Strip (20 page)

“Jeffrey!”

“I’m not a Jeffrey,” he said. “I’m a Jefferson.”

“Well, whoever you are, come on. Thousands of years of Chinese cooking and I have plans for tonight, and we’re waiting for you.” She snatched up a tissue from her vanity and whisked it across his cheek. “Missed a spot. Now you’re beautiful.”

She stepped past him to the dresser built into her walk-in closet and pulled out her big .45 pistol. She checked the magazine, clicked it back in, and put it in her purse.

“They’ll kill the chickens before we get there. You won’t need a gun.”

“Don’t you have yours?”

“Not on me. It’s in the trunk of my car with my stuff.”

She stopped and folded her arms. “Go get it. I’ll wait.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do.”

He studied her. She stared back up at him, unmoving.

“You’re weird about guns, aren’t you?”

“I could remind you that we robbed some armed guys last night and shot one of them. I could say there are circumstances and reasons right now why your being armed will make me feel safer.” She paused. “But yes. I’m weird about guns.”

“You might want to put your therapist to work on that one.”

She kept her head up and her eyes on him. “If you wanted me to wear a nurse’s uniform or a French maid costume or a skirt with no panties or something, I’d do it. So I think you should wear a gun for me.”

“Then so do I.” He went out to his car, got the gun from the outer pocket of his suitcase, and put it in the inner pocket of his black summer-weight sport coat. Carrie seemed to be a woman who never lost an argument.

She came out and got into the driver’s seat of her white car, and he got in beside her. He flashed the inside of his coat.

“There. Was that so hard to do?”

“Not so far. So where are we going?”

She backed out of the driveway, closed the garage door with the remote control, and headed down the hill. “I called some friends, and the word is that the Emerald Cloud Dragon is
la place du jour.
It’s actually pretty new, but it’s a version of a place the family owns in Taipei, which is a version of one they owned in Beijing until 1949. My friend said that about a month ago an important politician-slash-gangster from Taiwan had a reception there. He flew everybody to L.A. and then home two days later.”

“Your friends really know how to research a place. My friends would say ‘Stay away from the egg roll.’”

“This isn’t the kind of place where you stay away from things. It’s the equivalent of a two-star place in France. Maybe even three.”

“Am I dressed okay?”

“Have you got lots of other choices?”

“At the moment, no. I packed in kind of a hurry.”

“Then we’re just right.”

It was a long drive on the freeway from the Valley to Monterey Park. The freeway traffic moved in surges, pushing forward at seventy or seventy-five for a few minutes and then slowing to a complete stop. Carrie drove with the feral alertness of a Los Angeles native. She was quick to make a lane change to get around a slow-moving truck, but if she was trapped for a time, she waited without any outward sign of her impatience.

The trip was a pleasant change for Jeff, because he had almost forgotten what it was like not to be the driver. He got to study buildings and streets that he had only seen in flashes as he drove past at high speed. And he got to look at Carrie while she drove.

Unexpectedly, he thought about Lila. He had made a foolish mistake. This morning, when he was trying to keep her fooled about him, he had shown her the canvas bag of money that he had stolen last night. He had even made a point of spelling out the Bank of America name printed on the bag. In his attempt to persuade her, he had momentarily forgotten that the three men he had robbed worked at the strip club where she worked. The only reason he had known enough to steal the night’s receipts the first time was because Lila had worked at the club and he had seen her boss with a similar canvas money bag. Lila was not, by nature, a suspicious person, but she wasn’t stupid either, and right now she was hurt and angry. She was probably thinking about him a lot today, finding fault with everything he had ever said or done. Could she fail to notice that the bag that had been stolen and the bag that he’d shown her were both from the Bank of America?

“Why are you so quiet?”

“I was wondering why things happen the way they do. You know, unexpectedly.”

“I think I know part of it.”

“Really?”

“Character is destiny, but not the way people think. Were you wondering how I turned up?”

