe and mons veneris and one silver shoe.

Michael wondered if he should walk over to Crandall, push the muzzle of the gun aside, tell him to fuck off, and then go back into the hooch for a smoke. He figured it just might work.

While he was doing all this calculation, he forgot about Jessica for the second time that night, and remembered too late that once may be oversight but twice is stupidity.

The way he remembered was that Jessica hit him on the head again with the same object she’d used earlier, which he now realized was a metal tray of some sort, this time connecting more solidly and causing him to stagger forward almost into Crandall’s arms.

Crandall backed away as if being attacked.

He certainly did not want this thing in his hand to go off again. Nor did he want to catch Michael in his arms, which he would have to do if Michael kept stumbling toward him. But Michael suddenly brought himself up short because even in his dizziness he had clearly and finally perceived that Jessica and not Crandall was the real danger.

Where? he thought.

And turned, hoping he would not get shot in the back, after all, because getting shot in the back would be a first for him. On Christmas Day, no less. Which would not be such a terrific surprise since he seemed to be experiencing a great many firsts here in festive New York City, the least of which was being attacked by a ferocious movie star who now looked not like Marilyn Monroe but that lady, whatever her name was, in Fatal Attraction with the frizzed hair and the long knife in her hand.

Jessica did not have a knife in her hand.

Jessica had a poker in it.

Which she had grabbed from a little stand alongside the fireplace, leaving a shovel and a brush still hanging from it. She came limping at Michael, one shoe on, one shoe off, her lips skinned back, her capped movie-star teeth glistening with spit, her eyes blazing. He figured she was angry because he’d knocked her on her ass. But then Crandall put a very clear perspective on the entire situation.

“Careful!” he shouted. “He’s a killer!”

And Michael realized in a dazzling epiphany that Crandall either really believed he had murdered someone, or else was putting on a damn good show of believing it. Convincing Jessica —who did not seem to need very much convincing—that Michael was an armed and dangerous murderer, and this was a simple matter of survival. Which explained the desperate look in Jessica’s eyes and the headlong rush at him with the poker. But which did not explain why Crandall stood there with a weapon in his hand and his thumb up his ass.

Michael had never hit a woman in his life.

When he’d learned about Jenny and her branch manager, he’d wanted to hit her, but then he’d wondered what good that would do. He’d already lost her. James Owington had already taken her from him, so what was the sense of hitting her? Wouldn’t that be more punishing to him than it would be to her? The eternal knowledge that he had hit a woman who was only five-feet six-inches tall and weighed a hundred and twenty pounds? Who wasn’t even working for the Viet Cong?

Jessica wasn’t working for the Viet Cong, either.

She was merely a sensible woman trying to save her own life. She had a good cheering section, too. As she came at Michael, the poker swinging back into position, Crandall whispered little words of encouragement like “Hit him, kill him!” From the look on her face, she needed no urging. Crandall had warned her that Michael was a killer; unless she took him out, he would kill again. The thing to do now was knock off his head. Before he knocked off hers.

Which Michael did.

He hit her very hard.

There was nothing satisfying about the collision of his fist with her jaw. He hit her virtually automatically, bringing his fist up from his knees as if he were throwing an uppercut at a sailor in a Saigon bar, repeating an emotionless action he had gone through at least a dozen times before, unsurprised when he heard the click of teeth against teeth, unsurprised when he saw her eyes roll back into her head. He watched as she collapsed. One moment she was standing, the poker back and poised to swing, and the next moment she folded to the floor as if someone had stolen her spine.

Michael walked to where Crandall was standing with the gun in his hand.

“Fuck off, okay?” he said, and took the gun from him and went to the door.

He now had two guns.

Like a Wild West cowboy.

One in each pocket of his coat.

He was happy that the two uniformed cops who came up the steps as he was going down did not stop and frisk him.

“Are you looking for the guy beating his wife?” he asked.

“No, we’re looking for Wales,” one of the cops said.

“That’s near England, I think,” Michael said, and continued on down.

Connie was waiting outside in the limo, the engine running.

“I think it’s time we went home,” she said. She drove the limo to the garage China Doll used on Canal Street, and they began walking from there to her apartment on Pell. As promised, the temperature was already starting to drop. Michael guessed it was now somewhere in the low twenties or high teens. They walked very rapidly despite the packed snow underfoot and the occasional patches of ice on sidewalks that had been shoveled, their heads ducked against the wind, Connie’s arm looped through his. Under the other arm, she carried the green satin high-heeled shoes she’d retrieved from the limo’s trunk. The streets were deserted. This was four o’clock on Christmas morning, and everyone was home in bed waiting for Santa Claus. But Michael was brimming with ideas.

“What we have to do is find out where Charlie Nichols lives,” he said.

