While she went off to get the pot, he turned slightly on the stool and looked at the old man. “What do you say, Les?”
The other man rammed a forkful of sausage in his mouth and stared at Whelan. It was a sallow face, with the pinched look of a mouth caving in on itself after a lifetime of bad teeth. Up close there was a hardness in the face that Whelan hadn’t seen earlier. This one had seen the elephant, and it had been a lot more intimidating than Paul Whelan. He chewed a couple of times and the sausage became a lump in one unshaven cheek. “You don’t know me.”
Whelan slid a business card along the white countertop. “Paul Whelan. I’m a private investigator. I live a few blocks from here.”
The waitress came to pour his coffee and then warmed up the old man’s. She seemed about to say something, then caught the look passing between them and just walked away, tucking her check pad into a pocket in her apron.
“So? So what?” Les said.
Not bad, Whelan thought. Openly hostile within ten seconds.
“So I thought you might be able to help me with some information. I was told you know a lot of people and that you might be able to give me a couple of names I need.”
“Told by who?” He chewed slowly, mouth open, his eyes never leaving Whelan’s face.
“Somebody that, all of a sudden, nobody can find.”
Les stared at Whelan for a moment and then bought a few seconds by taking a sip of his coffee. He took his sweet time setting down the cup, wiping his bristly chin with a soggy napkin and poking at his eggs with the fork, then looked straight ahead. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his head began to shake. “I got nothing for you, I don’t care who you are.”
“I want to find Tony Blanchard, that’s all.”
“I don’t know anybody like that.”
“Well, yeah, you do. You know a lot of people, and a lot of people know you. That’s how I know you, that’s how I knew where to find you. It’s how I know you’re a fence, how I knew you moved some stuff for Jimmy Lee Hayes, among many others.” The old man looked down at the food going cold on his plate. Time to push. “I can tell you who busted you, and when. I can tell you which cops have come by in the last month to question you, I can tell you—”
Les held up a skinny hand, as if to ward off his many troubles. “I don’t know nothing about that damn kid, I can tell you that.”
“I didn’t mention his age, Lester. You know he was a kid, you just admitted you knew him. That’s a start.”
“But I ain’t seen him or none of them, not in weeks. Months, maybe.”
Whelan nodded and took a sip of his coffee. It was burnt, coffee that had died a slow death in the pot. It made him long for the wonderful brew he’d had the day before up on Broadway. “And you’re not going to see any of them again, you know that, don’t you?”
Les dipped his head slightly and punctured a piece of hash browns with his fork.
“Matt Makowski, Chick Nelson, that guy Rory what’s-his-name?”
“Martin,” the old man muttered. “Called himself that, wasn’t his real name.”
“No, let me think. Byrne, that was it. Rory Byrne.”
Lester turned slightly to look at him, then looked away.
“You know they’re all dead.”
“I can read.”
“And Jimmy Lee.”
This earned him a shrug.
“Jimmy Lee’s history, Lester, he’s floating with the catfish in the river.”
“They ain’t found him yet.”
“You think he’s still alive?”
“How do I know?”
“You did business with them, Les.”
“This shit’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Jimmy Lee is feeding flies someplace, and somebody took out all these guys who worked with him, even this kid Makowski who was a gofer, he was nobody, and you,” Whelan pointed a finger at the old man. “You moved his goods, Les, my man, you made money for him. And you made money for yourself, and whoever decided Jimmy Lee should bite the big one, he’s gonna get around to you eventually.”
The old man turned on the stool, the fork gripped tightly in a fist. For a moment Whelan wondered if Les would stab him with it.
“Lighten up, there, Les.”
“Goddamit, I told you this hasn’t got nothing to do with me, I told you that, I told those asshole cops that…” Lester’s voice grew louder and from the corner of his eye, Whelan could see people at some of the booths looking at them.
“Take it easy.”
“Don’t tell me to take it easy.”
“You’re gonna have a heart attack and die in your scrambled eggs.” Whelan fished. “The cops—Harrison and Gentry? That who you talked to? White guy and a black guy. Or Bauman and that Italian kid?”
