'Oh my, a Spanish whore,' Isaac said. He was letting all this roll off his back. This wasn't dirty fighting, it wasn't even fighting. Hamilton was just feinting, seeing could he get a rise without exerting too much effort. Isaac was the one with the power to punch below the belt today. Isaac was the one who insisted on knowing why Hamilton had handed fifty big ones to a spic.
'I thought you knew the Spanish were not to be trusted,' Isaac said
Of course, Hamilton might just tell him to fuck off.
'A race that writes on walls,' Isaac said.
'You are not making sense, man,' Hamilton said.
'It's a cultural thing,' Isaac said. 'Writing on walls. They also stare at women. It's all cultural. Go look it up.'
'Come look up my asshole,' Hamilton said.
'I might find a dozen roses up there,' Isaac said.
Both men laughed.
'With a card,' Isaac said.
Both men laughed again.
This was a homosexual joke. Neither of the men was homosexual, but they often made homosexual jokes, exchanged homosexual banter. This was common among heterosexual men, Harold. It happened all the time.
'To have trusted a spic,' Isaac said, shaking his head again. 'Whose credentials you never thought to . . .'
'He was checked,' Hamilton said.
'Not by me.'
'He was checked,' Hamilton said again, hitting the word harder this time.
'If so, he was . . .'
'Thoroughly,' Hamilton said.
And glared at Isaac.
Isaac didn't flinch.
'If I had checked the man . . .' he said.
'You were in Baltimore,' Hamilton said.
'It could have waited till I got back.'
'Visiting your Mama,' Hamilton said.
'There was no urgency . . .'
'Running home to Mama for Christmas.'
He was getting to Isaac now. Isaac did not like to think of himself as a Mama's Boy. But he was always running down to see his mother in Baltimore.
'Running home to eat Mama's plum pudding,' Hamilton said.
Somehow he made this sound obscenely malicious.
'While you,' Isaac said, 'are having a spic checked by ... who checked him, anyway?'
'James.'
'James!' Isaac said.
'Yes, James. And he ran the check in a very pro . . .'
'You picked James to do this job? James who later used baseball bats on this very same . . .'
'I didn't know at the time that lames would later fuck up,' Hamilton said frostily. 'You were in Baltimore. Someone had to do the job. I asked James to check on him. He came back with credentials that sounded okay.'
'Like?'
'Like no current affiliations. A freelancer. No police record. A courier once, long ago, for the Chang people. I figured . . .'
'Chinks are not to be trusted, either,' Isaac said.
'No one is to be trusted,' Hamilton said flatly. 'You didn't know what the situation was, you were in Baltimore . I had to operate on my instincts.'
'That's right, I didn't know what the situation was.'
'That's right.'
'And I still don't.'
'That's right, too.'
'All I know is Herrera stole the fifty.'
'Yes, that's all you know.'
'Do you want to tell me the rest?'
'No,' Hamilton said.
* * * *
The Ba twins had been Hamilton's idea, too.
They were named Ba Zheng Shen and Ba Zhai Kong, but people outside the Chinese community called them Zing and Zang. They were both twenty-seven years old, Zing being the oldest by five minutes. They were also extraordinarily and identically handsome. It was rumored that Zing had once lived with a gorgeous redheaded American girl for six months without her realizing that he and his brother were taking turns fucking her.
Zing and Zang knew that if the Chinese ever took over the world -which they did not doubt for a moment would happen one day - it would not be because Communism was a better form of government than democracy; it would be because the Chinese were such good businessmen. Zing and Zang were young and energetic and extremely ambitious. It was said in Chinatown that if the price was right, they would kill their own mother. And steal her gold fillings afterward. The very first time the Ba twins had killed anyone was in Hong Kong five years back when they were but mere twenty-two-year-olds. The price back then had been a thousand dollars American for each of them.
Nowadays, their fee was somewhat higher.
Back in December, for example, when Lewis Randolph Hamilton first contacted them regarding a courier named José Domingo Herrera, he'd offered them a flat three thousand dollars for messing up the little Puerto Rican and retrieving the fifty thousand dollars he would be carrying. Zing and Zang looked Hamilton straight in the eye - they were more inscrutable-looking than most Chinese, perhaps because they carried their extraordinary good looks with a defiant, almost challenging air - and said the price these days for moving someone around was four thousand for each of them, a total of eight thousand for the job, take it or leave it. Hamilton said he wasn't looking for God's sake, mon, to dust the little spic, he only wanted him rearranged a trifle. Eight thousand total, the Ba boys said, take it or leave it. Hamilton rolled his eyes and sighed heavily. But he took it.
Which made them wonder.
What they were wondering was the same thing Herrera had wondered when he'd been hired by Hamilton to carry the fifty K: Why is this man not using one of his own people to do this job? Why is he paying us eight thousand dollars for something his own goon squad can handle?
They also wondered how they could turn this peculiar situation to their own advantage.
The first way they figured they could pick up a little extra change was to contact the intended victim, this José Domingo Herrera character, and tell him they were supposed to move him around a little on the twenty-seventh of December, which was two days after Christmas.
'New Year you be on clutches,' Zing said.
They both spoke English like Chinese cooks in a Gold Rush movie. This did not make them any less dangerous than they were. Pit vipers do not speak English very well, either.
Herrera, who was already wondering why Hamilton had hired him as a courier, now began wondering why these two fucking illiterate Chinks were telling him about the plan to cold-cock him. He figured they were looking for money not to beat him up. Play both ends against the middle. Which meant that the possibility existed he would lay some cash on them and they would beat him up, anyway. Life was so difficult in this city.
Herrera listened while they told him they wanted eight thousand dollars to forget their little rendezvous two weeks from now. Herrera figured this was what Hamilton was paying them to ambush him and take back his money. He'd been planning to steal the fifty he was delivering for Hamilton. Vanish in the night. Fuck the goddamn Jakie. But now these Chinks presented a problem. If they beat him up, they would take the fifty and return it to Hamilton. Leaving Herrera cold and broke in the gutter. On the other hand, if he paid them the eight . . .