“So where do we go from here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Malasuerte said, not looking up from the little machine. “I mean, shit. Hoods like you and me don’t do this kind of thing. Whatever Nezumi was involved with is way out of our league. We really ought to just leave well enough alone and count ourselves lucky we didn’t get killed.”
“Great,” I said “There’s a sick bastard running through Hoodtown ripping the máscaras off Hood girls and we’re just supposed to stick our heads in the sand? Who the fuck else is gonna deal with it? Santo’s in heaven and the cops don’t care so if you have any heroes lined up to swing in and dish out some justice you better let me know.”
Malasuerte pushed the record player away and stood up.
“How about your hero boyfriend? He’s got as much reason as you to get involved. Why don’t you get him to take care of it?”
“Boyfriend?” I put my bottle down and stood. I realized that I was far drunker than I thought.
“You know, Jaguar de Juarez. Hoodtown’s golden boy. He’s a fucking técnico, let him handle it.”
“For one thing he’s not my boyfriend. Whatever happened between us is ancient history...”
“Well, then how come you’re always gone when I wake up?”
I put my hand over my eyes and shook my head, wishing I had never told him about Jaguar.
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“Do you still love him?”
“Look,” I snapped. “I am not going to do this with you right now. My past romantic mistakes have absolutely nothing to do with any of this.”
“Then why are you so angry?”
I looked up at the ceiling, letting out a long exasperated sigh.
“I am not angry,” I said, dropping my voice to a cool, even pitch. “But keep up this bullshit and I will be.”
I went over to the table beside him.
“Look, forget Jaguar willya, and concentrate on figuring out why Nezumi gave you this...”
“Fuck Nezumi, OK? Fuck him and fuck this whole sorry mess. You know you coulda been killed tonight. I don’t want any part of this and I don’t want you mixed up in it either.”
“You telling me what to do?” Now I really was getting angry. My broken nose throbbed and my head felt full of shredded wire.
“No X, I’m telling you I care about you and I don’t want you to get hurt,”
I turned away. I needed this shit like I needed another punch in the nose.
“Look, let’s not get carried away here,” I said. “We got our hands full trying to figure out...”
“Figure out what? We have nothing left to figure. This case is cold. Nezumi is dead, the cops are useless and all we have is this fucking...”
He swept the record player off the table where it smashed into the wall. The white rubber turntable came loose and spun off, skittering to a stop, belly up, against my feet. There was an envelope glued to the underside.
“...record player.” Malasuerte finished, staring dumbfounded at the envelope.
I bent to retrieve the turntable. The envelope was stuck to it with some messy brown glue and tore as I tried to pull it off. A red, heart-shaped locker key fell out and landed with a cheerful tinkle on the floor.
There was a note inside too. It read:
“There is another copy.”
30
Argument forgotten, we immediately started running through places that had lockers. Sure there were lockers in every gym in Hoodtown, but none that had heart-shaped keys. Bus station had plain square keys and the lockers at the Telco all had combinations.
“What kind of place would have lockers with heart-shaped keys?” I turned the key over and over in my hand. “Whorehouse? Massage parlor? Bathhouse?”
We both looked at each other, wide eyed.
“Sweetheart!” we both cried in unison.
The Sweetheart Bathhouse was down Sasuke, a quirky little street made up mostly of tacky noodle parlors and topless tea shops. The Sweetheart was near the dead end of the street, pink glowing heart over the door the only sign.
Inside we were met by a pretty little thing in a kimono patterned with autumn leaves and a matching hood. She greeted us in Japanese and then again in Spanish and finally English.
“We’re really dirty,” Malasuerte said.
I elbowed him in the ribs but the girl just nodded politely and handed us each a list of services available, along with the prices. They were fairly high, but we could pretty much get whatever we wanted. There was decent deal for couples, but if we wanted a “special attendant” or a “hot soap massage” that would cost extra.
