Starr Sign

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “I used to wait for the priest with my sister like this when we were children,” Anya says, still keeping her eyes on Mary. She fingers a string of shiny black-and-silver rosary beads that she’s holding loosely in her hands. I tell her I left mine at home by accident.

  “In Russia?” I say. It might be good to get her talking about the old country. Maybe she’ll divulge something that would help Deep with his birth record search.

  “Yes. In St. Petersburg. Not in a church, of course. Religion had been outlawed by the State. But my father kept his faith. A priest would come in secret to our home to say Mass. Beforehand, he would take my father to the study for his confession. We would wait in the living room.” She sighs. “Our mother died when we were babies, so it was always only Karine and me.”

  “Was it always this boring?” I say. I know I’m supposed to be playing the good Catholic here, but waiting for a bunch of people to unload all their sins on the padre is about as thrilling as watching the paint on the crucified Jesus dry.

  She smiles but doesn’t take her eyes off the statue. “We would play little games to make the time pass. Try to count the number of pieces of stained glass above the entrance to the hotel across the street. Or make up romantic fantasies about our teachers at school. Unrequited love. Scandalous affairs. Karine was a wonderful storyteller.”

  I should find out more about this sister. She could be a lead. Karine might have helped Anya if she showed up in Russia with a baby that wasn’t hers.

  “Where is she now?” I ask.

  “She died,” Anya says, turning her eyes away from Mary.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago. We were young women. Karine had a wild nature. One that my father couldn’t rid her of. She refused to do as she was told. That romantic streak again. She ran off with a man my father had forbidden her to see. A man who could not protect her as we could.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was kidnapped, by enemies of my father. The boy she loved was killed. Karine was forced into a brothel. Violated by strangers against her will.” Anya fingers the rosary beads so aggressively now I’m afraid the shiny beads are going to break and spill out onto the floor.

  “They found her a year later, in the penthouse of a prominent man. She had hanged herself with a filthy bedsheet. She was all but unrecognizable, even to me, her only sister.”

  “People look different after they die.” I know this from personal experience. They always show dead bodies in TV cop shows looking all serene, or mildly startled, with their eyes wide open. The only thing that stays wide open after you die is your mouth. That’s why the undertakers have to wire those suckers shut at the funeral home.

  “I think suffering is the only emotion that survives past death,” Anya says. “And my sister’s suffering was written all over her broken body. The last story she ever told.” She turns to me, her eyes sharp and focused, no longer dreamily contemplating the past.

  “This is why we do not allow prostitution of any sort in the family’s business dealings. People who want to destroy themselves with drugs, or gamble, this is their choice. My sister did not have a choice. As many young women do not. It is the only thing I ask of my Alex. To prohibit these activities. It is not my place to tell him how to run his affairs, but on this one point he respects my wishes.”

  Alex Scarpello didn’t strike me as a guy who gave a damn about anyone’s wishes, but I keep that to myself. “I’m sorry,” I say, “about your sister.”

  “My sister brought on her own bad fortune, I’m afraid,” she says. “Where I come from, a woman does as she is told. I know this is not a popular sentiment. But it is the way things work in families such as ours. Karine disregarded our father. She suffered the consequences of that.” She bites her lip for a moment, putting a crack in her lipstick. “But I am afraid that I did not discourage her. I enjoyed her spirit, my little Karine. Perhaps too much. I could have stopped her, but I did not.”

  I nod, thinking about Janet. I kind of enjoy her spirit, too. It’s different than mine. But maybe that’s what I like about it.

  Anya gets up from the pew and lights a candle next to a bunch of others flickering in the tray. She drops a couple of coins, which clatter into the bottom of a metal box for the privilege. Even remembering someone you love comes with a price, I guess.

  Anya returns to the pew, crosses herself before sitting down.

  “I am so glad you are here, Candace. For the beatification. Faith is so important. I would have been lost without mine.” We sit quietly again. I study the Stations of the Cross, depicted in graphic detail on the walls of the church, in case there’s a quiz later.

