Straight No Chaser

by Jack Batten

  “You and me got to wait,” Tran said to me.

  “Doesn’t come as a surprise, the way my day’s been going.”

  Big Bam, Truong, and their protectors were across the floor, about the width of a football field from Tran and me. A door led out of the huge room at the point where the bar ended. Big Bam and company disappeared through it.

  “You want a drink?” Tran asked me.

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Tran didn’t inquire after my preference in beverages, and I wasn’t certain we were palsy enough for me to speak up. A guy with muscles like Tran, maybe nobody got palsy enough with him to speak up.

  Tran went behind the bar, and I sat down at one of the tables next to the dance floor.

  Tran came back with two cans of Sprite.

  “Not exactly the kind of drink I had in mind,” I said.

  “Big Bam makes the rule,” Tran said. “No booze on the job.”

  “Speaking of the job,” I said, “what was going on up at the Pits? All that collecting cash and trading paper?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

  “You don’t know,” Tran said, “I don’t tell you.”

  “Another Big Bam rule?”

  “You got it.”

  Tran finished his Sprite and crushed the can in his right hand. It was probably as thrilling as life was going to get in Tran’s company. I asked him about the other guys. He told me Hawaiian Shirt was Dan Nguyen, and Warm-up Suit was My Do Thai. I said it was nice to have the fellas straight. He told me the names of the two lookouts. I didn’t commit them to memory.

  Tran walked back to the bar and picked up a newspaper from the counter.

  “That thing come in two sections?” I asked.

  Tran separated a pair of double sheets from the paper and shoved them across the table to me. It was printed in Vietnamese. Or maybe Sanskrit. I leafed through my share of the paper. There was a photograph of someone who looked strikingly like Lyndon Johnson.

  “What’s this about?” I asked Tran.

  He studied the photograph and the accompanying story.

  “President of the United States,” Tran said.

  “Not for a while now.”

  It came up to six o’clock. Tran had two more Sprites and gave his newspaper a real going-over. I passed through three phases. Impatience, fear, inertia. What if Big Bam in the other room was in touch with Trevor Dalgleish, and Trevor blew the whistle on me? That thought accounted for the fear. So did the memory of the tall guy in spasms on the road by the park. I didn’t think I’d suffer his fate, not immediately, and I didn’t think Big Bam would be in early communication with Trevor Dalgleish. Truong’s remarks in the restaurant and in the Seville, the stuff about waiting three days to resolve something or other, gave me the impression Trevor was being elusive with his Vietnamese clients. Clients? That was another question. I was developing more than a glimmer of suspicion that Trevor and the Big Bam bunch had something other than a traditional solicitor-client relationship.

  Around six-thirty, things perked up. Dan Nguyen and My Do Thai came back out of the door they’d gone through hours earlier. They said nothing and left by way of the back entrance we’d all entered by. Ten minutes later, the two lookouts made a similar passage, except their exit was by way of another steel door in the far wall opposite the bar. This door was double-sized and had a peephole in its centre. Five minutes after that, I did a definite ID on one of the people in the blowups on the walls. It was Sonia Braga, world’s third- or fourth-sexiest woman. She looked different in the blow-up, but still sexy. Next time Annie raised Ted Koppel, I’d counter with Sonia Braga. After that, events in the booze can calmed right down again.

  “Would you come in, Mr. Crang?” Truong said. He was standing at the open doorway to the inner room. His voice caught me with my head down. Maybe inertia had given way to forty winks.

  “Nice to see you again,” I said to Truong.

  I followed him into the office. It was smallish and had a cluttered feel. It also had the only window I’d noticed in the place that wasn’t painted over. The office window was covered by a black blind.

  Big Bam was on his feet behind a desk, smiling broadly, his arms held out to the sides, expansive, a gesture of apology.

  “What can I say?” he said. “Waiting like you been doing’s a drag. But what can I say? Basically, it’s got to be business before pleasure, you catch my drift.”

  “No bother,” I said. “Gave me a chance to do a little marvelling out there.”

  “Bottom line,” Big Bam said, “my place’s real strong, do I lie?”

