“Burke, you eat some of this soup. Very good. Make you feel better quick.”

“I feel fine, Mama. I don’t want any of that soup.”

“You eat soup, Burke. Too much here for just one. Better for you than duck.” She filled the bowl and passed it to me. “Chinese way, serve man first always.” I smiled at her. She kept stirring soup in the tureen, looked up, smiled back and said, “Not all Chinese ways so good.”

The soup was rich and clean at the same time. I felt my nasal passages opening up just putting it near my face. Mama’s eyes swept the room, better than any electronic device. She lived in fear of being discovered by tourists and having enough diners in her joint to ruin her business. I was there the night she got an advance tip that the restaurant critic from New York magazine was coming. They gave the guy and his date some stuff that was damn close to rancid dogmeat served in embalming-fluid sauce. But she was still scared the clown would like the ambiance of her dump and tell all the Now and Today jerkoffs to come around, so I made a gross pass at the critic’s date while he was in the men’s room fending off one of Mama’s boys, who was acting like he was drunk and needed to throw up-preferably on a human being. Mama was still screaming at me in Mandarin for being so obnoxious to the guy’s date when he returned to the table, so I called him a faggot and attempted to belt him. I missed, and fell right across the table instead. We all watched the reviews carefully for weeks, and were relieved to see no mention of Mama’s establishment.

I separated a hundred from my courthouse earnings and handed it to Mama. “Mama, please hold this for me. If I call tomorrow, please have Max carry this over to Maurice, okay? If for some reason I don’t call,” (she started to smile sadly), “hang on to it for me.”

Max is one of her relatives. At least I think he is. Max can’t hear or speak, but he communicates okay. He wasn’t programmed for fear-whoever rolled the genetic dice left that out too. If Mama asked Max to deliver a package to the Devil, Max would go straight to Hell. Unlike others of my acquaintance who had made that particular trip, I had complete confidence that Max would come back. Max the Silent is one tough boy. In fact, he’s so infamous that one time over in night court when he was being arraigned for attempted murder, nobody even laughed when the judge told him that he had the right to remain silent. They all knew that Max never attempted to murder anyone.

Mama pulled a scrap of paper from her dress. “This man James call you again, Burke. He leave a number, but he say you only call him tomorrow evening between six and six-thirty. He say he very busy and be out of his office except for then, okay?”

I looked at the number she gave me. I’d have to check it against my list, but the odds were a hundred to one it was a pay phone.

“Maybe you not call him, okay, Burke? He sound on the phone like I tell you. Bad man, okay?”

“We’ll see, Mama. I have to work for a living, right? Business hasn’t been so good lately. You got a marrow bone for my puppy?”

“Must be big puppy, Burke.” Mama laughed. She hadn’t met Pansy but she knew my Doberman pretty well.

“Yeah, she’s pretty big.”

“Burke, if this man who called you has a dog, I know what kind of dog he has.”

“What are you talking about, Mama?”

“Burke, I tell you. This man have the dog with the dark color back, you know?”

“No, I don’t. How could you know what kind of dog he’d have?”

“I don’t say he has dog, but if he has dog, it will be this kind.”

I took the marrow bone for Pansy and said good-bye to Mama. With the car back in the garage, I went upstairs and let Pansy out to the roof again. The marrow bone went into a pot of boiling water to make it okay for her to eat.

Sure enough, when I checked the list of numbers I got from the phone company through an indirect route, James’s number turned out to be a coinbox over on Sixth Avenue, near Thirty-fourth Street. If I remembered correctly, it was right across from the Metro Hotel.

Pansy and I watched television while we waited for the marrow bone to boil out perfectly. When it did, I cleaned it off, gave it to her, and waited for the first satisfying crack before I sacked out on the couch.

THE SOUND OF distant thunder woke me-it was Pansy slamming her paw against the back door to tell me she wanted to go to the roof. I got up, opened the door, and went next door to fix breakfast from the food I took home from Mama’s.

When everything was on the hotplate, I threw on a jacket and went downstairs for the News. My watch said it was about eleven in the morning, so even the thief who runs the corner store would have the four-star edition by now. He does make good egg creams, and I thought I’d treat myself with some of last night’s legal fees, so I sat down at the counter and waited for the proprietor. Since I was going to buy the News, I took the Post off the rack to read through it.

Some kids in the back were hanging around the ancient jukebox, imitating the latest Godfather movie. At least they weren’t trying to imitate Bruce Lee, like the kids a few blocks east of here. Their conversation drifted over.

“She’s got some beautiful body, you know, but her face’s ugly as shit.”

“Man, you don’t fuck her face.”

The third one added his sage comment. “Hey, where are you from, lame? Kansas?”

Even if I woke up some morning as totally disoriented as the hippies who live downstairs from me, I’d still only have to stagger as far as the corner to know I was in New York. I put back the Post, paid for the News, collected a sour glance from the owner of the dump, and went back upstairs. My Chinese food was just about ready. I’m a real gourmet-I know you have to burn pork to make it safe to eat.

Usually when I’m here in the mornings I read the race results to Pansy so I can explain why my horse didn’t do as well as expected. So today I called her over and fed her some extra pork scraps while I checked last night’s charts. I never read my horse’s race first-I start with the first race and work my way down. The seventh was the feature at Yonkers, and my horse won. The goddamned horse won, and the sonofabitch paid $21.40 to do it. I checked the horse’s name, checked his position and… yeah, it was number three for certain. I was over a grand to the good-damn! I wanted to sit back and read the charts again and again, to retrace my horse’s path to victory as slowly as I could. But I knew it was too good to be true-something had to be wrong.

So I bit the bullet and called Maurice, using the hippies’ phone. When he told me some reason why my horse wasn’t the one that won, I was just going to tell him I’d have Max deliver his money later that day. I’m a good loser-practice makes perfect.

“Maurice, this is Burke.”

“Burke, I thought you died-I figured you’d be on the fucking phone as soon as I opened this morning. You got someone else picking ’em for you now?” And I knew I really had won.

“Oh, yeah,” I said casually, as though my last big winner was last week instead of three years ago. “Look, Maurice, can you hold on to it for me until later this afternoon?”

“What’d you think, dummy, I’m gonna leave town with this big score?”

“No, I just-”

“I’ll be here,” says Maurice, and hangs up. What a charmer.

I went back and sat down at the table and read the charts to Pansy until she was bored to tears. My horse just wired the field-he left from the three-hole, got to the top with a 28.4 quarter, kept the pressure on to a 59.3 half, coasted the third quarter in 1.31 flat, and got home handily by a length and a half in 200.4. His best race ever, a lifetime mark-his father would have been proud. It was like the Flood broad had never taken her money back.