  It’s getting harder and harder to reconcile this woman with the baby-snatching villain I suspect her to be. But I know a bit about desperate times and desperate measures, and I’m sure Anya Scarpello does, too. You don’t grow up under the shadow of both Stalin and the Russian Mob without learning a thing or two about being ruthless. Or maybe it hadn’t even been her idea. This bullshit of women doing what they’re told seems to run deep with her. I suppose her experience with her sister gave her a taste of what might happen to those in the family who didn’t obey that rule. Still, I’m almost ashamed, sitting beside this woman who has provided me with her own confession, while I hide my ulterior motives. Feeling anything remotely like guilt is a new thing for me.

  Perhaps I’ll make a good Catholic yet.

  CHAPTER 15

  IT LOOKS LIKE THE POKER GAME is held on the other side of town, the rougher side. But then again, most of Detroit is rough, except for the downtown financial district, where they roll up the streets at night after all the office workers hightail it home to the safety of the burbs. We’ve been driving for a while when the goon at the wheel pulls into an old Jiffy Lube converted into a storefront. All the windows are darkened with thick acrylic paint. A sign above the scuff-marked door reads Ponyboy Vapes. I just don’t get the attraction to this new way of fucking up your lungs. Smoking is bad enough. But at least you don’t have to add to the stupidity of killing yourself by looking like a moron sucking on a kazoo while you’re at it.

  “Wait here,” the driver says. “I will be back.” He’s got a thick Italian accent, being what the Mob calls a Zip, a recent immigrant from Sicily brought to America for the cause. His English vocab is good enough, though — must have studied back home in preparation for the job.

  He disappears inside the vape shop. It’s probably a front for one of the Scarpello lines of business. Most likely drugs. The Mafia used pizza parlours for years to distribute heroin. A scheme that would come to be known as the Pizza Connection — like the French Connection, but with more dough. But the feds got wise to that, so I guess a Vape shop makes for a better smokescreen these days, both literally and figuratively. After a few minutes, the Zip returns, drops a baggie of white powder on the front passenger seat. I so called it.

  We pull back onto the darkened street. He adjusts the rear-view, trying to catch a better look at me in the back. I tug at the hem of my new black dress. When I’m sitting down, it rides up to my crotch. I’m not interested in showing my cooch to this guy, although I’m wearing more acceptable underwear since my trip to Nordstrom — a navy-blue lace number that makes my thighs itchy.

  “You want to keep your eyes on the road, buddy?”

  He ignores me. But he stuffs his peepers back in his head. We travel in silence. I watch out the window as the neighbourhood continues to deteriorate.

  “So, where is this place, anyway?”

  “It changes with the week,” he says.

  “So you don’t get jacked?” A lot of people don’t realize that the biggest risk for these underground high-stake card games is not getting raided but robbed. Changing the venue every week reduces their chances of being a target for thieves.

  “That is not a problem,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “We do not deal in the cash.”

  Malone ha
d said they were having some trouble following the money on this one. I had assumed it was a cash game. Sounds like I was wrong.

  “Then what do you deal in?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer.

  I lean forward from the back seat, close to his ear, trying to turn on the charm. I don’t bother to pull down my dress when it rides up my thighs this time. “So, what do they bet with?” I ask. This information could be useful, given what Malone had said.

  He pulls a half-smile in the rear-view. The teeth I can see are capped with silver metal, like that Jaws character from the Bond movies. He doesn’t take care of his dental hygiene as well as I do.

  “Are you Italian?” he asks me.

  “Half.” I’m not sure where this is going.

  “We have a saying in Sicily. La bocca è per mangiare. The mouth is for eating.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means shut the fuck up with the questions.”

  I lean back against the seat again, resisting the urge to strangle this Zip with my itchy lace undies. Nobody tells me to shut up. But I’ve got to behave, at least for now. If Alex Scarpello ends up being my brother, I’ll make sure this guy eats a whole lot more than his Sicilian words.

