When he opened the door to the hut the Lizards had given him and Liu Han, his nostrils twitched appreciatively. Something tasty was cooking, even if the vegetables that went with it would be strange and underdone for his taste. “Smells good,” he said, and added the Lizards’ emphatic cough.
Liu Han looked up from the pan in which she was cooking. It was, to Fiore’s way of thinking, a funny kind of pan, being shaped like the wide, conical hats a lot of Chinese wore. It had a funny name, too: she called it a walk. Whenever he heard that, he pictured the pan tossing away its bat and trotting down to first base.
Liu Han tilted the walk on its stand so he could see the bite-sized pieces of chicken in it. “Cooked with five spices,” she said. He nodded, smiling. He didn’t know what all five spices were, but they made for mighty tasty cooking.
After supper, he gave her the trade dollars Lo had paid him for learning the art of throwing straight. “He has other people he may want me to teach, too,” he said. “If they all pay as well as he did, that should keep us in groceries a good long while.”
He said it first in English, then added Chinese and Lizard words till he was sure she’d got the idea. When she talked to him, she used a Chinese frame padded with English and Lizard. As time passed, they gained more and more words in common.
She said, “If they pay silver like this Lo, I be fat even without baby.” She was starting to show now, her belly pressing against the cotton tunic that had been loose.
“Babe, you still look good to me,” he said, which made her smile. He got the idea she was surprised he kept wanting her even though she was pregnant. He hadn’t been sure he would, either, but the growing mound of her belly didn’t bother him. It meant he couldn’t just climb on top all the time, but doing it other ways was broadening his horizons.
Thinking about it made him want to do it. One nice thing about the way Liu Han cooked was that it didn’t leave him feeling as if he’d swallowed an anvil, the way pasta did sometimes. If you got too full, you had trouble staying interested in other things. As it was…
Before he could get up and head for the blankets on the kang, somebody knocked on the door. He made a sour face. Liu Han giggled; she must have known what was on his mind. “Whoever it is, I’ll get rid of him in a hurry,” he said, climbing to his feet.
But when he opened the door, there stood Lo with several other men behind him. Business, Fiore thought. He waved them in. Business counted, too, and Liu Han would still be there after they’d gone. Now she’d be hostess and interpreter. She offered the newcomers tea. Fiore still missed his coffee, thick with cream and sugar, but tea, he’d decided, would do in a pinch.
The last of the newcomers shut the door behind him. Lo and his Friends-six men in all-crowded the hut. They sat quietly and seemed polite, but the longer Fiore looked at them, the more he wished he hadn’t let them all in at once. They were all young and on the hard side and, with their silence, more disciplined than the usually voluble Chinese of the camp. He carefully didn’t glance over to the corner where he’d leaned his bat against the wall, but he didn’t let them get between him and it.
He knew about shakedowns. His uncle Giuseppe, a baker, had paid protection money for a while for the privilege of going to work every day without getting his arms broken. He wasn’t going to let that happen to him, not from a bunch of Chinamen. They could do their stuff on him tonight, but he’d have the Lizards on them tomorrow.
Then he realized the only one whose name he knew was Lo, and even Lo was only half a name. The rest-would he recognize them again? Maybe. Maybe not.
He grabbed the bull by the horns, asking, “What can I do for you guys? You’re interested in learning to throw the right way, yeah?” He made a proper, full-arm throwing motion without any ball.
“We are interested in throwing, yes,” Lo answered through Liu Han. Then he asked a question of his own: “Are you and your woman lackeys and running dogs of the little scaly devils or just their prisoners?”
Bobby Fiore and Liu Han looked at each other. Though he had been thinking of siccing the Lizards on these guys if they turned out to be hoodlums, that question had only one possible answer. “Prisoners,” he said, and mimed holding his hands up to the bars of a cell.
Lo smiled. So did two or three of his buddies. The others just sat, still and watchful. Lo said, “If you are prisoners, you must want to help the oppressed peasants and workers strike a blow for freedom.”
Liu Han’s translation wasn’t anywhere near as smooth as that. Fiore cocked his head to one side anyway. Traveling through small and medium-sized towns in an America staggered by the Depression, he’d heard plenty of guys standing on crates at street corners who talked like that. He pointed a finger at Lo. “You’re a Red, that’s what you are-a Communist, a Bolshevik.”
Liu Han didn’t recognize any of the English (or Russian). She stared and spread her hands, at a loss to interpret. But one of the terms made sense to Lo. He nodded soberly to Bobby Fiore, as if to say he was smarter than the Chinese had figured. Then he spoke to Liu Han, letting her know what was going on.
She didn’t gasp as if she’d just seen a rat scurry across the floor, the way a lot of American women would have. She just nodded and tried to explain to Fiore, then fell silent when she realized he already understood. “They not bad,” she told him. “They fight Japanese, more than Kuomintang does.”
“Okay,” he said. “The Reds were on our side before the Lizards came, sure. And everybody wants to give them a good swift kick. But what do these guys want with me?”
Lo didn’t answer, not with words. Instead, he nudged one of his comrades. The young man reached under his tunic and pulled out a grenade. He didn’t say anything, either. He just let it sit in the palm of his hand.
Bobby didn’t need more than a heartbeat before the light went on in his head. He started to laugh. “So you want me to do your pitching for you, huh?” he said, not caring that neither Lo nor Liu Han understood what he was talking about. “I wish Sam Yeager was here. You think my arm’s hot stuff, you oughta see his.”
Lo politely waited till he was done before speaking. Liu Han hesitantly translated: “They want you-” She forgot the English for throw, but made a gesture to show what she meant. Fiore nodded. Then she pointed at the grenade.
“Yeah, I already worked that out,” Fiore said. He’d worked out some other things, too: if he said no, for instance, he and Liu Han were liable to end up wearing whatever Chinamen used for concrete overshoes. This wasn’t just a shakedown. If he said no, he was a big danger to these people. From everything he’d ever heard, Bolsheviks didn’t let people who were dangerous to them keep walking and breathing.
And besides, he didn’t want to say no. He wished he could have chucked some grenades at the Lizards back in Cairo, Illinois, after they caught him the first time. That would have kept him out of this whole mess. Even though he did care for Liu Han, he would have given a lot to be back in the good old U.S. of A.
Since he couldn’t have that, giving the little scaly bastards a hard time here on the other side of the world would have to do. “So what do you want me to blow up?” he asked Lo.
Maybe the Red hadn’t expected such enthusiastic cooperation. He talked in low tones with his friends before he turned back to Liu Han. She sounded worried as she told Fiore, “They want you to go with them. No say where.”
He wondered if he ought to insist that Lo tell Liu Han where he’d be. After a second’s doubt, he decided that would be stupid. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t tell anybody, especially the Lizards… and, if she didn’t know, the Reds would have less reason to come after her to shut her up in case things went wrong.