by Dion Baia
Walter stayed with his head out of the doorway of the car and his foot on the running board longer than he should have, making sure nothing else was going to creep up and surprise them. Soon they were back on the main roads and starting to see other drivers. It was only then that Walter exhaled a huge sigh of relief.
He sat down on the back seat and tried to gather his thoughts. His side was on fire. He snatched a discarded jacket from the seat, rolled it up, and put it under his suit. He pressed it against his side and held it in place with his elbow. He hoped he didn’t need immediate first aid because he didn’t have his…shit! The Merc. He’d have to go back for it at some point.
Then he thought about that poor caretaker. Walter hadn’t seen what had happened when the man stepped out on the front stoop, but he knew enough to know that the poor man was no longer alive.
“Are you okay?” Walter yelled to Tatum. She didn’t reply. He could see how tight her knuckles were gripping the wheel. “Tatum!”
She looked up at him with teary eyes through the mirror.
“Are you okay?” he asked her more softly this time. She slowly nodded without speaking.
Walter checked his side again. It was still bleeding profusely. He closed his jacket and elected not to tell his companion about his injury. “Turn onto the next side street you see, then pull over.”
Tatum slowed the battered sedan and turned a corner, where it clanged to a stop several yards down a dark, tree-lined street off of the main road. When it came to a stop, smoke started to come up from around the edges of the bent hood.
“We may have to keep moving to keep the engine cool. I’ll drive.”
Walter exited the now doorless side of the car and carefully helped Tatum out. She was shaking. They embraced, and he held her tight against him.
“You okay, kid?” he asked.
She clung to him and nodded into his chest. Walter ran his hand through her hair a few times, before resting it on her shoulder. “I’ve never, ever seen someone take all that lead and not go down.”
“What?” Tatum said.
Walter glanced at the dead man crunched up on the passenger side floor.
“The ox with the BAR, the one you ran over. I unloaded my .45 into his chest and he didn’t go down.”
He glanced around at their wooded surroundings. They had to move, or the car would never make it back to the mainland and the five boroughs.
“You had to have missed him….”
Walt knew he hadn’t missed. She knew it too. He climbed in to take a look at the corpse. He gripped a handful of the dead man’s hair and pulled the head up to see his face.
“What do you think, Irish? Or…German, maybe?”
Tatum raised an eyebrow and stared at Walter for a long moment. Finally she sighed and looked down at the corpse. She tilted her head and shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Walter shook his head, laughing on the inside that he’d actually asked her to look at a killer’s face and guess the nationality.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“We drive and pray this jalopy makes it.” He checked the dead man’s pockets but there was no identification. “Well, you certainly don’t look like your friend the Golem back there,” he muttered, studying the corpse’s face.
Walter got out and walked around the car, sizing up the damage and the vehicle’s condition. He opened the passenger door and dragged out the body, sending it tumbling like a broken marionette into the darkness down the wooded hill they were parked along. He slammed that door shut and hurried back around to Tatum.
“Alright, let’s get this show on the road, we need to get back to the city as fast we can and ditch this car.”
Walter pushed her into the sedan. After a couple of false starts, the engine turned over and came to life, coughing out black smoke from the vibrating exhaust pipe. He put it into drive, pointed the smoking wreck toward New York City, and gunned it.
Chapter 18
THE ORIENT
They made good time and got back into the city within thirty-five minutes. And considering the car was missing one of its headlamps, front fender, grill, bumper, had no license plate, no brake lights, had a bullet-riddled back end, a ripped-open roof, and the back passenger suicide door was missing, they didn’t actually attract much attention other than the wandering eye from their fellow drivers and the toll booth collector who was stunned into silence. Luckily the vehicle stayed operational. Go Detroit.
Walter drove into the tenement neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and parked the car in the first spot he saw. Carrying the weapons, they both exited the beat-up sedan. Walt was sweating and starting to feel faint, but he had to press on. Once outside of the car, his eyes focused in on the giant’s severed arm, which was still attached and holding onto the roof.
After a lot of effort, Walter pried it off of the car. He studied the severed shoulder. Around the joint area he saw what looked to be metal attachments, perhaps gears or pistons, mixed into the flesh and muscle. While he was under a streetlight, it was difficult to see properly in the dark, but he’d never seen anything like it. Walt found a trench coat in the back seat, wrapped it up and tucked it under his arm, careful to favor his wounded side, in which pain was now becoming unbearable.
He took Tatum by the hand and led her up the street. “Are you okay?”
She shrugged. “I think so.”
Tatum was a tough kid. If anyone could get through a night like this, it was her. Walt’s old radio actress, part-time switchboard operator, and good friend, Tatum Marie Sullivan. They got to the corner and Walter raised his hand to hail a cab.
He attempted to lighten the mood. “Well, thanks for the exciting night.”
A couple of unoccupied taxis went by but didn’t stop.
Tatum laughed. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time, Walter Morris.”
Another cab passed by but didn’t pull over. Tatum put her arm up, and within seconds, a taxi stopped. Walter exhaled in frustration.
