Safe House (4 page)

“As if!” Mimi laughed, letting the girl go, giving her the shot if she wanted to take it.

The girl kept her hands down. Eyes too.

T.B. put his finger to his lips. The girl helped the guy up. They went out together—she was walking, he was leaning on her. T.B. went back someplace into the shadows. Mimi pulled a rag out of her waistband and started swabbing up the table.

Then the Chinese woman sat down in my booth.

O
nly she wasn’t Chinese. Her face was too square, especially around the jawline. And her complexion was a dusky rose, with a gold underbase. Her eyes were a pale-almond color, and they lacked the Oriental fold at the corners. Her hair was a red so dark that the color kept shifting in the reflected light, with a distinct curl as it fell to her shoulders. Her mouth was wide and full, slightly turned down at the corners. A faint spray of freckles broke across her wide flat nose. Along the L-line on her right jaw was a dark undulating streak, as though an artist had inked it in for emphasis.

“Trying to guess?” she asked me. Her voice was husky, cigarette-burnished. Musical, but not Top Forty.

“Yeah, I was,” I admitted.

“I’m half Inuit, half Irish.”

“Whatever the mix, it worked great.”

“Thank you,” she said, flashing a smile. Her teeth were so white, tiny and square they looked fake, like a mouthful of miniature Chiclets.

“You, uh, want something done?” I said.

“What are you?” she asked suddenly.

“Me? I’m just a guy who—”

“No. I mean, what
are
you. I told you what I was.”

“Oh. Truth is, I don’t know.”

“You were adopted?”

“Abandoned,” I told her, watching her face.

Her almond eyes darkened. “But somebody had to raise you. Didn’t they . . . ?”

“The State raised me,” I told her. Telling it all, if she knew anything.

“What’s your name?”

“Burke,” I told her. If she was a cop, she already knew. And even if she wasn’t, those almond eyes had photographed me good enough to guide a police sketch artist’s hand right to my mug shot anyway.

“Mine’s Crystal Beth.”

“Your parents were bikers?” I laughed.

“No,” she said, smiling. “Hippies. At least my father was. He met my mother up north, and they came back to Oregon together. Where I was raised.”

Rollo’s wasn’t a singles bar. And I didn’t even know for sure if she was the same woman who’d hired Porkpie. I was there on business. But I felt the current pulling me and I went with it.

“In a commune?” I asked her.

“Yes. It was a lovely place, but it’s all gone now. All the old ways, gone.” She might have been a Plains Indian talking about another century for all the sadness in her voice.

“You want something to drink?” I asked her. Once someone in a booth attracted a visitor, the waitress would stay away unless you signaled her over.

“You drink the stuff they serve here?” she asked. A slight smile played around her lips, but the corners of her mouth stayed turned down. Genetics, then, not an expression.

“I got a strong stomach,” I assured her.

“Umm. Then maybe you’d like a job . . . ?”

“I might. What have you got in mind?”

“My . . .” She hesitated just a heartbeat, but I caught it. “. . . cousin’s having trouble. With her boyfriend. Her
ex
-boyfriend. Only
he
doesn’t think so. Do you . . . ?”

“Sure. Some guys don’t get the message the first time.”

“And sometimes it depends on the messenger.”

“Yeah. You need a messenger?”

“That’s exactly what I need.”

“Uh-huh. You know this guy?”

“I don’t
know
him, I know
about
him, okay?”

“Just what you’ve been told?”

“No. I mean, I met him. Once. But . . .”

“. . . you have all the information about him?”

“Yes.”

“And you just want the problem solved, right? Not the details?”

“Yes. I thought it best to leave that to . . . professionals.”

“Professionals get paid,” I reminded her.

“I grok that. I don’t ask strangers for favors. And I’m guessing you don’t work on a sliding scale either.”

“Right. I don’t. But I’m sure I can fix whatever your . . . cousin’s problem is.”

“Yes? And how much would it cost to do that?”

“Depends on how . . . permanently you want the problem solved.”

“You mean . . . what?”

“I mean, for some people, it’s personal, you know? They get it into their heads that a certain person belongs to them, and they won’t let go unless . . . Other people, they’re just bullies.”

