When the map is unrolled, the dagger is revealed.
Next morning there’s a dead body on the sidewalk. Outside a bakery where I’ve gone to grab breakfast, the baker lies faceup on the asphalt, still wearing his white chef’s hat. He’s a big, florid man; it’s inscrutable that he used to have energy enough to keep his bulk upright-and that suddenly he doesn’t. Two women stand above him, waving their arms and making their pocketbooks swing. A police officer also stands over the chef, his car parked casually in the middle of the street. The tableau would have been unthinkable only a moment ago; now it’s as banal as dirt.
Then we onlookers, being not dead, go about our business, as the Vermont poet said. Life goes on: The take-out window ten feet away doesn’t even suspend its business, cash bills handed in, steamed buns handed out. I order a half dozen little pastries with almonds stuck in sweet white goo. A treat: If this is a bad omen of some sort, all the more reason to make sure I keep my spirits up…
Returning to the Super 2, I arrange to keep getting Internet in my room. The unfriendly receptionist in her flounce is never happy to see me, nor is the Internet an easy concept to express to her in party language, but eventually we work it out.
“So it’s all set for me keep accessing from my room?”
“Okay-okay,” she answers with a forced smile.
“I steal Tsingtao shot glass with lukewarm coffee from lobby, okay?”
“Okay-okay.”
“I go upstairs cry my heart out, okay?”
“Okay-okay.”
Sometimes the only way to make sense of your surroundings is to reach out to a far-off source. So now in my little Super 2 roomette, with paint droplets from the construction floating down and hardening on the outsides of my windows, I spend the day deep-Googling. I learn that Shi is an industrial city with little charm, known predominantly for two things: exceptional hospitals and a plethora of massage parlors. The first fact I’ve gathered by now, but the massage parlors are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Some of the Web sites offer virtual tours of their palatial interiors: fantasy temples with saltwater grottoes, saunas decorated with ceramic parrots and ceramic eagles, complete with discreetly bowing hostesses giving the revolving doors a little spin to help you through…
Larry’s right. Massage Central is where I’ve landed us.
And other facts. (It’s laughably easy to get information, despite there being an estimated thirty thousand Keystone Kops devoted to blocking Web sites seemingly at random.) Those fountains of last night that I found so alien, they were nothing worse than replicas of Old Faithful in honor of the U.S. of A., going off every quarter hour with a big blast at midnight. Also, sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities are Chinese, and Shi is among the top performers.
Yet for all its flaws, there’s something about this land that makes people want to waltz. As I munch on cold shrimp and celery cubes left over from breakfast, I recall one of the only times I’ve ever waltzed in my life, twenty-five years ago, when I was taking an overnight steam train through Shandong province, and at a rural station the woman I was traveling with started waltzing me beside the track. The fields around us were filled with peasants sleeping in the open air, with a small fire at the entrance to each family’s field of crops, but dozens of them roused themselves to stand and watch the strange sight of us dancing under the moonlight. Does something similar motivate the Red Guards to waltz? The haunting vision of last night is still fresh in my mind, those revolutionaries waltzing to old American favorites from a time before they were born…
By late afternoon, when I get to the hospital, I’m determined to figure out where the badminton noise is coming from. Before even checking in on Larry, I walk down the halls past the Family Crush Room, turn left at Sufferers Locker Room, and enter a wing I haven’t been to before. The badminton sounds grow louder, and soon I find an empty corridor where two ferocious Arabs in long robes are lunging for a birdie. I’m impressed: all that fierce heft in service of a corrugated plastic birdie. They’re really throwing themselves into it, their grandstanding cutthroat but silent, so hushed that the only sound is their bare feet making quick grippy noises on the glittering marble floor.
I whistle in admiration after a particularly savage smash shot hits one of the guy’s kaffiyehs. The ice is broken.
“You belong to America?” the smasher asks.
I admit it. Even though I know it’s stupid to do so when in dicey territory, I’m never able to pretend I’m Canadian. “I do belong to America. You?”
“ Saudi Arabia,” says the smasher.
“ Yemen,” says the smashee.
