Ed McBain by Learning to Kill: Stories Page B

unfurnished. There was a long curtained closet on one wall, and an easy chair just inside the doorway. A long table ran down the center of the room. A man was seated at the table. A stringed instrument rested on the table before him, looking very much like a small harp. The man had the withered parchment face of a Chinese mandarin. He held two sticks with felted tips in his hands. A small boy with jet-black hair stood alongside the table. They both looked up as I came into the room.
    "Yes?" the old man asked.
    "I'm looking for friends of Harry Tse."
    "Okay," the old man said. He whispered something to the boy, and the kid tossed me a darting glance, and then went out the door through which I'd entered. The door closed behind him and I sat in the easy chair while the old man began hitting the strings of his instrument with the two felted sticks. The music was Old China. It twanged on the air in discordant cacophony, strangely fascinating, harsh on the ears, but somehow, soothing. It droned on monotonously, small staccato bursts that vibrated the strings, set the air humming.
    The sticks stopped, and the old man looked up.
    "You
who
?" he asked.
    "Matt Cordell."
    "Yes. Mmm, yes."
    He went back to his instrument. The room was silent except for the twanging of the strings. I closed my eyes and listened, remembering a time when Trina and I first discovered the wonder of Chinatown, found it for our very own. That had been a happy time, our marriage as bright and as new as the day outside. That was before I found her in Garth's arms, before I smashed in his face with the butt of my .45. The police went easy on me. Trina and Garth dropped charges, but it was still assault with a deadly weapon, and the police yanked my license, and Matt Cordell drifted to the Bowery along with the other derelicts. Trina and Garth? Mexico, the stories said, for a quick divorce. Leaving behind them a guy who didn't give a damn anymore.
    I listened to the music, and I thought of the liquor I'd consumed since then, the bottles of sour wine, the smoke, the canned heat. I thought of the flophouses, and the hallways, and the park benches and the gutters and the stink and filth of the Bowery. A pretty picture, Matt Cordell. A real pretty picture.
    Like Joey.
    Only Joey was dead, really dead. I was only close to it.
    The music stopped. There was the bare room again, and the old man, and the broken memories.
    "Is someone coming to talk to me?" I asked.
    "You go up," the old man said. "Upstairs. You go. Someone talk to you."
    "Thanks," I said, and went into the hallway, wondering why the old man had sent the kid up ahead of me. Probably a natural distrust of Westerners. Whoever was up there had been warned that an outsider was in the house. I climbed the steps, and found another doorway at the landing.
    I opened the door.
    The room was filled with smoke. There were at least a dozen round tables in the room, and each table was crowded with seated Chinese. There was a small wooden railing that separated the large room from a small office with a desk. A picture of Chiang Kai-shek hung on one wall. A fat man sat at the desk with his back to me. The kid who'd been downstairs was standing alongside him. I turned my back to the railing and the desk, and looked into the room. A few of the men looked up, but most went on with what I supposed were their games.
    The place was a bedlam of noise. Each man sitting at the tables held a stack of tiles before him. As far as I could gather, the play went in a clockwise motion, with each player lifting a tile and banging it down on the table as he shouted something in Chinese. I tried to get the gist of the game, but it was too complicated. Every now and then, one man would raise a pointed stick and push markers across wires hanging over the tables, like the markers in a poolroom. A window stretched across the far end of the room, and one group of men at a table near the window were the quietest in the room. They were playing