Noir, Page 3

  “I hope not. I just want to be there—you know, throw the dice. Maybe my number comes up one of these nights. I got it bad for her, Sammy. I guess maybe I’m just a sap.” Moo hung his head, fixing his eyes on the beat-up wooden counter as noodles were ladled into their bowls.

  Sammy doctored his noodles with soy sauce and some chili paste, then blew on them to give himself time to think. In this nighttime world where everyone was on some kind of hustle, looking for some kind of angle, a guy seldom let his guard down, so when a pal opened up like Eddie just had, when a guy showed he needs sympathy, put his half-broken heart out there for another guy to see, he needed to be handled gently, very much like a fragile little baby bird what has fallen out of the nest . . .

  “Moo Shoes, you’re a goddamn idiot!”

  “What?” said Moo. “No. Maybe. Why?”

  “That doll has more angles than she’s got curves, and you know it. If a guy is going to wreck his life on a dame, it should at least be a surprise. Putting the chill on you is the biggest favor Lois has ever done you.”

  Then Moo Shoes launched into a soliloquy on the beauty, charm, and perfect astrological alignment (Monkey/Rat) of Lois Fong, and how he, a third son of a launderer, wasn’t worthy of the attention of such a creature. Out of respect, Sammy tuned him out and concentrated on his noodles, which were quite tasty indeed. He watched the jook guy take orders and collect empty bowls, then shamble down the narrow aisle to the end of the counter, where he deposited them in the dumbwaiter. He closed the hatch and pulled a cord, which must have rung a bell somewhere. A few minutes later, the dumbwaiter returned with another steaming pot and a stack of clean bowls.

  “This broth is tops,” said Sammy. “Chicken?”

  “You haven’t even been listening.”

  “I have. You are longing for Lois Fong, who thinks you are shit on a stick, hold the stick. Right?”

  “No. Lois likes me. She says I make her laugh.”

  “Well, I’m no dame, but you are a snazzy dresser, and you are not completely horrible to pass an hour with, so it seems to me that Lois does not realize what she is missing. You are a diamond in the rough, Moo.”

  “I got no car, no house, and I share an apartment with four other guys.”

  “And you are often more than somewhat short of folding money, as well.”

  “My people like to gamble,” explained Moo. “Luck is a big thing in Chinese culture.”

  “I am paying for the noodles, I take it?”

  “How about this broth? Huh?” Moo Shoes slurped some broth from a big porcelain spoon.

  “Delicious, huh? Huh?”

  Sammy looked up from chasing some noodles around his bowl with a chopstick. “Lois put the bite on you for your tips tonight?”

  “Borrowed. She has expenses. I’ll pay you back Friday.” The old guy next to Eddie tapped him on the shoulder. “You, too,” Eddie said. Then to Sammy: “I started a craps game here last Monday, thinking that my venerated elders are new to the game, but gambling is gambling, and they are Chinese, so they will be happy to part with some of their cash as part of the price of learning.”

  “Didn’t go well?”

  Eddie leaned in to Sammy and whispered, “These old fuckers are fast learners. Look, I have cash, but I can’t let these guys know it.” Eddie picked up his own chopsticks and showed Sammy the grip. “You need to use both chopsticks. Here, like this. I thought I showed you. See, you just move the one.”

  Sammy mimicked Eddie’s move and managed to strangle a couple of innocent noodles. When the counter guy came by again, Sammy paid him for the soup.

  Eddie said, “What was the deal with the brass with Sally Gab tonight?”

  “Runs an air base in New Mexico. I don’t know where Sal found him, but he thinks I can find him some broads for a campout he’s having next week with the Bohemians.”

  “So why does Sal not just go to Mabel’s on Post Street and arrange for some girls to be delivered? I am guessing that it is not the first time she does business with the Bohemian Club.”

  “That’s just the thing, the general does not want professionals. He wants normal dames, what you might meet at the butcher shop or on a train, in cotton dresses and smelling of Ivory soap, so that the Bohemians can feel that it is their charm and not their money that causes the girls to surrender their knickers.”

  “Even though the normal girls will be paid to come to the campout?”