Our conversation draws visitors from a communal kitchenette off the hallway. Five men slip out to join us, reticent and stern. One of them, a lanky young fellow in Western clothes, sips judiciously from an Oodles of Noodles steaming from the microwave. “You here for a liver?” he asks me.
“Kidney,” I say. “For my cousin.”
“Me also,” he says, giving me a fist bump. “Kidney for my father.”
“Liver for my brother,” says the Yemenite smashee. “Lung for his uncle,” he adds, since the Saudi smasher is too intent on his serve to speak for himself.
It really is a medical mecca for Middle Easterners. I’m introduced to an Egyptian with lovable brown eyes who owns a chain of stalls in a Cairo marketplace. He’s here while his nephew awaits a heart transplant. A Moroccan wearing an iPod that is more advanced than anything I’ve seen in America awaits a pancreas for his uncle. The lanky fellow is named Abu, and he’s the scion of a sporting-goods empire in Pakistan, responsible for all the badminton paraphernalia. There’s no royalty in residence, apparently, but these gentlemen are commercial royalty-rich and well connected enough to have found their way here, all speaking better English than the Chinese do. They tell me that instead of putting themselves in hotels, they’ve purchased nearby apartments to live in while they wait for the transplants to take place. I try to keep it straight. Egypt/heart/nephew, Yemen/liver/brother, Morocco/pancreas/uncle. All males, naturally. Do the women in these lands not require transplants, or simply not merit the expense? The only women are the wives and mothers in shawls and trinkets who shuffle soundlessly about, obsequious as servants. Except for being the recipients of an occasional tongue-lashing, they’re not spoken to, thanked, or otherwise acknowledged.
And no Westerners, of course.
“We are friends?” I venture.
“Oh, yes, no problem.” Big pat on the back from Abu, who all but says, “We are family of patients together!” But he doesn’t need to say it. We’re in neutral territory facing the ultimate common adversary. The usual rules are suspended. We even find it possible to chitchat about the state of the world-stuff that’s easy to agree on. For ten or fifteen minutes, we swap geopolitical truisms, and then it’s time to ask the question that’s preying on my mind.
“So how long you been waiting?” I ask.
“Two for me. Two also for him.”
“Two weeks? That’s not so bad,” I say, doing some rough calculations. At this rate I’ll be able to see my family again before the weather turns colder.
“Not weeks, months,” says Abu.
“Months? You’ve been here two months already?”
“Two, maybe three months more,” comes my reply.
Wait-maybe five months altogether? I run some more numbers in my head. That would bring us to Christmas. Be without my family all autumn? Not see Spencer starting drum lessons? Not see Jeremy rehearse his role of Tiny Tim?
Untenable. Gotta go.
“Pound it,” Abu says, giving me another fist bump before I race off to the elevator bank. “Keep it real.”
Maybe five months? At the rate he’s going, I doubt that Larry will be alive in five months. I need to hunt down the truth behind these terrible numbers. Cherry’s at the nurses’ station down the hall from Larry’s door, jumbo pocketbook in hand, conferring with the resident who looks like Judy. I pull her aside.
“Cherry, you and I need to talk hard balls,” I say. “I’ve been speaking to some of the Middle Easterners-”
She cuts me off. “Every case different,” she reminds me. “They have no Restriction, therefore less hazard, less hurry.”
“Is it possible we might have to stay here four or five months?”
Giggling is the last thing I’d expect at this juncture, but giggling is what Cherry gives me, her hand in front of her mouth, modestly covering her teeth. “Oh, no,” she says. “You special guests with many friends on Chinese soil. Big guanxi, not little guanxi. Don’t have to wait so long.”
“Then how long? Larry’s weaker every day.”
“So I think we give you the answer to this question other day.”
“Really? I don’t recollect getting an answer.”
“That answer is we do not know.”
“Oh, yeah, that answer I remember. But can I at least set up a meeting with Dr. X to discuss the time frame, and also the price, because Larry is not a rich man…?”
“He on the fly, very difficult to catch. You may try his secretary on floor four.”
“May I try her now?”
“She also difficult to catch: in, out, everywhere. Also, this after-hour.”
“It’s only ten to five.”
