by JJ Partridge
Aunt Ida continued to act wide-eyed surprised at my offer as she reached into a pocket of her house dress and handed me her son Arnie’s business card. “Arnie knows how much …”
16
WE MADE THE SEVEN-TEN Amtrak Regional at Penn Station with a few minutes to spare and found adjoining seats. Nadie, loaded with bags she refused to relinquish, fussed with passenger debris left on her seat, and complained about the air conditioning and lack of space in the overhead bin. She fiddled with the contents of her carry-on, opened a paperback and then closed it angrily when the overhead lights dimmed as the train approached the East River. Since Ocean Avenue, her cell phone’s buzzings had been ignored. My attempts at conversation had not penetrated her funk. Only when the train screeched and swayed its way into Queens did she open up.
“Ida had the scheme worked out. Calls Zelda, asks her to put the bite on me, in person, to talk to you, I cajole you into coming, and you arrive to save the day! I was the perfect foil.”
“Listen,” I replied, “Ida, her family, took a real hit. Any loan that Nick might arrange will be for the business, not the family, and will depend on the homes’ finances, its cash flow. Nick will be sympathetic, but he is a banker.”
Nadie’s cheek was pressed to the rain streaked window. Graffitied, dilapidated factory buildings and weed-strewn lots with piles of discarded tires, garbage trees, industrial trash, and junked cars sped by, an urban wasteland, a desert of shame, that shocked anyone on a first train trip to Boston. Then, even less agreeably she said, “Ida must be desperate. If Ida loses her stature in Brooklyn, she’d take to her bed, with Zelda waiting on her hand and foot.” Nadie has long complained her mother lived in the shadows of her older sister. “My mother is such a patsy!”
Seconds later, Nadie shook my knee. “There’s another thing that concerns me. About the loan, I mean. Arnie and Simon may not understand that the loan is a business deal. Arnie, I don’t trust, and Simon is as smart as a sack of rocks. Maybe it won’t be like, ‘Thank you, thank you, for saving us’; it could be more like ‘Is that all?’”
After reading several texts from Marcie on the evolving story of Carter University v. Christopher Columbus and the Italo-Americans of Providence, with links to the local media pouncing on the juicy story, I began a Lee Child thriller picked up in Penn Station. That got me through to Old Saybrook where Jocelyn snuck back into my mind. I remembered her hair spread on a pillow, framing her face, a single sun-blond curl playing peekaboo, her slim, ripe body, her tan highlighting alabaster body parts that needed my hands.
Nadie slapped her book close. From the corner of my eye, I saw her staring out at the dusky marshlands of Long Island Sound whizzing by. “Do you ever think of Jocelyn?” she asked.
ESP? Telepathy?
“Only when you bring her up.”
I gave myself a pass on my white lie.
When we arrived home, Nadie went upstairs to the loft while I punched in numbers on the telephone in the den for messages. Two awaited recall. The first, from this morning, was a man’s hard-edged, breathy voice crackling with anger. “Fuck off, who do ya t’ink ya are? Yer shit don’t smell? Well, fuck you, butt plug.” Click.
Huh? What the hell was that all about? A blowback from this morning’s Journal article? I listened to the message again, more carefully. The voice was rough, like a longtime smoker’s, slurred, and muffled as though spoken through a handkerchief, with a Providence accent and cadence, the words evenly spaced.
Next call had come a half hour later. Same voice, “Fuckin’ WASP blow job. Figlio, a bocchino, testa di cazza.” Click.
Some goomba of Frannie Zito letting off steam? Who else would take the time to so elegantly describe me? Was it just the unpalatable idea of a fuckin’ WASP replacing a somebody from the Hill?
A robotic voice insisted I had to save or delete the messages. What were my options? Ignore? A phone trace that would surely get Nadie involved? A call to the cops? I decided not overreact, and hoped that I wasn’t letting my ego, my Yankee stubbornness, get in the way of good judgment. I pushed ‘seven’ on the keypad to delete the calls and tapped in my brother’s speed dial number.
