“What are you talking about over there?” Ben called out. His voice wavering.
“What, Englishman?” grunted Connor through a cigarette pinched at the corner of his lips.
“I want to know what you were saying just now. Say it again,” Ben fidgeted and pulled at the creases in his slacks. Heart palpitating. A prickly heat running over his scalp and down his spine.
“Huh? We weren’t saying nothing,” IOU deadpanned. Blank faced blinking.
“Yes, you fucking were. I heard you. Now, say it again.”
“No one said nothing, honest to God,” Christopher said, shrugging and dealing out the greasy cards.
“Yeah, we’re just playing a game of rounders over here. And I’m getting my fucking ass handed to me by these degenerate cocksuckers,” IOU said.
“You fucking liars. I fucking heard you. Heard you. I fucking heard you. I fucking. Heard you.” Ben scrunched up his face. Slapped a hand to his mouth. Swallowing bitter stutters.
“Don’t call us fucking liars. We weren’t bothering you none, Englishman. Don’t come in here making no trouble today. Jesus fucking Christ, every single time with this guy,” Christopher said waving his hand dismissively in Ben’s direction.
“You Irish fuckheads.”
“Go fuck yourself, you stuttering prick, English. People round here getting pretty tired of you throwing your weight around because you got a detective’s badge and you’re Stevie’s little favorite,” Connor sneered, snubbing out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. Butts tumbled scattering onto the table and floor.
“All right, all right, that’s enough you mad dogs. We’ll have no fisticuffs today, you hear? You want a piece of cake, Englishman? Stevie’s old lady made it,” Leary gestured the bloated, disfigured, hairy hand in the direction of the plate at the end of the bar.
Ben dragged his eyes away from the Mulligans and watched a fat, black fly crawl across the dry cake. His guts rolled. He shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Fingering the cool damp front of his shirt. Trying to control his breathing. He counted. His hands shook and he wiped them again on the handkerchief until the bones in his knuckles cracked. The silence of the bar like ocean waves in his ear drums. The shakes starting to build up in the bones of his fingers. Becoming sicker as the day wore on. Cool mucus slid from his nostril onto his upper lip, and he used the handkerchief to wipe it away quickly. Needing a drink to last him until China Town.
“No, thank you, Leary. No. Just a whiskey from my bottle… You need to talk to the old man about retiring. Things are getting too much for him around here.”
“Who? Stevie?” Leary said filling up a tumbler from a bottle with a small Union Jack cocktail flag taped to the base and sliding it over to Ben. “He won’t retire. None of us do in this life. You keep going until a bullet or a pair of cuffs stop you.”
“All the same, Stevie should be at home doing crosswords and growing vegetables in the yard. Whatever it is retired bootleggers do,” Ben said, examining the glass in front of him and then placing his palm over the top of it.
Fat Man Leary squinted down at the protected glass, placed both fists down on the bar and leaned forward. Ben shuffled back slightly on the stool, pulling the drink closer to him. Leaned back. Cringing. Leary nodded towards the club doors. “He ain’t that old yet. Just his mind’s going is all. Taken too many shots to the head. Be damned if I know where to put him. Trying my best to keep the fool out of sight. Deborah’s trying her damnedest, too. But you of all people know best what he’s like. The smallest things set him off. Let me tell you something, things are already on a fucking knife edge with the guineas in the North End. Fucking fragile. Been like that since ’31 when they murdered Stevie’s brother over at the Hanover Street meeting but now that Stevie don’t really know what day of the fucking week it is, things could get real bad for all of us, real quick. Things ain’t been this bad since before me and Stevie snuffed out King Solomon. Hate to fucking admit it, but we’re outnumbered and outgunned over here. We all need to keep our heads down and our asses clean for the time being. The last thing we want is a fucking war. And let me tell you, we’ll be needing all the support we can get to keep Southie out of their greasy fucking wop hands. Seaport is another question all together. A lost cause. Can we at least be counting on you and your boss?”
“As long as you keep paying more than the Italians are offering.”
“Fucking typical English. Working for the all-mighty greenbacks.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“You’ll put cash money before the people you grew up with? Southie is your home too, ain’t it?”
