Year of the Dog (4 page)

Chao’s

Chao’s was a cathouse in a renovated five-story condo building on a quiet part of Chrystie Street near the old junkie park. Lucky brought along one of the Prada bags and dropped a fistful of Ecstasy pills inside it.

Angelina Chao, fortyish, a one-time Hong Kong hostess, ran the tidy little show out of her two-bedroom suite on the fifth floor, with a balcony that looked out over the park and the jumbled maze of rooftops in the distance. Angelina rotated a posse of Asian pussy from Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New Orleans.

Appetizers,
blowjobs, were fifty bucks a pop.

Chaos,
mused Lucky, playing the thought off of Angelina’s last name. He had called ahead to Angelina and she’d assured him he’d be the new girl’s first suck off of the night. Earlier, he had heard some out-of-town gamblers laughing about a
jop-jung
mixed-breed girl, a
fresh
one over at Angelina’s, a half-Cuban half-Chinese
ho
who performed something called a “yingyang” or “blackout” blowjob. Some johns had actually passed out.
What? She knew how to squeeze a john’s balls just right,
at just the right moment while she was sucking the head so that the
juices exploded out as she drained it dry.

He considered wearing a condom, and saw himself as test- ing the new merchandise, seeing what the girl’s skills were, sort of like quality control.

Lefty and Kongo waited in the car, patiently aware that the basements on Mott Street would be the next stop.

Lucky didn’t see any johns hanging around and Angelina waved him into one of the bedrooms. There was a twin bed, a nightstand, and a chair in one corner. The bedspread, the carpet, the curtains, were all red.

He stood by the door and rebuckled his belt after running it through the loop handle of the Prada bag. He swallowed an Ecstasy and waited. After a few minutes the
jop-jung
girl came in through a connecting door. She saw the Prada bag dangling in front of Lucky’s crotch and smiled. When she let her red silk gown slip off her shoulders, Lucky saw she was naked, a bodacious tanned body with an exotic face that displayed the best of her two bloodlines. Feline brown eyes and lips that were puffy, swollen, and sexy. Long silky black hair that shimmered when she turned her face.

She knelt down before him and unbuckled his belt, carefully placing the Prada bag to one side, never taking her eyes off him even as she unzipped his fly. She tugged down his pants, and pulled his
lun
cock out, caressing it with her French-tip fingernails.

“Dios mio,”
she exclaimed softly,
“Nei dai sai.” My god, how big
you are,
playing him along in two languages.

“Nei ho yeh,”
he answered sarcastically.
“You’re the winner.
I heard you’re the best.”

She smiled again, licked her lips, and then ran her tongue in a circle around the head of his cock. She licked it until it was swollen, and proceeded to suck him slow and strong.

The Ecstasy was working against the
sensimilla
now, working him like a yo-yo.

He felt the strength draining from his arms, his legs, all his blood rushing toward his cock, his heart pumping hard to keep things working. The shortness of breath caught him as he saw the mass of shiny black hair bobbing up and down at his stomach. She tightened her lips and deep-throated him. The pressure was building in his head, ready now. She was stroking his shaft, caressing his balls with her other hand. His orgasm exploded into her mouth, four, five, six loads. The noise he heard was his own groaning, the sweet anguish throbbing in his loins.

He was sucking in air through his nostrils, his mouth gasping like a fish, his thighs quivering as he braced his back against the door. He let his heart slow down as he came back to earth. When she turned her head he saw a sweet face, contemplating her palms. She looked up at him with her big brown eyes, then opened her mouth, and tilted her head to let the thick milky jism spill over her lower lip, her tongue pushing the spittle and saliva out into her palms. A thick translucent strand clung to her chin. She smiled and wiped it off with the back of her hand. Reaching into the nightstand, she took out a small towelette and wiped the stickiness off his shaft. There was no need for words and he watched her as she turned, still on all fours, crawling her way off with the red gown and the Prada bag in tow, giving him a rear view of her departing pussy. She stood up at the connecting door, and their eyes met a last time before she exited the room.
China-cubana.

He took a deep breath, pulled his pants up, zipped his fly, and after a few shaky steps, made his way back to the frozen night and the black car.