“Yes, but this Chinese time. Maybe she gone already. In China if you want to be sure, better choice to see early morning, say six A.M.”
Suddenly it hits me. Ow my God, is Cherry not to be trusted? Her evasiveness may or may not be legitimate, but is there something else going on? Is she keeping us in the dark on purpose, the better to keep tabs on us? Is that what the pocketbook’s about-it contains secret files on us?
And just as suddenly she seems to sense that I’m onto her. Her face widens into an extra-sweet smile as she tosses her hair.
“Hey, tonight Friday, big hoedown party night, could be? You want take Larry to restaurant? Par-tay! Par-tay!”
I’m thrown. Perhaps I’m meant to be thrown.
“What do you mean, outside the hospital?”
“Good for patient morale,” she says.
“But-”
“Larry say he like Peking duck,” she says sweetly. “Very good restaurant for just such a treat around the corner.”
“But…is he okay to go? I mean, how could we even get him down all the stairs from the ninth floor?”
She finds me amusing. I’m the one who called her from the backseat of the kidnap cabbie, after all. Oh, it pains me to recollect the message I left on her answering machine. I blush anew as she chuckles at me.
“Elevator not still broke, Daniel. Only one day broke. How you think your brother get to dialysis on sixth floor?”
My cousin, I want to say. But there’s so much going on in my brain, trying to figure out whether I’m being paranoid again, that for once I hold my tongue.
I open the door to Larry’s room, and there he is already dressed for dinner in heavy trousers, short-sleeved business shirt, and wool sport coat. So wait-Cherry suggested Peking duck to him before I grew suspi cious? Maybe she didn’t make this offer to throw me off the scent? The truth, once again, is that I can’t tell friend from foe. Perhaps she’s no more a spy than our poor cabbie was a kidnapper? I’m on the other side of the planet, after all, where upside down is right side up. I don’t know my ass from my elbow.
I turn to Larry, about to say, You’re not going to be too warm in that outfit?-but for the second time in as many minutes I keep it to myself. Larry has his own truth, as Cherry has hers, maybe even as the Red Guards have theirs. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it, though.
No question: Larry is failing. Walking down the corridor with me, on the way to dinner, he takes tentative baby steps. Descending eight floors by elevator leaves him breathless. By the time we make it across the cavernous lobby downstairs, he’s perspiring so much from the effort that he takes off his sport coat and asks me to hold it. He grips my shoulder to negotiate the curb by the sidewalk. I’m not prepared to hold his hand, but I do take his upper arm when crossing the street and can’t help noticing that the skin up there is pudgy soft, just like when he was a kid.
“Slow down,” he says. “If I don’t concentrate on standing upright, I’ll fall over.”
I surprise myself by not being impatient. It’s actually interesting to go at his pace; he points out things I wouldn’t have noticed at my usual speed. “Someone could make a fortune installing banisters in this country,” he says, noting the lack of railings everywhere. “We can’t go more than five yards without the walkway changing.” He’s right: The ground surface that passes for sidewalk goes from pebbles to puddles to rutted tar. It’s like my finding it advantageous to not speak the language-his perceptions are sharpened to compensate for his shortcomings. Two handicapped men in China, with only our wits to get us through.
“Eight A.M.,” he says. But my brain’s so busy working overtime that I’ve misheard him. What he actually says is “ATM”-pointing out a cash machine I hadn’t noticed before.
“It’s a good one,” he says, trying it out. “I’m going for broke.”
Unlike most of the ATMs I’ve been trying up till now, this machine’s not on the blink, and Larry is able to make repeated withdrawals. He’s already gotten seventy-five hundred RMB, about a thousand dollars in small bills. “This is better than Atlantic City,” he says buoyantly, playing it like a slot machine until his pockets are bulging.
Approaching the restaurant, the sidewalk path is so narrow and dark-lit only by passing headlights-that we shuffle single file. The mud is slippery from a shower earlier today and feels ancient in its slickness. As for the air quality? “If I were flying in fog this thick, I’d use instruments,” Larry notes.
In the gloom an excitable old man is playing “Danny Boy” on a violin, almost jittering with energy. Beyond him a line of street hawkers affords Larry an opportunity to teach me the art of bargaining.
