I squeezed his shoulder. “Look, I appreciate the concern. But don’t worry about me. I look worse than I really am, mainly because I’ve had only about ten hours’ sleep in the past two days.” I tweaked his khaki-colored cheek, because he hated it. “You worry too much, Pat, you always did.”
“Only over people who need worrying over. You and my fifteen year old.” He patted the film roll in his pocket. “What should I expect?”
I glanced over toward the girls, who were too wrapped up in whatever girls get wrapped up in to notice a couple old guys like Pat and me. “Naked ladies.”
Pat’s black eyebrows climbed dramatically. “I’m shocked. What would your mother say?”
“I’m not worried; I’m not the one whose mother lives with him.”
“Mother-in-law,” Pat corrected, “but good point.” He held a finger to his lips. “Discretion.”
“Your middle name. Also, there’s a client in this, so I can reimburse you for your trouble.”
“And that never hurts,” said Pat, though we both knew he’d do it for nothing. He had, plenty of times. When I was in the game full-time I always took this sort of business to Pat—though ordinarily I knew what was on the film, having exposed it myself in the course of, typically, a divorce case—because Pat was good, and fast, and knew how to keep his mouth shut, and didn’t cry if I wasn’t able to slip him anything this time. He knew I’d make it up next time or the time after, when the client was fatter. It had always been like that. As the saying goes, Pat and I go back a long ways.
Which is why I felt bad. I used to see Pat, and Angela and Mama and the kids, fairly often in those old days. Less so, much less so, now—this was maybe the second time since New Year’s, and both times were because I needed a favor out of Pat. It was uncomfortably exploitative. More so because I couldn’t stay now.
As usual, Pat said nothing. He was the most understanding man on the planet. I always hated that about him.
On the sidewalk I took a deep drag of muggy air in an effort to clear my head of the dust that had collected there. Immediately I was taken back to childhood, the way some odors can do more sharply than any image. The world today smelled exactly like a turtle bowl I had when I was a kid. The sky was a funny bluish gray overcast, close enough to touch, not cloudy but certainly not sunny. It was hard on the eyes, but since I hadn’t gotten around to replacing the sunglasses I sat on in the car the week before, I had to rough it on the freeway. Near the drugstore I got on I–480 south, at the point it becomes westbound I–80. That skirts the extreme south of Omaha, and links up with I–680, which runs north-south on the west edge of town. At Dodge Street I got off the freeway, looped the cloverleaf and ended up in Regency.
Regency’s one of those tony developments of sprawling brick-faced ranch-style houses spaced well apart, fake-looking but real lawns, circular driveways and circular streets that don’t seem to go anywhere but around and around. Fortunately the development is less than a mile square, so eventually you’re bound to stumble across your destination.
Eventually I stumbled across my destination. A real effort was called for to keep me from just driving past it and away. From everything. The days when I could get by on a couple hours’ sleep a night were long since gone, and from the way my head dully throbbed a reggae beat, the way my insides felt unattached to anything, I knew my interpersonal communications skills wouldn’t be up to their usual stratospheric standards. In other words, I felt crappy, and when I feel crappy I tend to forget to edit my off-the-cuff remarks.
But there I was. The house was a low-slung earth-toned number. Large? Well, if you were going from one end to the other you’d be well-advised to pack a lunch. The lawn was as green as a pool table, and as smooth. A brick wall the color of the house kept the yard from running into the street. Near the gate, a small brown box hung on the brickwork. I got out of the car and opened the box. Inside was a phone with no dial. I lifted the receiver and it rang through automatically, answered by a woman’s voice with a curiously precise lilt. She activated the gate electronically from somewhere in the house when I identified myself. The gate shut behind me after I drove through.
Sometime before Christmas I reached the top of the elliptical drive, where the house lay like a high-rise on its side. A petite young woman stood, dwarfed, between the fat white Doric columns that supported the roof over the entrance. The woman’s hair was the color of sunset, her face a lighter shade of gold. She was small-boned, classically attractive, appealing in a cool, refined way as opposed to, say, Marcie Bell’s electrical sexiness. She wore a pale blue suit, the jacket of which was cut along the lines of a sleeved vest. Under it was a cream-colored blouse, open at the neck. Little jewelry. Heels high but not ludicrously so. The “dress for success” guys would’ve approved.
She came briskly to the driver’s side of the car and introduced herself as Helen Tosco. Helen Tosco’s eyes were unusually dark, I thought, for a woman of her coloring, and they shone like black stars. She invited me to park the machine anywhere along the drive. I could’ve parked fifty there.
