The hand is removed.
“Very well then. You are the boss, as they say.”
The passenger secures the high buttons on the collar of his tunic and raps on the window to signal that Otto should pull over. Otto steers the cab to the curb, doesn’t bother to shift into park. The passenger exits the taxi without payment or goodbye and disappears down an alley into one of the labyrinths of Bangkok Park.
4
Gilrein steers the Checker down Rome Avenue with one hand, tilts the bottle of Spark with the other. The hooch will cut into the real pain until tomorrow, then he’ll have to scrounge for some Demerol down at the Visitation. Worse comes to worst, he’ll head into Little Asia and pay retail to one of the storefront healers.
He aims for downtown and tries to put the past twelve hours into some kind of logical order. Things happen for a reason. Effect follows cause. As Ceil used to say, Nothing is as random as it appears.
But Ceil is in the family plot three years now, buried next to Gilrein’s mother and father, an American flag folded into a stiff triangle of allegiance and cradled into what’s left of her arms like some surrogate for the child they never had.
At nine o’clock tonight, Gilrein was lying on his bed in the hayloft at Wormland, reading a page in one of Ceil’s books on Klaus Klamm for the third time, writing useless questions in a spiral notebook and thinking about having a nightcap. When the phone rang it was Leo Tani, calling, as always, from Huie Tang’s Visitation Diner. Twenty minutes later, Gilrein picked Tani up and was told to head for Gompers Station.
What would Ceil think of it?
Back when he was on the job, Gilrein rode Tani’s chubby ass as if he were God’s own cop, a plague designed specifically to make life unbearable for a midlevel fence with an insatiable appetite for the veal at Fiorello’s. Now he plays chauffeur to the ’Shank, hauling him from exchange to exchange and always pocketing the overgenerous tip.
Tonight was a standard drive — Tani climbed in the Checker dressed in one of his dozens of silk Michelozzi suits, smelling of musk and hazelnut and playing hail-fellow-well-met like a manic campaigner who’s just seen a big drop in the polls.
Leo the ’Shank loved to talk as much as he loved to eat and he had Gilrein circle the city for a half hour while he spieled, telling blue jokes, running down the backroom gossip from City Hall, mourning in a low, priestly voice, another rumor of death from St. Leon’s Grippe. And, once again, relaying his ambitions to one day write his memoirs. The whole freaking story, my friend, names and all. Leo seemed to love the word memoir, as if the sound of it alone conveyed the grandiosity of his life in the business.
When the hour came round, Gilrein was directed to Gompers Station. He wheeled the taxi off-street and crossed into the train yards, where a rupture seems to perpetually sprout in the chain-link fencing, then rolled into hiding behind a line of wheel-less boxcars and cut the engine. Tani adjusted his tie — red silk with baby calves patterned in white — pushed his hair back on his skull with two flat palms and told Gilrein he’d be back in fifteen minutes. Then Tani walked into the abandoned train station as if he was entering some embassy with news that could sink or save a nation.
He emerged before Gilrein could finish a single page of Klamm. Leo looked a good deal worse for the wear, his tie loosened, a film of sweat on forehead and upper lip.
He settled into the backseat, gestured with his head and said, “Let me tell you, Gilrein, there’s no talking to some people.”
The Checker deposited Leo in front of Mano Nero down on the far end of San Remo Avenue. Leo handed a fifty over the seat top and said, “You want to join me? I’m taking a goddamn bath in Gallzo.”
Gilrein begged off and headed for the all-night library branch at Sebond Square, found it closed without explanation. He thought about sampling some cuy at the Floating Kitchen, then realized he hadn’t yet heard of the restaurant’s current location. He even considered heading back to Wormland and going another round with Klamm, but he felt infected by Tani’s cloud of failure, gave up on the idea and changed direction.
So he settled for coffee in the rear booth at the Visitation, waited for his fellow indie hacks to show. Around midnight, Huie Tang took away Gilrein’s empty mug and said there was a fare waiting down on Voegelin for a lift. Recently, the two corporate fleets that dominate the cab trade in Quinsigamond — Red Rover Cab and Bunny Blackman’s Taxi & Limousine — stopped going into Bangkok Park after dark. That leaves all the Park calls to the last three independent taxis in town. For the indies, servicing Bangkok, day or night, is less a case of pride or stubbornness and much more something closer to existential disregard. At least it is for Gilrein. Though he’s never consciously admitted it to himself, every night run in Bangkok is a possible ticket to join Ceil. And, being a Catholic, it’s his only alternative to waiting out this lifetime.
Still, death is one thing and robbery another. And that’s why he continues to keep his service revolver mounted under the dash, the chamber fully loaded.
Gilrein headed for Voegelin. As always, the radio was tuned to the Canal Zone station whose playlist was limited to the recordings of Imogene Wedgewood. “Drunk on India Ink” was oozing through the cab as he pulled up to what should have been the right number, but instead was only the mouth to an unlit alleyway. As he reached under his seat to grab his street guide, the Checker door was pulled open and the meatboys hauled him into the alley before he could get hold of his piece.
The only thing he took away from the beating were these erupting bruises and the question, Where is the package?
Leo Tani hadn’t been carrying any package when he got in the cab. He didn’t have a package when he came out of Gompers.
But if Oster was right and the meatboys really did belong to August Kroger, there was only one thing the package in question could contain.
Huie Tang is a poor relation to the notorious Tang Family of Little Asia. Lately, the Tangs have ascended to neighborhood mayor status after the instability caused by the death of the legendary Dr. Cheng. Some years back Huie Tang had a falling out with his cousin Jimmy and lost his position supervising all the domino parlors of Chin Avenue. Something about a skim job that couldn’t be laid off on the underlings. For months Huie tried to wheedle his way back into the good graces of the clan, but when even Auntie Rose stopped speaking to him, he knew he was on his own.
Ashamed, he went to work managing Fritz Henry’s All-Night Diner and by the end of his first year he bought the lunch car, the restaurant license, and the extortion agreement with the health inspector. Now Huie’s plan is to use the diner as the cornerstone, the first step in challenging his ex-family and becoming a serious rival to his ungrateful cousin.
But slinging hash is a tough way to start unseating a mob dynasty, and until last month, Huie was starting to lose heart. It was the end of March and the diner was empty except for the one regular who took all his meals there — Father Clement, a senile Jesuit from St. Ignatius College. Huie had just served the old priest some grouper lo mein, then, on his way back to scrub the grill, he casually, absentmindedly, turned on the radio to WQSG and the local news hour. The diner filled up with an advertisement for a free introductory session of the Camisard Institute of Speed Reading Course at the Armory. And at some point in the midst of the announcer’s hyperbole, just after the voice on the radio promised astounding comprehension and increased recollection, Father Clement went crazy. He leapt up onto his table, sending fish and noodles to the floor. He began to wave his arms and scream out in a high-pitched cackle, stomping his sandal-clad feet, pointing furiously toward the radio with a dripping fork.