  The Zip driver never does tell me where we’re going, but eventually we arrive. The street looks like a zombie apocalypse version of Alex Scarpello’s classy neighbourhood. Same vintage of mansions, but most are boarded up and covered with graffiti. The rest have been made into rooming houses for the down-and-out, emphasis on the down. The house we pull up in front of looks like one of the latter — sagging porch, chipping lead-based paint. The surveillance cameras mounted on the roof are brand-spanking-new, though. One is trained on the front door, where I wait after being dropped off. The Zip took off as soon as I got out of the back seat. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to park a car in this neighbourhood at night. Even Charlotte’s shitbox would be stripped within the hour.

  A looker of a woman answers the door, surprising me. My height, in six-inch heels, appears to startle her, as well.

  “You are here for …?”

  “The card game,” I say. “I’m security.”

  “Oh,” she says. She ushers me through the metal-reinforced door.

  The inside is in way better shape than the outside but still gives off the feel of better days that got left behind with no one to do the dusting. The walls are papered in faded gold-and-cream felt, and striped satin couches with the sheen gone bare in places dot the large entrance hall. A wide staircase, with the steps worn down in the middle, is lit by murky wall lights. They have tattered orange shades with little balls fringed at the bottom.

  “The gentlemen have not arrived yet,” she says. “For the game of cards.” This one is foreign, too, although I can’t place the accent. She has on a flowing pant suit that I would have preferred to my Band-Aid of a dress, but it’s virtually transparent through the misty green material. This woman has no trouble with people seeing her cooch.

  “The game is upstairs,” she says. But she doesn’t take me up them.

  Instead, I follow her through the main floor to the kitchen in the back. The appliances haven’t been updated since stoves went electric. It smells of burned coffee and mould. She opens a wood-plank door next to a dingy white refrigerator. There are narrow stairs behind it leading up.

  “Wow, I say. “Just like Downton Abbey.” Alex Scarpello really must have studied that fucking BBC classic, taking notes to bar the help from using the main stairs. The woman smiles, like she’s trained to, and starts her way up. I follow her as best I can. My red Mrs. Claus stilettos keep catching on the narrow steps. I’ve pulled the lifts off, and the sharp points keep sticking in the soft wood.

  When we reach the first landing, there’s a heavily padded door affixed with studs. I go for the handle, but she blocks my way.

  “Not here,” she says, smiling again. “The games are on the third floor.” We continue our way up. The third floor has a door with a sliding-panel peephole like they used to have in speakeasies, back when the government was fucking insane enough to try to outlaw booze. She knocks, and a man slides the panel aside to get a look at us through Plexiglas. I suspect it’s bulletproof, or else he wouldn’t stick his face up so close to it. He sees me standing behind the woman in the see-through pantsuit and nods. The panel shifts back into place, and then the door opens. I don’t hear any disengagement of locks. I guess the guy at the door, who is as wide as he is tall, serves as a human deadbolt.

  I walk in and he pats me down, scooping my phone out of my leather jacket in the process. The broad in the pantsuit hightails it down the stairs.

  “No phones. No weapons.” He dumps my phone into a plastic tote full of other contraband. He points at the portable metal detector I’m supposed to walk through. It’s framed with hard plastic lattice, like a cheap entry-way into a butt-ugly garden.

  “You better give me the shoes,” he says, pointing at my red pumps, the metallic spiked heels flash in the fluorescent light.

  “I’ve got to have something to walk in,” I say.

  He scratches his head at that. This guy really is a deadbolt.

  “Why don’t you hold them while I go through, and you can pass them to me on the other side?”

