“The boss,” Hazel says, “would be your father?”
Loke shakes his head. “My Uncle Chak. Mother’s brother. Owns the Plain Jar Cafe. He’s the bank for our people. He’s trying to buy up the Goulden Ave block. He hands out housing, jobs. Got a half brother back in Phnom Penh. You can imagine.”
Hazel leans forward over her knees. “You think it’s a good idea to tell strangers your genealogy?”
Loke gives the now-familiar smile. “We’ve done the research, Hazel. You’re not exactly informer material. And you know that if we even see you with the wrong people you’ll be gang-fucked, set on fire, and served as the lunch special down the Plain Jar.”
He says this as if he were relaying the score of a boring ball game.
Loke goes on. “We’ve got over sixty full-member Hyenas. Mainly we’re errand boys and supplemental muscle for Uncle Chak’s company. Though I’d never say that to any of my boys. We handle all the merchant payments down Voegelin and Grassman. We do security for the O dens and whorehouses in our cut of the Park. We move some smack around Goulden. But mainly we’re linemen. We watch the border for the Popes.”
“The Colombians,” Hazel says.
Loke nods. “Scumbags. Which brings us to the question—”
“Why did I come to you instead of them?”
“So why?”
“If you’ve checked, you know I’m pretty well plugged in down the Zone. I’ve got all these little tech-hoods jumping through hoops for me. They’re into the Registry of Deeds mainframe on a regular basis. Since Cortez vanished, the Colombians are scrambling. There’s no one holding it together. Rayuela Realty Trust is going Chapter 11 any day. Didn’t take a genius to know that if you wanted to emigrate, Uncle Chak was the man to see.”
“You think you can afford the”—again he pauses—“licensing fees?”
“Tell me what you need.”
Loke bites on his lip and seems to drift into thought. He pushes the sleeves of his sweater up on his arms and slowly gets out of his chair. He walks around the desk and comes to a stop behind Hazel.
When his voice comes, it’s lower.
“There’s the entrance fee itself. It’s based on a per-person setup.” He places a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see what I can do about a discount in this case.”
She tries not to let him feel her muscles tighten under his palm.
“You’ll have to clear whatever franchises you want to work through me. We’ll want forty percent of your gross the first twelve months. We’ll renegotiate after that. You’ll have some start-up costs at first and we’re not out to make you starve.”
He starts to rub at her neck lightly.
“What else?” she asks, keeping an even voice.
He slides a hand inside her T-shirt, takes hold of her right breast, runs his thumb over her nipple. She lets out a heavy breath but stays quiet.
“All organizations,” Loke says, his own breath audible, “have some initiation rites.”
He pushes himself up against the back of her chair, starts to run his free hand through her hair.
“Rites,” Hazel repeats.
“We’re going to have to see a demonstration of some sort,” he says. “Show us you mean business. Show us some skills.”
“It’s taken care of,” Hazel says. “We’ve already picked someplace to hit.”
“Then there’s only one more piece of business,” Loke says, taking his hand from her hair and grabbing the back of her T-shirt, pulling her out of the chair and down onto the floor. She rolls onto her back and he gets on his knees, straddling her at her waist.
“You have any problems taking a Hyena?” he says, starting to pull off his Yale sweater.
Hazel shakes her head.
“Very good,” Loke says. “You’re going to love this neighborhood.”
12
Speer’s apartment is at the southern end of Bangkok Park, down off Brinkley Boulevard, a one-room studio in the basement of a five-story red brick monster built in the early twenties. Because of the building’s location and the position of the apartment’s two tiny rectangular windows, very little sunlight ever makes it inside. Speer thinks it would be the perfect place to raise mushrooms.
He pays two fifty a month to the super, who everyone calls Corny, an Armenian guy of indeterminate age who wears a purple eye patch and never speaks except to say gaddahm welfare state. The rent does not include heat, but the apartment gets the benefit of the two enormous cast-iron furnaces on the other side of the interior wall. Once or twice a week, always in the middle of the night, one of the furnaces will start an awful banging and thrashing, often punctuated with an excruciating series of pauses to deceive the tenants into thinking it’s always about to stop. Speer doesn’t mind the racket anymore. He’s almost ready to admit to himself that he welcomes it as a signal that things haven’t changed, that he’s still where he was when he went to sleep. Usually the banging pulls him out of a nightmare.
The apartment came semifurnished with a single metal-frame bed, an aluminum patio table that Speer uses as a desk, a wicker rocking chair painted kelly green, a five-drawer bureau with cardboard backing, a mini, dorm-style refrigerator, and a gas stove. To this he added a wall mirror that he hung over the bureau, the original Mr. Coffee he and Margie had received as a wedding gift, his collection of bound back issues of Ham Man Digest, and his radio equipment: a Kenwood R-5000 receiver, a Tascam recorder, and a set of Koss Pro 75 headphones.
Two weeks after he moved in, Speer gave Corny fifty dollars to allow a Dymek antenna to be bolted to the chimney up on the roof. He secured the coaxial lead to a drainpipe that ran down the corner of the building, then brought the wire in through the sidewalk-level window. Now, on a good day, he can monitor as far away as Nigeria. But Speer isn’t interested in most of the chat and babble found around the dial. He usually zeros in on a handful of frequencies. He listens for sounds that the hobbyists ignore. He strains to pull in the obscure and unclear.
Right now, for instance, it’s 4 A.M. and he’s sitting on the red Naugahyde seat of a metal stool and delicately turning the tuner knob on his Kenwood. Open flat on the kitchen table is a spiral-bound notebook, a standard 8½ × 11 schoolboy job, college-ruled and a red-line margin down the left side of each page. On the front cover, on the appropriate line, Speer has printed his name in block letters with a black felt-tip pen. On the inside of the front cover, running down in a neat column, is a series of numbers:
Frqcy (KHz)
3060
Spnsh
3090
Sp
4642
Frnch
4770
Grain
10450
Krn
14947
Gr
23120
Gr
Speer wears a starched T-shirt, the pants to one of his suits, and felt moccasins on his feet. From a water glass on the table he takes a pen, a Papermate metal roller fine-point. He picks it up as if it were a knife, maybe a scalpel, as if he could injure himself by mishandling it. He uncaps the pen and places it on the notebook page, reaches up, and turns on the radio. He spins the tuning knob with the side of his index finger, stops at the desired frequency, adjusts volume and squelch, then sits motionless for a moment as a voice enters the room from the speaker. It’s a female voice with a heavy Spanish accent. He finds it impossible to determine the speaker’s age. He tries to prevent his mind from forming a picture of the woman. He wants to concentrate solely on the voice, the words that come to his ears.