by Max Lockhart
The sliding metal peephole opened, and two Chinese eyes peered out. "Jack Cleary," he said quietly, wondering if the name would still open doors in Chinatown.
The peephole closed and the still-silent Chinese swung open the door. Cleary stepped inside to be suddenly surrounded by masses of Chinese gamblers. Everything was a sensory attack. From the haze of incense that blurred the size of the narrow room, rendering indistinct the faces of excited men clustered around the gambling tables, to the auditory assault of high-pitched voices, the clacking of dominoes and mah-jongg tiles, chatter, cries, curses, and the monotonous singsong of numbers, bets, and losers, all in a language in which the emphasis of a single syllable could change the meaning of a word.
Anyone who claimed the Chinese were a silent, reserved, inscrutable race, had never been in a gambling den, thought Cleary, closing his eyes to breathe in the myriad odors. The air was filled with cigarette smoke, incense, and steam from the tea tables that sat off to one side. And the sweat of men in the close, hot night air of Chinatown. But seldom the cloying sweetness of opium. Opium served another function. It had no place in a gambling hall where the object was another kind of nirvana: that of winning. With his eyes closed he could feel the excitement and tension as a palpable thing, composed of the desperation of men needing to win almost as much as they needed to eat.
He opened his eyes, blinking away the prickling caused by the incense, and looked at the men. To many of them, to win was to eat. The laborers, paid less than their labor was worth, the deliverymen, waiters, noodle makers, fish butchers still splashed with blood and scales, men in aprons and men in three-piece suits, all in unblinking concentration upon the next throw of the dice or tiles or dominoes. There were powerfully built men with rags tied around their heads, now wet with sweat, and old fragile men dressed in traditional Chinese clothes, who bet with care and precision. But all had in common the black oblique eyes and yellowed ivory skin of the Oriental. Only Cleary was unique in this world, with his white skin and round blue eyes.
But no one spared him a glance. He had passed through the orange door with its embossed dragon. He must belong. And there were other more important men to worry about, men whose words meant the difference between a bowl of rice or an empty belly for those who gambled what they could not afford. The pit bosses, one at each table, were the gods of this den. They somehow, by the grace of Heaven, kept track of the furious betting, raking in hundreds at a time, wagered and lost in a matter of seconds. Their low, steady monotones of confidence were in contrast to the high-pitched betting. Their black eyes flickered with the quickness of fireflies around the table, missing nothing, cataloging all with the precision of a machine.
Cleary scrutinized the faces in the room, but the shapes wavered and shifted in the cloud of incense, and it was impossible to be certain of an identity. Accepting that fact with the fatalism of the Chinese, he weaved through the maze of tables, feeling the tension grow as the night aged and laborers held off losing their money as long as they could. But eventually they would rise, broke but no wiser, ready to chase the vision again the next week. For most of them, Cleary knew, it was the only way out of the world of Chinatown. And most wouldn't make it. Couldn't, in many cases. They were locked into its alleys and streets by traditions stronger than any prison bars.
He claimed an empty chair at the fan-tan table, sliding into it with a sense of coming home. The flashing neon signs threw colored lights across his hands and the faces of the other players. He knew if he turned around and glanced out the long, low window behind him, he would see those same neon signs reflecting intense primary colors off the wet, rainy streets of Chinatown—red and yellow of the flashing signs of restaurants and bars, their colors splashing off the street to highlight the curved rooflines of the pagoda buildings.
He bet furiously with the other gamblers, his Chinese only faintly accented. Raking in his winnings, he searched the room like a casual Occidental visitor, curious to gawk at the slant-eyed foreigners. It was a good cover, because if white men found Oriental faces impossible to read, the reverse was also true. Cleary knew that to ninety-nine percent of the Chinese in this room, he was an inscrutable foreign devil, possibly evil, certainly uncivilized and barbaric, just barely above the level of a dog in the scheme of things. He could live with that.