“Bullies are easier?” she asked, leaning closer to me across the table.

“Bullies are very easy,” I said, holding her eyes. Or maybe hers were holding mine.

“The bigger they are . . .”

“. . . the more they cost to fix,” I finished for her.

She looked at the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the tabletop, raised her eyebrows in a question. I lifted it up, held it out to her. She took one. I fired a wooden match. She didn’t bring her face down to the flame like I’d expected. Just sat there watching my hand from under her long dark lashes. The flame burned, slow and steady in the musty joint’s dead air. I stayed on her eyes, feeling the increasing heat against my fingers. She leaned forward and blew out the flame, her breath so gentle it barely got the job done.

“Your hand is very steady,” she said.

“A jeweler needs good eyesight.” I shrugged. “You changed your mind about the cigarette?”

“Sometimes, if I really want something, I make myself wait. Then it’s sweeter when I finally have it. You understand?”

“I understand the waiting part.”

“You’re good at waiting?”

“I’m the best,” I told her. “It’s my specialty.”

“You’re not like . . . the others.” It was a flat statement. Her judgment, not a question.

“The others?”

“I’ve talked to a . . . number of people. About my cousin. You’re different from them.”

“You try any of them?” I asked.

“Try?”

“On your cousin’s problem?”

“No. Not yet. It’s a delicate thing. My cousin wants it to be over, that’s true. But she wants magic, you know? Wants it all to . . . disappear. And that’s hard.”

“That’s real hard. Real expensive too.”

“How expensive?”

“Depends.”

She glanced at her wristwatch: big black-and-white dial on a thick black rubber band. “This is taking longer than I thought,” she said. “I have to meet somebody. But I want to . . . talk to you again. Is there a way . . . ?”

“Sure,” I told her. “I could give you a number to call.”

“That would be great,” she said, flashing another quick smile.

I gave her a number in Brooklyn. It’s on permanent bounce—the only place it would ring aloud would be one of the pay phones at Mama’s. The woman didn’t write it down, repeating it a couple of times just under her breath. The dark streak at her jawline moved along with her lips. She nodded, like she was agreeing with herself, and started to get up. I didn’t move. She sat down again, put her hands flat on the table. “Can I do something with you? Just an old hippie thing. It would make me feel better . . . even if you laugh.”

“What?”

“Can I read your palm?”

I put my hands on the table between us, palms up. “I don’t know. Can you?”

“Watch,” she said softly, taking my right hand in both of hers, bending her face forward to study.

I let my hand go limp as she turned it in hers. A couple of minutes passed. “Can you strike a match with one hand?” she asked, holding on to my right hand, making the message clear.

I took out a wooden match with my left hand, snapped it along my jaw. It flared right up. When I was a kid, that used to impress girls. That was a long time ago—on both counts. “Hold it close,” she said.

I held the match just over my open palm, lighting her way. It only took her another couple of seconds after that. She blew the match out for me, closed my palm into a fist, squeezed it quick and then let go. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

I
gave her a good thirty-minute start, just in case she was hanging around outside, planning on the same thing I was. When I finally walked through the exit, the sky was clear and the air was sharp. But the ground was wet, like there’d been a light rainfall during the past couple of hours.

Clarence’s Rover was missing. So was the Prof. I cranked the Plymouth over and pulled out of the pitch-black parking lot, heading for Mama’s. On the drive over, I used the vibrating pager to call Max back in.

The Chinatown alleys are never really deserted, but they get quiet in the late-late hours. I docked the Plymouth under the white rectangle with Max’s chop painted inside and slapped my hand against the slab-faced steel door at the back of the restaurant; one of Mama’s so-called waiters let me in. After he scanned my face close. And put the pistol back inside his white coat.

It was almost three in the morning, but Mama was at the register in the front like she was expecting customers any minute. A tureen of hot-and-sour soup was at my elbow even before she made her way to my booth in the back. I surprised her by standing up and reaching for the tureen to serve her a bowl, but she waved me back down, an impatient look on her face. Then she ladled out a small bowl for me, the way she’d done it for years. To Mama, progress is a crack in the wall of civilization.