“Yes. That’s exactly it.” He had noticed that she was one of those women who thought they knew what other people were thinking. She was almost always wrong, but letting her think she was right was a good way to control her mood.

“I saw you in the diner and thought you were cute. I was bored, so I came back to meet you. The reason I stayed was that you’re the one I’m going to tell my grandchildren about.” She shook her head. “No, maybe just one of them, my favorite granddaughter.”

“Tell her what?”

“Everything, pretty much. That when I was still young and pretty, one of the things I did was have a passionate affair with an armed robber.”

“You’re going to tell her that’s a great idea?”

She looked at him and smiled. “It depends. I don’t know how this is going to work out yet.”

Carrie parked her car on a side street, away from the shops and restaurants, and they walked to the Emerald Cloud Dragon. As they approached, Jeff could see through the big windows that the dining room was very large. He counted twenty-eight tables, all a blond wood that matched the floors, then stopped because he thought he must have counted a few twice. Carrie seemed to know exactly where she wanted to sit and pointed it out to the host.

When they were seated, Jeff said, “Sure you’ve never been here before?”

“No. But everyone I asked said this is the place.”

“For what? What are we looking for?”

“Perfection,” she said. “A perfect experience changes your life.”

The waiter seated them and left them with menus.

Three waiters gave them tea and water and drinks from the bar while one stood sentinel over them to answer questions about the menu. When the proper interval had passed, Carrie held out her hand to the waiter and gave him a piece of paper with Chinese characters on it. He read it, bowed formally, and said, “Excellent!” before he left.

Jeff looked at her. “You know I’m going to ask.”

“Of course. I asked too. I was told it means ‘the Emerald Cloud Dragon’s best dinner,’ but not in those words.”

“Who is your source for all this?”

“A friend of mine named Jenny Wang. Her parents are Chinese, and they take her to Monterey Park a lot.”

The dinner was a spectacular succession of delicacies on little plates served with great care. To Jeff, it began to seem tragic that he could only eat so many pieces of wrapped meat or seasoned shellfish in one evening.

He and Carrie each tasted every dish set before them, trying a tidbit and then finding they couldn’t resist another, then another. After two hours and forty-five minutes in the Emerald Cloud Dragon, Jeff paid the check in cash, and the two walked out into the night.

It was late and the street was quiet, and Jeff felt a sensation he remembered from summers when he was a teenager in Indiana. Other kids had rules about going home at some particular hour, so Jeff had often found himself out as the numbers dwindled and he was finally alone on a dark street. He had always stayed until the last one left, because for him, being with people meant being out.

He was the only child, and his mother was the only parent, and neither of them was good at the role. His mother had been seventeen when he was born, and the forty-year-old truck driver from Alabama who had talked her into naming their baby Jefferson Davis had quit making his Indiana layovers in her town after about a year.

When Jeff was ten, his mother was twenty-seven and pretty. She dated the way avid outdoorsmen hunted. She took small game from the local area five or six nights a week throughout the year, and then occasionally went on month-long safaris in places far from Indiana. Jeff would be alone while she was in some warm place where rich older men spent their winters, and then again during the spring, when college students and people who could pass for that age partied. Her movements during the summer were unpredictable and varied. He would wake up late in the morning sometimes and find her bed still made and a message on the answering machine that she’d recorded for her male friends, not for him.

Whatever money she left for his use, he spent buying the best clothes for himself and small presents for the mothers of his friends, who invited him to family dinners. On holidays, if he received a gift from any of his mother’s relatives, shamefaced because they had never done much to help her, he would exchange it for something that would make him look better.

As he and his mother grew up and got to know each other, they liked each other less and less. They argued loudly until he was about thirteen, and then avoided talking much during the rare times when they had to be together. Summer nights were freedom, a time for going out and staying out as long as the companionship and excitement could be made to last.

Carrie leaned on him as they walked. “I’m glad I found you.” It was as though she had sensed what he was thinking and wanted to make him feel better.

Affection was an opening. “What’s your name?”

“I haven’t named myself yet.”

