Over dinner the other night with Dostoevsky and Kafka, I said, “Fyodor, have you read Huck Barkin’s new book, WHEN DO THE GOOD TIMES START?”
Dostoevsky looked up from his bowl of lentil soup and mumbled something I couldn’t make out. He had his cheeks stuffed with soup-soggy pumpernickel. I turned to Kafka. “Franz, how about you? Have you read it? Marvelous funny book.”
“Time ravages and memory seldom heals,” he replied.
I turned back to Dostoevsky. That damned Kafka, always obtuse. “C’mon, Ferdy, did Huck let you look at the manuscript?”
“Da.”
“And did you like it?”
“Let me borrow two hundred rubles and I’ll tell you.”
“Forget it,” I said, “you still owe me a thousand from that weekend in Vegas last April. Just answer the question, did you like the book?”
“Good book. It was to laugh.”
I gave up. Those guys are fun around the pool, but for a serious discussion they’re the shits. So I called up Haskell Barkin, known to those of us who adore him as Huckleberry, and invited him over. He came a-visiting, and lectured me for three straight hours on one of my character flaws. If he’d had a couple of more hours free he’d have gone on to a second one, I’m sure.
Then he said, “You’re always recommending sensational small inexpensive restaurants in your column…come on, I’m going to introduce you to a great place to eat.” He wound his pure silk aviator’s scarf around his neck and leaped for the door. On the pad just outside my house I could hear his Sopwith Camel revving.
“Hold it!” I yelled. “I just ate dinner, with Fyodor and Franz.”
He stopped and fixed me with a piercing stare. It was Lamont Cranston as The Shadow, all over again. “Admit it,” he said, “half an hour after eating with them…you’re intellectually hungry again…aren’t you?”
Sheepishly, I nodded. He chuckled with that devil-may-care Rafael Sabatini Sea Hawk Errol Flynn laugh of his, turned, and flung open the door. The whine of the Arctic Tundra wind whipped through the house. In a bound he was in the cockpit of the Camel, waving me to join him.
I buttoned the Bombay door of my Dr. Dentons, grabbed my Thesaurus, kissed Diana Hyland goodbye, and scuttled after him.
It seemed only moments later that we were winging through the saddle between the mountains, spiraling down on Van Nuys. Huck screamed, “Hang on!” against the shriek of the 180 hp Clerget engine, and performed an exquisite immelmann. We altered direction and swooshed over Ventura Boulevard. Huck pointed over the portside and I saw a group of people milling around the Joe Namson Union 76 station on the corner of Ventura and Van Nuys Boulevards. They were carrying placards. “Reagan/Nixon supporters,” he screamed. “Dupes who believe all that ‘energy crisis’ crap Dickie’s using for political misdirection.”
He threw the joystick forward. “Hang on!”
He dove with all the grace of a tern going after a seafood cocktail and just as he pulled out and leveled, he opened up on the mob of Imperialist lackey degenerate pawns of the Oil Monopoly with his twin Vickers. Huck ran the most beautiful strafing run I’ve ever seen.
Then, laughing gaily, he pulled up, did a barrel roll at a dangerous altitude, and we streaked away over Van Nuys Boulevard.
He finally touched down in a perfect three-point in a parking space right in front of Sid Fine Bail Bonds, in Van Nuys and, leaping from the cockpit, he removed his Captain Midnight secret decoder badge. He put it in the glove compartment of the Camel. “No sense advertising who we really are,” he said. I nodded dumbly. I’m always awed by Barkin’s worldly ways. Debonair, that’s what he is, fucking debonair!
“Where we going?” I asked. The last time Huck’d taken me off on one of those cavalier adventures, I’d wound up fighting for my life at Ft. Zinderneuf with the Geste brothers.
“An inscrutable Oriental restaurant,” he said, smiling wickedly. Oh, God, I thought, not Fu Manchu again!
We turned onto Van Nuys Boulevard and crossed the street. I saw the marquee. It said: GOLDEN CHINA RESTAURANT.
“Is that it?”
Huck merely nodded. His ice-chip eyes were narrowed down, watching for the enemy that always lurked in his trail. It was scary, traveling in company with a Living Legend, there was always danger and excitement when with Huck Barkin, but there was also the risk of grievous bodily harm…or even death.
“Who are we afraid of tonight?” I asked, softly, very softly.
“The Circle of the Serpent,” he said, enigmatically, and then shushed me to silence with a wave of his kung fu-calloused hand.
As we came abaft the restaurant, he indicated I should memorize the address. 6209 Van Nuys Boulevard. I marked it in my memory banks for future reference.