Peering across the incense-clouded room, he saw his prey. He knew that to the average person, there was nothing distinctive about this particular Chinese. The man was just another faceless laborer, filthy from his job somewhere in the bowels of Chinatown. But Cleary knew the average person could not tell one Chinese from another. But he didn't have that problem. Other than sharing the same hair and eye color, and even that varied, the Chinese were as different from one another as Chinatown and old Los Angeles. They weren't stamped out with a cookie cutter like most whites thought.
Easing out of his chair and moving down the room, past the long, low window, Cleary never took his eyes off the Chinese. What he was about to do was not as dangerous as most people would think. The Chinese had an ingrained, almost instinctive respect for authority. And he was authority, at least of a sort.
"Been a long time, Cleary," said an accented voice, slurring over the l in his name.
The Chinese had a difficult time pronouncing that particular English sound, thought Cleary, wiping his face of any expression as he turned toward the tong boss man. "Not by the look of things, it hasn't," he said, managing an easy smile and gesturing toward the rest of the room.
With a half smile, the boss man stepped down from the counting room that sat above the gambling table at the end of the room. Before the door closed, Cleary saw a couple of counters thumbing through stacks of money with incredible speed. "Business is good, I see."
The boss man gave him another half smile. "Some days it is good; some days it is bad. Today it is good." He nodded toward a table crowded with laborers. "It is like opium to some."
"Then why don't you keep them out?" asked Cleary, and immediately regretted his comment. In Chinatown, it was rude to criticize your host.
The boss man's smile disappeared. "Then they would go outside to gamble, and that would not do."
Cleary knew that outside meant the rest of the city or the rest of the world for that matter. The tong wanted no part of the outside world, and L.A.'s homegrown gangsters wanted no part of any exotic imports. Crime lords had their prejudices just like the rest of the population.
"I understand," he finally said. And he did, too. It was a matter of power. The various tongs held what amounted to absolute power over the residents of Chinatown. If the price of that power was a few laborers gambling away their wages and ending up begging in the gutters, so be it. It was the order of things. And that was something else Cleary understood about the Chinese. They held life cheap, and they were conservative to the point of idiocy. Change wasn't one of the race's favorite vocabulary words.
"Enjoy the games, Cleary," said the boss man, smiling again now that the foreign devil acknowledged the order of things.
Cleary nodded. "Some other time. I have business here." It was best to announce up front that he had a job to do, and that it had nothing to do with gambling. That, too, was the order of things.
The boss man's eyes flitted about the room, finally settling on the Chinese laborer. "We have been expecting someone. We did not know it would be you. It is well." He inclined his head in a gesture of respect. Cleary, after all, was not one of them.
Cleary dipped his head back. While the tong would not deliberately turn over one of their own to the foreign devil's law, they would not interfere, either. The Chinese laborer was a man with no power, and he had ventured outside, had broken the strange laws of the foreign devils, had brought unwelcome attention to Chinatown. He had disturbed the order of things. He would be sacrificed.
The boss man continued cruising through the room, giving instructions in a low, confident voice. Cleary knew none of those instructions concerned him. His job was an unpleas
antness to be ignored. He shrugged his shoulders and moved over to the mah-jongg table. Action was in high gear, betting at one hundred miles an hour, tiles clicking against one another like a race car's wheels on an uneven road.
He finally stood next to the Chinese laborer who was betting with great intensity, a quiet desperation that told Cleary the game was more important than life. The laborer didn't notice Cleary until he reached out his hand to place a bet with the mah-jongg tile. He couldn't miss the handcuff that the foreigner expertly slapped on his wrist. He was so stunned he froze, his hand still reaching out with his bet. He looked up at Cleary with an expression of horror, his face turning as white as someone with yellow skin could turn.
"Don't look so surprised, friend. When you jump bail in this town, they send someone. Even down here," Cleary said, as with a sure and permanent click, he slapped the other end of the handcuffs on his own wrist.
The look on the laborer's face was one of disbelief, mixed with that profound resignation at missing out on his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Cleary ground his teeth in irritation. Damn Chinese fatalism, anyway. They shouldn't be so goddamn accepting. The guy was so sure fate was against him he didn't even notice that he had won the money sitting on the table.
