by George Foy
‘You look normal.’ She didn’t say it as a compliment.
‘That’s what they all think, at first,’ the pilot replied. ‘Even my mother. Then they find out about it. My habit.’
She needed to smile. He could tell she needed to smile, but instead she said, ‘No. No,’ she repeated, ‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘Celery,’ he whispered, ‘I eat celery in bed. I keep the salt in the little hollows under my collarbones. I don’t have any choice, ’cause of BBL.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I give up. What da fuck is BBL?’
‘Belly-button lint.’
‘Fuckin’ ay,’ she said. Her smile loosened. When it loosened it took the rest of her face with it. Her eyes turned up at the corners. ‘That’s not very funny.’
‘I didn’t say it was funny. It’s ruined my life.’
‘You caught me at a bad time.’
‘I’m not fussy.’
‘You talk a little funny,’ she said, in an accent that owed more to Santo Domingo than to the East Coast of the United States.
‘I was born in Eastern Europe. It used to be called “Czechoslovakia.”’
‘Oh Christ,’ she said, and looked around. ‘It’s just – I don’t know. I’m better’n all these bimbos. I was go-go skating when they were still playin’ with dolls.’
‘They prob’ly don’t like Yankees down here.’
She nodded. ‘It was the girl from Macon,’ she said. She took a swallow of her drink, shook her hair around. ‘I’m not so good with blades yet, either. I was better on roller skates. Maybe that’s it.
‘But you remember my name,’ she went on. She turned her eyes on the pilot, a strong gaze, and her voice gathered depth. ‘I’m gonna be the best rollerblade dancer on the East Coast. In America. Maybe the world.’
‘That’s right,’ the pilot agreed. ‘“Fuck-off-pal.” I’ll watch the marquees.’
The cigarette connect showed up then and the pilot hadn’t got much further than finding out she lived in Queens, and giving her his answering service number. But he’d never forgotten the way her hair glinted and her eyes shone when she talked about go-go skating, and the contrast between the memory and the way she looked upstairs in Bellevue made his guts sink faster than the elevator he rode in.
Chapter Ten
‘Remember; after Night there is always Day.’
Cubano-Chino fortune cookie proverb
When he walked out the 34th Street gate of Bellevue two men came up behind him. One poked a roscoe just under his right ear. The other tried to do surgery on his left kidney with the muzzle of a sawed-off twelve-gauge.
‘Peace-up, Chico,’ the pilot said without turning around.
‘How you suss that, amigo?’ one of the men said in a puzzled voice.
‘Just lucky, I guess,’ the pilot answered.
‘Wise guy.’ The man jabbed him with the revolver. They pulled him with arms and pushed him with guns to a black limo parked down the street. They made him sit on a jumpseat between them. Fat Chico Fong was sprawled out on the backseat, eating a hot-dog-with-everything. A small Eurasian girl sat beside him, applying dark-green makeup to her eyelids.
Chico Fong was half Cuban but he looked mostly Chinese. He was very broad. His chin was very broad. His chest had no hair and lots of golden chains, and was also broad. He wore a Hong Kong suit, dark glasses, and a toupee that actually made him look older than forty-two.
‘Hello, Chico,’ the pilot said again.
‘Shut you face,’ Chico answered. ‘The chopper,’ he told the driver, ‘andalay.’
The trip, up one ramp of the FDR, down another, took all of four minutes. The limo stopped under the Drive, next to a chain-link fence and a couple of trailer offices. ‘Eastside Heliport,’ a sign read. Early patrols of rush hour made the ground tremble. A tug moved on the silent tide, upriver. Someone died of renal failure in the NYU Medical Center next door. A tall man with an attaché case joined the group as they hustled into a whistling, eight-seat Alouette. The pilot noticed a decal pasted beside the door. The decal bore a black two-headed duck and the words ‘Von Ewig-Halssteif/Am Heuchler Immer Treu.’
‘Hey Chico,’ he called, ‘why don’t you own your own chopper?’
‘You wan’ me off him?’ one of the men proposed, hopefully.
‘Later,’ Chico said.
‘It’s a rental bird,’ the pilot said. ‘I’m down with it, Chico. Real class. Tax deductible and everything.’
‘I own the rental company, asshole,’ Chico said, licking onions and sauerkraut off his fingers. ‘Brookolino,’ he told the chopper jockey.
