It worked here in downtown Manhattan, too.
Detective O’Brien screamed back at him in terror. Her gun went off wildly, and so did Michael, in the same direction Wong had gone, running back toward Moore, and crossing the street, and seeing Wong up ahead going a hundred miles an hour.
Michael took a quick look at his watch.
8:45.
His plane would be leaving in two hours and twenty minutes.
He could not go down into the subway to catch his A-train to the airport because Detective O’Brien was behind him, sitting between him and his transportation. There was not a taxi anywhere in sight, and besides the ten dollars Bonano had loaned him was not enough for cab fare to Kennedy. He did not know this goddamn city where everyone seemed to be either a cop or a crook and all of them seemed to be crazy. He did not know where there might be another subway station where he could catch a train to the airport, because his map was behind him, too, there on the sidewalk between him and O’Brien. He knew only that when you were lost in the jungle, you followed a native guide.
Behind him, Detective O’Brien fired her gun. Into the air, he hoped. He ran like hell after Wong. They ran for what seemed like miles. Wong was a good runner. Michael was out of shape and out of breath. His shoes were sodden and his socks were wet and his feet were cold and his eyeglasses kept caking with snow, which he repeatedly cleared as he followed Wong, both of them padding silently over fields of white, the curbs gone now, no difference now between sidewalk and street, just block after block of white after white after white in a part of the city that was totally alien to him. But at last he turned a 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 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.