Cleary nudged him. "Go ahead, pick up your dough. The rest of your night looks like a washout, but that's no reason not to grab what you've already won. Go on, do a little living for yourself." He smiled at hearing himself repeat Eileen's words.
The laborer reached for his money, his eyes still expressing disbelief, when the secured orange doors burst open. Two bandits wearing Chinese masks, one waving a two-inch .38, and the other holding a sawed-off shotgun, pushed the two "look see boys" into the room. Now everyone's eyes held disbelief as the room fell silent in waves, the gamblers in front falling back in the face of the ugly guns.
One man covered the gamblers as the other rushed into the counting room and threw the counters out, then shoveled the money into a sack as fast as he could. The two moved fast, without a word spoken. They're pros, thought Cleary, and they know what they want. He watched them sweep through the room like an evil wind, raking the money off the tables into the bag. The boss man wouldn't be happy. It wasn't going to be such a good night after all.
Looking up, he noticed a couple of tong gunmen ease their hands to their concealed guns, but the bandit with the shotgun casually pointed his weapon at the two men. The Chinese shrugged and dropped their hands. So be it. It was the order of things.
Cleary tried to fade into the background. Which was going to be tough since he was the only white man in the joint. Very carefully, he placed the key to the cuffs in the slot and began to turn it. Something bad could happen very soon, would probably happen, and the last thing he needed was to be cuffed to a Chinese. Freedom of movement was necessary if a guy had to run like hell for the door.
Feeling tension increase around the table, and hearing the laborer cuffed to him suck in his breath, Cleary looked up. He hadn't been quite fast enough. The bandit with the shotgun had noticed him. Avoiding looking up, he tried to blend in with the furniture. Which wasn't very successful, either, since he didn't look any more like the furniture than he looked Chinese. Giving up, he met the bandit's eyes and caught a spark of recognition. The bandit might remember him from Cleary's days on the Chinatown beat when he was a cop, or maybe the bandit was just happy because he found somebody he would like to blow up because he was white. It was a good bet either way.
Despite the fact he was in a big hurry, the bandit took the time to come up to stand mask to nose with Cleary. Locking his eyes with Cleary's, the bandit tapped the handcuffs with the shotgun barrel to see if the two men were actually locked together. The mask moved imperceptibly as if the man underneath had smiled. Cleary was glad the thug found something funny about the situation because he sure as hell hadn't.
He watched the twelve-gauge barrel move slowly and steadily until it rested against his neck. It was cold and uncomfortable, and he had an aversion to gun barrels parked against his neck. Just a personal quirk of his. He had an aversion to being searched, too, which was what the bandit was doing with his other hand. And he damn sure had an aversion to having some low-life scum take his winnings and his watch. On the other hand, he wouldn't bet on his chances of knocking the gun away and hammering the bandit, not with a Chinese cuffed to him. He might as well practice a little fatalism of his own. When you can't fight them, stand still.
He gritted his teeth when the bandit found his .38 with the two-inch barrel. So much for his ace in the hole, or mah-jongg tile on the table, as the case may be. His mouth dropped open when the thug placed the .38 in his hand, backed up three or four steps, then turned his back and slowly walked away. His fingers tightened around the grip and he rested his finger against the trigger. The son of a bitch was daring him to fire.
Cleary took a deep breath, then another, and held it. He slowly moved the gun an inch at a time, squeezing the trigger a little tighter with each inch. With luck, he could get off a clean shot, then dive for the floor and shoot the other hood on the way down. He watched the bandit intently and realized luck wasn't with him. For every inch he moved his gun, the bandit turned his muzzle back toward him. For relative size, a shotgun muzzle had it all over a .38. Besides, at this distance the bandit didn't need a clean shot. Any kind of a shot would take off various head and body parts of Jack Cleary, as well as those of anybody who didn't duck fast.
