Read Ed McBain - Downtown for Free Online Page B

corner behind Wong and saw him ducking into a doorway with Chinese lettering over it. Michael looked at his watch again. 8:57. Wong disappeared into the doorway. Michael followed him.
    He wiped off his glasses and put them back on again.
    He was inside a Chinese fortune-cookie factory.
    A Chinese man in white pants, a white shirt, a long white apron, and a white chef's hat stood behind a stainless steel counter stuffing fortune cookies with little slips of paper. "Which way did he go?" Michael asked.
    "True ecstasy is a golden lute on a purple night," the fortune-cookie stuffer said. There was a door at the far end of the room. Michael pointed to it. "Did he go in there?" he asked.
    "He who rages at fate rages at barking dogs," the man said, and stuffed another cookie.
    "Thank you," Michael said, and went immediately toward the door. Behind him, the fortune-cookie stuffer said, "Dancers have wings but pigs cannot fly." Michael opened the door. He was suddenly in a downtown-Saigon gambling den.
    In Saigon, there were only three things to do: get drunk, get laid, or get lucky. There were a great many gambling dens lining the teeming side streets of Saigon, and he had gambled in most of them and had never got lucky in any of them. Nor had he ever seen anyone playing Russian roulette in any of them. That was for the movies. He had told Arthur Crandall--or whatever his real name was--that _Platoon was a pretty realistic movie, but the operative word in that observation was "movie." Because however realistic it might have been, it was still only and merely a movie, and everyone sitting in that theater knew that he was watching flickering images on a beaded screen and that the guns going off and the blood spurting were fake. In the jungle, the guns going off and the blood spurting were real.
    You could never show in a movie the _feel
    65 of a friend's hot blood spilling onto your hands when he took a hit from a frag grenade. Never. You could never explain in the most realistic of war films that you had shit your pants the first time a mortar shell exploded six feet from where you were lying on your belly in the jungle mud. In war movies, nobody ever shit his pants. You could never explain the terror and revulsion you'd felt the first time you saw a dead soldier lying on his back with his cock cut off and stuffed into his mouth. In war movies, guys compensated for their terror and revulsion by playing Russian roulette in Saigon gambling dens. In real life, what you did in Saigon gambling dens was you bet on the roll of the dice, the turn of the card, or-- occasionally--the courage and skill of a rooster. Cockfights in Saigon were as common as severed cocks in the jungle, but you never saw a cockfight in the same building where people were shooting crap or playing poker.
    Here and now, in this section of the fortune-cookie factory, there were no cockfights. There were stainless steel ovens, and there were two crap games on blankets against one of the walls, and two poker games at tables, and a mah-jongg game at yet another table. The mah-jongg table was occupied entirely by Chinese men who looked as if they had stepped full blown out of the Ming Dynasty. This was by far the noisiest table in the room, the Chinese men slamming down tiles and shouting what sounded like orders to behead someone, and the men standing around the table shouting either encouragement or disparagement, it was difficult to tell. There was some noise, but not as much, coming from the two crap games on the blankets, where--as had been the case in Saigon--there were Orientals playing with white guys, black guys, and Hispanics. A television set on a shelf high on the wall was turned up to its full volume, and Andy Williams had just come on in a Christmas special that contributed mightily to the overall din. In contrast to the television jubilance, the poker players were virtually solemn. A pall of smoke hung over the entire room. Charlie Wong was nowhere in