“Okay, but not now,” Connie said. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, aren’t you freezing?”

“Yes, I am. But this is important.”

“It’s also important not to die in the street of frostbite.”

“You can’t die of frostbite.”

“For your information, frostbite is freezing to death.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Can you die of freezing to death?”

“Yes.”

“All right then,” she said.

“Connie, the point is we’ve got to talk to Nichols. Because if he’s the Charlie in Crandall’s calendar …”

“Please hurry.”

“Then maybe he can tell us who Mama is, or why Crandall drew nine thousand dollars from the bank, if he did, or what he did with that money, or what his connection is with the two people who took all that stuff from my wallet and the one who stole my car.”

The words came out of his mouth in small white bursts of vapor. He looked as if he were sending smoke signals. The clasps on Connie’s galoshes clattered and rattled as she led him through yet another labyrinth, this goddamn downtown section of the city was impossible to understand. None of the streets down here were laid out in any sensible sort of grid pattern, they just crisscrossed and zigzagged and wound around each other and back again, and they didn’t have any numbers, they only had names, and you couldn’t get anywhere without a native guide, which he supposed Connie was. A very fast one, too. She walked at a breakneck pace, Michael puffing hard to keep up, both of them sending smoke signals with their mouths. He hoped there weren’t any hostile Sioux on ponies in the immediate neighborhood. He would not have been surprised, though. Nothing that happened in this city could ever surprise him again.

They came at last to a Chinese restaurant named Shi Kai, just off the corner of Mott and Pell. The restaurant was closed, but a sign in the front window advised:

OPEN FOR BREAKFAST

AS USUAL

CHRISTMAS DAY

Connie took a key from her handbag, unlocked a door to the left of the restaurant, closed and locked it behind her, opened another door that led to a flight of stairs, and began climbing. There were Chinese cooking smells in the hallway. There were dim, naked light bulbs on each landing. She kept climbing. Behind her, he watched her legs. Her galoshes rattled away. He hoped they wouldn’t wake up anyone in the building. On the third floor, she stopped outside a door marked 33, searched in the dim light for another key on her ring, inserted it into the latch, unlocked the door, threw it open, snapped on a light from a switch just inside it, and said what sounded like “Wahn yee” or “Wong ying,” Michael couldn’t tell which.

“That means, `Welcome` in Chinese,” she said, and smiled.

“Thank you,” he said, and followed her into the apartment.

He supposed he’d expected something out of The Last Emperor. Sandalwood screens. Red silk cloth. Gold gilt trappings. Incense burning. A small jade Buddha on an ivory pedestal.

Instead, against a wall painted a pale lavender, there was a long low sofa done in a white nubby fabric and heaped with pillows the same color as the wall, and there was an easy chair and a footstool upholstered in black leather and there was a coffee table with a glass top, and a bar unit hanging on the right-angle wall, and several large framed abstract prints on the wall opposite the sofa.

Connie sat, took off her galoshes, and then padded in her stockinged feet to the bar unit.

“This has been some night,” she said, and rolled her eyes, and lowered the drop-leaf front of the bar. “I had a man vomit all over the backseat, did you notice?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I mean that the limo I picked you up in outside the deli wasn’t the same one I’d dropped you off in when you went to see Crandall’s wife?”

“No, I couldn’t tell any difference.”

“Charlie was very upset. Charlie Wong. My Charlie Wong. About the stink in the car.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you know how to make martinis?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“Why don’t you mix us some very nice, very dry martinis while I go take my shower, and then you can take your shower, and then we can sip our martinis in bed, would you like to do that?”

“Yes,” he said.

His voice caught a little.

Because he was thinking about what she’d just said.

Not about mixing the martinis or taking the showers.

But about sipping the martinis.

In bed.

That part.

“A twist, please,” she said.

You came through the bedroom doorway and the first thing you saw was the bed facing the door, its headboard against the far wall, a window on each side of it, a night table under each window. It was neither a king nor a queen, just a normal double bed. With a paisley-patterned quilt on it. There was a dresser on the wall to the right of the bed, and bookcases on the wall to the left, and a door to the closet on that same wall, and on the entrance-door wall, which he didn’t really see until they got into bed together, there was an easy chair with a lamp behind it to the left of the door, and a full-length mirror to the right of it.

They left the quilt on the bed because it was so damn cold.

Every few minutes, they poked out from under the quilt to take a quick sip of their drinks, and then they hurriedly put the glasses back on the night tables on either side of the bed. They did this until the glasses were empty. Then they pulled the quilt up over their shoulders and settled in close together.

“He turns the heat off at eleven o’clock every night,” Connie said. “There’s nobody cheaper in the world than a Chinaman.”

Under the quilt, the whole world was cozy and warm and safe.

Under the quilt, with Connie in his arms, he felt the way he’d felt long long ago in Boston, when his father was still alive and there to take care of him, and when the house was full of the smells of his mother’s good French cooking and when at night she wrapped him in a big white fluffly towel after his bath, and patted him dry, and then tucked him into bed and pulled the covers to his chin, and told him Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don’t Let The Bedbugs Bite, and kissed him on the cheek. In the darkness, he would smile. And fall asleep almost instantly.

After Boston, he hadn’t slept too well for a long time. That was because the Cong’s main job was keeping the Americans awake all night, never mind killing them. If the Cong could keep the Americans awake, why then they’d have to go home eventually in order to get a good night’s sleep. He was sure that had been the strategy. It worked, too. Even when you knew they couldn’t possibly be out there, even when intelligence reports told you they were fifty miles away, a hundred miles away, retreating even, you still imagined them out there creeping up on you while you slept. So you never really slept. Never completely. You closed your eyes, yes, and occasionally you caught ten minutes here, ten minutes there, even a half hour’s deep sleep sometimes until your own snoring startled you into frightened wakefulness, and you jumped up in a cold sweat, your rifle fanning the jungle even before your eyes were fully open.

When he’d got back home …

Boston.

Home.

Jenny told him he’d filled out a lot.

She had learned how to soul-kiss.

From Cosmopolitan magazine, she told him.

His mother had given away all his clothes.

And his father was sick and dying.

He’d come back to where it was safe—the Boston he remembered, the Boston he’d longed for all those months, the Boston that was the reality as opposed to the jungle nightmare—but his father was sick and dying and his mother, who was only forty-two, looked suddenly old, and the nightmare was here, too, here in Boston where it was supposed to be safe.

They buried his father on a cold November morning.

It was raining.

He remembered thinking he would never be safe again.

He told his mother one night that his dream was to marry Jenny and take her someplace where it was warm all year round. He almost said warm and safe all year round. His mother had looked at him with that sad, grieving expression she wore all the time now, and then she’d merely nodded. He wondered what she was thinking. Was she thinking it did not pay to dream because eventually all dreams die?

His father’s dream had been to own a chain of hardware stores all across New England. But cancer had cut him down when he was forty-four, and all he’d left behind him was the big old house and the one store. Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don’t Let The Bedbugs Bite, and don’t let the Cong creep up on you in your sleep, either. How can you dream if they won’t let you sleep?

It took his mother two years to get over his father’s being dead. At the end of that time, she told Michael she’d had a good offer for the store and was going to sell it. Said she could lend him the money for his dream. At prevailing interest rates.

Told him to go find his Someplace Warm, take his Jenny there with him. He’d never known whether she was trying to get rid of him or trying to help him. He’d had the feeling that maybe …

Well, he’d discussed this with the shrink.

That somehow his mother blamed him for his father’s death.

That because she’d prayed so hard for Michael to come home safe and sound, the gods had somehow taken payment for his survival. Had spared his life and taken his father’s instead.

That she hated him for this.

The shrink wondered out loud if she’d given away Michael’s clothes the day she’d learned his father had cancer.

Michael said he didn’t know.

In Vietnam, Sergeant Mendelsohnn had told him to shoot first and think it over later.

Michael took the money, asked Jenny to marry him, and moved down to Florida with her.

Where he’d felt safe for a while.

Until Jenny started up with James Owington at the bank.

And after that, you know, a man began to think there wasn’t much sense to anything anymore. You go fight a dumb fucking war where nobody will let you sleep and everybody including the people on your own side are trying to kill you, and you get through it by the skin of your teeth and you come home to find your father dying and your mother blaming you for it and your girlfriend soul-kissing her way through Boston and its suburbs, you begin to think, Hey, sheeee-it, as Andrew would have put it. And when even the sweet Florida dream turns sour, when the enemy creeping up on your sleep now is a fat fucking branch manager who’s getting in your wife’s pants, hey, man, what was the sense of anything?

Part of his dream …

Well, he’d wanted to start a family down there.

Little girl, little boy. Two kids, that would’ve been nice.

Name the girl Lise, after his mother.

Well, maybe not.

But shit, Mom, it really wasn’t my fault he died.

Name the boy Andrew for sure.

But if you can’t sleep you can’t dream, and anyway all the dreams died forever—or so he’d thought—nine months and six days ago, seven days ago now, but who was counting? All the dreams had drowned in the Gulf of Mexico on that blustery March day, drowned together with his sorrows. But tonight …

He could see snow beginning to fall again outside the window on his side of the bed. Fat fluffy flakes drifting down in the light of the lamppost.

He held Connie in his arms.

She felt so small and delicate.

He held her close and watched the snow coming down.

And almost instantly, he fell deeply asleep.

And for the first time in years, he dreamed again.