We went for the plain couple deal and forked over the cash. The girl handed us each a towel and then handed Malasuerte a little heart shaped key identical to the one in Nezumi’s record player.
“I regret to inform you the locker room is for gentlemen only.” She bowed her head like this shameful revelation brought her actual physical pain. “The lady will have to change in the spa room.”
“Fine,” I said, slipping Nezumi’s key into Malasuerte’s hand and giving him a significant look. “I’ll meet you in there.”
“Third door on the right,” the girl said. “Thank you very much.”
Malasuerte pushed through the door marked Locker Room while I headed down the hall to the spa.
The place actually wasn’t half bad if you ignored all the cheesy erotic art on the walls and the sappy Japanese love songs dribbling in through crackly speakers near the ceiling. The tile was clean and the tub was deep and massive, heart-shaped of course, and full of steamy, herbal-scented water. I stripped down to my underhood and lowered my sore, overworked, beat-up ass into the water, sighing gratefully.
I had nearly drifted off to sleep when Malasuerte showed up. He was still dressed and held a reel-to-reel tape in one hand.
“Just like the one the guy was burning at Nezumi’s.” He held it up and squinted at it as if trying to divine its contents by sight. “What do you suppose it is?”
“Just lay it down somewhere dry and get your damn clothes off,” I said, stretching like a cat. “It’s great in here.”
“Come on X, don’t you want to know what’s on here?
“Sure I do,” I said, sitting up in the water and giving him an eyeful. “But we paid for an hour in this tub and I plan to use it.”
Malasuerte laughed and shook his head, slipping the tape into his jacket pocket and peeling the jacket off.
31
We grabbed a few hours of uneasy sleep at Malasuerte’s place and then, in the grim gray dawn, we found ourselves threading warily through the trash on 168th towards Nezumi’s building. There were no cops, only some bulky, sullen city workers cutting apart the carcass of the fire escape and out front, our pal the landlady, who had tipped us off to Nezumi’s whereabouts in the first place. She wore an unspeakable housedress and worse máscara and was waving her scrawny arms and berating the workers in a drunken Hoodtown patois so thick even I could barely understand her. None of them seemed to care as we slipped past them and up to Nezumi’s apartment.
The place had been given a pretty thorough going over, first by cops then by the building natives. Anything that wasn’t nailed down had walked away, along with many things that were. All that was left was the awful sodden carpet and the big brown stain that used to be Nezumi.
“There’s nothing left,” Malasuerte said, toeing a loose corner of the carpet.
I squatted down and reluctantly pulled up the horrible dripping carpet. The padding underneath was rotten and moldy and released a truly evil odor as I peeled that back too but it was worth it when I was rewarded with a flattened olive oil can covering a hole in the warped floor.
Inside the hole, a plastic sack containing two things. First, a compact reel-to-reel tape machine. Second a book that was filled with incomprehensible, coded lists and numbers, half in Japanese characters, half in roman letters.
Now I dropped out
of school in Junior High so I had a tenuous grasp of Japanese Hiragana but never learned to read Kanji. Still, the roman characters I could read didn’t make anything like sense either. Just page after page of numbers and useless gobbledygook.
“Code,” I said. “Know any Matemáticos?”
“What about Buster’s kid sister?
“Who?”
“Buster. You know, that new comic over at the Burly Q.” Malasuerte said. “He’s got this weird sister with a Matemático gimmick. She hangs around the theater sometimes when he can’t get anyone to watch her. Spends her time counting things and scribbling numbers in little notebooks. That kid is obsessed with codes. She might be able to help us.”
“She read Kanji?”
“Buster does, so she probably does too. Fuck, I don’t know, it’s a shot anyway. We’ll worry about that later. For now I think we need to get the hell out of here and listen to this tape. Figure out what Nezumi knew that got him killed.”
Back at Malasuerte’s, elbows on the table and cups of undrunk coffee and between us, the tape machine spooling out thick, recorded nothing and then a hiccup and a gush of street sounds. Cars, distant voices and then a close-up voice, Nezumi’s;
“So, what Mr. Pinkwater is looking for is a mole, an assassin, somebody on the inside?”