He let his breath out a little at a time, and eased his finger off the trigger. Gently, moving slowly, he lowered his hand and placed the .38 on the gambling table. He heard a whoosh of relief as the others around him expelled their pent-up breaths. Amazing how everybody holds their breath when they're scared to death, he thought.
The bandit shrugged slightly, and walking back, swept the money off the gambling table, including the winnings of the Chinese laborer. In his hurry to stuff the money into the bag, the bandit spilled some of it on the floor. Cleary heard his handcuffed partner catch his breath, and nudged him. Now was not the time to disturb the order of things. Now was the time to be a typical, inscrutable, fatalistic Chinese. It beat being a dead Chinese.
The two bandits backed up to the orange door, still covering the room, and Cleary reached slowly for the key which was still in the handcuffs, never taking his eyes off the two men. He noticed the laborer was staring at the money lying at his feet as though his eyes were riveted to it. just as the bandits backed through the door, the Chinese lunged for the money.
"No!" screamed Cleary, but the sound was lost in the blast of the shotgun as the bandit caught the laborer's movement out of the corner of his eye and whirled around, unloading both barrels into the Chinese.
"Jesus, God!" Cleary gasped as the laborer was blown backward, yanking Cleary with him. They hit the table and slid onto the floor in the midst of hell breaking loose as the other gamblers scrambled away in panic. He gazed into eyes blinded to any consideration but that of staying alive, and staying alive meant getting away from the foreign devil and the crazy Chinese. He couldn't blame them. Nobody wants to stay in the vicinity of a shotgun target.
Blinking to clear his eyes, he focused on his torn and bleeding companion. Lights seemed to flicker as he thought for a minute he was looking at Joe Quinlan. It was too damn much, he wanted to scream. Less than twenty-four hours ago, only this morning, he had held another corpse in his arms. Now this. And both of them didn't have any damn business getting killed. He couldn't take much more of this, or he would be puking his guts out in some alley, just one more guy hiding in a bottle.
He clenched his shaking hand. No, he wouldn't, by God. A guy can't kill a dragon from inside a whiskey bottle, and he was going to slay those two if it was the last thing he did. Taking a deep breath, he quickly snapped off the now unlocked cuffs and, snatching his .38, turned and leveled it at the two bandits. Damn it, he thought. In the pandemonium, there was no way to get off a clear shot without risking some other inno
cent, dirt-poor, scared Chinese.
He watched, feeling his hot breath whistle between his lips as the bandits disappeared, then raced over to the door, delivered a kick in the middle of the embossed dragon's belly that left the door swinging from a busted hinge, and lunged into the hallway. He stumbled a step to look down the stairs just as the second bandit unleashed both barrels again and blasted the wall inches from his head.
"Goddamn it!" he spat, hitting the worn, dusty hall carpet on his belly. His breath left him in a rush, and he gasped for air. Fortunately he had always been able to walk and chew gum at the same time, so he was able to get off several shots at the same time he was persuading his body to breathe again.
The two bandits burst out the street-level door, and Cleary scrambled after them, his weary body breathing again but protesting with every breath. He burst through the door himself, gun level, to find—nothing. The maze of streets that was Chinatown had already swallowed up the bandits.
THIRTEEN
Cleary leaned against the window studying the now transformed gambling den. It might have been any narrow, stark, empty room, cluttered with a few toppled mah-jongg tables, strewn gambling paraphernalia, and a dead man on the floor. There was a lingering odor of incense and sweat, Chinese tea, and the humid air of Chinatown. Violence didn't leave behind a smell unless you counted the sweetish scent of human blood.
He smoked a cigarette and stared down at the dead Chinese laborer at his feet. The neon lights flashed through the long window at his back and threw bars of red and yellow across each of them. The colors were appropriate; red for blood, and yellow for the laborer's ivory skin, now lifeless and shrunken looking. Amazing how quickly a human being shrank after death, he thought, shuffling the two cigarette butts away from the corpse. It was as if life had some kind of substance, and once it was gone, the corpse collapsed inward. He glanced at his watch and wondered how much longer he had to keep company with a dead man. It had already been too long.