“More on Ravensford?” Nick asked, surprised by the late evening call to his West Seventies condo. I updated him on what Joe Civittolo had revealed. “All I can tell you is that if I was going to launder money, I’d use a hedge fund. You can move large sums of money without supervision and you don’t have to reveal who your clients are. That’s my bet. The money is long gone.”
“Thanks and no thanks,” I replied and briefly got into the financial perils facing Gershowitz Funeral Homes, the likely effects on Nadie, her mother, and importantly, the wedding, and the need of a quickly arranged loan.
“Funeral homes?” he interjected more than once. Money and finance, which ran in my family’s DNA, have strangely skipped me while Nick, like my father, had taken on investment of our family’s multi-generational fortune and augmented it several times over.
“I doubt the firm would fund a loan to a string of funeral homes,” Nick said very calmly, very bankerly. “That’s not the kind of situation in which we risk partnership money, let alone investors’ money, even if the interest rate is attractive, plenty of security, and positive cash flow.” There was a long pause. “Of course, we’ve got to take care of Nadie.” Another pause. “We could put them in touch with some work-out lenders outside the city or, if you feel it necessary, tap the TF?”
The TF, our shorthand for the Temple Fund, would be a last resort. The Temple Fund, managed by Nick, consisted of highly liquid, super-safe investments reserved for unanticipated needs of Nick’s family, me, and our mother, and from the investment portfolio he invested for our extended family and charitable foundations. Since Nick and I live within our earned income, and our mother had both family investments and income from trusts my father left her, the TF had grown considerably over the years and, although accessible, was rarely invaded.
Before we reached out to third-party lenders or used the TF, I suggested some due diligence on the funeral homes’ books. “I don’t want either of us to be embarrassed. There’s something slick about Arnie. Just to make sure … ”
He replied that he would have a credit analyst call Arnie Gershowitz in the morning—I gave him the telephone number from Arnie’s business card—to determine if the funeral homes were bankable.
I went up to the loft, Nadie was already in bed. I realized I wasn’t ready for sleep, told her so, kissed her forehead. I probably should have gone online for more Columbus Day reactions, but I decided that could wait for the morning when I would be clear-headed and ready to deal with the challenge. Instead, I went downstairs into the basement’s exercise area and my pool room.
A touch of a remote of the Bose CD player produced the first notes of Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert and I picked up my cue from the restored 1928 Brunswick-Balke-Callender pool table. It had a pristine, traditional green, Simonis cloth surface, classic leather basket pockets, and in-laid mother-of-pearl diamond spots along its nine foot rails. The balls on the table were in a triangle rack and I broke to a decent spread, missed a cut shot at the rail, then missed a carom shot as I played too quickly, leaving the cue ball boxed. I tried to squeeze it out with a shot loaded with English and missed again. And missed again.
I backed away and stared at the positions of the balls, cue cradled in my arm. Seconds passed; I let my breathing slow as the piano music became hypnotic. Something I just read in a pool magazine came to mind, that an MIT geek was designing a pool robot that trained laser sensors on the table, instantly calculated all of the possibilities in any shot—cue tip placement on cue ball, angle of approach, speed, and spin—and executed every shot with absolute precision. I shared the writer’s reaction that while pool looked like it was all geometry, angles and shots on a wire, its essence was beyond mechanics. At its best, pool was mental agility married to physical prowess within the psychological arena of competition, it all came
together when a player reached the shooter’s zone, the dead stroke, when skill, training, and experience were like fluids mixing in a bottle.
I made two shots and took a deep breath. I thought the Zen of pool and its physical, geometric mechanics would be evidenced in brilliant play over the course of the Shoot-Out but in a hundred matches in big money games in back rooms and pool pits all over Providence such qualities would be augmented by guile, hustle, stamina and the grease of gambling. Because that was the reality of pool.
It isn’t as though I don’t have a clue where they had abandoned me. The driver had been one side of cell phone chatter over the static of a police radio that he must keep handy. He complained that he missed supper, and laughed when told somebody’s in ‘deep shit’ for ‘banging Chickie’s camorata. “She’s ripe ’cause his dick is piccololini,” he responded Electrifying. Then, he said, “Next exit for the dump.”
