“Yes?” Mr. Blue demanded. He listened for a moment, and then snapped his fingers, twice. One of the Mr. Universe contestants, the one with the single eyebrow, leaped forward, pad and pen in hand. He handed them to the boss and turned submissively away, offering a back as broad as the Mississippi Delta as a writing surface.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Blue said into the phone. Then he said, “San Pedro,” and followed it with a couple of very fast paragraphs in Chinese, but it didn't sound like Cantonese. He took the phone from his ear and punched a button, turning back to me and holding out the pad and pen in one smooth gesture. Mr. Universe took them, and Mr. Blue holstered the phone.
“You understand Mandarin?” he demanded.
“No.”
He snapped something at me, watching me closely, and then flung a few syllables at his bodyguards. They started to move toward me, and Mr. Blue gave me the big calm eye for a moment and then snapped his fingers. The muscle twins froze.
“I told them to remove and eat your liver.”
“I'd rather they didn't,” I said, hoping my knees didn't decide to fold again.
“So I see. And I see you didn't understand when I said it.” He gave me a forgiving smile. “I am Charlie Wah,” he announced. “You see, I tell you my name. Do you know anything about Charlie Wah?”
“I'm learning.”
He laughed softly, a precisely measured and tightly controlled little ha-ha-ha, and then stopped, cutting the laugh off in mid-ha. “Well,” he said, “that's probably good. I would like you to tell me everything you know.”
I tried to think of something I could tell him, and failed. “I don't know much of anything.”
Charlie Wah smiled at me, one reasonable man to another. “And yet you are here.”
I said, “I was looking for Little Tokyo.”
“Please,” he said, “don't mess with my head.”
“That's a little dated,” I said.
He nodded. “And what would you say?”
“I don't-” I began.
“Would you say 'Help'?” Charlie Wah snapped, stepping closer. The two bodybuilders came with him in perfect lockstep. “Would you say 'Oh, don't' if Ying here was told to cut your nose off? You can live without your nose, but many veins supply it and a lot of blood would be involved. And then, of course, you wouldn't be exactly a fashion model when it was over,”
“I don't know anything,” I said, on the edge of pleading. “It's true.”
“Let me be the judge of that. Just tell me why you're here. Start at the beginning, please. Everything you know.”
“I know that my girlfriend's uncle showed up unexpectedly-”
Charlie Wah held up a finger. “Lo.”
“Lo. And he kidnapped my girlfriend's niece and nephew and then returned them without taking anything.”
He pulled the gold toothpick from his mouth. “Without taking anything from where?”
“From my girlfriend's brother's house.”
“In Los Angeles.” He was watching me very closely.
“And Las Vegas,” I added quickly. “Her mother lives in Las Vegas.”
Charlie Wah nodded, one short jerk of the smooth chin. “What was he looking for?”
“I have no idea.”
“And this is why you're here? To ask him what he was looking for?”
“Sort of.”
He smiled. It didn't raise the temperature any. “Pardon?”
“I'm curious,” I said. “That's my job, to be curious.”
“Yes. You're a detective. It says so in your wallet. But not a policeman.”
“Not,” I said. “Not a policeman.”
“Lo must have taken something,” Charlie Wah said persuasively.
“That's what I thought, too. But they say not.”
“Where is your girlfriend's father?”
“Dead.”
“Chinese?”
“Yes.”
Charlie Wah thought for a moment. “Of Lo's age?”
“Yes. I think they were friends.”
“In China.”
“I guess so.”
“But he came here before he died. The father.”
“No, He died in China.”
Charlie Wah looked at me for a very long time. “Think about your nose,” he said at last.
“He died in China. The Cultural Revolution got him.”
“You have no doubt about that.”
“It's one of the first things my girlfriend ever told me.”
“And when was this?”
“Years ago.” My nose was beginning to itch.
“Years ago,” Charlie Wah repeated. “How old was your girlfriend then?”
“You mean when she told me?”
“No,” he said impatiently. “When her father died.”
“Two,” I said.
“Nothing was taken,” Charlie Wah said. He sounded puzzled.
“Not that I know. Not from either house.”
“How odd,” Charlie Wah said distantly. Then he called something out without turning around. I heard "Lo" twice, and one of the men left the room. Charlie Wah drew in the corners of his mouth and stared at the floor for a moment, and then looked up at me.
“You are remarkably lucky,” he said.
I immediately felt better. “Well, whoopee.”
“Yes, whoopee. If you were Chinese, you'd be dead. Instead, you're going to live to be an old man and have many grandchildren.”
“I can't wait.”
“Unless you get in Charlie Wah's way again. If you do that, you'll be as dead as any Chinese. And we're going to persuade you not to get in Charlie Wah's way again. We're going to kill two birds with one stone. Ying,” he said without turning his head, “her bleeding has stopped by now.”
“Yes, Ah-Wah,” Ying said, stepping back.
“Bring in her friends.”
Ying hurried off like a good little wounded soldier. He still hadn't mopped the blood from his own face.
“She's pretty, as Ying said.” Charlie Wah sounded faintly regretful. “But trash. All Vietnamese are trash.”
“Whatever,” I said. He needed response to keep his rhythm going.
“Still, trash has its uses. In the old days, before things started to break down, you could use trash without worrying about it.”
“You can't touch pitch,” I said, “without being defiled.”
“Yes?” he said. “What is that?”
“I think it's the Bible.”
“And the meaning. Pitch is something in baseball, isn't it?”
“It's like tar, dirt. But sticky.”
“Dirt sticks to your fingers,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Bingo,” he said. Then he smiled again. “English is an exhilarating language.”
“Glad you like it.”
“Shakespeare,” he said irrelevantly.
“Cao Xueqin,” I said.
He looked startled. “Red Chamber," he said. "You know it?”
“It's my favorite book.”
“You"-he paused for a moment-"you are pulling my leg.”
I couldn't help it. I laughed.
His face darkened, but then he smiled. “Who do you like,” he asked, “Bao-Chai or Dai-Yu?” It wasn't an idle question; it was a pop quiz.
“Bao-Chai,” I said. “Dai-Yu cries too much.”
Behind him, three beefy Chinese pulled the Vietnamese boys into the room. They'd been stripped to the waist. Two of the men carried long machetes.
“She cries always,” Charlie Wah said, relaxing slightly, “but such sentiment.”
“Coughs a lot, too,” I said, watching the two boys. The one with the Dumbo ears looked terrified.
“She was dying,” Charlie Wah said. “Don't you think that's sad?”
“Death is always sad.”
He saw me looking past him and turned to regard the boys. “But sometimes necessary.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
“Jesus?” Charlie Wah asked, swiveling back to me. “My least favorite god.”
10
“In the good days,” Charlie Wah was proclaiming from one end of the room, “we had respect. We had natural order.” He paused, and the mild-looking translator who'd gotten the laugh at Ying's expense turned it into Chinese. Charlie had one hand in the pocket of his blue, double-pleated suit trousers, jingling enough change to choke a parking meter. He liked making speeches.