* * *

It was a short ride back from Chrystie to Mott Street, so Lucky left the window open, the cold wind on his face working with the Ecstasy, refocusing his mind.

The On Yee always collected cash off the streets before holiday weekends, and squared up the Chinese accounts, before the crush of waiters crowded into the gambling dens, their pockets fat with Thanksgiving Dinner tip money from the
gwailo
white devils.

When they reached Bayard Street, it was almost ten-thirty, early yet for the gambling crowd. Lefty parked the Riviera on Mulberry, facing north, and out
,
toward the Holland Tunnel or the Manhattan Bridge, a quick left or right if they needed to bust out of Chinatown.

Lucky, Lefty, and Kongo walked onto Mott and the street was quiet except for the shrill whistle of the arctic wind.

They went into Number Nine basement first.

The basement was brightly lit, and Lucky saw one mahjong game underway, but otherwise there was only a smattering of the association’s cronies hanging around making lowball bets just to keep the action going. It was cold out, and anyway, the night was young for the night crawlers, he thought.

Kongo gave the fake Marlboros to the house manager and stood to one side, overlooking the one active table of thirteen-card poker. There were no players at the fan-tan or
paigow
tables, and the dealers were smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and watching Chinese cable television. Lefty took the Ecstasy pills over to Number Sixty-Six basement, where other Ghosts would package them into small plastic baggies before delivery to local karaoke joints and uptown discos and dance clubs.

Lucky dropped another hit of Ecstasy, and then chased it with a shot of Johnnie Black. He waited as the managers tallied their accounts. The players would show up soon enough so the basements would be jammed again, and he still wanted to place a hot bet with the Chinese bookie at the OTB, but the troubles out at East Broadway kept bouncing to the front of his mind and crowded out the images of blowjobs and bodacious bodies. Instead, he saw a crew of incompetent Ghosts, thought about Koo Jai—Kid Koo—and called his pager. Lefty came back with a suitcase of cash for the manager and turned it over to the house accountants. Then he swallowed an Ecstasy and stood next to Kongo by the door, watching the house take money off the card table.

Lucky watched them all, but he was feeling impatient, thinking about
face,
and the far end of East Broadway.

OTB

The Chinatown OTB branch was the highest performing betting parlor on the Lower East Side, grossing a hundred thousand a day, while serving the biggest volume of gamblers in the city. That volume did not include the large number of Chinese gamblers who placed their bets with the Chinese bookies working the streets outside the OTB.

The average Chinese gambler, who didn’t speak much English other than the name of the horse and maybe the track where the race would be held, preferred the services of the Chinese bookies. These bookies offered a 10-percent discount on bets of ten dollars or more, and unlike OTB, did not require that a W2-G tax form be completed, and a driver’s license and a social security card be provided for winnings above six hundred dollars.

No illegal Chinese, no
prudent
Chinese, was going to furnish that information, especially since many of the old-timers placed exotic bets that were more difficult to win, but which would generally pay out more than six hundred.

Fong
Sai Go—
fourth brother Fong—considered himself a bookmaker,
johng ga,
but in reality he was only a
teng jai,
a small sampan, in the vast ocean of illegal Chinese gambling. He was a small-time Chinatown bookie, sanctioned to work the main OTB by his village association cronies who owned the building from which the OTB operated. The other family associations went along, and the tongs didn’t make a fuss as long as they got their piece of the action.

Sai Go held the gold-plated metal card in his hand, running his thumbnail over the dragon and the Goddess of Mercy etchings, over the Chinese words on either side of this Buddhist talisman, a gold credit card–sized panel of metal featuring laser-etched phrases:
cheut yop ping on,
or “peace be with you,” and
“
a safe journey always.” He began to consider the irony of how the
bot gwa,
talisman, had failed him, when he noticed the front end of the betting floor filling up, the frigid cold outside driving indoors the throng of Chinese waiters and kitchen staff just come off the late shift.

Sai Go stood off to one side, where he had a good view of the wide-frame color television monitors showcasing holiday horse racing from Golden Gate, Los Alamitos, Delta Downs. The overseas action from Down Under—Sydney, Melbourne, Caulfield—would come later, but in Hong Kong, races from the Happy Valley track, and from the Sha Tin oval in China, were getting ready to be run.