“Your parents gave you the name Melisande?”

“Melisande Carroway Carr. If they had an excuse, they must have told me when I was too young to remember.”

“When you wrote down your name and number for me, why did you use that one?”

“Balance.”

“Balance because I told you my real name?”

“No. Because you already saw and touched everything about me, but didn’t know anything.”

As they approached her car, she took the keys out of her purse and handed them to Jeff. He looked to both sides, up and down the street, and back toward the alley behind the restaurant. “What are you doing?”

He said, “We just pulled out a lot of cash to pay in there. Sometimes it attracts attention.”

She laughed. “From people like us.”

He opened the car door for her and then went around to the driver’s side, started the car, and drove toward the freeway entrance.

They were on the freeway for thirty seconds before she said, “I want to pull a robbery.”

He felt a sudden tightness in his stomach. “I just finished eating the biggest meal I ever had in my life.”

“It doesn’t have to be right now. It’s not even eleven o’clock. We can wait around until we feel less full.”

“Don’t we have enough money after last night?”

“If we do something tonight, we’ll have even more money. And who’s going to expect us to go out again two nights in a row?”

“But why take the risk?”

“That’s why. The risk is what I love. You can have the money.”

He glanced at her and brought back with him a picture of her beautiful face, the big brown eyes gleaming in excited anticipation. She looked absolutely crazy, but he could feel the beginning of an erection. He shifted in his seat. “I’ll think about it.”

“Not too long. If you don’t want to, I’ll have to drop you off and find someone else to go with me.”

M
ANCO KAPAK WAS
in Wash, his dance club on Hollywood Boulevard. He found the place much more alien than his two strip clubs in the Valley. He leaned on the wall behind the bar just to be out of the crowd for a bit and squinted his eyes to see through the dark and the flashes of light.

Wash looked as prosperous as he needed it to. The dance floor was full, and all the bodies merged into one mass compelled by the same sound, looking from his vantage point like the sea, with waves of movement sweeping across it and back. The tables on the far side of the big room were more than full, often with a girl sitting on a lap, or two of them sitting on one chair. The bartenders near him were pouring drinks as fast as they could.

The lights in Wash were throwing a reddish cast over everyone right now, and it gradually changed to yellow, then green, then blue. Laser beams swept across the room far above at the fourteen-foot level, thin green lines of light intersecting to make a moving web ceiling.

The whole spectacle was mesmerizing—the lights and music and the young men and women stepping, turning, gyrating to one beat. Kapak looked beyond the long bar at a group of girls dancing together in the crowd, and they reminded him of the girls in Budapest so long ago—faces with that fresh, smooth look, the long, shining hair, the bodies so perfect. He felt a sudden emptiness, a terrible longing to go back that was so strong that he could feel a film of moisture forming in his eyes. He blinked it away. The place he missed so much wasn’t Budapest. It wasn’t a place at all. It was being young.

He squared his shoulders, opened the hinged section of the bar, and began to walk. He made his way around the edge of the dance floor, patrolling the building, making sure every waitress, every bouncer, every busboy saw him. In all of these years in America, he had learned plenty of management secrets. One of them was showing up and displaying interest. All most employees needed to know was that the boss was paying attention. They could forgive the owner for being rich, because they could see for themselves that the price of getting rich was getting old. But if the boss didn’t care about the business, he didn’t care about them either. And they’d make him pay for it, punish him by stealing and being lazy.

Kapak made a second circuit around the cavernous club. Once he was sure everyone had seen him, he could go inside to the office where the music was shut out. He unlocked the thick, padded door in the back wall, went inside, and closed it. The anteroom he entered held a bank of television monitors above a control desk and an unoccupied table and chairs. At the control desk staring at the monitors was the club’s security manager, a retired cop named Colby. He picked up a hand radio and said, “Bobby, take a walk over to the bar and get a look at the tall guy with the mustache and the wife-beater shirt. He looks like he’s thinking of starting a fight.” Then he set it down again.