April said she needed a gun. She said she didn’t feel safe in her studio at night anymore and I knew she’d been mugged (if you can call it that) only a few weeks ago. It was more what you’d call a drive by, only the guy drove by on a bicycle and grabbed her purse and peddaled into the park. As usual there was no money in the bag, but it was a Fendi… a gift from her mother and one of the few gifts she hadn’t returned for the cash.

“It had a juanty style,” she’d told me… ” And beautiful leather.”

A gun would have been no help in her scenario, but she promissed to buy me lunch at Joe’s Ginger and it had been a while since I’d had soup dumplings. We went to a gun shop in Little Italy and the whole thing took on a cinematic quality. There was a guy behind the counter right out of central casting and April kept taking the revolvers in her hand and then snapping open the cylinder and counting the chambers.

“Don’t you have anything that shoots five bullets?” She asked the man.

“Lady, they’re called six shooters for a reason.”

“Yeah, but six is a terrible number. I’d feel much safer with five. It’s my lucky number.”

“I got an automatic that shoots eleven,” he said.

“That’s better, but I need a revolver,” she said. “My uncle had one with five holes.”

“Must have been an antique,” he said.

“He was a collector,” she offered.

“He have any interest in selling them?”

This was going nowhere, so I started whining about being hungry and why don’t we eat and think about it some more over lunch and April actually smiled and agreed and the man behind the counter gave her a card in case the uncle wanted to sell his five shooter and we walked up Mott street past the fish stalls and vegetable stands and the whole street smelled of that particular Chinese brand of fecund death.

“Forget about it Nick. It’s Chinatown,” I said.

“Huh?” April said distracted.

“Forget about it April. It’s a movie.”

“What is?”

“Chinatown.”

“That’s where we are now.”

At the restaurant we sat quietly and didn’t talk about the gun store. The dumplings came and they have a small amount of warm soup inside the wrapper. You eat them by placing them in a spoon and biting a small hole in the dumpling skin and sucking out the warm liquid. When the dumpling is drained of juice, you can take a bite, or swallow it whole.

“There’s something about eating these,” She finaly said. “That makes me understand the thrill of being a vampire. I don’t think I want a gun after all.”