Silence on the tape and then the radio announcer voice of the fucker that broke my nose.
“That’s right.”
Malasuerte and I looked at each other, eyes wide. The voice continued.
“We have a lot of Hoodtown business that requires a very special sort of person to handle. However there is one particular bit of business that is becoming more and more critical every day. Mr. Pinkwater feels that a certain...” Pause. “...little problem...” Another pause. “Is getting too big for his little britches. Simply put, we need someone to get rid of that little problem for us and make it look like one of the other gangs was responsible.”
“El Jefe?” Silence but the guy must have nodded because Nezumi continued: “Well that’s a pretty tall order. But you can count on El Nezumi to take care of his friends.” Pause and scratch of a match, the quick inhale of a cigarette. “It just so happens that I know the perfect guy for you. You a lucha libre fan, Oscar?”
“That shit’s for kids,” the other voice, Oscar presumably.
“Well then you probably don’t remember a luchador named Black Eagle.” Malasuerte gripped my arm and we both leaned closer to the tiny speaker. More silence and then: “Story was he was killed a few years back. I guess in a way it’s true. The Hood named Black Eagle died that day, but there’s a new face now in your clean Skin city.”
“Are you saying a Hood took his mask off and is walking around Angel City like a normal person?” Oscar sounded genuinely horrified, like a racist that has just learned blacks could change their skin color to white at will. “I thought you guys never take those things off.”
“Desperate situations call for desperate measures, my bare-faced friend.”
We both jumped, startled when the tape abruptly ran out, the tail flapping against the reel.
A long minute ticked by and we both just sat there, stunned.
“Lemme get this straight,” Malasuerte finally said, dumping a healthy knock of bourbon into his coffee and drinking the whole thing down. “Nezumi helped Black Eagle fake his own death so he could become a Skin?”
“That’s kinda how it sounds to me.” I took the bourbon and bypassed the coffee all together, sucking down a deep slug direct from the bottle. “Nezumi used to forge all kinds of phony ID. If anyone could forge Skin papers it’d be the Rat.”
“That just isn’t possible.” Malasuerte took the bottle back and refilled his coffee cup with straight bourbon. “I mean, how can anybody walk around every day without...” He trailed off, shuddering. His fingers involuntarily crept up the back of his neck to his mask laces as if making sure they were tight.
Just the thought of it was almost too much to bear. Living with your whole head exposed all the time and nothing you could do about it. Not to mention the fact that if anyone ever caught even a hint that you weren’t a real Skin, you’d be lucky if you’d survive long enough to make it to jail. Skins only put up with us because of their iron clad confidence that we would never cross that line. If this ever got out, who knew what the consequences for Hoodtown would be. I couldn’t help touching my own máscara too.
32
Buster lived just around the corner from the theater. The comic met us at the door wearing a ridiculous black and gold dressing gown with a pink ascot and fluffy pink women’s slippers. His big smile for me petered out as he looked past my shoulder and saw Malasuerte.
“Gee, X, why’d you have to bring the giant?” He pouted elaborately. “I like you and all but I don’t get into that kinky three-way kind of stuff.”
“I’m not here for a date, comic.” I smiled a little. “Got a favor to ask.”
“Favor, eh?” He eyed Malasuerte. “Nothing kinky right?”
“I’ll give you a kink.” I raised my fist.
“Hey now, no violence. I’m really a delicate boy.” He backed away in an elaborate pantomime of cowardice. “But look, if you’re gonna clean my clock, let’s at least do it in the parlor like civilized folks. Tea?”