He opened the back door for Tatum, who got in, and looked over at the hack in a dubious manner. “Thanks for stopping, my man.” He winked at Tatum, while the cabbie tried to decipher what Walter had meant by his remark.
Walter was about to tell her to use the cash he’d given her back at The Whalley Room but realized she didn’t have it.
Tatum must have sensed what he was thinking, and at the same time said, “Oh no, I left my bag in your car.”
“Shit.”
Walter dug into his pocket and handed the cabbie some cash. He stepped back and closed the back door of the taxi. “We’ll go for it in the next day or two, with the law backing us up.”
Tatum put her arm out on the window frame and rested her head against her forearm. “Are you okay, Walt? You didn’t get too hurt back there, did you?”
“Naw, I’m fine.”
He pressed his elbow against the rolled-up jacket that was wedged at his side; it was a warm, wet glob at this point. A sharp, shooting pain told him he needed to get whatever was wrong sorted immediately. “I’ll be fine.”
He kissed her lightly on her forehead. The cabbie’s eyes bulged, watching in the rearview mirror.
“You’re swell, kid. This whole darn thing just burst wide open, and I gotta go after it before it all goes down the drain.”
Tatum smiled. “Let me know if you need anything else, okay?”
“I will. And good work tonight. Shall I tell Jacob we may be getting a new partner?” She laughed and he winked at her. “Now get outta here.”
He tapped twice on the roof of the sedan and the taxi drove off.
Walter stood there for a moment longer, thinking about what he had tucked under his arm. “Love you too, Tate.”
It was well after midnight when Walter made his way to Chinatown, but you wouldn’t know it by the crowds. It
was like Chinese New Year, a parade on the sidewalks. There was a surreal, carnival-like atmosphere, akin to some far-off exotic port of call. Walter maneuvered his way through the busy masses, tourists on his left and plenty of sleazy market dealers on his right. It was Chinatown.
By now Walt was unconsciously showing the physical pain he was in, favoring his side and holding it with his free hand. He was hunched over with his new knickknack under his arm. He wiped the sweat from his brow and carefully made his way through the streets, passing the various bakers, frozen fish stands, and trinkets for sale.
He walked by a circle of men betting on a praying mantis fight in a side alley. There was a crowd of shouting onlookers and a couple of men took notice of Walter and stared at him in bewilderment as he walked by. At the mouth of the alley, he made room for a large cage that was being wheeled down the street; it contained a pacing tiger which was growling at the people nearby.
Just another night in Chinatown.
Walter staggered over to a building’s entrance, to a set of stairs that led down and under the structure. He nodded to an elderly man who was sitting next to the steps.
“Ni hao,” he said before descending into the darkness.
Walt walked through the old damp passageway of the building’s dimly lit basement, ducking to clear a low threshold. Abruptly, the darkness faded and the room opened up into a maze of enormous tunnels and walkways. He headed down a catacomb, moving on a downward incline for what surely was the length of a city block.
He finally came out in a large, manmade space built of brick, mortar, stone, concrete, and who knew what else. It stretched high up into the darkness. Above, the room was filled with cast-iron pipes and conduits that had steam pouring down them, spanning every direction as far as the eye could see.
He continued on, occasionally stumbling over the uneven floor. He passed giant vats of cloudy water where Chinese men in traditional suits and hats were tending to the contents. There must have been hundreds of entrances and exits to this place, but this was the only way Walt knew. He walked through multiple work areas; laundry was hung up in all directions and there was a large room with endless troughs of exotic plants growing under bright, artificial lights. He passed Titanic-sized machines, boilers, and engines, outlined by thousands of rivets, that rose high up into the darkness of the labyrinth on either side of his path. Sweaty equipment was busy working away at tremendously loud decibels. Steam and fog surrounded the area, and the sound of loud machinists working in the distance could be heard all around.
Walter was in a totally foreign world to the one that existed above the streets, one completely hidden from the average New Yorker. Occasionally the odd laborer would glance up from the job they were doing and notice Walter, and the unanimous reaction was to stare at him with a mixture of shock and curiosity, as though he was the first black man who’d ever set foot in their hidden world. He didn’t want to cause too much alarm, so he soldiered on, going deeper and deeper underground.
His path narrowed and he was once again walking through tight brick-lined catacombs that eventually opened up to a vast space a couple of stories high. Directly ahead was a type of shanty-town, full of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnam immigrants. Some took notice of Walter and stopped what they were doing, staring at the private detective in bewilderment. He truly was in another world.
Walt stumbled along, persevering through the labyrinth of underground dwellings and encampments toward the other end. The passageway narrowed even more, lit from above by single bulbs spaced twenty feet apart. Walter started to feel more isolated. The area around him unoccupied, becoming more akin to what one would normally see underground the further he traveled. He was determined to find a quicker route to his destination next time.