He put away the talisman and saw that it was well after midnight. A few more gamblers came in and joined the noisy smelly mix of men in
meen nop
cotton-padded vests and down jackets shaded gray, brown, black—the somber tones of the working class. There was the faint burnt smell of dead cigarettes on the sticky linoleum covering the floor.

A crew of young Chinatown gangbangers came in, wearing black down coats and punky haircuts. Several wore black racing gloves with the fingers cut off. They fanned out through the betting parlor, and Sai Go instinctively brushed his hand back to feel for the box-cutter steel in his rear pocket. He felt better when he saw Lucky, the
dailo,
step into the room with another crew of Ghosts.

Lucky spotted him immediately, went in his direction. The crowd parted for the dark phalanx that escorted him, eight crazies and a big dark-skinned Malay.

Sai Go thought about the pad in his pocket as the crew came to the back of the house. He decided not to reach into his jacket as they circled him.

“I want a thousand on Ming Sing, to win,” said Lucky, “in the second race at Happy Valley.”

“Ming Sing,” Sai Go repeated, acknowledging the bet.

“Any action on that yet?” from Lucky.

“You’re the first,” Sai Go answered, waiting for his moment to change the subject.

Lucky had overheard one of the uncles explaining how the fix was in, and how Ming Sing,
movie star,
a three-year-old gelding from Australia, was an eight-to-one payout. Lucky didn’t catch the details but figured that the Hong Kong triads had probably kidnapped a family member or relative of a jockey, or trainer, and maybe paid off or coerced other jockeys to hold back or block out for the “fixed” winner.

Lucky didn’t stress any of that, or the big bet, win or lose. He was putting back into play the fifteen-hundred winnings he’d just taken out of the Mott Street basements.

Sai Go said, “You can catch it on the satellite channel . . .”

Lucky already knew that, but held his eyes on Sai Go while firing up a Marlboro.

“So what’s this problem you have? Lucky asked, exhaling smoke. “One of the boyz owes you money?” He could see that Sai Go was relieved, appreciative that the gang leader was addressing the situation.

“It’s that kid, he’s about your height.
Leng jai,
a good-looking kid. They call him Koo, or cool, something like that.”

Lucky was careful to downplay his own curiosity. “But how come you gave him that much play?” Lucky said, more an admonishment than a question.

“He bet a few times before this,” Sai Go countered. “And he always had money. A few thousand was no problem.”

Lucky blew out the cigarette smoke in a tight stream. “A few thousand walking-around cash, huh?”

“Correct,” answered Sai Go.

Both men were quiet a long moment. Sai Go spoke first.

“It’s just that he said he wasn’t going to pay me. In front of all the bettors. He didn’t give me any face to work with, and—”

“I’ll take care of it,” Lucky interrupted,
“gau dim,
done. You said a thousand, right?”

“Correct again,
dailo,”
said Sai Go, bowing slightly. Now he felt his blood pressure rising, tension starting to grab in his forehead.

Lucky jerked his head at the big Malay, flicked his Marlboro to the linoleum, and crushed it under his heel. The others made a path for him and they went back through the crowd.

Sai Go watched them leave as he penciled Lucky’s bet onto his pad of soluble tissue sheets. He could swallow the paper anytime and evidence of betting records would dissolve before reaching his stomach. There was a flash of dizziness and then he felt short of breath.
It’s the medication,
he thought,
the
gwailo
white
devil medicine that was supposed to cure even the worse of all diseases.

One of his cell phones blared a musical tune, and he readied his betting pad. It was Big Fat, calling in bets from the China Garden. In Sai Go’s peripheral view the ponies were thundering across the big color monitors. He was feeling lightheaded as he jotted down numbers next to the nickname Big Fat. He knew all his players by their nicknames.
Pai Kwut
was Spare Ribs.
Gee Jai,
Little Pig. All of them like that. The others would be calling in soon.

Hang in there,
he thought,
it’s just the medication.
He felt the need for some cold night air, and slowly made his way toward the shivering bodies at the front vestibule.