We entered the house. It was quiet and cool, decorated in a very simple, even sparse fashion that, I gathered from magazines, was the style. “You’re right on time,” she told me as I followed her through a foyer with genuine tile on the floor and genuine wood on the walls, through a living room with sea blue carpet on the floor and attractive, anonymous watercolors on the wall, and through a dining room with hardwood on the floor and floor-to-ceiling windows on two of the four walls. “Mr. Gunnelli is waiting on the patio,” she said. That was through a set of glass doors off the dining room. By the time we got there I was winded.
Gunnelli was in his late seventies, I knew, but he looked twice that. He was thin—emaciated—and pale, his skin a yellowed, waxen mask stretched taut over the bone, crisscrossed with more lines than a Rand McNally atlas. His eyes, once no doubt blue, were watery, colorless, empty-looking—like a dog’s eyes at night when the light catches them just so. His hair was a soft white fleece on the sides and back of his head. His hands were claws, and they held, shakily, the Wall Street Journal. He sat under a sun umbrella at one of those white wrought-iron tables that are usually aluminum. This one was the genuine article.
Gunnelli appeared not to notice us until the woman spoke. “Mr. Gunnelli, this is Mr. Nebraska, the gentleman Tom Carra told you about.” The old man looked up from the news capsules on page one and nodded. His thin stiff lips peeled away from shiny yellow teeth in what I took to be a smile. I’ve seen more appealing grins on iodine bottles. He set aside the paper and waved his trembling hand in invitation. Helen Tosco pulled out a metal chair for me and I sat. I’d expected her to silently vanish after the introductions—the Mob not being noted for its equal-opportunity efforts—but to my surprise she took the next chair over and seated herself.
The old man stared at me, through me, with those vacant eyes. For a dreadful instant I thought the man must be a feeb, the woman his nursemaid/interpreter, which would make for a fun conversation. However he soon shifted his gaze past me and toward the house. His lips parted in the false start old people sometimes make in speaking, then bellowed to the house, “Jimmy! Coffee!” The voice was a deep bass bullhorn that needed no amplification to be heard inside through the closed doors. I wondered where in the fragile old frame he stored it, as well the energy to put behind it.
He returned his eyes to my face. I got another death’s-head grin and felt a trickle of sweat run down my left side. He was a spooky old bird. “Thank you for coming,” he rumbled deeply, which set my unsteady innards vibrating. “Forgive me for not standing.” He slapped a leg. “I cannot always depend on these old pegs.” Sixty years in this country—and, I didn’t doubt, sheer determination—had scoured from his voice any trace of accent, leaving only the careful, meticulous enunciation of someone for whom English is not the native tongue. The woman had the same precision of speech, bu
t with someone her age I’d’ve bet it was drummed into her head over several years’ worth of English lessons.
Gunnelli eyed me warmly—as warmly as the icy eyes could manage anymore—like the prodigal son. “I am so glad we have this chance to meet,” he said.
“It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
It was also a stupid-ass thing to say, given whom I was saying it to; besides, it was inaccurate: our scene was as much like The Godfather as Old Yeller. I was a little disappointed, in fact.
The Tosco woman, meanwhile, shot darts at me with her black eyes as Gunnelli roared in apparently sincere laughter. “Very good, very good,” he croaked as a tear escaped down the right side of his creased face. “And I’m glad you thought so, too; horses are much too expensive and beautiful to be cutting off their heads and leaving them among people’s sheets.”
Smiling lamely, I ran my palms along my thighs. Now that I’d broken the ice by saying something cloddish, it seemed time to get the festivities underway. “Well,” I began with stunning originality, “your man Tom—Carra?—said he thought you’d like to have this little chat with me.”
He waved it off. “And so I would. But food and business do not mix.” He indicated a young, slender man letting himself out of the house. “Here comes Jimmy with our coffee. Then we will have breakfast, and then we can discuss our business.” He looked at me questioningly.
I figured his opinion of me was rapidly on the way to solidifying already, so I had few points to lose by being tactlessly honest. “To be perfectly blunt, I was hoping we could kind of just get it over with. Maybe I wouldn’t ordinarily mind sitting here shooting the breeze for an hour, talking about the weather, the elections, the price of pasta and everything else but what we’re here to discuss, but I’ve come up a little short in the beddy-bye department of late, and it’s left me edgy. Besides, I’ve always felt that breakfast-, lunch-and dinner-meetings are perhaps the least effective way of getting anything accomplished.”