  “That is what I gather. The general feels that bringing normal Bettys who go moony over the old, rich, and powerful Bohemian guys will put him in a most favorable light with their club.”

  “Which he is not one of?” Moo Shoes shoveled a tangle of noodles over the edge of his bowl into his mouth with a slurp.

  “I gather that this is the whole reason he concocts this caper. It seems that despite the many ranks and medals and airmen under his command, the general is regarded by the Bohemians as strictly a guest, but once he provides them with a gaggle of dolls to dote upon them and be impressed and perform further nasties of their own free will, he will be in.”

  Eddie let some noodles slide back into his bowl as he looked up to see if Sammy was yanking his chain. “He tells you this?”

  “No, this part I piece together while cleverly spying from my position two feet away across the bar, a place where, evidently, I am completely invisible unless they need something from me.”

  “Douche bags.”

  “That would be my assessment, yes,” said Sammy.

  “That’s the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Also correct, and that’s saying something, considering the Lois Fong variable.”

  “And Sal comes to you for this service because . . . ?”

  “I am extraordinarily charming.”

  “If a guy goes through life as Sal Gabelli, sure, I can see how he’d think that.”

  “And I am loaded with street smarts . . .”

  “And as someone eating noodles you are paying for, I would have to agree there as well.”

  “And I know many citizens, many of them dames.”

  “All of them Sal also knows, but who wouldn’t take a leak on him if he was dying of thirst.”

  “True,” Sammy said.

  “And you are going to accomplish this roundup of normal Bettys in calico and pigtails and whatnot—”

  “Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz was mentioned,” Sammy said.

  “You are going to round up these Dorothys, how?”

  “I am going to go to Mabel’s on Post Street with a generous stack of the general’s doubloons and arrange to have a few of her most Dorothy-like girls scrubbed up and pigtailed and asked to refrain from swearing or disrobing until the Bohemians are well in the bag, which I am told is early in their campout.”

  “That might work.”

  “It will for Mabel and the girls, and I will keep my august position behind the bar.” As well as keep Sal from rolling on me to the cops and sending me to prison for an extended stay, Sammy thought.

  “You know, Janet Chang at the club can sing the shit out of ‘Over the Rainbow.’”

  “I’m not clear yet if Sal is going to be there, Moo, and we know how he feels about persons of the ornamental persuasion, but if he’s not there, and she wants to spend a weekend oiling old rich guys, I think we can find a spot for her on the bus.”

  “A whole busload of whores . . .” Eddie looked up toward the smoke-stained ceiling like he was receiving a vision from the patron saint of nookie.

  “And Toto, too,” said Sammy.

  “And for this you will be paid in the amount of . . . ?”

  “I told you. I get to keep my job,” said Sammy. And out of prison. He really should tell Moo.

  “And for this Sally Gab and his tin soldier chased away that luscious doll at the end of the bar?”

  “The Cheese,” Sammy provided.

  “Exactly,” said Eddie Moo Shoes. “Not only are you pimping for free, you are upside dow
n by one delicious Cheese at the hands of that dago fuck. This is a bad deal, Sammy.”

  “When I think of all the guys down on Third Street eating Salvation Army soup, I think keeping my job is not such a bad deal. And besides, I think I will see the beauteous Cheese again.”

  “You got her phone?”

  “Not in full.”

  “You got some of her phone?”

  “Nah, but she says she will see me later.”

  “Oh, well, you should have said. A see you later is as sure a bet as the sun rising in the east. I would give six-to-five on a see you later.”

  “No one cares for your sarcasm, Moo Shoes.”

  “Look,” said Eddie, tossing his head toward the dumbwaiter at the far end of the counter. “You got to see this.”

  A buzz moved through the room, excited exclamations in Cantonese that sounded to Sammy like someone throwing a drawer full of silverware down the stairs. As the dumbwaiter hatch opened, it revealed a glass box perhaps two feet wide and three feet high, and in it squirmed dozens of very active snakes, all struggling to get above the three or four inches of liquid at the bottom of the aquarium.

  Eddie said something to the old guy next to him in Cantonese and the old guy rattled something back that sounded like someone assaulting a broken banjo. The old guy’s eyes lit up and he started digging in his pants pockets in a manner most frantic.

