Number One Son snatched up the dynamite before the dynamite could blow up the snatch. He tossed it back out the window. A moment later there came the sound of a dull explosion from the street below.
Penny, her eyes still closed, was unaware of what had transpired. “Why do you delay, my lover,” she asked, wriggling her hips primitively. “Why do you make me Wait?”
“Tong delay you,” Number One Son explained tersely.
“Who is she and what has she got to do with it?” Penny wanted to know.
As Number One Son puzzled over Penny’s puzzlement, the breakdown in communications was kept from expanding on that particular level by the sudden arrival on the scene of a shrieking Oriental bearing a live hand grenade in each hand. He’d leaped through the window from the house next door and his arms were stretched out like a dive-bombing Zero. Number One Son quickly grabbed him by the cockpit and rudder and sent him flying out the way he’d come.
“What the dickens was that?” Penny’s eyes were open now—wide open!
“Kamikaze,” Number One Son told her as he leaned out the window and nodded to himself with satisfaction as the hand grenades went off in mid-air. He wiped off bits of diced assassin from his chin and added, “King Tong,” as if that should make everything clear to Penny.
“King Tong? But what’s he doing here? What does he think this is? The Empire State Building, or something?”
“My father attacking fortune cookie bakery to rescue honorable brother. So now King Tong counter-attacking my father’s house. The day is at hand. The Communist struggle begin.”
“But aren’t you going to finish what you started with me?” Penny asked plaintively.
“So sorry. No time for sex now. Communism come first.”
“Ooohhh!” Penny yelled her frustration. “Screw Communism!”
“No time even for that.” Number One Son strode to the bureau, opened a drawer, and took out a sharp hatchet. “Must join fray,” he told Penny, pausing in the doorway to the bedroom on his way out. “Must make sure Chinese junk carefully guarded.”
“You mean some dumpy boat is more important to you than I am?”
“Not boat. Junk. Opium. Very important. Must go now.” He turned and left.
“Rotsa ruck!” Penny called out after him bitterly. And for once the usually fair-minded darling girl didn’t care if she did sound chauvinistic.
Alone now, she became more aware of the holocaust bursting. A laundry truck converted into a tank rumbled down the street. And everywhere hatchets flew through the air.
Penny began to realize that it might be very dangerous indeed to stay around the house of Kim Asutra. As a matter of fact, she decided, it might be wisest to get out of Chinatown altogether. So the darling girl went downstairs and searched until she found the closet containing the mink she’d borrowed from Scarlett Amber. She was impelled by her innate honesty to take off the Chinese kimono Kim had loaned her and to fold it neatly and leave it where she was sure it would be found. Then, dressed as she was when she’d come, in the too-short mink coat and riding boots, she slipped out the front door into the night of Oriental violence.
Scurrying between the rain of dropping hatchets and flying bullets and shells, she made her way through the narrow streets to the outskirts of Chinatown. The last of these twisting streets brought her out on the Bowery, and the battle was behind her. The sounds of it, however, still rumbled in the distance.
These noises were clearly audible to the occupants of the police patrol car Penny passed as she started up the Bowery. “It sounds like there’s trouble in Chinatown,” the rookie cop remarked to the wizened old sergeant. “Do you think we should check on it?”
“That I don’t, laddie,” the wise old sergeant answered. “You don’t want to be messin’ ’round with them Chinese fellers. They’ve a nasty way of carvin’ up policemen, shavin’ ’em so to speak, ’til there’s nothin’ left but chopped fuzz.”
“But it sounds like a full-scale Tong war!”
“Nonsense, me bucko. ’Tis nothin’ but the Chinese New Year. Let’s not be troublin’ ourselves about it.”
“I suppose you’re right. Gee,” the young officer sighed nostalgically, “I sure wish they hadn’t transferred us out of Central Park.”
“ ’Twas certainly a dirty shame. A few more minutes an’ I would have had that solitaire game licked for sure.”
“That’s because you cheat,” the rookie reminded him.
“Well, I used to be attached to the Vice Squad. Ahh, those were the good old days all right, all right . . .”
Penny was well past them by now, trudging up the Bowery with the air of a girl who has sampled too much of the bitterness of defeat life has to offer. Smudged with the dirt of battle from her flight, weary of a night filled with one disappointment after another, all hope of devirginization gone from her, the unfortunate lass felt that she had arrived at her fate, her empty, empty fate. To be a derelict wandering the Bowery seemed—in that bleak moment — to be all that was left for her.
But the moment passed. Penny was young and resilient. Pessimism was too foreign to her nature for her to give in to it for long. And if what replaced it had overtones of cynicism, then it should be remembered that this too was only a step on the road back to her natural optimism.
This step was taken when Penny burst into song. Plodding up this street of regrets, sliding down the razor blade of life, the darling girl still was able to pluck from her bosom a melody. She glanced upward, was struck by the fact that the Third Avenue Elevated Structure had been removed, and began to warble Noel.
It wasn’t seasonal, but it suited Penny’s mood. For her, indeed, there had been no “L”. There had been no lewdly lecherous liquefying love. There had been no lascivious, licentious lust. There had been no lessening of her libido, no loosing of the lightning in her loins. There had been no “L”, and she sounded her lament to the stars.
“Noel, Noel ” And there was hope in the song if Penny could but hear it. For this is what it might have said to her:
“Yes, virgin, there is a Santa Claus!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THUS, A—CAROLING in the summer night, Penny’s spirits were raised. This change in mood seemed to direct her wanderings. She crossed the Bowery and walked east. Soon she found herself on Mulberry Street in the heart of the Lower East Side’s Little Italy. Turning into a side street, she spied a pitiful little park, really just a bench or two, a sparse olive tree and a drinking fountain.
Becoming aware of how grubby she must look, Penny crossed over to the park. She lifted the tail of the mink, intending to dip it in the water from the drinking fountain so that she might wash her face and hands. But, as she turned the spiggot, the diabolically timed pressure built into the convenience by the city’s Department of Public Works loosed a geyser full in her face.
Penny backed off, dripping. She approached the drinking fountain again, cautiously. She turned the handle slowly. Nothing happened. She turned it a little farther. The smallest trickle appeared. She bent low to sip at the trickle. Immediately, a torrent of water exploded over her. It drenched her golden hair, the top part of the mink, and her lovely naked breasts where the jacket had parted as she tried to leap away from the sudden Niagara.
The droplets on her precious firm breasts were particularly uncomfortable to Penny. The summer night was warm, and the mink made her feel even warmer, so that the water on her bosom felt like the dew which collects on the ceiling of a steam room. To relieve this feeling, Penny stood beside the fountain, allowed the coat to fall open, and shook her full breasts firmly with both hands in an effort to dry them. It was while she was so engaged that a souped-up Ferrari screeched to a halt at the curb alongside the little park. The driver raised his sunglasses to take a better look at Penny. Then he leaped from the sports car without troubling to open the door. Unfortunately, the tail of the polo coat tossed so casually over his shoulders caught on the floor-shift of the car and he went sprawling on his face.