“Him. Bauman. I ain’t moved nothing in six, eight months. I got no money comin’ in or nothing, I’m livin’ like a damn dog. I ain’t doing any business with anybody.” Whelan thought about the little notebook with the day’s wagers and said nothing. “Somebody has a problem with Jimmy Lee Hayes, it’s got nothing to do with me.”
Whelan shook his head. “You’re being logical. This thing, it’s not logical. I think you’re in trouble, and you know it.”
The old man looked down at his cold breakfast and his entire body sagged. He shook his head. “There ain’t any reason for them to come after me. There’s other people oughtta be sweatin’ now, instead of me.”
“Such as?”
Les’s bony shoulders moved slightly in a shrug. “Jimmy Lee had a couple people working with him that I didn’t know. This kid you’re talkin’ about, for one. He’s just a name to me, that’s all.”
“Who else?” Lester seemed to be ignoring him, and Whelan was about to prod the old man some more when Lester pointed his deadly fork again.
“I’ll tell you who oughtta be thinking about gettin’ the first bus back to Tennessee. His brother, that’s who.” Lester nodded in agreement with himself.
“Whose?”
“Jimmy’s.” Lester allowed himself his first smile. “Didn’t know about him, did ya? Didn’t know he had a brother.”
“We didn’t socialize. I don’t know his family tree, Les.”
Lester nodded, his superior knowledge confirmed. “Name’s Bobby.”
“Same last name?” Lester nodded again. “Where’s he?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Where would you look for him?”
“I wouldn’t. I don’t give a shit where—”
“Where would you look if you didn’t want to bother old Lester any more?”
“Tavern where he hangs out.”
“Which one?”
“Place up on Clark Street, up near Lawrence. By a park.” Les pointed his fork north.
“Does it have a name?”
“Ed and Somebody, I don’t know. Anyhow, that’s who oughtta be sweatin’ now, not me. Picked a helluva time to come back to town, didn’t he?”
“Just got back?”
Les nodded. “Couple weeks ago. Maybe a month. That’s what he said.”
“Did you tell him about any of this trouble?”
“Naw. I didn’t say nothing about any of that. Got nothing to do with me, and anyways, I wouldn’t trust this Bobby Hayes far as I can throw him.”
“You didn’t talk about Jimmy Lee at all?”
“Naw. And I wasn’t gonna say nothing either. People talk. This was a tavern, for Chrissake. People talk.”
“When was this?”
“What’s today—Wednesday? This was maybe a week ago. I forget.”
Whelan finished the bad coffee and zipped up his jacket. Then a new thought struck him. “When did you talk to Bauman?”
“I dunno. Couple weeks ago.”
Excellent, he thought. “And the kid? You can’t tell me anything about the kid?”
Lester shook his head and watched Whelan. Whelan signaled for the waitress. When she arrived, he nodded toward Lester.
“Give me his check, too. See you around, Lester,” Whelan said, and then walked to the register.
The jukebox in Ed and Ronda’s was too loud, and there was no ventilation, so that cigarette smoke hung in the air forever, and a little bald man at the far end of the bar was singing a Johnny Cash song while the box played Barbara Mandrell, and the bartender was an untalented liar who said he hadn’t seen Bobby Hayes in he-didn’t-know-how-long. Other than that, Whelan told himself, it was a profitable visit.
Six
Whelan made the turn off Broadway and saw the brilliant red-and-gold pagoda-style roof of the Argyle Street El station. Less than six blocks from his own home, but no longer on his own turf. You left Broadway and you weren’t in Uptown anymore, you were in someone else’s country. He’d had the same feeling in other places, on 16th Street where mariachi music blared out onto the streets, and Chinatown itself where you crossed under the dragon gateway and found all the street signs written in Chinese characters as well as English. But Argyle Street was still a Northside secret, still a tiny undiscovered pocket of foreign-born humanity known largely to cops and deliverymen and seekers of cheap restaurants. Even the nickname served to thicken the smokescreen: for “New Chinatown,” as some called it, wasn’t Chinese. There were Chinese living in the area and a scattering of Chinese businesses, but this little three-block stretch was a street lifted whole from South Vietnam and dropped with all its parts into Chicago.