“NO TOURIST PRICES,” he says to the first hawker he encounters. Larry’s stiffened for the confrontation, wrapped so tight he could be mummified. “WE’RE NOT STUPID WESTERNERS. WE’RE NOT WHATEVER YOU THINK WE ARE.”
“Go easy,” I tell him. “I don’t think they follow-”
“He knows more than he’s letting on,” Larry says.
“Good-friend price,” says the hawker, who wears a flowing Fu Manchu and is smiling with a kind of joy to be in our company.
“I’M NOT YOUR GOOD FRIEND,” Larry says. “I’M A BLACK-BELT NEGOTIATOR. Now watch this,” he tells me, “it’s called low-balling. He wants sixty-eight RMB for the lighter, right? That’s only about eight dollars American, if my calculations serve. But does he think I’m a schmeggege? Instead of coming in at sixty-four, I shock him into a whole new stage of negotiations. FOUR!” he barks.
The hawker looks deeply disappointed in us. “No four. Forty-eight,” he says.
“FOUR!” Larry barks again. “Another tactic I use,” he continues, “is to offer to buy in quantity. Ask for a half dozen of anything, suddenly they’re interested. SIX FOR EIGHT!” he barks.
The hawker looks as though he’s reached his tongue into the most fragrant of honey pots only to be stung by a bee. “No six for eight!” he says. “Forty-two each!”
This goes on for another minute while the crowd watches raptly to the tune of “Danny Boy” and the hawker seems alternately joyous and bee-stung.
“Finally, don’t be afraid to walk away empty-handed,” Larry counsels, walking away empty-handed. As my hunched-over cousin crosses the street, I pick up four lighters for twenty RMB, to the delight of all.
I’m chuckling to myself when I catch up to him. What a schmeggege, whatever that is! And suddenly the schmeggege saves my life-pulling me back from a cab that comes as close as a bull in a bullfight. Weak and misoriented as he is, he yanks me out of harm’s way while I’m crossing the street. I didn’t bother checking both ways, too busy feeling superior…
Entering the crimson restaurant, Larry and I spontaneously start to cough from the spice in the air. But soon our lungs adjust, and after being cut ahead of in line twice, we’re seated next to a table of four businessmen. From their overrelaxed manner, I can tell they’ve put a few away and will be smoking like chimneys before long. I request a table far from everybody, a window seat facing the dark street, all by itself. But no sooner have we settled in than the empty table next to us is taken by a man who begins smoking like a chimney.
“You know, we haven’t spent this much time together since we were kids,” Larry says conversationally, settling himself with a groan of relief. “Have you noticed we’re starting to look alike? We’re walking around with the same watch, the same kind of camera; even our expressions are practically identical.”
The way I see it, it’s not that we’re alike as much as he’s in culture shock, casting about to make connections with anything remotely familiar. It’s how he handles his homesickness. The food on the waiter’s tray reminds him of something his mother might have had in the old country: like kasha that hasn’t been cooked right, like chicken soup except that shrimp heads are trying to mate on the surface.
“By the way, just so there won’t be any misunderstandings later, this is on me,” Larry says, studying the menu in Chinese.
“Don’t worry about it, I got it,” I say.
“I’m not worried, I’m paying,” he says.
“You paid the last several times,” I point out.
“That’s a reasonable thing to say, but no,” he says.
“Larry, I want to pay.”
“You want to? That’s a nice impulse. Just understand it’s my treat. Accept it.”
I do so, but with a certain unease. It’s not merely politeness on my part. It’s not merely that it reminds me of his father giving away silver dollars he didn’t have. It’s also that Larry and I have a history of him paying for my meals, and they haven’t ended up well. Every time he wanted to interest me in gold coins just before the price of gold plummeted, or a Boston condo as the real-estate bubble was on the point of bursting, he would take me to lunch and insist on paying. I’d save thirty bucks on the bill and end up thousands in the hole.