  I allowed that he didn’t. Big Bam was about five-ten, slim and dark, and he had the sort of old-time handsome features that were the rage in 1940s movies. The shape and arrangement of his nose, cheeks, mouth, chin were like Turhan Bey’s. Sexy, if you don’t object to bland. Big Bam’s grey suit jacket hung on the back of the chair he’d been sitting in. The suit was raw silk. His shirt, a fainter grey, was pure silk, and he had two thick gold chains round his neck. His watch was a Rolex.

  “Let you in on what’s going down here,” Big Bam said, sitting in his chair. “Truong and I’re into some serious number-crunching.”

  “That so?” I said.

  I sat in the chair across the desk from Big Bam. Truong had another desk at an angle to Big Bam’s. The top of Truong’s was a jumble of thick logbooks of the kind that accounting records are kept in, loose sheets of paper with long columns of numbers, and smaller pieces of paper, also jammed with numbers, ripped from notebooks. Truong had a pocket calculator in his hand. Big Bam kept his desk executive style. Clean except for a telephone and an appointment diary.

  Big Bam said to me, “I laid it on Truong, best-case scenario, go for it. Say the price holds at one-twenty-five, what’s my profit margin?”

  Big Bam looked at Truong.

  “Between thirty-four and thirty-six per cent,” Truong answered without consulting anything, the pocket calculator or the stuff on his desk.

  Big Bam said, “And this is at a point in time when purity’s way up. Eighty per cent. The buyers are where it’s happening. Basically their market, but what can I say?”

  “Everybody’s got problems,” I said. That seemed innocuous enough.

  “Tell me about it,” Big Bam said. “But, hey, babe, deal another scenario. Say we get it on in the crack market. More volume, more dinero. What’s my profit margin?”

  “Forty-eight per cent,” Truong said, no hesitation.

  “But what’re my priorities? I want crack on the agenda?” Big Bam was still pointing the conversation at me. I trusted he didn’t expect an answer. He didn’t. He kept on talking. “Basically not really. Crack’s for the low-rent trade. Teenyboppers, riffraff. My call, it’s a thumbs-down.”

  “Except in profit margin,” I said, getting an oar in.

  “Right on, bro,” Big Bam said. “But crack, you got more mess, you got extra employees. Bottom line, I say hold down the overhead and stay with the straight coke. Go for it. Ride it out.”

  Maybe I was inching my way into Big Bam’s line of gab. Not into his jargon. The guy talked like he might have proceeded without pause from native Vietnamese to ad agency English. Anybody’d take him for a career account exec at J. Walter Thompson. It was his subject I might be getting a handle on. He was talking cocaine. No difficulty reading that. And he was talking prices, weights, purity. The “one-twenty-five” must be dollars, and it had to be price per gram. Drug dealers always seemed to work on the metric scale. Big Bam was currently selling cocaine at one hundred and twenty-five dollars a gram. As for the purity part, cocaine that was eighty-per-cent pure must be powerful stuff. Maybe it was safe for me to stick in a question.

  “Tell me, ah, Big Bam,” I said, shifting in my chair, striving for the learned air of an old hand, “what purity we talking about back there when you got into the, um, business?”

  “Bitchin’ times they
were.” Big Bam’s beatific expression reminded me of the way old folkies look when they reminisce about the years before Dylan went electric. “Customers used to think sixty per cent, hey, it’s heaven, and they’d pay one-eighty, not blink once.”

  “Those were the days,” I said.

  “Right on,” Big Bam said.

  “You get into crack,” I said, bluffing along grandly I thought, “you need, what, a laboratory to handle the work?”

  “Basically, yeah,” Big Bam said. “Don’t have to be a nuclear scientist, catch my drift. Mix your baking soda in with your coke. Cook it up on a medium heat. Let it cool out. Get hard. You got your crystals. That’s crack. Package it up and sell it for twenty-five buckaroos a pop. One kilo of coke, how many bags of crack that make?”

  The question was directed at Truong.

  “Between nine thousand, five hundred and ten thousand,” Truong answered.