In Rhode Island, the dump is the Central Landfill, Mount Trashmore, highest elevation in the state’s glacial plain, decades of garbage and junk covered by impenetrable plastic and tons of earth, the feeding ground for every lazy seagull within thirty miles of Narragansett Bay.
As I begin to assess my situation, I straighten to reposition myself every few minutes to keep circulation flowing. My brain is clearing, less buzz and murk. Who is the ‘somebody’ who calls ‘somebody’ to get me out? Would the second ‘somebody’ be a cop or worse, a reporter? Think of the notoriety! Damn!
A rotten egg odor seeps into the trunk, confirming I must be on the western side of Trashmore, off Shun Pike, where methane gas is extracted for electric generation from the decomposing garbage. Which makes me wonder how much air is in this trunk? I seem to remember sixteen cubic feet of cargo space. How much space do I take up? How much air do I need? My breaths suddenly became shorter, the air seems staler. There must be airholes some place in the frame because I can smell the stench. Right?
The specter of claustrophobia seeps into my brain.
17 Wednesday
I AWOKE WITH SWEATY sheets wrapped tightly around me, after a night of scattered, confused, all too familiar dreams. Nadie’s side of the bed was empty. I put on a robe, went downstairs, and found her note on the breakfast counter: Gone to the gym, and I forgot to tell you, I have dinner and an early movie date tonight with Kate and Louise. Wedding present. Love and kisses and ‘Goodbye, Columbus!’
Well, better than a brooding silence at breakfast.
With my coffee, I read the Journal’s coverage of the Columbus Day mess. Columbus Day Banned at Carter was the banner headline, the story replete with vitriolic quotes from city council members, the President of the Sons of Italy, the Commander of Italo-American War Veterans post, and a Knights of Columbus spokesman. Strident proponents from among our faculty fired back, joined by the President of the Third World Students Association, and the sachem of the Narragansett Indian tribe. Buried in the last paragraph at the end of the second column, inside page was a statement from the University’s Public Information Office, a bland “studying the situation” equivalent of “no comment.”
After a shower, and in consideration of both my first Shoot-Out Tournament Commission meeting at noon and the Shoot-Out Gala tonight, I dressed in full lawyer mufti: a light gray suit, blue tattersall shirt, blue tie, and polished black shoes. Because of an overcast, I took a Burberry raincoat and headed to our garage around the corner and down the hill on East Street. I unlocked its side door and snapped on overhead lights. “Algy’s Autorama,” was Nadie’s disapproving description for my garage full of cars. Nadie, who usually walks or bikes and handles a steering wheel like a tricycle’s handlebar, cannot understand the attraction. ‘Who needs four cars?’ she asked early on in our relationship.
I did. I’m a car buff. A Mini Cooper, our jointly used city car, was almost hidden between my muscle car, a sleek, midnight blue Dodge Charger with a big-mouthed grill, a rear spoiler, and a fuel injected 6.4 liter, Hemi V-8, and a black, aluminum trimmed Range Rover, our comfortable travel car. Under a dustcover in the fourth bay was my trophy car, a Maserati Gran Turismo convertible that deserved driving gloves, only the best of weather, and the open road.
If you are what you drive, what does that say about me? I have had a love affair with cars beginning with an ancient Ford pickup driven on the rutted roads around my family’s retreat on Fishers’ Island. In high school, I owned a souped-up V-8 Plymouth Barracuda, then a Chevy Camaro while in college and law school. I rebuilt carburetors and refinished scratches or dents, did most of my own repairs. I handled trucks during summer jobs at Tramonti Construction and a deuce-and-a-half in the Marines before Officer Candidate School. Later, at Thompson Speedway and Lime Rock’s natural terrain track, I had driven everything that could be driven there, from ancient Austin Healeys and Shelbys to muscle cars, in time trials and races. Like pool, track driving concentrates the mind.
Within minutes, I was behind the wheel of the Mini on Waterman Street turning the AM dial and finding the expected snorts and snarls of talk radio jocks decrying elitist Carter, freeloading Carter, insulting Carter. One got into the rumored negotiations between Mayor Tramonti and Carter University President Charles Danby on a treaty providing for a payment from the University to the City in lieu of taxes on its exempt real estate. Such a treaty was known as the ‘third rail’ of Providence politics: whatever would be agreed to would never be enough for critics. As University Counsel, I knew that Tramonti and Danby were close to resolution; Danby had made a public offer to sign such a treaty if the amount paid was “reasonable,” and if the city worked cooperatively on issues like policing near campus, zoning, and campus expansion. That opportunity, I thought, was now in a swirl of a toilet flush.