The waitress arrives with a free hors d’oeuvre plate of little watermelon cubes. “Another spellbinder,” Larry remarks. “This country has the best-looking women I’ve ever seen. I find ninety percent of them attractive and twenty-five percent of them gorgeous.” He puts down the menu and addresses her. “I WANT TO ORDER PIZZA WITH EXTRA ONIONS, MUSHROOMS, WHAT I CALL TACO BEEF, BUT REALLY ANY BEEF WILL DO, PEPPERONI-”
“Larry-”
“Am I talking too fast again? I never remember to slow down.”
“Larry, there’s no such thing as pizza here, much less taco beef. Besides, I thought you were cool with Peking duck.”
“You win,” he says, showing me the whites of his palms in submission.
“Peking duck for two,” I tell the waitress. “And two middle Cokes.”
“Duck not ready for half a clock,” she warns us.
That’s fine. This will give me a chance to ask Larry something I’ve been wondering about for a while. But first Larry has to slip the waitress a bill that amounts to 100 percent of what the entire meal’s going to come to.
“YOU’RE PRETTY AS A PINUP,” he tells her.
She preens.
“Doesn’t speak a lick of English, but all girls know the word ‘pretty,’” Larry says, giving her another 100-percent tip. Twice the price of the meal.
“Larry, you’ve got to preserve your capital…”
“She’s working hard, she deserves it.”
“But, Larry, they don’t even tip at the end of meals in this country.”
“That’s not my fault.”
Fine. I concede again. It’s a series of mutual compromises. He’s sampling the native cuisine. I can let him tip to his heart’s content.
“So, Larry, I’ve always wanted to ask you this. I’m only asking now because you’re plying me with duck. But are you mobbed up?”
This question seems to please him and make him tight-lipped at the same time. He pops a Beano, then reaches over to snag one of the watermelon cubes, each with its own plastic dragon toothpick. “I don’t want this to go wide, but yes,” he says, and launches into a blue streak of mini-sagas that he says must be off the record. Most of it’s too complicated for me to follow anyway. All I get are some choice names and phrases: “A-hundred-and-fifty-percent financing.” “Disappeared in ’92.” “Unfortunately also deceased.” “Political asylum for Russian girlfriend.” “Embezzled billions, but they could only get him for making free calls from pay phones.” It’s a lot of generalized innuendo, and the only way to keep my head from spinning is not to follow too closely. Still, is it possible he knows the people who offed Jeffrey Dahmer in prison?
“But better than the mob,” he says, coming out of deep background, “are my connections with the MM.”
“You mean the Motor Men?”
Larry shushes me and turns stiffly in his cushioned seat to see who might have overheard. “The mob’s easy to infiltrate. The MM’s twice as hard, but this has to be even deeper background, because these guys lack any sense of humor whatsoever.”
So here’s a disguised account of what he tells me about the MM.
“In Miami, a few miles south of my domicile,” he begins, “there’s an allergist I grew up with who found himself with a client who it turns out is a member of the MM. This client had a stuffed-up nose, couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Milton diagnoses the problem as being the fault of a cat living in the MM’s clubhouse. Client gets rid of the cat, presto, problem solved, client’s so grateful he starts referring Milton to other members who also turn out to have allergy problems. Who knew the MM had such sensitive nasal issues? Soon Milton finds himself in a pickle. What’s he gonna do with patients who are basically hard-core criminals-find the nerve to throw them out? Soon there are six or seven members of the MM as clients, including the leader of the local clubhouse we’ll call Killer. They’re filling up his waiting room in their chains and leathers, and for some reason they took a shine to Milton, started offering him some of their whores that he regularly declined. But Milton ’s basically a sissy who got a kick out of this proximity to real life and bragged about it to me on one occasion. Not really bragging. Allergist bragging. Any case, I had a problem with a tenant I was sleeping with. She couldn’t make rent because she was in debt for cocaine for two grand that some black guy in Overtown had advanced her. He didn’t want the money. Pretty little red head, he wanted to pimp her out. She didn’t know what to do so came crying to me. I checked her out, spoke to her sister, who’s a petroleum engineer in Sioux City, tells me she’s basically a good girl but she’s in over her head. So I said, ‘Tammy, don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’ Had Milton set up a meeting between me and Killer. I lay out the situation, they agree to pay the pimp a visit, I’ll drive.”