I sipped the soup, making the required sounds of deep appreciation. Mama nodded acceptance, played with her soup while I finished the first small bowl, and then filled it up again. Once, I’d asked her why I had to have at least three bowls at every sitting. “Bowl small,” is all she said, and I haven’t questioned her since.

“Max around?” I finally asked her.

“Basement,” she said. “You find girl?”

So Max had brought her up to date. No surprise. Even the Chinaboy gangsters, with their merciless eyes and ready guns, who dot the viper-twisted back streets around the restaurant like clots in the community’s bloodstream, step aside when Max walks . . . but he obeys Mama like a dutiful son.

Nobody knows why. Nobody ever asks.

“I think so, Mama,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”

“Girl Chinese?”

“No. But she’d look Chinese if you didn’t know, maybe.”

Mama grunted, letting it pass. Years ago, she would have called a woman like Crystal Beth a bar girl, her shorthand for half-breed. But Immaculata had cured that. Immaculata was Max’s woman, part Vietnamese, part American soldier–whatever. And when their baby, Flower, was born, Mama proclaimed the newborn both her grandchild and pure hundred-generation Mandarin Chinese in the same breath.

Nobody argued with her.

I was halfway through a dish of braised beef tips on a bed of fluffy brown rice with scallions and shiitake mushrooms when Max came upstairs. He sat quietly with Mama until I was finished, then I hand-signaled what had happened with the woman between sips of ice water as the silent warrior watched.

His turn: He took me through Porkpie’s night—mimed putting quarters in pay-phone slots, cupped one hand over the side of his mouth to show whispered conversations. Grubbing, hustling—no scores. Porkpie had never gone anywhere near Rollo’s. Finally, Max put his hands together against one cheek, tilted his head and closed his eyes. Porkpie was back inside his crib, presumably asleep, dreaming of nickel-and-dime hustles.

“Mama,” I asked her, “you know anything about palm reading?” I put a finger to my own palm, tracing the lines so Max would understand what I was saying.

“Gypsy? That just—”

“No. For real. You ever hear of—?”

“Sure. Chinese invent first. Very good.”

Naturally. Far as Mama was concerned, Galileo was Chinese. Noah too. Only he took some of the wrong animals on that ark.

“You really think some people can foretell the future?”

“Not future. Past. Which palm look at?”

“Uh, my right hand.”

“Yes! Work hand, right? Hand show what you do. What you
do,
what you
are,
see?”

“No.”

“Some men farmers, some make shoes, right? Work with hands, leave marks. Like tracks.”

“It only works on men?” I asked her, smiling to show her I was joking.

Big mistake. “Women do
all
work. Work in factory, come home, clean house, take care of baby, plant garden. Man do only one thing. Woman hand tell nothing.”

“Where do you look, then, Mama?”

“Look in eyes,” she said, looking deep into mine.

“The eyes tell lies,” the Prof said, right behind my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him come in. “What you do, that’s what’s true,” he finished, echoing Mama’s wisdom of a few minutes ago.

I moved over to make room for him and Clarence. “How’d you make out?” I asked him.

“We lost her, bro. Bitch vanished like cash in a whorehouse.”

I raised an eyebrow, not saying anything. There had to be more—losing the Prof in city streets would be harder than confusing a London cabdriver.

“She comes out the joint,” Clarence explained. “Pulls this parka-thing over her head so she is all in black. Then she walks around the back, right past where we are waiting. We do not see her after that, but there is no other way out of the parking lot, so we are patient. All of a sudden, mahn, we hear this
roar,
and she comes flying past us. On a
motorcycle,
mahn. A black one. Small. Japanese, I think, but she was moving too quick. By the time I get the Rover into gear, she is
gone.
I hear the bike, and I follow the sound. Catch a glimpse of her going around a corner. No taillight, couldn’t see a license. And that was it. We box it around, trying to pick her up at an intersection, but it is no good. That woman is a fine rider, mahn. Hard to make time on those slick streets.”

Nothing to do now but wait for a call.

I
t came the next day. The cell phone I was using that week chirped on the table I use as a desk, startling Pansy into some semblance of activity. The massive Neapolitan raised her huge head and glared in the direction of the noise. She’s gotten more conservative as she ages—anything new is viewed with baleful suspicion. Anything old she’s already intimidated.