The rain, fitful during my drive, began in earnest as I left the protection of the administration parking garage. Say one thing for a good soak, the boisterous rally I might have expected on The Green was reduced to a paltry dozen kids and faculty in hoodies, slickers and rain gear bouncing wet, hastily made anti-Columbus Day signs and placards for the benefit of the cameras of Channel 11 and our campus station WCAR-TV. Off to one side, a solitary student in a knee-length yellow slicker enthusiastically waved a sign that read Young Republicans—Italo-Americans—Proud of Chris!
Inside College Hall, I shook off the wet like a field dog, walked the length of the building, and climbed two flights of stairs to our office suite. Marcie immediately flagged me down. “Claudia Cioffi is in your office,” she whispered. “She was pacing around my desk, mumbling, wouldn’t sit in the library, there was nowhere else …”
“Just what I needed!”
“And you have a conference call with the President and Provost at ten. About Columbus Day. The President is still in California.” I took off the Burberry and knocked perfunctorily on my office door and understood why Claudia Cioffi had been moved here. The chair in front of my desk was occupied by a muddle of sweaters, scarves, a red knit cap pulled down to eyebrows, a non-descript brown skirt hovering above scuffed laced boots. The pile of musty smelling clothing stirred at my entry, enough to allow a pale, angular face, with perhaps a trace of what was once prettiness if not beauty, to appear.
I introduced myself, asked her not to rise, but she did and gave off a shiver of damp. She was taller than I might have expected, perhaps five-eight or so, her shoulders wide, although affected by curvature of the spine. Her stare was unnerving; one eye was milky, maybe with a cataract. My offer of coffee was ignored as she lowered herself into the chair and loudly announced, in a heavily accented, almost masculine voice, “Brunotti fired me!” She thrust what I assumed was her termination notice at me. “Because I refuse his demand that I act at Palagi’s executor.”
As I moved to behind my desk, I read a one paragraph termination on Institute stationery signed by Direttore Brunotti. Even before I finished, I considered that at her age, she would be ineligible for any federal or state protected employment status and that since her employment was at will, Brunotti, h
er boss, had the authority to dismiss her. Being terminated for not acting as a pliable executor, however, was neither appropriate nor honorable and probably constituted two or three violations of the University’s Employment Handbook. If she pressed her case, the University had a problem.
“Hah,” she shouted, as only someone going deaf might, “Executor? Keeping me responsible for his estate? Me? Executor?” A laugh ended in a hiss. “Let the priest pick up after him.”
Her head began to move from side to side with the regularity of a metronome. “Suicide confirms his cowardice. Dante’s Inferno, canto tredicesimo. There, self-murderers … suicides … become eternally stunted trees, gnarled, warped, their fruit is poison. The Harpies gather, eat their fruit, and tear apart the trees. For eternity. You know of the Harpies?”
I nodded that I did, recalling Palagi’s description of his secretary.
“So fitting that one who flees life should become rooted in eternal pain,” she said and added, “Brunotti will suffer for his sins. Who is … was … worse? The day before Palagi died, they argued.”
“What about?”
“Back and forth. I could hear them,” she said sullenly as the milky eye narrowed and her voice lowered to a hoarse whisper, “frode, ingannotore, rapinatore.” Loosely translated, these were accusations of fraud and criminality.
“Brunotti searched our files while Italo was in Italy. He was not careful. He left files out of order. When I told Italo on his return, he was outraged. Later that day, they had their argument.” Her fingers found a lock of errant hair and twisted it like a shy little girl. “How can I be sure it was him? That cologne he soaks on himself!”
“You said frode …”
Even though my office’s room temperature was set at seventy, her hands clasped her elbows as though she was freezing. “Brunotti insisted on seeing him after five o’clock, when everyone would be gone. I remained in my office across the hall with the door closed so they thought I had left. I heard their shouts.”