Here Larry interrupts himself to wet his whistle. “Dear, could I bother you to remind you about those middle Cokes?” he asks the waitress in a normal tone, as casually as though she were working the pub at his condo club. “Actually, bring the whole bottle,” he corrects.
Larry gazes out the window at the black night. “I must say the local truckers have remarkably bad aim. They hardly ever hit the bicycles,” he says, and no sooner are the words out of his mouth than down one goes. Not a serious accident. The bicyclist brushes herself off and shakes her fist at the truck that winged her.
“Not to take anything from the guy in the famous Tiananmen Square photo, standing up to the tank,” Larry says. “But it does give you perspective to be here. Face-offs like that are an everyday occurrence. It’s called traffic.”
“Let’s get back to the story,” I propose.
“This next part involves a knife,” he warns me.
“How big a knife?”
“Here to here,” he says, opening his arms exactly as wide as our restaurant table.
“Basically like a saber?”
“That’s your word,” Larry says. “Whose saga is this, yours or mine? When it’s your turn, you can use all the clichés you wish, but right now I’ve got the floor. You ready?”
“Shoot,” I say.
“So we drive to Overtown. I stay in the car. Ten, fifteen minutes tops, they come back down and say it’s all set, he’s moving to his mutha’s in Chicago in the morning. Tammy’s off the hook. What they did was take a knife to his balls. They show me the knife, it’s as aforementioned. They place it against his balls and give him a little cut, just enough so he has to go to the hospital for a couple of stitches. Careful to break only one toof when they put a gun in his mouth. ‘Notice we’re not wearing masks,’ they tell the pimp. ‘That’s because we want you to remember our faces. In fact, every night before you go to sleep for the rest of your life, we want you to remember our faces. See? Ramon here’s got a scar on his chin. And see, I’ve got a cute little button nose? My mother used to call me Button-Nose. But you can’t call me Button-Nose. You can’t call me shit. All you can do is remember our faces and pray that nuffing bad better happen to Tammy. Because if anything ever does, even if she takes a tumble getting on a bus, we’re gonna assume you caused it and come after you. You’re her insurance company. You better hope she has a nice long life.’”
End of saga. Larry starts counting the broken eggshells overflowing the ashtray from the previous diner’s meal.
“So what happened?” I ask.
“I told you, he moved in with his mutha! Weren’t you listening?” Larry conceals his annoyance by stretching across the table to spear another watermelon cube.
“No, I mean, to Tammy.”
“Overdosed sixteen months later. Died with the needle in her arm. Too bad, sweet kid, just a little confused.” He signals the waitress sidling by with ten soup bowls stacked in her embrace. “Any chance of our getting that Sprite, dear?” he asks with a winning smile.
“And what happened to Killer?”
“Serving twelve to fifteen for possession of kidney porn,” he says.
“Kidney, did you say?”
“Kiddie, kiddie, get your ears checked, Dan,” Larry advises.
“Well, anyway, that’s an amazing story,” I say.
“So am I sorry I took the action I did?” Larry asks rhetorically. “No. I did the right thing. Plus, I dated the sister in Sioux City for like six months. Amazing oral technician. Treated it like a French horn. You think it would be rude to ask our waitress for more pineapple?”
“You mean watermelon?”
“Sure, I’m not picky.”
Just in time the duck is wheeled over, looking like it was pulled out of a pond of brown glaze and had its throat sliced two minutes ago, about the time in the story when the saber was put to the guy’s balls. A man in white flips the duck back side up. He resembles a surgeon, but he’s a duck slicer wearing a surgical mask as he carves so adroitly. Snip, carve, slash. Such a pro you can’t even make out his breath moving through the mouth gauze. Two male waiters prepare the table, but one makes the mistake of reaching to ready Larry for his meal. Larry smacks the man’s hand away and gives him a dirty look.
And so the meal begins.
