Tuesday late afternoon was already as black as night. He didn't have Mona scheduled for a Tuesday pickup, but outside the China Plaza, Johnny rose out of the Continental in his black leather jacket and hustled Mona into the back seat. In the dim light, beneath her makeup, he didn't notice the blush on her cheek, under her right eye.
"I got it," he said, secretly proud of himself. "I pick it up tonight."
Mona blew him a small smile, counted out the handful of crisp new hundreds, fourteen of them, crinkling each one slightly so they wouldn't stick.
Johnny watched the focused energy in her eyes.
"Cheen say," he had told her, fourteen hundred, the Chinese words sounding vaguely like a thousand deaths. Four hundred more than Anthony "Bags" Biondo had told him the piece would cost.
Tony Biondo was a street level goodfella, a heroin dealer for the Campesi crew that still operated out of Little Italy. They were the wiseguy remnants of the big bust-up two-year war within the Scarponelli family. Johnny knew him from the Blossom Club, where Bags liked to pick up the Malaysian hostess girls, take them to the Italian side of Mulberry Street, where he enjoyed them until daylight shone on their shame.
Johnny had met him one rainy night while waiting outside the Blossom, graciously driving Bags and a hostess the six blocks across Canal. Bags gave Johnny a twenty-dollar tip. Afterwards, Johnny noticed a glassine bag of China white on the backseat. He kept it and the next time he saw Bags, returned it to him. This act of honesty impressed Bags, and he offered his help ifJohnny ever needed it.
That time had come.
Mona splayed the money evenly across the backseat. She gave Johnny a look and he knew he didn'twant to ask why-he simply agreed to run the errand, purchase the merchandise, pocketing four hundred in the exchange. Not bad for an hours' work.
But the silencer, that was the surprise. A gun with a silencer, she'd said, seemingly cool even though he'd felt her fear running just beneath the surface. In an odd way he was impressed that she was exerting some control over her life. His risk, getting stung by undercover dogs, became his unspoken contribution to their hak, illicit, relationship.
He couldn't say no, and when he scooped the money off the seat, she leaned in and kissed him on the soft part of his throat, gathered in the fleshiness with her lips, bit him. He gave her a long hard hug, then she exited the car and went back into the high-rise, never turning her head.
Johnny watched her go, striding faster than usual, into the elevator under the soft lights, the tidy compactness of her body forming a silhouette against the blank metallic enclosure. He watched until the elevator door snapped shut and swallowed her.
He felt the wheels hop off the curb as he drove into the horizon of dull streetlamps, thinking of Tony Bags.
And the gun with the silencer.
Johnny waited as Bags climbed into the black Lincoln, the side of the car kneeling under his hulky bulk. Bags patted Johnny on the shoulder with his hammy hand, said, "C'mon, let's see the dollars, liana." He flared up a cigarette, powered down the window.
The way Johnny unpeeled the Ben Franklins from the wad Mona had given him impressed the wiseguy. Bags's hand came out of his black coat and showed the piece. He opened his lips enough to let out smoke, working the cigarette over to one corner of his mouth, speaking through the other side.
"It's a Titan twenny-five caliber, six shots. Same type that Long Island Lolita bitch used. Less than a pound with the silencer. And I got you an extra magazine clip." He ran a fat finger over the ivory grips, the blue-metal finish, the knurledsteel silencer.
Johnny listened from the driver's seat, not that any of it made a difference to him, as long as it worked.
"Good up to fiteen, twenny feet." Bags grinned and pointed it in Johnny's direction a second, then aimed it out the open window and pulled the trigger.
Johnny heard the compressed suppressed explosion-pool.. at the same time the fluorescent sign shattered, exploded, leaving jagged plastic hanging above the Jade Takeout shop.
"It's clean right now, but it's probably got bodies on it, know what I'm sayin'?"
Johnny nodded.
"I no keepy," he said in his best English.
"You no /teepee, you got dat right," chortled Bags. He popped the clip and removed the bullets, handing the goods over to Johnny. He folded the cash into his pocket and said "pussy time" with a Cheshire cat grin.
"Remember," he said, climbing out of the car, "you use it, you lose it. You get caught, you don't know nothing. Capice?"
"No pobbum," Johnny answered, slipping the piece under his seat.
"No pobbum, man," he repeated, watching Bags grease down into the Blossom.
Forgiveness
Two nights went by without a word. Her cheek, which had swelled the first day, felt normal now, but the sting of it had gone far deeper than skin and muscle. On the third day Uncle Four appeared at her door, as Mona knew he would, with roses and cognac, and a diamond tennis bracelet. She allowed him a kiss on the cheek and a fleeting hug, watching him the way an alleycat watches a bulldog.
Uncle Four wasn't apologetic, instead acted as if nothing had happened.
"It was just a misunderstanding," he declared. "You know how it is with men, this business of bei meen, saving face."
Mona pouted when he slipped the glittering bracelet on her wrist. He declined to summon the radio car, so they hailed a yellow cab to a fancy seafood restaurant uptown, which had a view on the Hudson River nightscape. Then he took her windowshopping along Fifth Avenue, promising her the Chanel, the Gucci, the many exquisite things he would buy her.
Mona was cool and said she'd forgotten about the incident, and before midnight came she allowed him again to enter her bedroom in the darkness above Henry Street.
She lay beneath the silk sheets, quiet after he had mounted her unsuccessfully with his horny drunk erection, finally rolling his fat weight off of her. She was pretending to be asleep.
Uncle Four was at her makeup table now, drinking again and talking on the phone with the night light on. When he was drunk this way he rambled, his voice slurring, bragging about his deals. Golo, she supposed was on the other end.
Mona lay silent, motionless, listening. She heard about the diamonds, the big deal, something about washing money and Hakka powder.
"October eleventh," she heard, the day after the Double Ten celebration. A week away. Her eyes open in the dark now, she listened.
"The lawyer's office. Dew keuih lo mou hei, motherfuckers. No bodyguards. Who would dare anyway? At noon."
Uncle Four was slugging down the XO. Bragging. Laughing a pig's chortle.
"The side elevator, on Hester Street. That's the trick. Dew! In a plastic takeout bag from Big Wong's. Ha! You come after, with them. Together, no, we call attention to ourselves."
Then he hung up the phone, grunted, staggered back toward the bed, toward Mona, lying breathless and still.
He rolled in next to her, his hands already on her body, squeezing her breasts, her nipples, his fat fingers sliding down to her soft downy triangle, poking, violating her. He rubbed his flaccid flesh against her backside, licked his tongue against her neck, the stench of liquor on his breath.
She kept from recoiling, as she always did, even as he turned her in toward him. The diamonds, she thought as he pushed her head lower. The gold coins and the big cash deal. Her head was on the quivering round of his stomach. She opened her mouth.
Then she closed her mind.