"The side elevator, on Hester Street. That's the trick. Dew! In a plastic takeout bag from Big Wong's. Ha! You come after, with them. Together, no, we call attention to ourselves."
Then he hung up the phone, grunted, staggered back toward the bed, toward Mona, lying breathless and still.
He rolled in next to her, his hands already on her body, squeezing her breasts, her nipples, his fat fingers sliding down to her soft downy triangle, poking, violating her. He rubbed his flaccid flesh against her backside, licked his tongue against her neck, the stench of liquor on his breath.
She kept from recoiling, as she always did, even as he turned her in toward him. The diamonds, she thought as he pushed her head lower. The gold coins and the big cash deal. Her head was on the quivering round of his stomach. She opened her mouth.
Then she closed her mind.
Temple
Jack swung in for a late lunch at the Chinatown Arcade, and ordered Malaysian noodles with satay, peanut sauce. There was a composite sketch of the Chinatown Rapist in the window, and Jack knew it was just a matter of time before this predator of children, was caught. Trouble was, he didn't feel it was cops who were going to nail him. The tongs had their own bounty out, and they weren't forthcoming with information.
The shop had a small shrine containing a Kzoan Kung god flanked by red Christmas bulbs, and a mirrored bot gzoa octagram to deflect bad spirits. The shrine made him remember Pa, and he ate his noodles toward the end of his shift thinking about the Temple he was overdue to visit.
The Grace Temple of Heaven was a Buddhist order that occupied two stories above Weinstein's Wholesale Fabrics on Orchard Street among the Yiddishe.
The entrance was a stairway on Allen Slip, and Jack ascended past the second floor where there was a dining hall and kitchen, where the monks prepared the vegetarian jaai, rice and soups, that they shared with their faithful.
He entered the temple on the third floor and looked for the monks, scanning the huge space beneath a row of gleaming crystal chandeliers. The room had a twenty-foot ceiling, which was ample height for the three ten-foot gilded Buddhas that sat on the front stage. There were prayer cushions and mats and worshippers reading from books in front of the altars, where he spotted the elder sister monk.
He went over to the table and proffered a five-dollar bill.
"Sifu," he said, teacher, nodding respectfully at the shaved head with dot markings. She accepted the offering and he signed in. Behind her there was another room, which contained a wall of matchbook-size photographs attached to plastic tags with Chinese names. There was an altar there, and the flanking walls featured four-foot-tall Buddhas under glass-enclosed intricately carved pagodas.
There were smaller multi-faced and multi-armed Buddhas in gold and red, and a scattering of kuan yin, goddesses of mercy.
He stepped up to the altar, which was adorned with oranges and peaches, vases of gladioli, carnations, and mums. He took three sticks of incense, lit them and placed them in the lilypads of lit candles floating in a large glass urn of oil, an eternal flame.
The yellow plastic tag with Ma and Pa's names and photos was on the upper left of the wall, fitted in with a hundred others, closer to the heavenly clouds painted on the ceiling.
The humming sound he had heard upon entering the temple turned out to be the chanting of the monks, namor namor namor, so smooth it sounded like one word, an unending om.
He bowed three times, planted the other sticks of incense on the altar and stared at his parents yellow tag. Ommmmm, and he could feel the spirits of Ma and Pa flowing through him.
Darkness
Mona turned off the lights. The place was less ugly then. She undressed herself in the dark ofJohnny's flat, then scented herself with a spray mist, sat down at the edge of his bed and waited.
Johnny stepped out of the shower, saw the blackness beyond the slit of the open door and instinctively hit the wall switch. His eyes adjusted, then he saw her clearly, seated perfectly still in the small square of moonlight that fell through the window. The only movement came from her fingers working over something hidden in her hand. He threw on a towel, watching her all the while. He heard a small humming sound coming from her as she began rocking slowly back and forth on his bed.
Water over Heaven. Auspicious sign.
Water over Heaven. Cross the river, move forward.
Buddhist, Johnny thought at first, then realized it was "Taoist invocation.
When she saw him the spell broke.
The towel dropped as he approached her, the two of them falling together, onto the bed. She, warm and soft, and he, cold from the shower rinse, hard with desire. Yin crashing into Yang.
He turned on a small light, showing her the pistol as she pressed her softness against him. She peered along the barrel and silencer, squinted and imagined the target in her sights. She took a breath and squeezed the trigger, heard the hammer snapping down on the unloaded pistol.
"Don't worry," Johnny said. "You won't be shooting far and there's no kick."
Mona watched asJohnny chambered a round for her, flicking on the safety, then ejected the round, explaining the slide action to her.
"All you need to do is squeeze," he said. He passed the bedsheet over the Titan in a quick wipe, cursory but careful enough to remove his prints.
Mona turned off the light on the night table, leaving the bedroom illuminated only by moonlight. She climbed on top of him and worked her body until he was hard again, inside her. Almost a half hour passed before she rolled off him.
"Will you help me load those extra bullets, my love," her lips demanded just before sliding over the head of his hardness.
In the dim light he groped for and found the extra six-shot magazine, never taking his eyes off her head, then felt again for the small box of bullets, spilling them across the night table. He was in ecstasy, his mind drifting, with clammy hands slipping the little bullets into the magazine.
Her head was bobbing, eyes open, watching him, her tongue twisting inside her mouth. He tossed the loaded clip onto the night table as her lips tightened on him, her fingernails fluttering, closing on his testes. He was ready to explode, to blast himself away from Chinatown, to a sunny place far from the reaches of the mean and unforgiving city.
Double Ten
The Kuomintang banner of the Republic of China was a twelvepointed white sun on a dark-blue rectangle, cornered on a field of blood red. It was raised on every lamppost in Chinatown and flew along with plastic American flags over all the wide two-way avenues.
October 10th, celebrated as Double Ten, was a political holiday, the Eighty-third Anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Republic, a break away from civil war and the clutches of warlord feudalism.
Uncle Four wore his best gray suit, with a small red carnation in the lapel, beneath a red, white and blue Kuomintang flag pin.
He stood on the corner of Mott and Bayard, felt the faint sun on his face and knew exactly how it was going to happen. He'd seen it every year the last thirty years. The faces changed but the routine was the same.
He let his eyes roam over the program for the celebration. There was the Chinese Calligraphy Exhibition that the Lin Sings offered annually. Once a year the Nationalists cranked up their loudspeakers and blasted the streets with martial music, marching fanfare. In the auditorium of the Community Center there was Cantonese Opera and a Chinese Music Recital, followed by a reception-by invitation only-restricted to the big shots. They ran out the schoolchildren with candlelit Chinese lanterns and the floats with beauty queens in cheong saams.