  The guy in the apron wrestled the box of snakes out of the dumbwaiter and onto the counter, then went back for another huge pot of noodles. Another apron guy came up the steps and joined the first guy and scooped steaming noodles and broth into a bowl.

  “You guys are going to eat those snakes, aren’t you?” Sammy whispered to Moo.

  “Just watch.”

  The old guys had all pulled bills out and were waving them in the air at the noodle guy like guys calling out bets at a craps game. The guy with the glass box opened the hinged lid and the snakes all struck at his hand, missed, then slid back down into the liquid. He took a very long ladle with a bowl that held maybe a jigger, reached into the tank, scooped some of the amber liquid from the bottom, then poured it over the noodles the other guy was holding. The noodle guy then ran down the counter to the farthest guy and delivered the bowl to an ecstatic old man, then snatched the twenty-dollar bill out of the old guy’s hand.

  “Snake piss,” Eddie said, all but giggling.

  Sammy watched the process again as a bowl of noodles and whiz went by.

  “Twenty bucks?” Sammy said. “A double sawbuck for a scoop of snake piss? Don’t these guys know there’s a war on?”

  “There’s not a war on anymore,” said Eddie, reveling in Sammy’s dismay.

  “Yeah, but I don’t have another saying and this is the daffiest thing of all the daffy things you have pulled on me.”

  The old guy next to Sammy tapped him on the shoulder and said something in Cantonese, while pointing at his crotch.

  “He says it will give you the dick of death,” Eddie translated.

  The old guy grinned, stood, pushed his crotch against Sammy’s shoulder, and twanged something in Cantonese again.

  “He says it gives you a shaft of steel,” Eddie translated. The old guy bumped against Sammy’s arm. “He says, feel it.”

  “I don’t want to feel it,” Sammy said. “Sit down, pops, before I am forced to loosen your last tooth. Eddie, tell him to get his wang off of me.”

  Eddie did and the old guy did, just as his noodles and snake piss arrived, which the old guy dug into.

  Sammy looked at Eddie. “So that works?”

  “Feel for yourself.”

  Sammy started to stand and Eddie pushed him back down. “Relax, old Chinese guys will eat and drink all kinds of weird stuff to get a boner. The stranger and more deadly the better. Those snakes are sea snakes, the most deadly in the world, so they give the best boners, but I’ve seen them with coral snakes, rattlesnakes, a cobra once. The more deadly, the better stiffy.”

  “But they’re paying twenty bucks apiece to slurp piss?”

  “Twenty bucks a scoop. Some really old guys get two or three scoops. It’s not all that bad. They feed the snakes nothing but beer for a couple of weeks to purify them before they bring them in here.”

  “How do they get the snakes to drink the beer?” Sammy asked.

  Moo Shoes shrugged. “Free pretzels?” Big grin.

  “Moo Shoes, you are both a mook and a jamoke. You, sir, are a jamook.”

  Sammy did a quick count of the guys at the long counter. There were around forty, and all of them except him and Eddie were waving twenties or slurping snake whiz. “So there’s a counter like this on every floor?”

  “Yeah,” said Moo. “All the cooking and dishwashing is done in the basement.”

  “And it’s like this every night? With the snakes and everything?”

  “Not always. Only when they can get the snakes. They don’t live a long time in that glass box. But yeah, when they have them, all four floors are full from midnight on.”

  Sammy did some quick calculating, scratched his chin, then stood up. “I gotta go, Moo.”

  “Ah, shucks, Sammy, I didn’t mean to chase you off. You know I love sharing Chinese culture with you, just to see you get the gwai lo heebie-jeebies.”

  “Nah, it’s not that. I want to get home and catch twenty or so winks. I’m going to head over to the docks in Oakland in the morning. I need to see a guy.”

  “In the morning? In the a.m.? Really?” They were nighttime guys.

  “Yeah, I can do it. I’ve done it before. I think I got an angle on something.”

  “Okay, Sammy. Thanks for the noodles. You want me to put the word out to find the Cheese dame?”

  “Sure, but keep it on the sly. I don’t want to scare her off.”

  The old guy next to Sammy grabbed his crotch and said something in Cantonese.

  “He says you can give it a squeeze before you go,” Eddie translated.