“You know full well how expensive The Chief already is and with Stevie retiring I’m getting together enough money to get the fuck away from this place and all the people in it. No offense intended.”
“Let me tell you something, things get any more heated than they are, there’ll be a lot of work coming your way. Cold cash, too. Stevie’s had a war fund stowed away for years. You’ll not have to do it for free like over in Seaport earlier today, am I right?”
“I take it everyone is well aware of my actions by now then.”
“This is Southie. If you fucking stomped on a roach, we’d hear about it before you’d even scraped it off the bottom of your shoe,” Leary laughed heartily. The word cockroach brought a dark, murmuring, shuffling mass to the forefront of Ben’s mind. He cringed, blinking the thoughts away.
“What was that then? Earlier in Seaport? Business or pleasure?”
“It was neither.”
“Whatever it was, you’re playing kind of fast and loose with that badge of yours. You’re no good to us without it, you know? Stevie pulled a lot of strings to get you where you are. Don’t forget it. Just a friendly heads up, English.”
“I’ll worry about my side of the street. You worry about yours, Leary.”
“Talking of your side of the street, that son of a bitch was sniffing around here again. Not thirty minutes before. Looking for you. Forever building his case. That’s why you need to be smarter.”
“Jones?”
“Yep. Son of a bitch Welshman. They fuck sheep, I’ll have you know.”
“What did you tell him?”
“What do you think? I told him to get back into his shamrock green fucking Ford Coupe and get the fuck outta here. Stealing our colors. Livestock fucking Welshman.”
“Good, that’s good, Leary,”
“Covering your ass again, Englishman, but at least we weren’t called to clean up your bloody mess this time around,” Connor shouted over.
“You were paid well enough the last time, Irishman. It isn’t like you’re making anything substantial on your own, is it now?” Ben called back over his shoulder.
“Still, nothing worse than cleaning up a mad dog’s shite,” Christopher chimed in.
“Well, like I said, it isn’t like you paddy fucks have anything better to do than sit around playing poker, is it? You’d be best suited working out of the sixth floor of The Charlesgate selling your asses to the degenerates,” Ben said pushing his stool out and standing.
“I said that’s enough now, lads,” Leary clapped the large, deformed hand down on the bar top, motioning Ben to relax and take a seat. “We’ve more important things going on.”
Ben sat back down. The Irishmen went back to playing cards, muttering underneath their breath.
“Let me tell you, English, thank Jesus it wasn’t a wop you snuffed out in Seaport. Last thing we need right now is a war.”
“Yes, yes, yes, as you’ve already made me well aware, Leary. Don’t you start repeating yourself too,” Ben finished his drink and shook the empty tumbler in the air. The whiskey hitting his empty stomach like splinters of ice.
Leary refilled it, pushed the cork back into the bottle and returned it to the shelf apart from the others. Shoved another piece of cake into his mouth and smirked, speaking with his mouth full, “perhaps I’m going a little squirrelly, like the boss man. Maybe it
’s this fucking bar that does it to all of us. I’m sure the place is fucking cursed. Came in here early one morning and was sure Solomon was sitting at the bar sipping at a cold one, the whole of his face gone where we put the slugs in him. Fucking creepy. Yep, this place makes a man buggy,” he shrugged. Crumbs tumbled down his beard and shirtfront to the floor.
Ben swallowed a gag, mouth dry, scrutinizing Leary’s face for signs of an insult. “Just talk to Stevie about taking it easy from now on. I’d stay, but I’ve other matters to attend to and this place stinks like an Irish bog today.” He raised his glass to the table of poker players. “Slainte fellas.” Tipped it down his mouth. Smooth. Clean. The Irishmen shrugged their shoulders. Their faces empty.
He stood up, throwing a crumpled dollar bill on the bar, thought he heard the word buggy hissed in his direction again. Why couldn’t people just leave him the hell alone? Suddenly dizzy. He started counting the shapes of light cut golden yellow across the picture frame clustered walls. Knife blades that caused his eyes to ache. Staggered, pushing hard through the front doors, the brass handles slammed against brick, out of the bar. His fist clamped in his mouth.