When the first Vietnamese businesses had been established here, Whelan had come for a look, wondering if the sight of so many Vietnamese signs, Vietnamese people, would bring out feelings and memories he didn’t want to deal with, but his reaction had been the opposite. He’d had dinner in a big brightly lit place called Mekong and then explored the street. The odd feeling of walking alone among hundreds of people of different race and culture, smelling the cooking smells and hearing the high-pitched nasal sounds of their language reminded him that he wanted someday to visit the country and see it in peacetime. The other feelings touched him when he saw a shivering wreck in khaki standing aimlessly on a corner puffing at other people’s cigarette butts. At such times, he knew he was one of the lucky ones: all his wounds had been physical.
He made a long slow tour of the main strip, drove up and down side streets and realized he didn’t know where to begin. At last, he parked at a meter near Sheridan, the eastern end of the strip. Across the street from his car, a little group of elderly Russians huddled in front of New Chinatown Bakery and Coffee Shop and debated whether to go in. Whelan sat in his car and watched them: this was a familiar sight in the area now, Russian Jewish immigrants, recent recipients of a rare Soviet leniency, wandering in groups in their heavy coats and outrageous fur caps, sightseeing in the damnedest places. From what he knew of them, the old Russians would stop wearing their winter clothes sometime in May.
Whelan looked up the street and saw that these Russians were the only other Caucasian faces to be seen. He admitted to himself that he had no clear idea what he hoped to find up here.
I’m a poor boy a long way from home.
He got out of his car and fed the meter. He found that he was parked in front of Thanh Phuoc Gifts: a poster in the window advertised a series of tapes, Chinese songs for young lovers. A few inches away, a colorful sign announced the triumphant tour of a popular Vietnamese recording artist. The woman in the poster had gone Western all the way: she was sexy and tough-looking in black leather and boots.
Looking up and down both sides of Argyle, he saw Hong Kong Fashion, Pho Xe Lua Restaurant, Hoang Kim Fine Jewelry, Sunny Supermarket, Viet Hoa Grocery, Mai’s Fashion and Bridal Shop, Lucky Garden Market and a dozen more businesses, most of them Vietnamese. The people on the street were Vietnamese, and all ages. A young Vietnamese man pulled into the parking spot ahead of him, got out with a cigarette in his mouth, glanced at Whelan and went on his way.
Whelan crossed Argyle and started walking up the south side of the street. A group of young Vietnamese women passed him, laughing and talking in high girlish voices. One of them seemed to look for a second at his hair and then said something to her friends.
I know, he thought. You don’t have a lot of redheads in your neighborhood.
No one else seemed to give him a thought as he walked against the wind and tried to decide where to begin. He peered into the window of New Chinatown Restaurant, tried the door, found it locked. He knocked and a young man inside shook his head and pantomimed that the restaurant wasn’t open yet. In front of a place called Lucky Grocery Market he paused. A dozen people seemed to be milling around inside, and a Vietnamese man in a T-shirt was whacking away at a chicken on a thick wooden carving board. In the window, a half-dozen ducks, their skin gone reddish and oily from the smoking process, hung by their unhappy necks from a steel bar.
Good a place as any, Whelan told himself: if I strike out, I can always buy a duck.
The smells that assailed him were food smells of another world: teas and ginseng and other herbs, and over it all, the pungent odors of smoked meat. And cigarette smoke: the air was blue with it, half the customers were smoking and the man with the cleaver puffed away while hacking at the hapless chicken. If the bird hadn’t been dead, the smoke would have killed him.
Whelan looked around for a while and then noticed a slender Vietnamese woman in her thirties watching him from behind a counter. She had large eyes and a flat nose, and would have been plain but for her improbably high cheekbones. He realized how out of place he looked and grinned, and when she flashed her own smile, it changed her face and lit up the rest of the room as well, and for just a half second, Whelan could only stare.
“May I help you, sir?” she asked in a high, clipped Vietnamese accent.