  “Tell him thanks, but I’m good,” Sammy said. “Eddie, can I have a word, outside?”

  “Sure,” said Moo Shoes. He followed Sammy down the stairs and out into the alley.

  “I need to borrow a hundred bucks,” Sammy said.

  “I just told you, I’m broke.”

  “Yeah, and I backed you up, because you were saying it for the benefit of those old guys, but I got an angle on something, and I need to borrow a hundred bucks. This works out, you’re in for half.”

  Eddie looked over his shoulder, then all around the alley, before pulling a money clip out of his pants pocket. “This leaves me with ten bucks to last the rest of my life. What if Lois wants to go out later?”

  Sammy took the money and pocketed it. He said, “Moo, a guy can’t throw a stick in Chinatown without hitting a young doll with potential, and odds are that she will pick up the stick and make a delicious soup from it, so as a pal, let me advise you to leave Lois Fong to the white devils, and go for one of them.”

  “First, most Chinese dolls’ families won’t let them have anything to do with someone like me who works in a nightclub, and second, you don’t know what it is to have it bad for a dame, but you will, then we’ll talk.”

  “Fine,” Sammy said. “Thanks for the loan. I got to go see a guy about a snake.”

  3

  The Kid

  Around noon the kid clocks me with a pillow and I come awake to a room that is unpleasantly bright, even with all the shades pulled. Anyways, I am sleeping the sleep of the mostly innocent when the kid jumps on the bed astraddle me and starts pummeling away on my melon with a sack of feathers like he’s trying to beat out a fire, while shouting thusly:

  “Get up, ya mug (whack!) ya mook (whack!) ya lazy bum (whack!) ya gold-bricker. On your feet, loser—”

  And here I snatch the pillow from his hand and wind up as if to pillow him well into next week, when I remember that he is only a kid, and a smallish one at that, and it is on me as the man here to teach him, which would be better
accomplished if I stitch him up in a potato sack and stash him in the cellar for a day or two until he calms down, but then I catch a glance at the clock on my orange-crate nightstand, which reads a little after noon (and I have been out to the docks in Oakland and back already this morning).

  “Kid,” I say, “it is only noon, and not the agreed-upon time of after three, and furthermore, why are you not in school, and finally, and do not think this item is less important because I bring it up last, but why in the hell are you standing on my bed with your dirty shoes?”

  And the kid jumps off the bed and runs over to the heavy bag, which hangs in the hexagonal alcove of my small apartment, and starts pounding on the bag as he says, “I took my shoes off before I jumped up there.”

  And I look, and indeed, the kid wears no shoes, but has two socks so dirty as they might be knitted from mud, and from the front of each protrudes a once-pink but now filth-burnished naked toe. In fact, the kid, from his toes to the top of his newsboy cap, is covered in a fine patina of street grime, as one might find on an unfortunate urchin in a Dickens novel. He could be nine or he could be twelve years of age—I do not know and I do not ask—but he is small and has the aspect of a very sour-faced little Jimmy Cagney. In short, he is a horrible little kid.

  “And it’s summer, dummy,” says the kid, “so there’s no school. But I have a message for you, so you can just pay me a bonus, and don’t try to hold out on me, because my uncle Beemis is a union man and he will knock the tar out of a mug for not paying an honest fella’s wages, and I want to go to the pictures. There’s a new one down to the Alhambra, with Bogey and that skinny doll from To Have and Have Not, and it’s supposed to be shot right here on Telegraph Hill, so pay up or I won’t tell you the message.”

  First, I don’t know why the kid thinks I have tasked him with taking messages. He lives with his ma in my building, a Victorian with six apartments (a couple of blocks from Sal’s), and he is always sitting on the stoop or loitering about the halls, while his ma is upstairs entertaining his various uncles. The kid’s dad was killed in the war, and although I have never seen his ma, she seems to keep busy looking after various uncles. If she is not a professional it is a safe bet that she is a very hardworking amateur. For all I know, the kid might have offed dear ma and stashed her body in the icebox months ago, but that is unlikely, as the kid is entirely too small to accomplish the hydraulics of such a move, even if he is well stocked with enthusiasm and bad intentions.