Here Larry interrupts himself to wet his whistle. “Dear, could I bother you to remind you about those middle Cokes?” he asks the waitress in a normal tone, as casually as though she were working the pub at his condo club. “Actually, bring the whole bottle,” he corrects.

Larry gazes out the window at the black night. “I must say the local truckers have remarkably bad aim. They hardly ever hit the bicycles,” he says, and no sooner are the words out of his mouth than down one goes. Not a serious accident. The bicyclist brushes herself off and shakes her fist at the truck that winged her.

“Not to take anything from the guy in the famous Tiananmen Square photo, standing up to the tank,” Larry says. “But it does give you perspective to be here. Face-offs like that are an everyday occurrence. It’s called traffic.”

“Let’s get back to the story,” I propose.

“This next part involves a knife,” he warns me.

“How big a knife?”

“Here to here,” he says, opening his arms exactly as wide as our restaurant table.

“Basically like a saber?”

“That’s your word,” Larry says. “Whose saga is this, yours or mine? When it’s your turn, you can use all the clichés you wish, but right now I’ve got the floor. You ready?”

“Shoot,” I say.

“So we drive to Overtown. I stay in the car. Ten, fifteen minutes tops, they come back down and say it’s all set, he’s moving to his mutha’s in Chicago in the morning. Tammy’s off the hook. What they did was take a knife to his balls. They show me the knife, it’s as aforementioned. They place it against his balls and give him a little cut, just enough so he has to go to the hospital for a couple of stitches. Careful to break only one toof when they put a gun in his mouth. ‘Notice we’re not wearing masks,’ they tell the pimp. ‘That’s because we want you to remember our faces. In fact, every night before you go to sleep for the rest of your life, we want you to remember our faces. See? Ramon here’s got a scar on his chin. And see, I’ve got a cute little button nose? My mother used to call me Button-Nose. But you can’t call me Button-Nose. You can’t call me shit. All you can do is remember our faces and pray that nuffing bad better happen to Tammy. Because if anything ever does, even if she takes a tumble getting on a bus, we’re gonna assume you caused it and come after you. You’re her insurance company. You better hope she has a nice long life.’”

End of saga. Larry starts counting the broken eggshells overflowing the ashtray from the previous diner’s meal.

“So what happened?” I ask.

“I told you, he moved in with his mutha! Weren’t you listening?” Larry conceals his annoyance by stretching across the table to spear another watermelon cube.

“No, I mean, to Tammy.”

“Overdosed sixteen months later. Died with the needle in her arm. Too bad, sweet kid, just a little confused.” He signals the waitress sidling by with ten soup bowls stacked in her embrace. “Any chance of our getting that Sprite, dear?” he asks with a winning smile.

“And what happened to Killer?”

“Serving twelve to fifteen for possession of kidney porn,” he says.

“Kidney, did you say?”

“Kiddie, kiddie, get your ears checked, Dan,” Larry advises.

“Well, anyway, that’s an amazing story,” I say.

“So am I sorry I took the action I did?” Larry asks rhetorically. “No. I did the right thing. Plus, I dated the sister in Sioux City for like six months. Amazing oral technician. Treated it like a French horn. You think it would be rude to ask our waitress for more pineapple?”

“You mean watermelon?”

“Sure, I’m not picky.”

Just in time the duck is wheeled over, looking like it was pulled out of a pond of brown glaze and had its throat sliced two minutes ago, about the time in the story when the saber was put to the guy’s balls. A man in white flips the duck back side up. He resembles a surgeon, but he’s a duck slicer wearing a surgical mask as he carves so adroitly. Snip, carve, slash. Such a pro you can’t even make out his breath moving through the mouth gauze. Two male waiters prepare the table, but one makes the mistake of reaching to ready Larry for his meal. Larry smacks the man’s hand away and gives him a dirty look.

And so the meal begins.

And then the meal’s done. The duck’s hit the spot. Larry has pushed back his chair and is applying Blistex to his lips with a sigh of satisfaction. Without meaning to, Larry has proved to me that he has a better palate than I do-discerning breast skin as having a different flavor from thigh skin. Additionally, he’s used his utensil with great skill-the KFC spork that he apparently plans to carry everywhere, like an all-purpose Swiss Army knife. As for me, I’m still trying to process things.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” he asks me, whittling at one of the holes in his teeth with the plastic dragon toothpick.

“It’s just hard to imagine anyone in our family being connected with either the mob or the MM,” I reply. “See, look, now you’ve got me calling them by their initials. I don’t want to call them by their initials. I want to call them by their real blood-and-gore name-”

“Call them what you wish,” Larry says. “All I can tell you is, time comes, they’re gonna have Burton ’s ass on a stick.”

“Whoa!” I say, pushing my chair back and holding up my arm like a traffic cop. “What are you talking about here?”

Larry takes off his sunglasses and gives me a Mona Lisa expression that says, I have no expression whatsoever. “Dan, you’re my cousin, and besides that you’re more or less my friend, so I’m going to do you a favor and say, ‘No comment.’”

I re-strain the muscle in my neck. Now it’s officially a crick. “I thought the fatwa was over, Larry. Larry?”

“You’re absolutely right, it was over,” he says, taking a tissue that serves as napkin to pat the drops of sweat that constellate his brow. “Then it became under again.”

“But you said it was done!”

“If you recall, I didn’t say it was done. What I precisely said was it was behind us, and it is behind us. Specifically, it’s behind Burton, not to get too anatomical.”

“But, Larry, here we are in China on a whole new page. What did Burton ever do to you that was so unforgiveable you can’t let it go?”

The Mona Lisa smile means he means business. “Dan, believe me when I tell you, you don’t want to know. Suffice it to say he stabbed me in the back, trying to swindle my mutha.”

“But if you don’t tell me, how can I judge it for myself?”

“Who’s asking you to? I know what I know. That’s good enough for me.”

He spears another watermelon cube and sucks it thoughtfully for a minute. A cab races by the window. More more more more, goes its horn.

“Okay, bottom-line reason, sparing you the details? He said I owed him money, I said I paid him back. To teach me a lesson, he demanded a mortgage on my mutha’s house, saying it’ll be a learning experience for me, a growth experience. Long story short: My mutha died the worst kind of death, thinking she had lost her house and that Judy and I were left homeless. We were with her day and night at the hospital at the end, and she thought the only reasonable explanation was that she had lost everything to Burton and we had no home to go to. Yes, she was delusional, and we tried to convince her otherwise, but she was set on it, and she died in agony. She died sick with worry, and for this I blame Burton. For this he deserves everything coming to him. That’s why it’s not over.”

“But Burton didn’t get the house,” I protest.

“Doesn’t change anything. He tried.”

“But you’ve got to keep things in balance,” I say. “Didn’t you tell me a couple of days ago that you wouldn’t have been able to arrange the cure for Judy’s epilepsy if it hadn’t been for Burton?”

“Absolutely. He was an angel.”

“Then why-”

“That was then. This is now.”