“What did you do that for?” he said.
“I trust my feelings.”
The man in the plaid jacket crossed the room in a slow walk, bandy-legged, hands in his pockets, smiling with fraudulent good humor. He greeted Frank with, “Hey, Scrape.”
“Waldo, get rid of this,” the Asian said, pointing.
Up close the man’s eyes had a moronic intensity. They were marbles in the face of a doll. He had hairy fingers, nails chewed down to the raw.
“Wrong table,” Frank said, but before he could turn away Waldo locked one hand around his elbow. His thumb speared down to bone. Frank’s arm went numb. Waldo leaned close and whispered, “You go outside, I’ll shoot your pink ass.” He shook Frank’s arm like a rag. “Look at me.”
The top of his head came level with Frank’s nose. Frank stared into a flat, reddish face, cavernous pores, thin hair combed back on a damp skull. Waldo breathed heavily, offering Frank a smile.
“Let’s,” he said.
He spun Frank around and steered him toward the men’s room. The three women waved to his back, chirping “bye-bye” like the Puerto Rican girls in West Side Story. Frank made a quick glance around the room. The waitresses turned their backs. The cooks and busmen kept busy, looking away. It was not a pressure job.
The slender one, the driver, stood watch at the rest room door while Waldo pitched Frank against the sink. An old man tottered out frantically. Frank felt a sudden bond with him.
“Look,” Frank said to Waldo, “go slob the knob with your faggot friend out there, leave me alone.”
With startling quickness, Waldo laid a punch hard to his temple, creating water from the waist down and a nauseating blackness. In the doorway the slender one told someone to use another rest room, a man was inside getting sick. Waldo lodged a handkerchief into Frank’s mouth, took out a penknife and opened the smallest blade, then locked Frank’s wrist in his grip and forced the blade deep beneath the thumbnail. The pain shot everywhere, he fell to his knees. This earned him a kick in the abdomen so violent his arms disappeared, his face hit the floor. He was choking, the linoleum stank with urine.
At the doorway, the slender one said again, “Inside,” louder now. “Getting sick.”
Waldo wiggled his knife free and rifled Frank’s pockets. Coins scattered across the floor. Through a galaxy of black stars Frank watched Waldo count his wad of bills; he tossed Frank’s car keys into the urinal. Another kick struck the base of his skull.
Waldo bent down. “Check it out, Scrape. Who’s the faggot now?”
At the Pierpont Hotel a gaunt bellman with feathery white hair and fleshy eyes Hoovered the lobby rug. Uniform jacket unbuttoned, he sang fiercely over the warm noise and the tickling dust, smiling into the carpet trails.
Frank limped through the Powell Street door. The bellman stood straight and fell quiet. He turned off the vacuum. Frank took shallow breaths, holding his side, ignoring the bellman’s stare. He had a paper napkin wrapped tight around his thumb because blood continued to seep from under the nail, which had turned a purplish black. He moved each foot as though it were weighted down.
He got to the rest room as fast as he could, checking the back of his head for blood. He’d swallowed ten aspirins already, taking them dry from a bottle he’d shoplifted from a Tenderloin Thrifty. Reaching an empty stall he collapsed onto the toilet seat, latching the door as he sat. His heart was racing. He pressed his good hand to his eyes and squeezed, sitting like that till the bellman came in after him. Frank could see the man’s shoes and pant cuffs beneath the stall door.
The bellman said, “Can’t stay in there. You know that.”
“I’m a guest,” Frank said.
“Like hell you is.”
“I’m the guest of a guest.”
“What you is,” the bellman said, “is gone. Else I call the police.”
Frank breathed gently through his mouth. The nausea lessened that way. He looked up and saw an elderly bloodshot eye peering through the door crack at him.
“Tell you what. I’m feeling just a little bit better, I’ll go.”
“Ain’t no junkie gettin’ sick in my hotel, understand?”
“Your hotel?” Frank cackled. “Mr. Pierpont, sir.”
The bellman pulled back from the door. “Okay, smart-ass. Here it comes.”
He turned on his heel and left. Frank closed his eyes as the rest room door swooshed open then closed. Here it comes, he thought.
After a moment he checked his thumb again, probing gently with the forefinger of his good hand, then wrapping the thumb in fresh tissue. The blood had dried on the back of his head; he reminded himself to leave the scab alone. Eventually he rose to his feet, combating a swirl of dizziness, and leaned forward on the door till the latch gave way. He tumbled out, gaining his balance only after he hit the far wall. He looked up into the mirror and once again felt utterly astounded to find himself there, gazing back.
“You need money,” he told his reflection.
He tottered back out to the lobby, flipped the bellman off, crossed to the Powell Street door and ventured back into the street. Pedestrians marched in vacant-eyed unison down the sidewalk. A damp wind howled between buildings. He stuffed the wounded hand inside his jacket, where it would be warm and out of sight.
He could feel people looking at him as he searched out his truck. It rested in a green zone down the block from Omar’s. He checked through the restaurant’s window to be sure Waldo was gone, then hurried past with his head down. When he reached his truck he discovered a parking ticket tucked under his windshield wiper. As he crumpled it and prepared to throw, he glanced up at a newspaper dispenser and saw a headline that stopped him cold: TRIPLE HOMICIDE IN THE DELTA. In smaller typeface, a second lead read: SUSPECTED LINK TO BRISCOE MURDERS.
He moved closer. Beneath the headline, the only words he could read were, “Last night three persons, one of them a seven-year-old boy, were murdered execution-style in a remote…” The rest disappeared below the fold. He tried to open the dispenser, gently at first, but the catch held. Shortly he was pounding on it, kicking it, till passersby stopped and he shrank back. Panting, it dawned on him finally he might have the change. He’d retrieved it from the floor of the rest room at Omar’s after Waldo had left. He checked his pockets but found only thirteen cents; he needed twenty-five.
Just then a salesgirl from one of the nearby shops came out, dropped in her quarter and lifted the dispenser lid. Frank lunged, shoved her aside and caught the lid before it closed, grabbing a paper from inside. The girl recoiled, ready to scream.
“I’m sorry,” Frank said, easing away.
Abatangelo spent the better part of two hours trying to reach Waxman on the phone. The screak of the busy signal seemed particularly galling, given the state of things. Even so, it was never more than a minute before he had the phone in his hand again, redialing Waxman’s number. A little after noon, deciding he needed a break, he went down to the street to see if the early afternoon edition was out. Might as well check the damage, he thought, remembering Cohn’s admonitions on the subject of Waxman’s faithlessness. He bought his copy of the paper from a corner stand and returned upstairs to his flat. Incapable as yet of reading Waxman’s article, he turned instead to the interior pages.
The Saturday edition, as always, was particularly ripe with morbid news, most of it drug-related. One item in particular mentioned a 7.6 mm chain gun, designed for troop support aboard attack helicopters like the Cobra, discovered missing from the Port Chicago Naval Weapons Station; officials feared it may have fallen into the hands of drug traffickers. The term “narcoterrorism” appeared twice, and this was the briefs.