Stevie pissing against a streetlamp that had the remains of a child’s missing poster stuck to it and growling words towards a repair garage across the street. Ben started to go to him but stopped, turned and walked hurriedly in the opposite direction, pulling his jacket tightly together against the icy breeze. Tremors ripping through his body. Migraine tearing his brain into two. Nose starting to run again. He wiped the cold sweat from his face with the handkerchief, blew his nose and tossed it at a fire hydrant. Cramps tearing through his guts. Losing himself. Needing China Town. Needing Li Yu.
Since a child, fresh off the ship from Southampton, England, Ben had always loved Boston’s China Town. His mother had forbidden him to enter its boundaries. Had said it was filthy and rife with sickness, he had disobeyed her and played truant from school just to explore its streets. He supposed he loved it still. There was something supernatural about the place. An atmosphere that seeped out of the very brickwork and ran slick over the streets, like a hot summer rain. He enjoyed the vibrancy of it all. The people with their mysterious language and mysterious, ageless faces. The signs that glowed alongside lanterns that burnt a luminous red. Scents of the food—a curious enticement he never partook in, but could appreciate all the same. Strictly the odors. Eating the filth they served in the restaurants was a good way to become ill. Hospital sick. His mother had been correct about that. The people ate chickens’ feet. Sucked the flesh right off the clutched claws. Imagining it fleetingly brought a hot, bitter flow of vomit to the back of Ben’s throat. He spun into an alley and cleansed himself against an overturned trash barrel. The smell of rotting garbage. He heaved again. Eyes burning. Trembling hands on his knees. Mucus running from his nostrils. He waited for the convulsions to end and wiped at his face with a fresh handkerchief. Cursed. He needed to purify himself.
To purify himself. The only reasons he had started frequenting Chinatown again since his mother passed away from the illness that had eaten her from the inside out. Opium. Opium and Li Yu. The only things that could ease his mind. Take the jagged, bitter edge away from things. Stop the screams, the whispers, the chatter, the counting, the festering within the prison cell of his mind. Li Yu and Opium. They had come into his life together and he needed them both. Became sickened, weakened without them.
Glimpsing another missing child’s poster pasted to a dented lamp post, ripped and weathered, he spat the nasty taste from his mouth and stumbled quickly on.
In the garment district a couple of Chinese kids ran giggling from the early evening darkness of an abandoned storefront with boxes of matches and toothpicks to hawk but recognizing his face sank back into a shadowed storefront with disappointed, black eyes. One said something to the other in Mandarin and they both giggled. Ben knew enough of the Chinese language to identify the words ‘crazy’ and ‘Englishman’. Insolent little shits. He turned into Ping On Alley where Li and her mother ran a small teahouse and nodded bluntly at the old, toothless, bald-headed Chinaman who stood out front every evening underneath an intricate banner of green double dragons. Rain or shine, staring and rigid. A cigar store Indian.
Antiquated women with faces like crumpled, brown paper bags playing mahjong and sipping at tea slowly from delicate white porcelain cups glanced at him as he entered into the warm glow of the tea house interior. In the basement was the opium den. Poor blacks, poor whites and poor Chinese all slumped over wooden pallets together, sucking on the ends of pipes, gawping into their pasts or their futures through a haze of cheap opium that stung the eyes like a brittle gun smoke. One of the handful of opium dens scattered, hidden around Chinatown.
“Good evening, ladies. You must love the tea here. Every time we meet like this. Every single night,” he said it faux casual as usual, and they said nothing in response as usual. Li’s mother one among them, he assumed. Didn’t know which. He slid past their tables, through the spiderweb vapors of their drinks and jogged up the stairs, passed what looked like a waiter in a white coat, smoking a cigarette on the middle step. Ben knew he had a pistol concealed on his person and would use it on anyone the old ladies pointed their fingers at.
