He had. In fact he’d never really considered that the Chinese men and women he had bribed for information would even admit to having talked to him. Why should they? He looked at the man. How little he understood these people. Then he smiled. How little they understood him.
Fine.
“Yeah, the Jew brats.”
“I was there then.”
“Did Silas keep a record of their names?”
“Of course.”
Robert waited but the man said nothing. He stared at the 1,000-yuan note. Robert put three more 1,000-yuan notes beside them. The man reached over and folded the bills together, then pocketed them. “Are these the proceeds from sales of the priceless cave frescos, books, and statues from my country’s glorious past?”
Again Robert found himself surprised. Odd that a gardener would be so well informed. He put on his best “fuck you” smile and said, “You wouldn’t be suggesting that I am involved in smuggling antiquities, would you?”
The man met Robert’s fuck-you smile with one of his own. “No – not suggesting – knowing.”
“Knowing what?”
“That you are a smuggler, Mr. Robert Cowens.”
A smuggler. Not a usual occupation for a nice Jewish boy. But then again Robert wasn’t all that nice and he wasn’t Jewish in the sense of being religious. In fact, he enjoyed referring to himself as an active and committed agnostic. Despite that, he was definitely a Jew – a card-carrying, yeah-but-is-it-good-for-Jews kind of tribal member.
A smuggler Jew.
He had first come to Asia four years ago when his law firm had insisted that there was big movie business to do in the far east. “Kung fooey films?” he’d asked. But when they showed him the grosses from the latest Jett Li film he’d whistled through the gap in his front teeth. Then they showed him the cheap cost of production. He calculated the net profit without their help. All he asked was, “When’s my flight?”
It was that night. He flew to Chicago then transferred planes. The JAL flight took him up the Mackenzie River, over the pole, then down to Hong Kong. He’d lived in Canada all his life but had never even remotely appreciated the vastness of the country until that trip. He didn’t even know where Great Slave Lake was until he saw it slide beneath the belly of the plane. It changed him. But not the way turning forty had changed him or the way leaving his wife had. He had touched the Plexiglas window of the plane and sensed the movement of time through the vibrations. He allowed himself to think about his recently deceased father – and their snooker games.
Robert used to play snooker with his father every Wednesday right up until six weeks before he died. They’d lunch together at his father’s golf club – his father still played well into his late eighties. Robert never played. The two of them would eat downstairs at the snack bar, then retreat to the large L-shaped room that was known as the men’s section. Truth be told, the women referred to it as the old men’s section. There were a few card tables, a glassed-in smoking area, a large-screen television usually tuned to a station that had stock quotes running across the bottom, and a single full-sized snooker table.
At the card tables, gin rummy was the game but bullshitting was the entertainment. The elderly Jewish men seated there were the last remnants of their kind. The very end of the European Jews in North America. “From whence we came,” Robert thought as he watched an old guy slam his cards down on the table and announce to the room, “I got a hard on for this one.” Robert looked back at the pool table where his father was carefully setting up the snooker balls. The man at the card table who had shouted was named Itch. Or at least that’s what he was called. Robert assumed he didn’t like the nickname. At least it could have been grammatically correct: Itchy. Well, whether that mattered to Itch or whether he did or didn’t like the appellation, Robert was certain of one thing about Itch. The man hadn’t had a hard on – for a card game or much of anything else – for quite some time.
Robert’s father broke the stack of red balls, being careful to hit the cue ball so it travelled back down table. Despite his age, Robert’s father was a good snooker player. For as long as Robert could remember, his father had been a good snooker player. As he walked over to the cue ball, Robert remembered how his father had convinced his crazy mother to allow him to buy a pool table for the basement of their house: “It will keep the boys out of the pool halls.”
Robert came down on the very first day the pool table arrived and grabbed a cue. His father took it from him and showed him how to form a bridge with his seven-year-old hand. He wouldn’t let Robert even hit a ball until he could glide the pool stick across his bridged fingers perfectly parallel to the green felt surface for a full three feet. That took more than a week of practice.
Robert never forgot the feel of finally hitting cue to ball. The solidity of it pleased him. But it was the pure mathematics of the game – the controlled, totally non-subjective reality of it – that hooked him. His father insisted that he learn how to play English billiards first. He blocked the pockets with plugs and put a red ball and a black ball and a white ball on the table. “The black is yours. The white is mine. The red is common. Now make your ball hit my ball, bounce off a rail, then hit the red. Each time you do, it’s worth two points.” There were no sinking balls in the game. Just caroms and spins to position your cue ball. Robert lost that first game 100 to 8. After three months of practice, his father finally removed the pocket plugs. He took three red balls and put them in an arc about a foot and a half away from a side pocket. Then he took the cue ball and put it down table on the snooker spot for the pink ball. “When you can pot each of those balls twenty times in a row without a miss, call me.” Then he left. It took Robert just under two months to accomplish this task.
Thereafter he and his father played nightly. Snooker. Only snooker. The only night he didn’t play with his father was on Thursdays when his father had his cronies over and there was big money changing hands in the basement – sometimes over single shots.
Robert remembered returning home one Thursday night after a summer evening of carousing with his high school friends and hearing his father and his buddies whooping it up downstairs. Maybe it was his desire to show off his skills with a cue stick – or maybe it was the false courage induced by the excellent Lebanese hashish that coursed through his veins – for whatever reason, Robert found himself downstairs – $120 of his hard-earned dollars on the table, a pool cue in his seventeen-year-old hands.
His father took every penny from him in less than an hour, then asked if he wanted to play double or nothing on three balls. Robert agreed. He never got to shoot in the game. As he left the basement, hurt and angry, his father spoke to him. “Two lessons, Robert. One, don’t ever make any decisions about money when you’re in that ‘condition,’ and two, you’ll pay me back every penny before you spend a single penny on anything else. Is that clear?” Robert nodded. His father patted his cheek hard and said, “Check on your mother before you go to bed. I don’t want her wandering the halls.”
Robert ignored the order, assuming his father must have been light on his insulin dosage that day. His mother had been dead for some eight years at that point. Robert didn’t ignore the rest of the order though, and paid back every penny he owed his father. And $240 was a fortune to a seventeen year old in 1965. But the lesson was worth the cost he thought, as his father’s liver-spotted hands began to shake causing his cue to tap a red ball to his left. All those years later, Robert once again worried that his father had forgotten to take his insulin shot.
Snippets of conversations floated over from the card table: