did say she’d make the coffee tomorrow, I said. And she didn’t seem enthusiastic, so I don’t think there’s much chance of her drinking it by herself.
All right, Bon said, looking at the sun to determine the time. His watch had been taken from him by our guards in reeducation in order to . . . in order to . . . well, there was no justification for it. Let’s get this done as quickly as we can.
The housing was a short walk away, through an area whose pedestrian architecture was charmless. Unlike the Paris of Maurice Chevalier and Catherine Deneuve, most of the 13th arrondissement was deficient in charm, although it was unclear whether the authorities permitted Asians to live in this quarter because of its ill-favored qualities or whether the presence of Asians added to the unloveliness. Regardless, Bon was satisfied when the weary concierge with the deflated perm showed us his lodgings, the stacks of bunk beds recalling for Bon the military barracks he had loved with true ardor. The atmosphere was nostalgic, too, tangy with masculine sweat that evoked honesty and camaraderie. Otherwise the room was lived in by civilians, judging from the blankets huddled in shame on the mattresses, the rumpled reed mats on the parquet floor, and what passed for a kitchen: a folding table on which sat a rice cooker and a greasy two-burner plug-in stove.
Everyone’s at work, the concierge said. This bunk’s yours.
What’s the rent?
The Boss takes care of that. Good deal, huh?
A good deal for Bon meant an even better deal for the Boss. But with no other recourse than my aunt’s apartment, Bon dropped his duffel on the mattress and said, I’ll take it.
That, as reeducation had taught him, was his unique talent. He could take anything.
Our next stop was Delights of Asia, located on rue de Belleville, where Bon would work as a line cook. Cook? Bon had said. I don’t know how to cook. Don’t worry about it, the Boss had said. The place isn’t known for its food.
In this restaurant not known for its food, the white tiles of the floor throbbed with varicose veins of brown grease, the yellow walls were stained with what I hoped were sticky fingerprints, and the surly waiters and cursing chefs could be heard shouting and cackling whenever the kitchen doors swung open. Next to the register, a stereo played cassettes of high-pitched Chinese and Vietnamese opera. Behind the register was the maître d’ and musical curator, Le Cao Boi, who, from looks to manners, was the typical romantic Vietnamese man: part poet, part playboy, and part gangster.
I love seeing their bodies tense after I hit the play button, he said with a laugh, watching the lone customer leave behind a plate still swarming with worms, which on closer inspection turned out to be greasy and gelatinous noodles. He ejected the cassette and inserted another. Led Zeppelin, “Stairway to Heaven,” he said. That’s better. So! The Boss told me all about you two bad boys.
Le Cao Boi was the Boss’s field marshal. He introduced the restaurant’s employees: the two waiters, the three chefs, the busboy, and the janitor, or, as Le Cao Boi called them, the Seven Dwarfs. Unlike the Seven Dwarfs of Snow White, they were not cute and not even that dwarfish, being merely nasty, brutish, and short. Most notable, as I pointed out to Le Cao Boi, was that seven of them seemed excessive for a restaurant empty at noon on a weekend. He grinned and said, Makes you wonder why the Boss would send me two more employees, doesn’t it?
As must be obvious even to a tourist or stranger, the restaurant was not surviving on its culinary output, being instead an outpost for the Boss’s ambitions to expand from the ghetto of Little Asia to inner Paris, the heart of whiteness, even with its shadows of darkness. This outpost was a front for Le Cao Boi and the Seven Dwarfs, who, besides being short, were angry and ambidextrous. Their favored weapons were cleavers, functional in the kitchen and on assignment, when they would each carry two of the big blades sheathed under their armpits in custom leather holsters.
They’re angry because they’re short, Le Cao Boi said. And they’re hard to beat because they’re short. Someone takes a swing at where they think their heads should be and they hit air. You don’t want all seven coming at you at once, but that’s how they do their job. One cuts off your manhood, another slices your kneecaps, a third hamstrings you, all at the same time. He exhaled a cloud of smoke. But they’re not great on nuance. “Nuance” is not in their vocabulary. Hell, “vocabulary” is not in their vocabulary. That’s what you’re here for.
Le Cao Boi adjusted his aviator sunglasses, which he never removed, not even during lovemaking, or so it was said, especially by him. He was proud of their name-brand status as authentic American Ray-Bans, not, as he liked to point out, cheap imitations. Le Cao Boi was fashion-conscious, from designer socks to hair so streamlined with pomade that not a strand moved regardless of whether he was declaiming poetry (his own), making love (energetically), or swinging his favored weapon, a baseball bat gifted by an American cousin. It was Le Cao Boi’s bitter experience to come as a refugee to France instead of America, the country for which he pined during his youth in Cholon. Le Cao Boi, like the Boss, was ethnic Chinese, son of a Cholon gangster and grandson of a Guangdong merchant who had settled in Saigon at century’s turn. The grandfather sold silk and opium, the father sold only opium, and the grandson sold nothing except his violent services, a great decline over which he ruminated often in his poetry, which was so unspeakably bad that none of it will be quoted here.
Just think of me as Baudelaire with a baseball bat, he said, showing us his prized Louisville Slugger. What a name, he added, rolling the baseball bat on the counter where the depressed cash register stood, its sole purpose in life—to have its keys punched—hardly ever achieved. So, what should we call you? You’re Killer, that’s obvious. I wouldn’t want to see your face when I open the door. But you! Le Cao Boi turned his reflective gaze to me. The Boss said you already had a name. Know what it is?
He offered a smile, the kind that the Americans he admired so much called a “shit-eating grin,” a phrase whose meaning was the exact opposite of what one would suppose. Hello, Crazy Bastard, Le Cao Boi said. I’ve heard a lot about you.
Once, I would have taken offense. But after all I had suffered and seen, perhaps I actually was a crazy bastard. Perhaps that was just another name for a man with two faces and two minds. If so, at least I knew who I was, and that was more than could be said for most. The dual images of myself floating in his lenses reminded me that I was not one but two, not only me or moi but also, on occasion, we or us. We might have been two people in one body, two minds in one shell, but if this was a weakness, to be divided against oneself, it was also a strength, to be one’s own twin. We were not half of anything. As my mother had told me time and again, You are twice of everything!
Okay, enough chitchat, Le Cao Boi said. Small talk kills me. Let’s get to work.
Hey, chief, said one of the dwarfs, emerging from the back of the restaurant. He had droopy eyelids. Grumpy did it again.
Du ma! Le Cao Boi said. Well, why don’t you do something about it?
Du ma! Sleepy said, pointing at me. He’s the new guy.
Good point. Le Cao Boi nodded at me. Follow Sleepy. He’ll show you what to do. After that, we get to the real work.
I followed Sleepy to the back of the restaurant. He paused before a grimy door and said, with a grin, Got to start from the bottom and work your way up, right?
Sleepy laughed mightily at his joke and seemed somewhat resentful when I did not laugh in turn. Grumbling, he kicked open the door and said, Got to keep your hands clean. Clean hands, clean food, am I right? When Sleepy noticed me gagging, tears coming to my eyes, he stood on his tiptoes outside the open door to look down into the toilet and said, Jesus Christ. Ugh. I mean . . . good
