Midnight.

Driver

Johnny slept through the morning behind drawn shades, showered, rubbed mousse in his coal-black trim, and combed it straight back. He put on a turtleneck and a leather vest, drove down Eighth Avenue and out of Brooklyn. Then he ate lunch from a takeout box while waiting for the Lincoln to clear the track at the Broadway Car Wash.

The buffing gang put a glow on the black-and-chrome body, vacuumed the interior, cleared the air of cigar smells, and exchanged the odor of stale perfume for that of pine and new leather.

He booked two afternoon trips, one to Belmont, the other out to LaGuardia. Mona's pick-up wasn't until nine-thirty, so he had time to kill.

He purred the Continental toward Grand Street, skirting gridlock traffic until he could see the queues of people waiting for the van jai passenger vans-back to Queens. Pick off a few going to Flushing, he figured, and he'd set himself up for the races at Belmont.

Cheen Money

The Harmonious Garden was a cramped fast-food sit-down on Baxter Way that had a backdoor leading out to a cinder-block bunker slapped up in the courtyard between buildings. The bunker had a back exit, leading through the building in its rear to the boulevard beyond.

One of its walls featured video poker and slot machines. Opposite them, the Ghost boys sat on bar stools with their portable phones and ran a sports book next to the two thirty-inch color TV monitors flashing the Knicks, the Giants, the Rangers.

They ran three card tables featuring Chinese Poker. The On Yee covered the joint with pocket money. Twenty-four hours. They kept on hand six cases of Johnny Walker Black, eight eighths of Ecuadorian flake, and quarter-ounce plastics of sensemilla smoke for the day's customers.

Lucky went through the restaurant into the crowded bunker, where he found a seat at the card tables. Above the noise from the TV sets and the electronic ping of the video games, he picked up on the rough chatter of the gamblers:

"The cok-sooka won six thousand last week. Took four straight turns at House. Kept eating heads and tails."

"Took everybody's money."

"Big game later, the laundry boys from Boston, and that Jap high roller from Atlantic City."

"The Thailand Brothers are coming."

"They're closing two tables for the Lucky Eight."

"A hundred a section."

Some players, busted, fell out of the deal with dezv ka ma ga hei motherfucker curses, and Lucky edged up along the table. He wanted to spread some of the loot from the Yee Bot rip-off into his own joints, spur up the action. He laid his stack of U.S. Grants behind the House box, scanned the bets in the four squares, and waited for the cards to turn up. The dealer took the thirteen cards and opened them in his palm, the other bettors working their hands. Lucky set up the three sections, rearranging the suits, the pairs. The best he had was a pair of jacks, a pair of kings, and a straight flush.

The straight flush would likely win the last section, and he decided to play the jacks up front, figuring the two pairs too weak in the middle.

Lucky watched as his cards took heads and tails, raiding cash from the Thais and Malaysians betting the four boxes.

Lucky let the winnings roll.

The dealer ran through a three-hour rotation of players and before the dinner shift had taken three thousand eighty out of the squares.

When the sun set, Luckywent down to the Bowery outskirts, the desolate streets leading out beyond Chinatown where it rubbed raw against the rest of Loisaida and the Alphabets. He entered the storefront with its window gate down, next to the bodega. One of Flavio's places. Spread the dirty money among the clients. Goodwill for Flavio, a kilo-a-week buyer of Ghost Number Four heroin.

Inside, Lucky gave the mommy fifty dollars, looking over the partition to scan the Latina crikas-whores-seated on folding chairs under the sickly green-blue light of lava lamps. Some of the whores had thighs heavy with cellulite inside fishnet stockings, bean-bloated bellies under spandex, hard faces pushing the far side of forty.

The mommy gave him a playing card, a yellow jack. Men were waiting about, sexual tension leaned up against the walls, and then a few more girls came out of the back maze of cubicles, carrying baskets of mouthwash, condoms, KYJelly, and paper towels. There were Cubans, a Venezuelan, a Panamanian, a Colombian, but mostly they were Dominicans fresh off the tarmac at LaGuardia, jetting in via the Santo Domingo pipeline.

For the merciless dollar they'd surrender themselves up to desperate men they'd rendered faceless, shapeless, colorless, just a trick tube of flesh invading their vaginas, their mouths, but not their souls.

The Panamanian. Young and tall, bottle-blond. He gave her the playing card and followed her inside.

"Pon na ma?" he asked.

"Si papisito, habla espanol?"

"Poquito." He smiled.

"Chino, no?" she said as she rolled down her top. Big brown torpedo nipples.

"Si," Lucky said, undressing. "Chino."

They were naked on the mattress and she was licking him. He heard himself moaning, watching her tongue working him, then sucking him into Chinaman heaven.

"Ma mao bicho," he whispered, blow me, holding her by the neck. He got rock hard and turned her over, entered the rich brown of her, doggie style.

"Mi amor," she was whispering, his lun cock stroking her.

"Mamita," he groaned like the low growl of a dog, and came long and angrily, deep inside of her.

Memory

As was her routine on Sunday afternoons, Mona pressed the Discman's plugs into her ears, adjusted the volume, then wrapped the Hermes silk square over her head and knotted it under her chin. Shirley Kwan sang a ballad into her brain as the elevator descended, and before Mona stepped out onto Henry Street, she slipped the black Vuarnets over her eyes.

She took the side streets south, away from the China Plaza, went as far as the Seaport and turned west toward the Hudson River. She didn't know the names of the streets but followed landmarks from memory, walking distance from Chinatown recalled. The way led through the steel-and-glass canyons of the Business District, pass a gwailo American department store where she found designer lingerie, toiletries, household items. Farther down that street was a travel agency she recognized by the pictures of ships and exotic locales, and a model airliner, displayed in the show window. On one occasion she had noticed a Chinese woman inside, wearing the red uniform blazer of the agency. Lucky red, she'd thought, and jook-sing, born American, she'd guessed.

Her route took her toward the river until she reached the World Financial Center. The promenade was deserted, as she had expected. She looked out over the harbor where the rivers met and mixed into riptides.

In the near distance she could see the Statue of Liberty, and she considered the word freedom, but remembered Uncle Four's bitter remarks about the exclusion of the Chinese, especially Chinese women, from these shores. She switched off the Discman, peered out beyond the choppy expanse of water, and began to wonder about liberty, and what she would need to do to gain it.

Out on the wet blue shining, the ships and boats reminded her of Hong Kong, the fragrant harbor, and as she stroked her piece of jade her mind reeled back to lost youth and forgotten hopes.

In Hong Kong she had crowded into cousins' bunk beds until she was sixteen, when she feared uncle would come into her room at night, herself the only girl there. She remembered wanting to be a movie star.

The memories that came after were mostly about jobs she had had long before she'd managed to work her way up from Wanchai to Central, in Club Volvo, in TsimSha Cheui, the tourist sex ghetto, before she'd wound up on Nathan Road.