  “Large money,” Big Bam said to me. “But basically I don’t get it on with the crack crowd.”

  “You’re more carriage trade,” I said.

  Big Bam stood up and rubbed his hands together.

  “I’ll drink to that,” he said. “What’s your main taste, Crang?”

  “Tran took care of me earlier,” I said. “A little Sprite goes a long way.”

  Big Bam laughed. It was a tinkling sound, entirely without menace. “Hey, it’s happy hour,” he said. “Let’s get down.”

  “In that case,” I said, “vodka on the rocks.”

  I thought Big Bam would dispatch Truong on the bartending duties, but he left the room to fetch the drinks himself. Truong stayed at his desk.

  “Real captain of industry,” I said to Truong. “Big Bam.”

  “Mr. Crang,” Truong said, “may I have the piece of paper in your shirt pocket?”

  My heart let go an extra thump.

  I said, “I don’t suppose I could say I was planning to return it?”

  “I would have trouble believing you.”

  I took the slip of paper from my pocket without fumbling. It came out blank side up. I turned it over. There was an address written on it and, in the corner, a number. I handed the slip to Truong.

  “You don’t miss much,” I said.

  “Big Bam pays me not to.”

  “What’d the guy who had this paper do, the tall guy, to get the home-run hitters sicced on him up there at the Pits?”

  “He altered the script.”

  That didn’t tell me much. Told me nothing, as a matter of fact. Truong the inscrutable. I went for another question of more dangerous relevance.

  “Big Bam know about this?” I asked. “About me and the piece of paper?”

  “There may be no need.”

  I assumed that qualified as a no. Truong opened the top drawer in his desk, dropped in the paper, and shut the drawer. At the same moment, Big Bam came through the door. He was carrying a tray with three glasses on it.

  “A little Russian for you, my man,” he said, handing me a drink in a heavy crystal glass.

  Big Bam settled behind his desk. His drink looked like Scotch. Truong’s looked like Sprite. Big Bam jumped up again. There was a compact-disc player on the shelf behind him. He chose a disc from a stack on the shelf and slid it into the machine. Soft rock thumped into the room.

  “Hey, that’ll work,” Big Bam said, back in this chair.

  He raised his glass in a silent toast. All of us sipped. Big Bam was right about the vodka. Russian. It was made from grain, the same as Wyborowa, but it had a stiffer taste.

  “So,” Big Bam said to me, “where we at, Crang?”

  “Well,” I said, going for a concerned look, “I gather there’s a little misunderstanding about Trevor.”

  “Shorted me four K,” Big Bam said. “From where I’m sitting, that’s a big misunderstanding.”

  “Four K?”

  “Hear me talking,” Big Bam said. “I got a lot of time for Trevor. He’s a righteous man. But, hey, our deal this time’s for twenty-four K. I fronted him like I been fronting him the last year and a half. The deal on the twenty-four was twelve thousand a K.”

  Big Bam looked at Truong.

  “Correct,” Truong said.

  “And delivery came in last Friday night as per arrangement with Trevor. But what’s this? Delivery wasn’t twenty-four K. Only twenty K.”

  Another check with Truong.

  “Correct,” Truong said.

  “Stranger things start going down,” Big Bam continued. “Truong phones Trevor about the shortfall. The four K. And, hoo boy, Trevor ain’t taking no calls.”

  “Correct,” Truong said without being asked.

  “We dial Trevor’s home, get on to his office,” Big Bam said. “What do we get? Secretaries and answering machines. The man’s avoiding me. I thought I knew Trevor, and now I can’t tell where he’s coming from.”

  Big Bam got up and changed discs on the compact player. I took a swallow of vodka and wondered how far over my head I’d put myself. As far as I knew, K had two meanings in the vernacular: thousand and kilogram. Big Bam had to be talking kilogram, as in kilograms of cocaine. As in kilograms of cocaine that Big Bam had paid Trevor for in advance. Fronted him. As in twenty-four kilograms at twelve thousand dollars a kilogram. I didn’t take time to do the multiplication. It was serious money. And Trevor was evidently short by the delivery of four kilograms. Or, another way of looking at it, four times twelve, more my speed in multiplication, Trevor had forty-eight thousand of Big Bam’s dollars he wasn’t entitled to. I needed to go into a big-league stall and think through the implications. For me, not for Trevor. I already seemed to have confirmation that Trevor was up to his eyeballs in the cocaine industry. Cam Charles wouldn’t be delighted to receive the news.