And then the meal’s done. The duck’s hit the spot. Larry has pushed back his chair and is applying Blistex to his lips with a sigh of satisfaction. Without meaning to, Larry has proved to me that he has a better palate than I do-discerning breast skin as having a different flavor from thigh skin. Additionally, he’s used his utensil with great skill-the KFC spork that he apparently plans to carry everywhere, like an all-purpose Swiss Army knife. As for me, I’m still trying to process things.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” he asks me, whittling at one of the holes in his teeth with the plastic dragon toothpick.
“It’s just hard to imagine anyone in our family being connected with either the mob or the MM,” I reply. “See, look, now you’ve got me calling them by their initials. I don’t want to call them by their initials. I want to call them by their real blood-and-gore name-”
“Call them what you wish,” Larry says. “All I can tell you is, time comes, they’re gonna have Burton ’s ass on a stick.”
“Whoa!” I say, pushing my chair back and holding up my arm like a traffic cop. “What are you talking about here?”
Larry takes off his sunglasses and gives me a Mona Lisa expression that says, I have no expression whatsoever. “Dan, you’re my cousin, and besides that you’re more or less my friend, so I’m going to do you a favor and say, ‘No comment.’”
I re-strain the muscle in my neck. Now it’s officially a crick. “I thought the fatwa was over, Larry. Larry?”
“You’re absolutely right, it was over,” he says, taking a tissue that serves as napkin to pat the drops of sweat that constellate his brow. “Then it became under again.”
“But you said it was done!”
“If you recall, I didn’t say it was done. What I precisely said was it was behind us, and it is behind us. Specifically, it’s behind Burton, not to get too anatomical.”
“But, Larry, here we are in China on a whole new page. What did Burton ever do to you that was so unforgiveable you can’t let it go?”
The Mona Lisa smile means he means business. “Dan, believe me when I tell you, you don’t want to know. Suffice it to say he stabbed me in the back, trying to swindle my mutha.”
“But if you don’t tell me, how can I judge it for myself?”
“Who’s asking you to? I know what I know. That’s good enough for me.”
He spears another watermelon cube and sucks it thoughtfully for a minute. A cab races by the window. More more more more, goes its horn.
“Okay, bottom-line reason, sparing you the details? He said I owed him money, I said I paid him back. To teach me a lesson, he demanded a mortgage on my mutha’s house, saying it’ll be a learning experience for me, a growth experience. Long story short: My mutha died the worst kind of death, thinking she had lost her house and that Judy and I were left homeless. We were with her day and night at the hospital at the end, and she thought the only reasonable explanation was that she had lost everything to Burton and we had no home to go to. Yes, she was delusional, and we tried to convince her otherwise, but she was set on it, and she died in agony. She died sick with worry, and for this I blame Burton. For this he deserves everything coming to him. That’s why it’s not over.”
“But Burton didn’t get the house,” I protest.
“Doesn’t change anything. He tried.”
“But you’ve got to keep things in balance,” I say. “Didn’t you tell me a couple of days ago that you wouldn’t have been able to arrange the cure for Judy’s epilepsy if it hadn’t been for Burton?”
“Absolutely. He was an angel.”
“Then why-”
“That was then. This is now.”
I can feel my face doing funny things. It’s as though my eyebrows are trying to convince him out of it by sheer force of contortion. My neck muscle is seizing up. “But the FBI interviewed you last time, when they advised him to go to a motel for two weeks. You’ll be the first person they suspect.”
Now the Mona Lisa smile deepens a bit, so the toothpick can reach some deeper recess. “Let’s just say I have made arrangements,” he says. “To be dispatched upon my death.”
“You’re kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding me.”
“No, that’s the beauty part, because as soon as I’m dead, presto, the plan goes into effect. They can’t come back at me. Pretty sweet, huh? So in a way I hope Burton does find out where I’m going to have my surgery and does manage to squash it, because it’ll be his ass.”
I’m squinting through the smoke from tables everywhere, blinking much more than I want to. “So I’m assuming this is still a wake-up call rather than a fatwa fatwa, as you said. And Burton will survive it, right?”
“Yes. Whether he’ll want to, that’s a different question. Put it this way: It’ll be a learning experience for him. Like he prescribed for me. A growth experience. He thinks he rules the world. He’ll find out that he’s not even an ant in the real world.”
I’ve never heard such contempt packed into a single word as what he does with “ant.” He extracts his toothpick and points it at me.
