McBride looked at him. In a soft voice that just escaped being gentle he said, “Get stuffed, Icky.” The black man smiled again, just as faintly as before, and then gave his head a couple of sorrowful shakes as though to demonstrate that he bore McBride neither grudge nor malice.
“Saturday,” Icky Norris said, although the way he said it made it sound something like “Saa’dy,” but not quite. “Saturday,” he said again; “noon.”
“Yeah,” McBride said, “noon.”
“You get behind like you got behind, Eddie,” the man across the table said, “and it gets hard to catch up. When you borrowed that five thou from Solly you said right up front that you maybe couldn’t pay it back for a couple of months on account of things being a little tight for you just then. Well, hell, Solly appreciated that. He really did. Some of these jerk-offs will come in and say, ‘Hey, Solly, lemme have five thou for a week, I got a real sweet deal goin’.’ Well, shit, they ain’t got no deal goin’ and they can’t pay no five thou back in no week, but Solly, because he’s a sweetheart, he really is, will say, ‘Okay, here’s five thou, but I gotta have it back in a week.’ Well, you know what happens.”
The man shook his head glumly, as though suddenly struck by the realization that all was perfidy. “What happens is that the jerk-off starts playing hide-and-seek and me and Icky here have to drop what we’re doing and go find him and try and convince him that if he can’t pay the nut, then he’s gotta pay the vigorish. And lemme tell you that some of these jerk-offs are so dumb that it takes just one hell of a lot of convincing.”
The man delivering the cautionary monologue was Antonio Egidio, sometimes called Tony Egg because of both his name and his shaved skull, which, along with his muscles, made him look very much like Mr. Clean. He often complained that if he hadn’t lost his hair ten years ago when he was twenty-three, he would have had a clear shot at the Mr. America title. Icky Norris, who wasn’t quite as tall as Tony Egg’s six-two, but whose bulging muscles were just as overly developed, claimed that the only reason he had never got to be Mr. America was because of what he darkly described as “politics.”
Both men spent most of their days working out at a gymnasium called Mr. Wonderful on Lincoln Boulevard not too far from Muscle Beach. The gymnasium was owned by Salvatore Gesini, an occasional lender of modest sums — never more than $5,000 — for which he charged 10 percent a week, or 520 percent in simple annual interest. Eddie McBride, into Gesini for the maximum $5,000, had fallen behind in his payments. The broken thumb was a Please Remit notice.
McBride now had the thumb down underneath the table pressed lightly between his thighs. It seemed to help the pain a little, but not much.
“I’ve gotta go find a doctor,” McBride said.
Icky Norris made no move to let him out of the booth. “Finish your drink, man. Hell, that’s good Scotch.”
McBride picked up the shot glass and drained the whiskey. They’re not through yet, he told himself. They haven’t got to the real horror stuff yet. That’s what they always leave you with, the horror stuff.
“Now, Eddie, we know you’re gonna be here Saturday noon just like you said,” Tony Egg said. “Hell, me and Icky here trust you, don’t we, Icky?”
“Sure, man.”
“But Saturday’s only a couple of days away and you gotta come up with at least a thousand bucks by then and we’re just sort of curious about how you’re gonna do it. I mean, we don’t want all the details or anything like that. We just want something that we can tell Solly, on account of you know how he worries.”
McBride started to speak, but stopped because he felt that if he spoke the words would come out high and scratchy. He cleared his throat. “A couple of guys out in Malibu,” he said. “We’ve got a deal going. I’m gonna go see ’em at two o’clock this afternoon.”
“Out in Malibu, huh?” Icky Norris said. “Well, that’s nice out there. Real nice.”
“Lot of money in Malibu,” Tony Egg said. “Lot of money.” He shifted in his seat, leaned forward across the table, and dropped his deep voice down into an even deeper tone, which gave his confidential whisper a rumbling sound something like distant artillery. Enemy artillery.
“Are these two guys you’re gonna go see thinking of buying something off of you maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe like a map?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe like a map of where all you’ve gotta do is take a shovel and dig up maybe two million bucks?”
“It’s there,” McBride said.
Tony Egg leaned back in his booth, picked up his glass of Tab, and took a swallow. “Oh, hell, I don’t doubt it’s there, not for a minute. I mean, when you told me and Icky and then Solly about it, well, shit, you know, you convinced everybody, didn’t he, Icky?”
“Convinced me,” the black man said.
“There was only this one thing, and that was the thing Solly raised, which was really sort of a minor point, like they say, but hell, there it was, and what bothered Solly sort of was that he never could figure out how you’d get into Nam and then out now that the fucking Commies and all have kind of taken over. I mean, it’s just a minor point, but there it is.”
“One of these guys is Chinese,” McBride said.
Icky Norris turned his mouth down at the corners, stuck out his lower lip, and nodded comfortably as though to testify that that made sense. “Lot of Chinese folks in Nam,” he said. “Was when I was there, anyhow.”
“Well, hell, that’s different, then,” Tony Egg said. “All the Chinaman’s gotta do is get into Saigon somehow. Just how he’s gonna do that I haven’t got figured out yet, although maybe it’ll come to me in a minute. But anyway, once he’s in nobody’s gonna notice him, because all those slopes look alike, right? So all he’s gotta do then is buy himself a shovel and maybe a flashlight somewhere, wait till it gets dark, then sneak into the embassy grounds and dig it up. Two million bucks. Just like that. Right, McBride?”
“It could be done,” McBride said in a soft, stubborn voice.
Egidio stared at McBride for a moment, sighed heavily, and slumped back in the booth. He played with his glass of Tab, moving it around on the table. Still playing with it, he said, “You know what I hope, McBride?”
“What?”
“I hope for your sake that these two guys you’re gonna go see this afternoon are just half as dumb as you are. Because if they are, maybe you got a half-ass chance of coming up with Solly’s thousand by Saturday.”
“Noon,” Icky Norris said. “Saturday noon.”
“We knew a guy one time who had a little trouble coming up with his money,” Egidio said, looking at Norris. “Remember old Toss Spiliotopoulos?”
“Shit, man, he was something else, wasn’t he?”
“He was a Greek,” Tony Egg said to McBride. “Toss Spiliotopoulos. Took me about a month to learn how to pronounce his name. Well, all Greeks have got what’s called an Achilles’ heel. They like to gamble. You know what an Achilles’ heel is, don’t you, McBride?”
“Yeah, I know,” McBride said, and knew it was coming now. The horror stuff.
“Well, there’s also something called an Achilles tendon. But anyway, to get back to old Toss, he got behind in his payments and took off for Vegas to try to double up and catch up, but that didn’t work out because it never does, and so he just got more and more behind. Well, the first thing you know old Toss the Greek has got himself a severed Achilles tendon. Now, if you ain’t ever seen a guy trying to walk around with a severed Achilles tendon, then you’ve missed one of the funniest fucking sights in the world.”
Icky Norris chuckled. “Old foot’s flippety-fioppin’ back and forth and up and down and ever which way.” Norris flopped his hand around to demonstrate. “He sure was some sight.”