The flight was shorter than the limo ride. The helicopter crossed the East River at two hundred feet, followed Newtown Creek, turned southeast. Two minutes later it slowed, hopped over a couple of chimneys, dodged a burnt-out office building, and landed, noisily, on the roof of a five-story factory that took up an entire city block. The goons hauled the pilot over the roof tar, down a fire exit, and into a hallway so brightly lit it was blue. The hallway was lined with dormitory rooms. Bells jangled, radios crackled, satvids glowed with the cheap colors of Taiwanese VR serials. A lot of Cantonese men, wiping their eyes clear of sleep, walked around in pajamas and towels. The night shift, just getting off, drank green tea and played mah-jongg in dirty coveralls. No one so much as glanced at the group as it passed by.
There was a familiar smell in the air that grew stronger as they went down another staircase.
The next two floors were taken up by freezers large enough to drive small trucks into. Labels on the doors read waterchestnut, plantain, MSG (liquid), bean curd, mofongo, snow peas, in Chinese characters with Spanish translations underneath. Forklifts backed and whined. An arrow pointed to the ‘Seccion Cubano.’
The two lower floors held kitchens, gleaming steel, chopping machines, and one long office where small men at wide desks typed short phrases on Malaysian word processors. ‘Fortune cookie department,’ Chico told the girl, and laughed. ‘We got six writers on payroll. Writing fortunes. “You will live to great age, you get very rich.” Hah! Not fockin’ likely, my pilot.’
A cargo elevator took them below ground. When it stopped they found themselves on a vast floor filled with gigantic stainless-steel vats, three-foot-diameter pipes, and coiled pumping stations the size of summer cottages. The smell of Cuban-Chinese food was overpowering now.
Chico Fong told the red-sticks to stop beside the elevator. He stood in front of the pilot, crossed his arms, and looked judgmental.
‘You down wit Cubano-Chino food? Hah?’ he asked suddenly.
‘It’s OK,’ the pilot answered. ‘But, entiende. It goes right through you. You scarf a big meal, next thing you know, you hungry again.’
‘Very funny,’ Chico said and snapped his fingers. ‘Spring roll!’
The goon with the pistol scampered off. The one with the sawed-off kept feeling for the pilot’s innards. It was a Benelli Super-90, the pilot noticed, the kind with the round magazine like a Thompson. This goon wore a portable CD-player. A tinny sound came from the earphones; the funk beat, earth-rumbles, and weird samples of Shift-shin.
‘Can we go now, Chico?’ the girl complained. ‘You know I’m allergic to MSG.’
‘You can’t be,’ Chico said, without looking at her. ‘It’s you roots. Even pilot here dig it. What’s you numbahone favorite Cubano-Chino restaurant, my pilot?’
‘The Szechuan Bordello.’
‘On 28th Street. What you favorite food, hah?’
‘They all taste the same,’ the pilot answered, just to get Chico’s goat, for he liked pork chow mein, Habana-style.
‘All taste the same.’ Chico said it neutrally. The pilot sighed.
‘Number 45,’ he admitted, ‘on the Bordello menu.’
The pistolero came back with two spring rolls. He offered one to the girl and the tall man. They refused. Chico Fong took both. ‘Numbah 45,’ Chico mumbled, as he stuffed an entire spring roll in his mouth. �
�Andalay.’
They walked for several minutes through thickets of valves and meadows of gas burners. The stainless-steel vats, polished to mirror-shine, rose fifteen feet high on either side. The bodies of five men and one girl swelled from thin sticks to gross proportions then narrowed back in the silver metal as they walked by. Huge fans sucked out steam and air and replaced them with the hum of their machinery.
Eventually they came upon a vat with ‘#45’ stenciled red upon the out valve. Fat Chico led the way up an iron inspection ladder to a small gridwork platform on top of the vat.
Eight thousand four hundred gallons of gooey gray slop burbled and smoked beneath their feet. Their faces softened in the greasy steam. The steam in fact took over. It shot through their nostrils, pumped down their throats, pissed through the fabric of their clothes and streamed into every pore. Each follicle of hair put on a coat of steam. Greasy steam was in the backs of their ears, in the cracks of their ass, under their nails and eyelids. They were steam; hot, spicy, pungent.
Fat Chico Fong pointed at the vat.
‘Pork chow mein, Habana-style, pilot,’ he yelled triumphantly, ‘that’s you favorite food. Twenty-four long tons, asshole! From here, we pump it to mid-station, then tank truck. We supply every Cubano-Chino restaurant in the Eastern states, all the way to Pittsburgh.’
‘Dag,’ the pilot said, at loss for words.
