Warren Murphy: Sweet Dreams

Vince Marino fidgeted in his chair as he always did when Grassione was abusing Edward Leung. The chair creaked and Grassione shot Marino a vicious look while Leung began to shuffle toward the jacket on the floor.

Grassione's eyes moved back to the moving Chinese.

"Slower, you stupid coolie," he screamed.

Edward Leung slowed down and carefully slid his left foot in front of his right, rocked, slid his right food forward, rocked, left, rock, right, rock, left…

"That's better," Grassione said.

Leung reached the jacket and leaned forward, almond eyes narrowing, his hand opening slowly, as if waiting for something to happen.

Marino looked away. He didn't like Chinese any more than the next guy-unless the next guy happened to be Chinese-but this disgusted him.

Grassione stood still, mouth open in anticipation, until Leung's hand was an inch from the jacket on the floor.

"Your gloves," he yelled. "Where are your gloves? You ain't getting my clothes full of your yellow germs."

Edward Leung closed his eyes and sighed inwardly as he reached to his back pocket for his thick gardener's gloves. He had never worked in a garden, not even when he was growing up in Columbus, Ohio, but Grassione wanted to believe that all Chinese worked in gardens so Leung carried gardener's gloves.

He picked up the jacket gingerly between right thumb and index finger.

"Now you get that cleaned," Grassione said. "And hurry it up. I've got an important guest coming and I don't have no jacket and it's your fault, you dumb, stupid, frigging yellow gook chink."

Grassione stared at Edward Leung until the door closed behind the small yellow man. Then Grassione moved to a closet behind his desk. Slamming it open, he pulled a perfectly cleaned and pressed jacket from a bright wooden hanger.

As Grassione slid on the dark silk jacket, a perfect match to his trousers, Marino looked back at the Sony where two people were talking happily in their sunny playroom about how wonderful it was not only to get their clothes soft but to keep the colors bright as well. The black man was just asking his TV wife, in soothingly pleasant tones, how she got his shirts so white when Grassione's hand shot up to smack the set off. As the green dot in the middle of the screen began to fade, Grassione whirled back to Marino.

He leaned forward over the oak desk and said with a smile: "What do you think, Vince? What's Massello going to want?"

Vince Marino desperately searched the thick pile rug for the right words. "I don't know, Chief. I guess he wants us to hit somebody."

He looked up and saw Grassione rise to his full five-feet-nine, and walk tightly around to the front of the desk. He stopped in front of Marino, smiling inwardly as he approvingly gauged his effect on his lieutenant.

"Yeah," Grassione said. "But not just anybody. Massello got his own people in St. Louis that can do hitting."

Marino shrugged. "Who then?"

"Massello's pretty smart," Grassione said. "Smart enough that some people figure someday he's going to be capo of capos. The way I figure it is he's got a special hit for us."

"Special?" said Marino, realizing at that moment that his boss with his shiny suit, his grease-slicked hair, and his oily skin looked like a plaster doll that had been deep-fried.

"Yeah. Special. Like maybe that guy who's been messing us up around the country. The one who got Johnny Deuce and Verillio and Salvatore Polastro. The guy who's been devastating us."

He pronounced the word as dee-vastating, but Marino did not correct him because Grassione had once told him he had spent "a lot of bucks learning to talk good." So he nodded.

But later when Marino had left the room, and Don Salvatore Massello had arrived, Grassione was disappointed to find out that the hit was only a maybe-hit, if the man wouldn't deal, and the man was only a college professor. He stayed depressed until Massello explained to him that the man had invented a new kind of television machine which Grassione took as an insult because he liked television just the way it was.

"Sure, we'll hit him, Don Salvatore," he said.

Massello smiled and shook his head. "No. We will hit him only if he will not deal with us. Those are Don Pietro's instructions."

"Whatever he wants," Grassione said. "Whatever you want, Don Salvatore."

"Good," Massello said. He made arrangements to meet Grassione later, then hurriedly left the lower Broadway office. He felt in desperate need of a shower.

After Massello had left, Grassione turned on the television set, just in time to catch an independent station's sports report. But it was showing a film clip of some stupid guy winning some stupid race in Boston and because Grassione was not interested in sports on which he could not bet, he turned from the set and pressed a buzzer.

A moment later, Edward Leung entered his office. He paused inside the door of the darkened office, his almond eyes looking first at Grassione, then at the green-imaged television set.

"Tell me, wise one, what do you see?" Grassione asked.

"I see nothing," Leung said.

Grassione half-rose in his chair. "Hey, I don't pay you for 'I don't see nothing's.' "

"That is what I see."

"Get outta here, you Chink bastard."

Leung shrugged and opened the door behind him. He turned one more time to look at Grassione, then at the television screen which showed the winner of the Boston Marathon, racing past the finish line so fast he was only a blur on camera.

"All of life ends in death and dreams," Leung said.

"Get outta here. Go pack your rickshaw, coolie. We're going to St. Louis."

CHAPTER FOUR

Fourteen people fell in love with Remo as he returned to the hotel.

Several women on the outskirts of the marathon crowd where it thinned out two blocks from the finish line tried jogging alongside him, gasping as they tried to give him their telephone numbers. He got rid of them by telling them mincingly, "My woommate Bart would never approve."

One woman passenger in a car saw Remo and grabbed her boyfriend so hard he almost drove into the entrance of the Todd Private High School. A cashier and a candy girl in a theater, along with an usher whose sexual preferences were somewhat unclear, followed him with their eyes.

So did a black airlines reservation clerk who decided she would grow her hair back long and uncurl it from its Afro. She'd move from Dorchester and walk no more in South Boston. She'd gain a little weight and stop being such a tease. She'd meet him one night in the reading room of the library and from that night on be his slave, cook, cleaner, maid, fox, and mammy. Screw the movement. Screw women's lib. His. Now, then, and forever.

There were more, and Remo was aware of them, sensing the slight pressure of stares on him, but he couldn't be bothered now. After all, sex was just another technique-squeeze here for a purr, touch there for a gasp-and he had more important things on his mind than techniques. His techniques were perfect; everything he did was perfect. So why wasn't he happy? Didn't perfection include happiness ?

Remo slowed down as he passed an around-the-clock bookstore, and jogged inside.

The clerk at the front check-out counter looked at Remo and said: "The exercise books are in the back on the right. Jogging on the top shelf."

"Where's your dictionaries?" Remo asked.

The clerk had a beard that grew up his cheeks, almost to his eye sockets. Now the beard flickered as he winked to the clerk next to him, trying to gift-wrap a copy of The Prophet. "What are you looking up? Jockstrap?" the clerk said.

"Actually, no," Remo said. "I was thinking of surly, insolent, asshole, and fatality." He did not wink.

"Over there," the clerk said, pointing a trembling index finger at a low, flat counter.