When we entered, I was struck first by the perfectly ordinary look of the place. Had I not been in Huck’s company, and had I not had ample reason to know that such innocent lairs always masked nefarious goings-on, I would have thought it merely a quaint, charming dining spot: booths, tables, Muzak. “Careful,” Huck hissed under his breath. He flexed his shoulders and the bulge of the .357 Magnum in its breakaway shoulder rig showed for only a moment. Then he relaxed and his tuxedo fell back into its elegant lines of composure. That’s another thing about Huck: he really knows how to wear clothes!
We slid opposite one another in a booth, Huck watching the door to the kitchen with steely scrutiny. “Do you hear that unearthly sound?” he asked.
“‘Poor Butterfly’ by Oscar Peterson, isn’t it?”
“Not the Muzak, stupid. The sound of ungodly resonances, drawn from Cyclopean depths by nameless sources.”
I listened carefully. “Sounds like ‘Poor Butterfly’ to me,” I said. Huck looked away. I hate it when I disappoint him.
The door to the kitchen swung open and a svelte, almond-eyed beauty in a skintight satin dress slit to her thigh came slithering toward us. “That’s Jade,” Huck murmured, “one of their best agents. On your guard now, Watson.”
“Are you sure it isn’t ‘Poor Butterfly’?” I said, then realized he’d called me Watson. For a nanosecond I thought Huck was slipping toward the Banana Works, but then I realized he’d cleverly tipped me to my codename. “Right, Holmes,” I replied.
“I thought I told you never to call me that?!” he snapped.
“Menus, venerable sirs,” Jade said, handing us the bill of fares.
With chagrin at Huck’s rebuke still stinging me, I took the menu and scanned it quickly. Thunderstruck, I whispered, “Doc, this is incredible! Black mushroom chicken for only $2.50…Kung-Pao beef at $2.45…prawns sautéed with hot spicy sauce only $2.95! Mongolian beef only $2.35…Moo-Shi pork for $2.50! No one can sell Mandarin cooking at these ridiculously low prices. Why, the prices weren’t even this good at Ting Ho before they sold out and a lousy cook took over their kitchen.”
Huck was staring at me with scintillae of light in his glacier eyes. I realized what I’d done. I’d called him “Doc.” If the booth was bugged, now the Circle of the Serpent would know the real identity of this mild-mannered cabinetmaker and brilliant novelist. Clark Savage, Jr. Doc Savage! Scourge of the underworld. What had I done!
“Now we’re in for it, motormouth,” he said.
And just then, as Jade brought the five entrees I’d whispered—the booth was bugged—the henchmen of the Circle of the Serpent attacked.
They came up from the floor. One of the tables revolved, an elevator cleverly concealed beneath the linoleum rose, and seventeen screaming thugs of that most devilish of Oriental murder societies lunged toward Huck Barkin and myself.
“Defend yourself!” Huck howled and leaped from the booth. As I used my chopsticks to snag one of the delicious pan-fried dumplings, Huck met the first wave of assassins with a savate kick that sent two of them crashing through the showcase. “Hieeee!” he screamed, whirling a reverse crescent kick into the face of a 350 lb. sumo wrestler carrying a battering ram. I sipped at the delicate essences of the three-flavor sizzling rice soup.
“Use your wrist radio!” Huck yelled at me, whipping out the .357 Magnum and cutting in half an opium-crazed Serpent worshipper. “Call Blackhawk, tell him we need help! And have him bring Terry!”
“How about the Pirates?” I asked, chewing on some sensational crackling shrimp.
It went that way for the better part of an hour. Finally, they brought him down. The radioactive asp was the final blow.
He lay there beside the booth, staring up at me as I polished off the last of Golden China’s special dessert, the unforgettable candied apple, and he managed to gasp, “Why, Friday? Why didn’t you call for help?”
I stared down at him, my mind half with his fading glower of disenchantment and disappointment, half with memorizing the phone number of The Society for the Abolishment of MSG.
“Sorry, Huck,” I said. “A friend is just a friend…but the best goddam Mandarin restaurant in town is a treasure.”
He died, then. Quietly, sadly, without having eaten a morsel. I wiped my chin and paid the check. “Was he a friend of yours?” Jade said, looking at me carefully.
“Who? That scrutable Occidental? Hell, no,” I said, and waddled toward the door, burping happily.
I’ll always remember that roguish laugh and those sparkling eyes. And as I flew home, swerving slightly to run Jonathan Livingston Seagull through the propellor of my Sopwith Camel, I thought to myself, “You just can’t beat odds like those, Huck.”
But I knew when next I returned to the Golden China, I would be a man in search of revenge…they’d been all out of Tang Tang noodles.