‘Also sweet an’ sour chicharron, number 67; beef with plantain and bamboo shoots, number 12; shrimp lo mein, 48; ropas viejas an’ noodle, number 8; diced pollo with mofongo, number 36; you name it, we make it right here in Brookolino.’
‘I always suspected something like this,’ the pilot said, staring through the steam at the lumps of pork and water chestnut that oozed to the top, waltzed around the interface, then sank into the hot ocean forever. ‘So number 45 is always pork chow mein?’
‘That right.’
‘And number 33 is moo goo squid – all over the States?’
‘Yes.’
‘Number 23,’ the pilot thought back to his favorites, ‘paella, bean curd?’
‘You got it,’ Fat Chico yelled back proudly. Then his face altered. His eyes narrowed like a cat’s. ‘An’ you gonna be part of number 45 forever, pilot,’ he screamed, ‘if you don’ tell me what happened to my cargo!’
‘I left you a message,’ the pilot said.
‘That’s bullshit,’ Chico answered. ‘You tell me plane meltdown, ditch in Rhode Island. Hah! I send red-sticks, chop chop. Find Boeing – no cheung. Emeralds, eighty-sixed. Reefer full of aminochips, B-’n’-E, empty. Parrots, eighty-sixed. OK, flyboy,’ Chico’s voice crescendoed to a psychotic shriek, ‘Que pasó?’
‘They were waiting over Montauk,’ the pilot yelled back, ‘BON. Two Vikings.’
‘You think Chico estupido, man?’ the mobster barked. ‘No bullet holes. No rocket marks.’
‘The engines caught fire, man. You soldiers see it!’
‘My soldiers find firemarks. No find jewelcases.’
‘Jumpers stop me, Chico. Luparas all over the place.’
‘You take the emeralds, Gwailo moth’fuck! You chow mein!’ He stabbed stiff fingers at the pilot. ‘You think Cubano-Chino food go through you? Hah! Now you go through Chinese food! Number 45, Aynumbah-one, pilot.’
‘Christ,’ the pilot muttered, and looked down at the bubbling vat. He thought of how many times he had eaten number 45. ‘This how you off people?’ he asked Chico. ‘In number 45?’
‘Sure thing,’ Fat Chico said. ‘Chow mein, baby. Nosy reporters. Guys think restaurant union happening again. Long pig, no problem.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘You got fifteen seconds to spill where you took the emeralds. Fourteen, thirteen, twelve.’
One of the guards lifted his sawed-off in anticipation. Too high, the pilot thought; the Benelli pulled up like a bastard if you didn’t hold it down hard.
The pilot hung on to an iron railing as Chico counted and snapped his fat fingers in time to the count.
He had been close to death before. Once he’d flipped a superboat off Bimini and it had ploughed straight underwater and broken up, almost taking him with it. Another time he’d ditched a DC-4 off Hatteras. Death for sure had skull-grinned over his shoulder while he stalled in that electrical storm, and then pancaked the Citation into the Davisville marshes. But in all these cases he’d been too busy to take much notice.
Here, he was helpless. He had nothing to do. So he worried.
He wondered, for example, how his parents would take his disappearance. They already had lost one son; it sometimes seemed that pain had spaced them out so far they had forgotten about the other. Perhaps they wouldn’t notice.
He hoped someone would take care of Carmelita now Roberto was gone. Her mother was useless, far gone into the dog’s-eye depths of cheap mescal.
No one had heard from her father in years.
He peered at the Cubano-Chino food through the steam. This was too ridiculous, he thought. No one goes this stupidly. Then he wondered if that’s what everybody’s last thought was; ‘Oh dag I finally fucked up and all I had to do to avoid it was this, an’ I don’ wanna g-o-o-o-o,’ final baby wail, full circle to the first waah of disgust and protest from the wrong side of the vulva.
Snap, snap, snap. ‘Five, four, three.’ The goons pressed harder, watching Chico’s fingers, getting ready to bend and pull their prisoner over the guardrail.
‘Cut the shit, Chico!’ the pilot yelled in panic. ‘The Jumpers glommed the fuckin’ stones! I swear! Offin’ me ain’t gonna get it back!’
‘He’s right,’ the tall man said, and nudged the goons with his attaché case. Everyone stared at him. ‘He’s tellin’ the truth.’
The tall man was not Chinese. It was hard to tell what he was, especially through the steam. His features were too thin, his eyes too small. He lifted the attaché case and showed Chico a tiny green pin-light set in the handle.
