Strega - Andrew H. Vachss [13]
The light changed. The Plymouth rolled forward until I spotted Roscoe standing on the divider, a bunch of papers in one hand, a big canvas bag held by a thick strap around his neck. Roscoe's about thirty, too old to be selling papers.
He recognized the car—looked close to be sure he recognized the driver too.
"Paper, mister?"
"Yeah, give me The Wall Street Journal," I said, holding a twenty out toward him at the same time.
"Oh, yeah. I got one around here someplace," he mumbled, rummaging in his canvas bag.
While he was looking down at his bag, I did a quick scan of the streets, knowing he was doing the same. Nothing. I reached my left hand out for the paper Roscoe was holding over the open top of his bag, snapped the twenty toward him, and dropped the sawed–off into his bag at the same time. Gravity is one law nobody fucks with.
Roscoe comes honestly by his name, if not his income. I tossed yesterday's News on the front seat and drove off, heading for Chinatown. I don't like to carry heat across the border.
7
THE CHINATOWN streets were just getting organized: young men pushing hand trucks loaded with fresh vegetables, older women lumbering toward another day in the sweatshops. I spotted Hobart Chan cruising the Bowery in his sable Bentley, a shark looking for blood in the water. Even gangsters go to work early in Chinatown.
I rolled past Mama's checking the front window. The white dragon tapestry was in place—everything cool inside. I tooled through the narrow alley and left the Plymouth in its usual spot, right underneath some Chinese writing on the wall that warned the local hoods not to park there. It didn't bother me—it was Max's writing.
I went through the kitchen and into the back like I usually do. When I opened the door, one of Mama's alleged cooks smoothly slipped his hand inside his white coat—he pulled it back empty when he recognized me. I walked to the front, pulled the two–star edition of the News from underneath the register, and walked to my table in the back, next to the kitchen. No one approached my table pretending to be a waiter, so Mama was around someplace. I read through last night's race results from Yonkers and waited.
I caught a shadow across the newspaper and looked up. It was Mama—looking as though she just stepped out of a 1950s beauty parlor, hair black and glossy in a tight bun at the back of her head, plain high–collared blue silk dress that almost covered her shoes, a jade necklace setting off her dark–painted lips. She's somewhere between fifty and ninety years old.
"So, Burke. You come to eat?"
"To eat and to see Max, Mama. He around?"
"Burke, you know Max not come around so much anymore. Not since he take up with that bar girl. You know that bar girl—the one from Vietnam?"
"Yeah, I met her."
"That girl no good for Max, Burke. He not keeping his mind on business—not reliable like before, right?"
"He's okay, Mama. There's no problem."
"You wrong, Burke. Plenty problems. Problems for me, problems for Max, maybe problems for you, okay?"
"I'll talk to him," I told her, more to stop this broken record than anything else.
"Yes, you talk to him. I talk to him, he not listen, okay?"
"Okay. You got any hot–and–sour soup?"
But even the mention of her favorite potion didn't calm her down. Mama was a businesswoman in her heart. She wanted me to get on Max's case about the girl, but she hadn't been there when they first met. I had.
WE WERE working the box system that night on the subway: me lying across three empty seats on the uptown express, dressed in my Salvation Army suit and a smashed old fedora, Max right across from me wearing an old raincoat, staring straight ahead like he was on his way to some early–morning cook's job, the Mole at the other end of the car, Coke–bottle lenses fixed on pages and pages of