“I mean, aren’t you freezing?”
“Yes, I am. But this is important.”
“It’s also important not to die in the street of frostbite.”
“You can’t die of frostbite.”
“For your information, frostbite is freezing to death.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Can you die of freezing to death?”
“Yes.”
“All right then,” she said.
“Connie, the point is we’ve got to talk to Nichols. Because if he’s the Charlie in Crandall’s calendar …”
“Please hurry.”
“Then maybe he can tell us who Mama is, or why Crandall drew nine thousand dollars from the bank, if he did, or what he did with that money, or what his connection is with the two people who took all that stuff from my wallet and the one who stole my car.”
The words came out of his mouth in small white bursts of vapor. He looked as if he were sending smoke signals. The clasps on Connie’s galoshes clattered and rattled as she led him through yet another labyrinth, this goddamn downtown section of the city was impossible to understand. None of the streets down here were laid out in any sensible sort of grid pattern, they just crisscrossed and zigzagged and wound around each other and back again, and they didn’t have any numbers, they only had names, and you couldn’t get anywhere without a native guide, which he supposed Connie was. A very fast one, too. She walked at a breakneck pace, Michael puffing hard to keep up, both of them sending smoke signals with their mouths. He hoped there weren’t any hostile Sioux on ponies in the immediate neighborhood. He would not have been surprised, though. Nothing that happened in this city could ever surprise him again.
They came at last to a Chinese restaurant named Shi Kai, just off the corner of Mott and Pell. The restaurant was closed, but a sign in the front window advised:
OPEN FOR BREAKFAST
AS USUAL
CHRISTMAS DAY
Connie took a key from her handbag, unlocked a door to the left of the restaurant, closed and locked it behind her, opened another door that led to a flight of stairs, and began climbing. There were Chinese cooking smells in the hallway. There were dim, naked light bulbs on each landing. She kept climbing. Behind her, he watched her legs. Her galoshes rattled away. He hoped they wouldn’t wake up anyone in the building. On the third floor, she stopped outside a door marked 33, searched in the dim light for another key on her ring, inserted it into the latch, unlocked the door, threw it open, snapped on a light from a switch just inside it, and said what sounded like “Wahn yee” or “Wong ying,” Michael couldn’t tell which.
“That means, `Welcome` in Chinese,” she said, and smiled.
“Thank you,” he said, and followed her into the apartment.
He supposed he’d expected something out of The Last Emperor. Sandalwood screens. Red silk cloth. Gold gilt trappings. Incense burning. A small jade Buddha on an ivory pedestal.
Instead, against a wall painted a pale lavender, there was a long low sofa done in a white nubby fabric and heaped with pillows the same color as the wall, and there was an easy chair and a footstool upholstered in black leather and there was a coffee table with a glass top, and a bar unit hanging on the right-angle wall, and several large framed abstract prints on the wall opposite the sofa.
Connie sat, took off her galoshes, and then padded in her stockinged feet to the bar unit.
“This has been some night,” she said, and rolled her eyes, and lowered the drop-leaf front of the bar. “I had a man vomit all over the backseat, did you notice?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I mean that the limo I picked you up in outside the deli wasn’t the same one I’d dropped you off in when you went to see Crandall’s wife?”
“No, I couldn’t tell any difference.”
“Charlie was very upset. Charlie Wong. My Charlie Wong. About the stink in the car.”
“I can imagine.”
“Do you know how to make martinis?” she asked.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“Why don’t you mix us some very nice, very dry martinis while I go take my shower, and then you can take your shower, and then we can sip our martinis in bed, would you like to do that?”
“Yes,” he said.
His voice caught a little.
Because he was thinking about what she’d just said.
Not about mixing the martinis or taking the showers.
But about sipping the martinis.
In bed.
That part.
“A twist, please,” she said.
You came through the bedroom doorway and the first thing you saw was the bed facing the door, its headboard against the far wall, a window on each side of it, a night table under each window. It was neither a king nor a queen, just a normal double bed. With a paisley-patterned quilt on it. There was a dresser on the wall to the right of the bed, and bookcases on the wall to the left, and a door to the closet on that same wall, and on the entrance-door wall, which he didn’t really see until they got into bed together, there was an easy chair with a lamp behind it to the left of the door, and a full-length mirror to the right of it.
They left the quilt on the bed because it was so damn cold.