He opened the case. It was filled with memory boards, sound equipment, dials. A little adding-machine printer pipped out a ribbon of paper. He ripped it out and read it off.
‘High background noise,’ the tall man said. ‘Readings ain’t exo. But his glottal strain is okay. No laryngeal stochastics. No training plateaus, either. That’s what I believe, you wanna know the truth. The plateaus don’t lie. It happened like he said.’
‘So he’s not lyin’,’ Chico yelled. ‘So what? The emeralds, gone. The chips, eighty-six. What the difference? Chow mein!’ He snapped his fingers in the pilot’s face.
‘We can still use him,’ the tall man said.
‘Fuck,’ Chico said, and cracked his knuckles. ‘Chewing gum!’ The goon with the pistol whipped out a pack. Chico chewed so noisily you could hear him masticate over the bubbling of number 45.
‘What you say, Mister Pilot,’ the tall man yelled, ‘you run a couple cargoes for us, free, no cut, no share?’
The pilot looked at the tall man. Over the pounding of his heart and the buzzing adrenaline in his brain he wondered where this guy came from. The Tongs seldom used people who weren’t Chinese, or Cuban, or, more rarely, Viet. Maybe this was Organizatsni talent, the Tbilisi mob; though you’d think they would know the first rules of the Trade.
‘You gotta be loco,’ the pilot shouted back. He wiped his face. The steam was really getting to him. If he ever got out of this he would smell like number 45 for a week. ‘That ain’t the way it works.’
The tall man wiped fog off his dials, closed the attaché case.
‘You jivin’ us how it works?’ Chico yelled. ‘You jivin’ us, here?’ He pointed at the vat.
‘Nobody takes the rap for busted cargoes,’ the pilot shouted at him. ‘It’s basic. You make smugglers pay if we get busted, or crash, we don’t do the runs. We ain’t got the scratch to do it any other way. No immunity, no cargoes. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Then you fuckin’ lunch,’ Fat Chico shouted happily. The goons moved to handle the pilot again.
‘S
top,’ the tall man said.
‘This Spirit Knife place,’ Chico told him.
‘But we own half Spirit Knife now,’ the tall man answered. ‘You know the deal.’
The two looked at each other. In the tension, in the steam, it seemed to the pilot neither of them had eyes anymore.
‘OK,’ Chico said finally. ‘We gotta block. We settle it the old way. Face for me, face for you. Bring me fortune cookies.’
The red-stick grinned. He disappeared down the ladder and came back five minutes later with two handfuls of the biscuits, each wrapped in a small wax-paper bag.
Chico pulled the Eurasian girl from behind the tall man where she’d been pouting, and stamping, and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep her mascara intact.
‘You,’ he yelled. ‘Read ’em!’
The girl made a face, but she did what he asked, ripping the bags, breaking open the egg-glazed dough, extracting the thin predictions.
‘See,’ Chico yelled, ‘good joss, we let pilot do a free run for us. Bad joss, we throw him in. More fun this way.’
‘“You long to see the great pyramids of Egypt,”’ the girl read.
Chico frowned. ‘That no fuckin’ good. Read more.’
The girl cracked another cookie.
‘“There is no fool like an old fool.”’
Chico waved this away in disgust. The tall man turned impatiently, a half-circle, turned back. The girl flicked her fingers to get rid of crumbs, which fell through the grating and were absorbed in the chow mein.
‘“You love nature in all its forms.”’
‘What the fuck is this,’ Chico shouted, ‘who writes this shit? These cookies s’posed to have fortunes, joss, not what you like, what you don’ like!’
‘“The secret of happiness,”’ the girl read, hesitantly, ‘“lies not in doing what you love, but in loving what you do.”’
‘When we stop writing fortunes?’ Chico screamed. ‘Get me head of writers’ office!’
All of a sudden the tall man lost it. His tiny features seemed to go out of control, split from each other, widen, resolve in anger through the pungent fog. ‘Fuck this!’ he screamed at the pilot. ‘You do a run for free or we throw you in now!’ He signaled the goons. They jabbed their guns, wound their fists in the doctor’s coat, hoisted him halfway over the railing so three-quarters of his weight hung unsupported over number 45. The pilot threw up his hands, in terror, in defeat. He could almost feel the slurping agony as the disgusting gray-green glue scarfed him, pulled him down, lifting puckered skin from boiling flesh. He could not be part of this crime perpetrated on the Cuban-Chinese food consumers of America. It was time for compromise.