We laughed and let him usher us through the big quirky rooms of his cluttered house. The place was like a museum dedicated to the history of burlesque. Old books stacked to the ceiling. Posters advertising acts like Fiery Topaz, The Brazilian Whirlwind and Sweetie Tahiti. Tiny spangled g-strings preserved under glass like they were priceless diamonds. Framed records of famous comedy routines and novelty songs, signed by the original performers. Weird old props, fake squirting flowers and exploding cigars, I could have spent hours perusing all the fascinating junk, but we had bigger fish to fry. He finally led us into a homey little room at the end of long hall. The walls were crowded with photos of his parents. Dad apparently had been a big time comedian and his mother a famous Japanese luchadora. Most of one corner was set up as a memorial shrine to the pair, surrounded by dozens of candles.
“So what’s this not-so-kinky favor?” Buster asked.
Malasuerte and I exchanged a glance, unsure about how to even broach the subject. Finally I just came out with;
“Lucky tells me your sister’s into numbers.”
For the first time since I’ve known him, he looked genuinely suspicious.
“Yeah...” he said.
“Well...” I looked back at Malasuerte who was absorbed in picking lint off his tie. “We found this book. It’s some kind of code.” I held Nezumi’s book out to him. “Think she might be able to make heads or tails of it?”
“She’d love to I’m sure,” Buster said, flipping through the pages. “But she doesn’t like strangers.”
“I’m not a stranger,” Malasuerte said. “We’ve met a bunch of times at the theater.”
“Come on Buster,” I added. “It’s important. Just ask her and if she says no, she says no.”
Buster shrugged.
“Ok,” he said, handing the book back to me. “But you guys wait here.”
He disappeared down the hallway. Lucky and I stood around, fidgeting and uncomfortable until finally after what seemed like a century, Buster returned with a tall, gawky girl in a plaid bathrobe and white hood covered in black numbers. There was something very odd about her body language, the way she held her knifeblade shoulders in a permanent cringe and the way she kept pinching the fabric of her bathrobe and twisting it between her thumb and forefinger.
“Pi, you remember Malasuerte from the theater?”
The girl looked sideways at Malasuerte with several rapid-fire, darting glances.
“Trumpet,” she said. “Sure. Trumpet.”
“Hola, Pi,” Malasuerte said, holding out his big hand to her. She turned away without taking it and he shrugged and let it drop back to his side.
“I’m X,” I said.
The girl t
urned to me with sudden, intense interest like a bird.
“X,” she repeated. She took several steps closer to me until she was barely an inch away, staring fixedly at the X on the forehead of my hood. “The value of X is relative to its position in the equation.”
I looked at Buster who was grinning.
“She likes you,” Buster said as the girl reached up to pinch each of the four arms on my X one after the other and then abruptly lost interest and walked away.
“Pi,” I said. “I brought you something.” I held up the little book. “A puzzle. Do you think you could tell us what it means?”
She turned back to me with that bright, birdlike interest. Her dark eyes flitted to the book and she ran at me with alarming speed, snatching the book from my hand and dropping, cross-legged to the dusty floor directly at my feet.
“I’ll make that tea,” Buster said. “This could take a while.”
He came back several minutes later with a tray and we all sat at the long antique table. He handed us each an awful, goofy novelty cup. Mine was shaped like a ugly clown’s head and Malasuerte’s was shaped like a big pink tit. Surprisingly, the tea was excellent, a rich, smoky oolong.
We made small talk and tried not to stare as Pi twisted her bathrobe and scribbled in a battered yellow notebook. Watching her, you’d think she was copying the one book directly into the other, eyes flicking back to the original with robotic regularity and writing without pause. She did not stop to ponder or puzzle out anything, just kept writing.
“You guys gonna let me in on the big mystery here or what?” Buster finally asked.
“You don’t want to know,” I said. “Hell, I don’t want to know.”
He looked at me curiously.
“I’m serious,” I told him. “Once we leave here, you want to forget all about this, OK?”
“That bad, huh?”
“What about the kid?” Malasuerte asked, tipping his head towards Pi. “Can we count on her to keep her mouth shut about what she’s doing?”
Hoodtown Page 11