  “Maybe I should ask the boss,” he says, looking nervously around. I hear the murmur of voices in the other room, catch the faint whiff of cigar smoke. Shit, that’s even worse than vaping. I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I stride right up and through the metal detector while the deadbolt still scratches his head. Sirens and lights go off like I just won the jackpot on a game show. But instead of a grand prize, two security guys rush from the other room and tackle me to the hardwood floor. They knock the wind out of me, but I recover enough to get one in a headlock. My dress rides up to my waist as I backwards head-butt the guy behind me. He falls back to the floor, holding his forehead like he’s discovered he should have had a V8. At this point, Alex Scarpello shows up and leans over us sprawled in a tangle on the floor.

  “Well, Candace,” he says, peering down at me through the smoke curling up from his cigar. “It appears you have arrived.”

  After releasing the guy I had in a headlock at Alex’s urging, I get up and take in my surroundings. The game room is a converted attic, with a sloping roof on both sides. A professional card table decked out in green felt with beige bumpers around the edges takes up most of the space. Black leather wingback armchairs surround it. Right now, they’re all empty, the players yet to arrive. A woman in her sixties, wearing the sort of tweed suit favoured by the wives of Republican candidates and Miss Marple, is setting up at a desk stocked with blocks of blue-and-white striped poker chips.

  My attention is soon drawn to the full-length bar that runs along the far wall, well stocked with top-shelf liquor that a Goon Tavern patron has only seen in their wet dreams. I bend myself almost double to duck under the sloping roof and make an aggressive beeline for it, taking care to avoid the guy with the goose egg on his dome that I put there. The other guy who tackled me has taken over for the numbnuts at the door who Alex banished to patrol outside in the cold for being such a screw-up. On a bar stool, the dealer for the evening sits idle, dressed not unlike the penguin from dinner last night. I pour myself a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker Platinum, offering him some, but he shakes his head, mouthing soundlessly, “No drinking on the job.” I ignore this advice. It doesn’t apply to me.

  Soon the players for the card game begin to file in. Some wear Wall Street wannabe get-ups, the same as Alex’s; others, loud velour track suits and gold chains, as if they’re middle-aged white men in a rap-star entourage. They give each other a wide berth. Many are from warring factions of families or gangs, Alex explains when he joins me behind the bar. These men would shoot each other out in the street but keep it peaceful here for the sake of the game. High-stakes poker is a no man’s land, where all bets other than those on the table are off. Alex continues
to nurse the cigar he’s been sucking on since I got here, taking infrequent but deep pulls into lungs I imagine to be as black as his soul.

  Once all eight players have arrived, they line up for the buy-in. The woman issuing the chips sits behind her desk. She watches the screen on her laptop as the players place their phones one by one in front of an attached scanner before tossing them in the same bin that’s holding mine. As she hands them their blue-and-white striped tokens, she speaks at times in Italian or Russian, occasionally Arabic, seemingly hired as an interpreter as well as cashier. Since the advent of Google Translate, these multilingual types have to take work where they can get it. When one player flashes his phone for the scanner, I catch a glimpse of a square on the screen that looks like a Rorschach inkblot for robots, what they call a QR code.

  “Bitcoin?” I say to Alex, figuring they’re using the underworld’s cryptocurrency of choice to manage the cashless buy-in, the QR codes linked through an app to their accounts.

  Alex gives a disdainful snort, like I’ve just asked him if he uses Rogaine to grow his short-cropped hair.

  “Do you know how much is stolen from those exchanges through cyber fraud and hackers?” he says as he surveys the players taking their seats. “Over four billion just last year.”

  “That’s a lot of coin,” I say, making a mental note to ask Deep why he hasn’t looked into this virtual bank bandit use of his skills.

  “It is,” he says, not taking his eyes off the room. “And I am not a man interested in exposing my assets to thieves.”

  Or to the FBI, I’m thinking. Those blockchain transactions are anonymous but still publicly accessible. The Feds only have to link your online trading persona to your real one to follow the dirty money. Easier said than done, but still possible. That’s part of the reason they were able to nail the guy running the Silk Road drug market on the dark web a few years back. They figured out he was using the Dread Pirate Roberts as his handle, and you know no good can come from tarnishing the name of a movie as fucking flawless as The Princess Bride.