  “How can I put this?” I said to Big Bam. “Trevor’s embarrassed. That accounts for what might strike you as his evasiveness. Understand, the trouble originated at the supply end. Trevor’s supplier, I mean to say, and it left egg on Trevor’s face.”

  I paused. Would that line of guff wash?

  “Trevor’s supplier, tell me about it,” Big Bam said. “I sent my guys around the other day to put the grab on the rest of the cans. But nothing shaking there. Cans had no coke in them.”

  As he talked, Big Bam waved his hand in the direction of the corner of the office near Truong’s desk. There was a squat combination safe in the corner, and beside it, in three careless stacks, there were the cans Big Bam must have been talking about. I wouldn’t have called them cans. Containers maybe. They were three or four inches thick through the sides, which were large and flat, and they were in something like a hexagon shape around the outer edges. They had handles for lifting them, and they were a dull silver colour. They looked familiar, but I couldn’t place why. The can on top of one stack had a yellow sticker with printing on it.

  “You know what went down with the cans?” Big Bam said to me in a tone of voice that assumed of course I should know.

  “Yeah, sure,” I lied.

  “Basically, I’m a patient man,” Big Bam said. “For one day, I’m patient.” He smiled. “After three days, I’m looking to get even.”

  “Which explains my presence here,” I said, producing an expression I trusted was reassuring.

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Trevor’s difficulties at the supply end are on the verge of a successful conclusion,” I said. Jesus, would Big Bam swallow this? Maybe he had no choice. He wanted his coke or his money. Or somebody’s neck. “I came over, as a friend at court you might say, to extend Trevor’s apologies and let you know the coke is on its way.”

  “When?”

  It was Truong who asked the question.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow night. Right here. This office.”

  When I improvise, I don’t kid around. But the timing seemed smart. Big Bam probably wouldn’t kick up a fuss over one more day. And the twenty-four hours would give me a chance to develop something more elaborate in the
way of logistics.

  Big Bam was spending a lot of time sipping at his drink and not saying anything. Too much time for my comfort.

  “You pay attention to what went down at the park this afternoon?” Big Bam finally asked me.

  “I found it all very, um, instructive.”

  “That’s what it was supposed to be.”

  “Instructive?”

  “Right on.”

  “I guess you’re referring to the part where your fellas worked on their batting strokes?”

  “You might keep that part in mind, my man.”

  “It’s emblazoned.”

  “And paint the picture for Trevor.”

  “I catch your drift, Big Bam.”

  Big Bam broke out another smile and swung to his feet.

  “Let’s have the other half of these drinks,” he said.

  He collected the empty glasses and left the room. Truong and I sat in silence. That suited me. I had to deal with a small dose of aftershock. Big Bam wasn’t exactly subtle when it came to threats. Straighten out the misfired cocaine deal, he was saying, or expect a few broken bones.

  Strange guy, Big Bam, strange set of priorities. He wouldn’t deal in crack even though it’d earn him more profit. The decision about the crack seemed to come out of some misguided notion of what was and wasn’t classy. Crack wasn’t. But Big Bam wouldn’t hesitate to lay on the violence when it suited him. Hard man to figure. And not a man to trifle with, which was what I seemed to be doing. Trifling.

  Big Bam returned with the refills, same all round. He picked out a new disc and stuck it on the compact player. It may have been new, but it didn’t sound different to me. More thumping soft rock.

  “So you’re a lawyer,” Big Bam said from back of his desk.

  I didn’t remember telling him that. Or any of his entourage.

  “Got an office on Queen Street,” Big Bam said. “Duplex on Beverley.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m in the phone book.”

  “Take mostly clients who’re up on fraud charges,” Big Bam said.

  That wasn’t in the phone book.