After a moment of stunned silence the young men howled in rage and came off the wall and up from the milk crates. Lucy stood by Marlene and stuck her tongue out at them. Two elderly women passing in the street, who had heard the exchange, giggled and hid their mouths with their hands.
“What’s going on, Lucy?” asked her mother, giving the young men the eye.
“Oh, nothing, Mom, we were just talking,” said Lucy, with the confidence of one who has a 220-pound attack-trained dog standing by as well as a literal pistol-packing mom.
The Chinese youths mumbled and glowered and pretended nothing had happened, like embarrassed cats. Lucy and Marlene moved on, Lucy cracking lichees and sucking on the intense sweetness of the fruit, and the slick, heavy seed within, crunching the fragile shells into fine sandy grains and scattering them as she walked. It was the best hour of her day, the only time she had her mother to herself, as in the blessed past, before the advent of Them. Lucy went to P.S. 1, where the Chinatown kids went, along with a handful of gringo children from SoHo, whose parents liked the idea of their offspring inhaling solid Confucian values with their lessons. The advantage of being able to speak with her friends a language that her mother did not understand had early appealed to her, and, discovering in herself a remarkable gift for tongues, she had avidly learned Cantonese from her little gang of bilingual schoolmates.
They were walking north on Mott, toward Canal.
“Are we going to Tranh’s now?” Lucy asked.
“Uh-huh. What was all that back there, Lucy? With those punks?”
“They’re gangsters, Mom.”
“I know, honey, that’s why you shouldn’t talk to them.”
“They were talking bad about you. Sex stuff.”
“Yeah, I figured. Nevertheless …”
“If they give us any heat, you could shoot them.”
“You shoot them, Luce. I’m through with shooting people,” said Marlene, and changed the subject to the events of the past school day.
Chatting amiably, they came out onto Canal. Here Chinatown had flowed past its historic barriers, pushed by the new immigration attendant upon the partial collapse of the Bamboo Curtain and the oriental misadventures of the American government. Much of this immigration was not, strictly speaking, Chinese, for it included Thais, Filipinos, and Vietnamese, of which Tranh, of the eponymous noodle shop, was one. It was a tiny, narrow place, with steamed windows, rich garlicky smells, a counter and four shaky tables.
“Oh, here you are,” said Tranh from behind the Formica barrier, when Lucy ran in. “Usual?” asked Tranh.
They agreed that it would be. Marlene had been bringing Lucy here for her after-school gouter, as they used to call it at Sacred Heart, for a little over a year, or just after the twins had arrived and Marlene had thought her daughter in need of a special daily treat. The place was nearly always empty at this hour, and unlike many of the proprietors of hole-in-the-wall Asian joints, Tranh did not treat them like lepers. He was grave, correct, and polite, although his English seemed limited to the two phrases he had just used plus “everything okay?”, “thank you,” and “goodbye.”
Marlene liked the place because it wasn’t cheeseburgers, because Lucy liked it, and because Tranh, through some odd telepathy had, on her first visit, while she watched Lucy gobble hot noodles with bits of pork and onion, placed before her a huge cup of the sort of milky, hot, very powerful coffee that Parisians call a grande crème. It was such an unlikely gesture from an oriental man on Canal Street that Marlene, stupefied, had simply thanked him and drunk the coffee gratefully. He had done the same on each subsequent visit, no comment passing between them beyond polite thanks on her part, a stiff little bow on his.
Tranh was thus one of her small urban secrets: an odd bird entirely. She reckoned he was in his late forties, although he could have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty. His face was lean and hard looking, with a long, pensive upper lip and tufted black brows, topped by the typical, dreadful, Asian-guy haircut-nothing on the sides and a black crest above, like Woody the Woodpecker. His face’s chief distinguishing mark was a circular indentation at the temple, as if someone had tried to shove the butt of a pool cue through his skull. His arms were thin and sinewy, finished by long-fingered, nicotine-stained hands badly scarred across their backs. His motions at the stove were crisp and economical. He smoked constantly, unfiltered Pall Malls, and read dusty-looking Vietnamese newspapers when business was slow.
The woman, Tranh thought, looked worried today. Usually she took one cigarette with her coffee, but now she had smoked two already, and the girl was barely half through with the noodles. Perhaps he should offer her another coffee. No, it was best to leave everything the same. He was well practiced in looking at things out the corner of his eye while pretending to read a newspaper. She was not like the other American women who occasionally came in to pick up a coffee or a take-out meal. She reminded him more of the women he had known in Paris before the war, the intense, shiny girls interested in politics or literature. One girl in particular-he could not recall her name, but she had that small grace, finely boned but strong, the dark curly hair, the ivory skin, still smooth, although she was no longer in the first flush of youth. Not a woman who had gone down the ordinary paths. She had only one eye too; the right one was glass. He had noticed that the first day. Also the left hand was missing fingers. Tranh was something of a connoisseur of mutilations. It could have been an auto accident, of course, but he suspected something rather more interesting had happened to her. And she carried a gun, a small automatic tucked in a plain nylon holster on her belt, on the left side, although she was right-handed. He had spotted that the first day too, although she always wore some sort of jacket to conceal it. There were, of course, many police in the neighborhood, because of the nearness of the courts and police headquarters, but he very much doubted that she was a police officer. He had a lot of experience spotting those too. In memory of Paris, he had made her the first grande crème. And she had accepted it with grace, and had not tried to use the offering as an occasion to chatter, for which he was in turn grateful. He would have liked to converse with her. He could not remember the last time he had spoken at any length to a woman. But he was stupid in English, and he would not have wanted to be stupid to this woman.
And there was the girl too, clearly her mother’s daughter, the same delicate bone structure, the heart-shaped face, the black curls. The eyes were from the father, obviously, gray with lighter flecks. Sometimes when he looked at her, just a covert glance as she ate, he felt the ache of loss so strongly that his knees wobbled and he had to look away and concentrate on his breathing. He left the counter and walked over to their table, smiling.
“Everything okay?”
Their eyes met his, three smiling eyes and one glass one. Everything was okay. It was the peak of his day.
Karp’s habit, when getting ready to leave work, was to hunt through the several yellow pads he had used during the day, and empty his pockets and wallet of the rags of paper he had used to jot down things that must not be forgotten. These he interpreted and converted into a Dictaphone tape containing instructions to his people and memos to the administrative powers, which tape he would hand to Connie Trask, the Secretary of Steel, with the confident expectation that she would cause the paper to fly in the right directions, and see that all was done that ought to be done. The junior attorneys were more afraid of Trask than they were of Karp, which was as it should be.