He made his way towards Li’s room. Anxious to feel the smoke wash through his lungs, over his flesh, soothing and smoothing out the aches and pains. The shakes. Anxious to feel Li’s gentle fingers on his body, massaging away the putrid decay that settled there from the streets of Southie, from his job on the Vice Squad and the things that nested in the crooks and crevices of his mind, spawning shadows that flickered in moonlight, deformed, putrid things. The corridor lit a dull yellow by small paper lamps on the walls. At the end of the hall, a small shrine with a jade statue of Buddha smoldering incense that burnt twisted spirals of fragrant smoke to the narrow wooden ceiling. He tapped lightly on the rich brown door at the end of the hall. One knock. Wait. Two knocks. Wait. One knock. Three knocks. Lucky seven. Their agreed signal.
Li swung the door open smiling something akin to sunshine through a thick fog. Ben breathless. Like a feline in myth, her coffee black almond eyes sucked the very air from his lungs. She was something else. The very embodiment of smoke. Ethereal. His woman. His medicine. Li Yu and her opium.
The daughter to a dead negro and a Chinese mother. A girl of two worlds, wanted in neither. Too black for the Chinese. Too Chinese for the blacks. He’d led a raid on the house of prostitution she’d been enslaved in a year and six months previous. Had fallen in love with her as soon as he discovered her laying naked on stained silk sheets in that small, smokey room. Just a child. There had been a pale cockroach crawling over her body. He’d tried to kill the fucking thing. She said he’d saved her.
Li standing in the doorway, draped in a deep maroon, silken kimono, gazing at him with those limpid eyes of hers. She let the robe fall open displaying her caramel-colored breasts, dark nipples and the thick patch of hair between her legs. Ben licked his dry lips, stuttered something and she laughed out loud, pulling him into the sweet aroma of her. Chanel Number Five and poppy. The room a deep maroon-red matching her kimono, fragrant, aglow with soft lighting, cushioned and draped with silks and velvet. Reminded Ben of a womb and he ruminated sometimes about the psychological implications of the girl and the room, China Town and his dead mother. Mother. He knew he thought too much. Another symptom of his sickness. His mind would catch on something. Become fixated. Twisting and writhing like a diseased fish on a rusty hook. Something that had to be managed or drowned out by whiskey, opium and her.
He passed her the envelope of bills and she took it with a small, shy bow. Peeked inside and placed it in the drawer of a cream-colored vanity desk with other similar envelopes.
“You should be careful someone doesn’t rob you.” Ben raised his eyebrows towards the drawer of cash stuffed envelopes. A sharp pain in his stomach. Trying to recall if all of them were from him. Suddenly cold and clammy
underneath his shirt.
“It’s my rainy-day fund. Besides no one will get in here with Mister Chun on the stairs. He was the Hong Kong police pistol champion three years running, don’t you know?” She smiled, letting herself fall onto the large bed. Propping herself up on an elbow watching him undressing carefully. She’d prepared three coat hangers as usual. For his jacket. His pants. His shirt. He hung them intricately on the curtain rail away from other things and walked over to her in his jockey shorts and white vest. Placed his hands on her head, standing over her, feeling her kinky, thick, jet black hair in between his fingers. She lifted the vest, kissing his stomach, gazing up at him with eyes that shimmered in the glow and then ran her fingertips tenderly over the inflamed pink patches of flesh that crisscrossed his lean torso.
“You’ve been scratching at yourself again, haven’t you, Detective?” she said examining his body.
“It’s this February climate, perhaps. An allergy. I’m not quite sure. Everything seems to make me itch as of recent,” he scratched at the back of his neck impatiently as he said it and she kissed the deep claw marks that were yellowish and healing over, gazing into his grey eyes again. He ran a hand over her face and her lips were a rose underneath his thumb. Closed his eyes. Her warm tongue flickered over his skin.
After a while, she paused and spoke “do you want me first or the smoke first? You look as though you need the smoke first.”
“You know fully well I always want you first, my flower. But I need to ask? Did you?”
“I did it, Ben.”
“You did it?”
“Yes, I did it. You know I always use that thing before I see you, my Detective. I use it after, too. Clean before and clean after,” she pulled him down onto the bed next to her, “I don’t want any babies. Not yet, anyway,” she said speaking the words to the door.
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