Eventually the narrow corridor widened out, and ahead of him stood two very large Japanese men the size of sumo wrestlers. They were dressed in formal but old, black Japanese gi. Their complexion was graying and their skin dried and cracked. Their faces were like white Kabuki masks, frozen in an unspeakable terrifying expression, and their eyes…their empty eyes were like those of Haitian zombies, wide and black, with pupils as tiny as pinheads, as bottomless as an abandoned well. They towered over Walter like statues.
In between them they guarded a rusty iron door with a porthole-styled window in the center that would have been more at home on a submarine than it would have down in this crazy seventy-five-year-old space under New York City. The entire scene was an extremely odd sight, right out of a pulp magazine. The men looked like supernatural entities straight out of the Orient, that would be more suited to guarding an ancient temple or tomb.
When Walter was close enough, they came to life and moved forward, blocking his way. Walt stopped and leaned up against the brick wall to rest. He was pretty sure the blood was leaking down into his loafers.
“I need to see Gray Matter.” Sweat was now pouring down the side of his face.
Behind the towering underlings, a raspy, high-pitched voice called out from the darkness. “Walter Morris? Is that you, Walter Morris?”
The sentinels separated, and a small, emaciated, blind Japanese man came into view, the same frail man who’d been eavesdropping the other night on Walter’s conversation with Small Change at the pool hall. He was sitting on a tall stool, looking as ancient as the two giants standing guard, smoking that long, thin, curved pipe of his. Walter had immediately recognized the voice. How could he ever forget the man who had once stabbed him in his shoulder blade?
“Mao Lo, I need to see Gray Matter.”
The thin man’s reply mimicked that of the current Charlie Chan cinema parlance. “Forgive please, forgive please…so sorry…” He couldn’t even finish the sentence without sniggering in his shrill snicker. “He is with Zipper.”
Fatigue was setting in and the pain was almost unbearable. “Can you tell me when he’s not with Zipper?”
Mao Lo laughed and gestured with his pipe. “You should really watch out walking around the catacombs without being escorted. You may lose your way.” He let out another snicker. “You may even yield to temptation.”
Walter ignored the joust. “Thanks for caring, Mao. You never did tell me how a Japanese man acquires a Chinese surname. That some sort of insult or cultural downgrade? Mama-san musta really hated you.”
“You won’t be the first to go missing down here. It would be very unfortunate for your partner to lose his boy.”
“I really need to see Gray Matter and Zipper, and I need to see them now.”
Another giggle escaped Mao’s mouth. “Then you should always mind the path you walk on, Mister Morris, not to step out of the light.”
Walt was beginning to see double, and he’d had enough. “I don’t have all goddamn night for your fortune cookies, you necrophiliac. Now screw!”
Mao Lo glanced toward Walter with a fierce rage. The muscle under his right eye pulsated with anger and a loud, quick giggle unconsciously escaped his throat.
The large metal door creaked open, disappearing on a sliding track into the wall, and Walter staggered in.
The cavernous chamber resembled a traditional nineteenth-century circular operating theater, complete with dramatic lighting from above that illuminated the lecturing section. White sheets hung below and around the presentation space to act as a barrier and provide contrast to the lit area. Walter found himself at the top of the theater looking down to the circular space below. He collapsed into a chair on the last row. Another two extremely large bodyguards, who looked like the lobotomized twins to the two outside, stood like statues on either side of the operating theater’s presentation area.
Almost as if it had been switched on, one of the guards became alerted to Walter’s presence and started up toward him. Down on the third row, at eye level to the lecture area, sat a man in the shadows that Walter wanted to see, Gray Matter.
A gentleman named Zipper
worked on a man who was laying on the operating table. The patient’s chest was wide open, and the surgeon’s hands were deep inside. Zipper had black hair down to his ears, parted to either side, and it was drenched in sweat. He wore a huge bloodstained white apron which concealed most of his slender frame. Along with his patient, he had an IV coming from his arm leading to his own drip; it was hanging from a hook next to the others. His was filled with a clear liquid to keep him hydrated and awake long enough to endure the many hours their surgeries usually took.
Numerous tubes and wires were attached to the body on the table, each leading to surrounding machines which monitored different life functions, keeping the patient alive. A large RCA television camera was mounted right above the surgical table, pointing down at the patient, and directly across the room from the shadowed man in the third row, hung a fifteen-foot-high projection screen that displayed the live zoomed-in camera shot of the patient’s operation.
In the middle row of the theater sat two Italian gentlemen dressed in three-piece suits, covered with blood. They stared at the man on the table, anguishing over the surgery below.
Closer to Walter in the back row sat a skinnier man dressed in a light blue suit with a loosened tie and an unbuttoned vest. He had blondish hair, which was wet and combed to one side, five large, awkward bandages on all fingertips of his left hand, and one on the thumb and pointer finger of his right hand. Walt couldn’t decide if the man’s hair was blond or in fact brown; it appeared to change depending on the angle of the light.
The large guard made his way up to Walter.
“Tell ’em it’s Walter Morris.”
The sentry turned around and headed back down. Walter looked over to the blond/brown-haired man with the bandaged fingers. “What did I miss in the first reel here?”