He went over to the counter and leaned against it. “I’m looking for someone. A boy, a teenage boy.” He stopped short of saying “A white boy” and settled for “Not a Vietnamese boy.”
“American boy?”
“Yes,” he said, grateful. You’re Americans, he thought, but nobody’s willing to admit it to you yet. “Yes, a young American boy. Maybe sixteen years old.”
“What he look like?”
“About this tall,” Whelan said, holding his hand flat to estimate the boy’s height. “Long hair, longer than yours.” This information seemed to amuse her, for the smile returned and her eyes took on a dark little sparkle. “A small scar on his chin and a tattoo.” She wrinkled her nose and the smile got nervous.
“A picture of a comet, or…a star, here,” he pointed to his right forearm.
She shook her head. “I don’t see him.” She turned and spoke rapidly in Vietnamese to the man with the cleaver.
No, Whelan thought, I don’t want to talk to anybody with a cleaver. The man squinted, looked at Whelan and shook his head, then lopped the unfortunate chicken in half and grinned.
“He don’t see him either,” the woman said, and the smile lit up the room again.
“Well, thanks,” Whelan said, and left. He tried three more places and came up with nothing but smiles or blank stares.
Two doors from the corner of Argyle and Kenmore, a square-built man in his sixties swept the windblown newspapers away from the door of a restaurant. He wore a white apron and a T-shirt; Whelan could see the red edge of a scar emerging from under the sleeve. The windows of the restaurant were steamed and sweating. A paper menu in English and Vietnamese hung in the center window but the other signs were entirely in Vietnamese.
Must be the real thing, Whelan thought, and decided this would be the restaurant he’d try next time down here.
The man dug with the edge of his broom at a corner of the doorway, then noticed Whelan.
“I’m looking for someone.” The man blinked and made a little shake of his head. “No English, huh?” Whelan tapped himself on the chest. “No Vietnamese.”
He shrugged and went inside the restaurant. There were a halfdozen customers inside, all Vietnamese. A young couple looked at him in mild curi
osity. The others paid him no attention. He advanced toward the woman behind the little beige counter.
She was in her forties, with pale skin and large eyes, and she flashed a quick hard smile and reached to take a paper menu from a pile on her left.
“Do you speak English?”
She winced, grinned, held up two fingers in a pinch and said, “Little bit English.”
“I’m looking for a boy. An American boy. Long hair, scar here on his chin, a blue star tattoo on his arm here. A tattoo. You understand —a tattoo?”
“I know tattoo, ya. Ya. I no see this one. American boy he don’t come in here.”
“Have you seen any American boys—on the street maybe?”
She shook her head. “No. No American boy. Only Vietnamese boy,” and she laughed. “Lot of Vietnamese boy.”
“I bet.” The old man came in, rubbing his cold arms and grinning. He said something in Vietnamese to the woman and she nodded. As he passed Whelan, he nodded politely, then went into the kitchen with his broom.
The woman watched Whelan for a moment, then held up the menu. “You eat? You like Vietnamese food? You like more better Chinese.”
“I do like Vietnamese food.”
“Yes? You like?” She indicated her kitchen with a little nod. “My cook, best cook. Food very nice.”
“This is your restaurant?”
She nodded. “My restaurant.”
“Nice place. I’ll come back. Well, thanks.”
She nodded and gave him a little wave as he left.
At the corner he passed a long white truck and stopped to watch a young Latino man unloading pig carcasses. The man was slightly built and the pigs looked to be industrial strength, but the man slung a deceased pig over a shoulder with no visible effort and smiled at Whelan.
“You want a pig?”
“No thanks. I ate already.”
The man patted his pig and carted the carcass into a Vietnamese meat market. Whelan crossed back to the other side of Argyle again and found himself in front of Phnom Penh Jewelers, a narrow storefront bearing script in four alphabets on its windows. The man and woman behind the counter were involved in two separate conversations with customers. Neither looked Vietnamese: from the name, he assumed this place was Cambodian. The man was tall and a little darker than his customers, his features less Asiatic. He was going bald, and the retreating hairline emphasized the high dome of his forehead. At the moment, he appeared to be negotiating to buy a ring from the customer.
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