A Bitter Feast by S J Rozan

Author:S J Rozan [Rozan, S J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429908511
Published: 2011-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

“Can we go for a walk?” I asked Bill as we hit the night air. Never before had East Broadway seemed so sweet, so breezy, so easygoing and full of possibility. Exhausted and achy as I was from my dim sum day, I was also too wired to want to do anything except keep moving.

“Sure,” Bill answered, shaking out the match to the cigarette he’d pulled out the minute we hit the sidewalk. “Where?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll walk you home.”

“That’s backward.”

“You want to make something of it?”

“No. Although,” he ruminated as we started west, “that’s the second time you’ve married me without telling me about it. I wonder what your shrink would say about that?”

“I don’t have a shrink.”

“Go get one, and find out what he’d say.”

“She would say I’m very quick, clever, and able to think on my feet.”

“That’s not your shrink, it’s your fortune cookie.”

“It’s probably just as accurate. You were great in there, by the way.”

“Me?” He sounded surprised. “I said absolutely nothing.”

“That’s what I mean. You ought to do that more often.”

“You hurt me to the quick.”

“No, I don’t, because you know I don’t mean it. But in this particular case it was perfect, because it made Duke Lo talk to me. If you’d opened your manly mouth just once he would have ignored me completely and spoken only to you. He kept trying to do that anyway.”

“I saw that. That’s why I shut up. So you think my mouth is manly?”

“The same as the rest of you, sahib.”

“Too many compliments and I’m going to think you really do want to marry me.”

“That’s just like a man.”

“I am a man.”

“That’s your problem. But let me ask you something: why didn’t you have a cigarette in there? You usually do when you’re just sitting around, and that room’s obviously not a no-smoking zone. I kept waiting for you to light up.”

He shook his head as he took a deep drag on the cigarette he was having now. “It was a power thing. He’s a smoker—and it’s a good thing, by the way, or he would’ve blinded us with all those toothy smiles. It would have been a mistake for me to light up before he did.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. It would have meant I was less able to control my craving. Weaker than he was.”

“Cigarettes work that way?”

“Everything works that way.”

I considered that for a block or two. As we waited for a light I said, “I wonder if you are.”

“If I’m what?”

“Less able to control it. I wonder what Duke Lo craves.”

Bill looked over at me. “What are you thinking?”

“Did you believe him?”

“About what?”

“When he said he only wanted to see the men stay disappeared because he thought it was funny. In other words, because it made trouble for H. B. Yang.”

“Isn’t that our theory? That his power grows as your friend Yang’s shrinks, and the point of this was to embarrass Yang?”

“My friend Yang. My mother would keel over if she heard you say that. And that was our theory, yes.

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