Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [74]
“All Chinese people not same, Burke. You know this, right?”
“I just meant, is it a cultural thing, Mama? Like when the Irish drink beer even when they don’t like it?”
“I don’t know. But Max like tea too. Very good for him.” I looked at Max. He made a face to say the stuff wouldn’t hurt him so what the hell. He reads lips so well that sometimes I think he only pretends not to hear.
“Well, that’s kind of what I meant. You’re Chinese, Max is Chinese, you both like tea . . .”
Mama giggled like I’d said something funny. “You think Max Chinese?”
“Sure.”
“You think all people from Far East Chinese?”
“Mama, don’t be—”
“Maybe you think Max Japanese?” Mama giggled again. Don’t ask me why, but Chinese people don’t like Japanese people. In fact, the only subject on which I’ve seen Orientals agree is that none of them seem to like Koreans.
“I know Max isn’t Japanese.”
“How do you know?”
I knew because one night Max and I were talking about being a warrior and what it meant, and I mentioned the samurai tradition and Max said he had nothing to do with that. He told me a samurai must fight for his lord and Max had no lord. I didn’t get all of it, but I knew he wasn’t Japanese. It made sense to me—if you’re going to do crime for a living, the only way is to be self-employed. But I just told Mama, “I know.”
Max looked over at Mama, bowed his head to show great respect for all things Chinese, and then made great mountain peaks with his hands and pointed at his chest. Mama and I said “Tibet” at the same time and Max nodded. What the hell, Max wasn’t any more of a citizen than I was.
Mama said she had to get back to business, and Max stood up to let her out of the booth, bowing and sitting back to face me again all in one motion. Mama looked at me, then at Max, and spread her hands in a gesture of frustration. Max nodded sharply to tell her that I would be all right, and she seemed satisfied. Then he put twenty fifty-dollar bills on the table next to my copy of the racing form. I pocketed eighteen of them, left the remaining two for him—ten percent is his usual transportation fee.
Max wasn’t going for that. He crooked the first two fingers of his right hand in a come-here gesture and I put my money back on the table. Then he extracted another two bills from my pile and motioned I was free to pocket the rest. Okay, so we each had a hundred on the table. So what?
Picking up the racing form, Max indicated that I should pick out a horse for that evening and we’d both invest. I made a variety of gestures to show him that I couldn’t always be expected to pick winners, but Max put his hands together in a prayerful attitude, pointed at me, and tapped his pocket. He was saying that I must be especially skillful since, after all, I’d won all this money.
The last thing I needed was Max’s silent sarcasm. Thus challenged, I whipped out a felt-tip pen and went to work on the form. Max sat down next to me and we spent the next hour or so going over the charts. I used some blank paper to demonstrate that although Yonkers and Roosevelt were both half-mile oval tracks, Yonkers had a much shorter stretch run. So a horse that fired late but lost at Yonkers because he just ran out of racetrack would have a shot at Roosevelt. Then I showed him the bloodlines of certain animals that seemed to run better in cooler weather. (You have to look for Down Under horses, from Australia or New Zealand—their biological clock is different from American horses because their summer is our winter.) I told him about high humidity making horses go faster, and the importance of post position. For pure guts, I told Max, all other things being equal, you have to go with a mare rather than a male horse.
When I finally checked my watch, hours had flown by. Max was as intent as ever. Finally we found a horse that had been running strong at Rockingham, up in New Hampshire, and was shipping in for the first time. A