“And you know the part I love best, Dan? That he thinks he’s safe. Oh, I relish that. This is my masterwork. I want to be remembered for this.”
“But, Larry, you don’t think something more moderate might be in order? Like challenge Burton in a court of law?”
“I’m not interested in paperwork. This is poetic justice. He screwed me up the ass, I’m returning the favor. And in front of his wife. That’s the part Killer especially liked. When Killer heard about my mutha on her deathbed, he said he couldn’t wait to take care of it personally. He was very attached to his mutha, too, apparently. Well, I already alluded to that. She called him ‘Button-Nose.’”
Larry’s eyes are dancing. Even the thought of the deed makes his eyes sparkle with happy menace. I haven’t seen him this animated since he was ten, doing his favorite trick of speaking Clint Eastwood lines into the fan: “I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.”
I look around the crimson restaurant, aghast. My eyes search out a TV for distraction. On the screen above the waiters’ station, they’re running a show about pandas. What is it with this country and pandas? Everywhere you look, pandas chewing on celery stalks, pandas batting one another playfully in the balls, pandas in positions that in any other species would be called obscene. They even have an expression for someone with droopy eyes: “panda eyes.” Enough with the pandas already. I make one last effort at denying Larry’s news.
“You’re gaming me, right? You’re hoping I get back to Burton with this so he freaks out all over again, even though in reality there’s nothing to it.”
“Oh, I like that version,” Larry says. “That adds a nice little bit of surrealism that even I couldn’t have dreamed up.”
“But that’s the truth, right? You never really issued the first fatwa against him. You were just blowing smoke to shake him up. You’d never do something like that to your own cousin, or anyone else for that matter. You just said it so he’d get anxious, and that would be punishment enough right there.”
“Good. Keep your head in the sand. That’s the version we’ll go with.”
“Because you’ve got the golden heart, even for people who cross you. I mean, you’re someone I’ve known my whole life, you’re not…evil…are you?”
“No, I like the first scenario. We’ll leave it at that. Why spoil a nice Friday-night duck feast. Good Shabbos, by the way. We ought to make this Peking duck a Friday-night tradition.”
The denial is over. I’m at one of the next stages of grief-depression-and am surprised at how weak and supplicating my voice comes out. “I really thought the feud was dead.”
“Not dead. Dormant. But I do have some good news.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve refined it somewhat. I now want the act recorded on film so it can be posted on YouTube.”
“Larry, I’ve got to tell you this is making me physically ill.”
“Don’t worry. It’s less than a grand. Killer gave me a discount-”
“I don’t mean how much you’ve had to shell out, Larry! I mean the idea of you doing bodily injury to a relative. To anyone!”
When have I ever seen eyes so merry with deadliness? And then it comes to me. At his father’s funeral. There was a man no one recognized at graveside. He stood right beside the casket, waiting patiently for it to be lowered. And when it was set into the ground, he was the first person to pick up the shovel and perform the traditional rite of casting dirt upon the grave. Only he did it with too much gusto. It’s meant to be symbolic, a reluctant drizzle of soil, but this grunting stranger heaved five, ten, twenty-five shovelfuls: He didn’t stop till his shirt was soaked through. It was only after the ceremony that it occurred to me he must have been someone with whom Sam had had a blood feud. Decades earlier, perhaps, the man must have vowed, “I’ll toss dirt on your grave!”
Who knows, maybe it was what kept the guy alive all those years. Maybe Sam, too.
Primitive business, this vengeance thing. People took their restitution seriously back in the shtetl.
Larry’s watching me, an enigmatic smile playing on his lips. He looks more like Mona Lisa than the original Mona Lisa does, so that I understand something about Leonardo’s model that I didn’t understand before. She’s more than enigmatic. She’s a schemer. Behind that famously mysterious smile, she’s plotting to violate her cousin. And make another cousin an unwitting accessory.
“So come to think of it, Dan, you’re doing a twofer too, just like me,” he says.
“How’s that?”
“You thought you were coming to China just to save one cousin. But if you save me, you save Burton, too, at least for the time being. Two for the price of one…”