Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

“C’mon, Jo.”

“All right. Hispanic guy with a trimmed beard. Wore a Hawaiian shirt—”

She doesn’t have to finish. Gilrein is already out of the booth and heading for the exit, wiping away the holy water that the pilgrims throw at him. And pushing aside Father Clement as the Jesuit yells, “Salvation is yours for the asking.”

While it is not a requirement for admittance, if you plan on visiting the Last Man Supper Club in Little Asia on karaoke night, it might be a good idea to brush up on your knowledge of pop standards. In a place where every possible human activity seems to have an analogous ritual, you can’t be too overprepared. Don’t imagine you’ll be carried out to the delivery platform and stomped by some Tang Family goons if you blow a line of, say, “Book of Love” when the microphone finally gets passed your way. But the name of the tune in any Tang establishment is respect. And on any given Thursday evening in the Last Man, respect might be measured by the extent of your familiarity with the poetry of teenage heartbreak.

It’s not that August Kroger is oblivious to the mores of this part of town. He’s transacted business along the Little Asia border long enough to pick up the required smattering of totems and taboos. And he’s at least an instinctual enough creature to sense the weight of Family power emanating from every doorway under Tang protection. It’s just that as a would-be neighborhood mayor, Kroger feels he can’t grovel, that the need for respect is a given, but groveling will come back to haunt you, plant an image that will one day undo every inch of bloody progress you’ve worked so hard to attain. And surely, for an independent businessman like August K, born into the sobering history of Old Bohemia, memorizing the chorus of “Big Girls Don’t Cry” must be considered in the realm of the grovel.

His personal assistant, however, would probably see things in a different light, but she’s too fresh in her career to have gained the confidence required to argue with the boss. Even in her current condition, halfway to sloshed on a house drink called a Granberry Morpheme. For all intents and purposes, Wylie Brown was hired by Kroger as his archivist and librarian, overseer of his magnificent collection of rare books and decorative papers. To her surprise and confusion she was promoted, just this morning, to the somewhat more vague position of general secretary.

Is Wylie aware that her advancement is really the result of Kroger’s newly discovered lust? It’s unlikely, given August’s unilaterally stoic facade, the unflinching mask and imperturbable body language he perfected back in his native land. But if she has qualms about her new duties pulling her away from the heaven of Kroger’s immense penthouse library and into mob bars like this one, the pay raise and the bonus of a rare Brockden first edition— In the Beginning Was the Worm: Selected Dream Journals— were compensation enough to buy her acquiescence.

The evening, however, is to have a dual purpose, which August failed to explain on the way over, taking up more than his fair share of the back of the Bamberg, letting his thigh brush up against Wylie’s and slapping driver Raban across the back of the skull when he missed the turnoff to Chin Avenue. Certainly, the night is to be a celebration of Ms. Brown’s first step up the Kroger Family ladder. But while they’re celebrating with the best dim sum in town, why not have a friendly chat with Jimmy Tang himself? Jimmy, the Tong King of the moment, might just be interested in an Asian-backed knockover of Hermann Kinsky. Kinsky, the neighborhood mayor of the Bohemian Wing, is the closest thing Kroger has to a boss, and that humiliating fact alone is motivation enough to risk all the uncertainties involved in throwing an allegiance across ethnic lines.

Which is why August is currently feeling so distracted, trying hard to listen to the object of his most innovative fantasies discuss her doctoral thesis, while at the same time keeping an eye out for the arrival of Jimmy the Tiger and his ever-present flock of meatboys. What’s making concentration even harder is the troupe of drunken Japanese business jocks wrapped around the bar, smashed on sake and the day’s trading at the gray market-place, already engaging in a little push and shove as they vie for the microphone and attempt to will their way past the haze of the booze and the genetics of their native tongue just to croon a verse of “Love Letters in the Sand.”

Kroger watches the bizboys with a mixture of contempt and envy. He knows they’re Tang employees like everyone else in the club, the linked synapses of Jimmy’s personal brain trust. Though they dress and act in rigid imitation of the ziabatsu warriors back home, the particular conglomerate they work for, while perhaps technically no darker than its legal, government-sanctioned cousins, still does business in the shadows and, at the moment anyway, still tends to rely on payroll assassins a bit more than tax attorneys. These are Tang’s money movers, born savvy in the ways of numbers, markets, and the valuation of goods. They spend their days with a telephone implanted in their ear, a cryptic balance sheet just below their fingers. In the course of a weekend they change opium capital into real estate capital, real estate capital into livestock capital, livestock capital into munitions capital, and, very likely, munitions capital back into the milk of the poppy. They could quote the price of yen against the deutsche mark in a coma. They wash Jimmy’s profits in the Caribbean Basin, stockpile them over in the Pacific Rim. And though each, as a servant of the Tang Family, necessarily carries a gun, they leave the blood and guts work to the meatboys and the new generation of street samurai.

Kroger and Wylie are mounted on the last two stools of a bar made from a circular block of lucite filled with one-spot butterfly fish and an occasional specially bred miniature octopus. Wylie wanted a booth, but August needs to keep an eye on all entrances and exits, especially given the fact he’s forced by protocol and common sense to walk softly into the kingdom of Tang, sans weaponry or his two favorite lackeys. But Raban and Blumfeld have other, more pressing duties tonight. And besides, being alone with the librarian , as he still enjoys calling her, is a burden he can learn to love.

“The interesting thing about karaoke,” Wylie is saying, raising her voice just a bit to pull back the boss’s wandering eyes, “is that its popularity in America coincides with the moment the Asian corporations bought up all the rights to the standard playlists. It’s a brilliant maneuver. You create the demand for your back product.”

August picks her hand up off the table and caresses it, trying to stay just this side of fatherly. “Your compulsion to analyze is, forgive me, Ms. Brown, simply adorable.”

Wylie is uncomfortable with both the gesture and the sentiment, but she reminds herself she’s dealing with the product of a foreign culture. So he’s coming on a little too strong tonight, the guy’s got a library that could rival the Library of Congress. With a love of books that pure and strong, he can’t be all bad. And her recent experience with men makes her savor a bit of harmless admiration. So for tonight, anyway, she’s ready to toss back a few drinks and say to hell with being a guardian against objectification.

“Myself,” Kroger says, hesitantly releasing the hand, “I tend to look at things much more simplistically. I am a bottom-line mentality. Go with what works, jettison what does not.”

Wylie raises her drink to him and says, not without humor, “You’re the boss.”

August turns to look toward the restaurant entrance and says quietly, “So I am.”