Helen Tosco fired another evil-eye salvo my direction, and added in a voice that went with it like ham with eggs, “Mister Nebraska, do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”
“ ‘Whom,’ honey, and it isn’t you.” I said it, as usual, without thinking, and then it was too late to do much except apologize, for what it was worth. I opened my mouth, but Gunnelli spoke first.
“Helen, our guest is one-hundred-percent right. This is a business meeting, not a social call; we should get down to business.” Though he said this to her his eyes were on me, as they had been all along. I knew the look. It was the look a cat trains on a potential adversary. He was sizing me up, quite simply. Was I just a smart ass, or did I carry some weight? It was another variation on the old macho could-I-take-him question, only a little more civilized than what goes on on the playgrounds and in the bars. I made my face and the front part of my mind blank. He could take that as candidness or stupidity, I didn’t care. There’s very little you can lose by having your opponent underestimate you.
To the waiter who stood by, oblivious to all—as is the hallmark of good waiters—Gunnelli said, “Jimmy, you will please serve us immediately.” The boy nodded and trudged back to the building, the grass under his feet crushing and crackling like crepe paper.
Again Gunnelli looked at me. “Very well, then, Mr. Nebraska, to the point.” He inserted a palsied yellow hand into the inner pocket of his summer suit coat and extracted a smooth-finish leather wallet. From it he selected a single bill, a $1000 note. It was clean and crisp and new-looking, though I knew it couldn’t be new: they quit making them years ago. Gunnelli placed it, facing me, on the mesh tabletop and weighted it with a spoon. It was only the second time in my life I’d seen one—the thousand bucks, I mean; I’ve seen lots of spoons. When I was a lad I had a great-uncle who carried a $1000 bill in his wallet always, in case he got somewhere and needed to buy a car.
I pried my eyes from Mr. Lincoln’s face and focused on the old man’s. “Those Instant Cash cards are really something, aren’t they?”
“Consider this a gift,” Gunnelli rumbled. “A goodwill gesture. I will be perfectly happy to pay this much for each and every photograph you bring me.” He let that sink in, and it did—along with the understanding of what had triggered the little signal in my head the night before, when I was getting rid of Tom Carra. Subliminally, I’d realized I was reading the tea leaves all wrong. Now it came to the front of my mind: It wasn’t the cops Manzetti was trying to keep the pictures from, it was Gunnelli. That was fun to know, all right, but it only raised the same old questions.
So far, at least. In this business there’s no telling what sort of trivia or intuition might prove valuable later. I filed it away and, trying not to look at the money, said, “Your man Tom’s obviously told you everything that took place last night, so you know I wouldn’t turn the pictures over to Manzetti. What makes you think I’ll turn them over to you?”
“Because I am not a barbarian. I am a businessman. I do not use that in the way the movies do—‘I am a legitimate businessman.’ We both know the business I am in, but it is a business, or at least it has become so. So I prefer to do things in a businesslike fashion. Unlike Manzetti, I do not expect to gain what I want by torture. What, so far, has Manzetti achieved by his devices?”
“A stack of pictures.”
“So he has,” Gunnelli wryly allowed, “but in spite of his methods, not because of them. He still lacks the photographs you control. You made him a laughingstock, from what Tom Carra tells me. Not too many living men can claim they made a laughingstock of Alfredo Manzetti. But it is Manzetti’s own stupidity that opened him to ridicule, just as it is his own stupidity that brought the matter of this Morris Copel to the attention of the police. We try to avoid that sort of, shall we say, publicity these days. The times have changed, as Manzetti has been unable to appreciate. They have changed in many respects; thirty or forty years ago, a word would have been sufficient to dissipate the event entirely from public awareness. Today it requires my calling in many, many favors to downplay the situation. So Manzetti has been doubly stupid: he has attracted attention to himself, to us, and he has put your photographs beyond his reach.”
“He didn’t put them there,” I said disagreeably, for I realized sourly why Oberon had been ordered to shelve the Copel investigation. “I put them there. Out of his reach and out of yours, too, I might add.”
Gunnelli sipped at his coffee, somehow managing to spill none. I tasted mine. It was excellent. Shows what you can do when you don’t start with the $1.98-a-pound generic stuff.
He set down his cup with a rattle against the saucer and said, “The thousand dollars was merely a preliminary offer. I am, of course, open to reasonable counteroffers.”
“Which is reasonable of you, but money isn’t the point.”
The woman took up the pitch. “I’m not sure you understand, Mr. Nebraska. Mr. Gunnelli has offered you a fair bit of money for the negatives Tom Carra believes you possess. Even if you have only a few—even just two or three or four—we are talking about a rather substantial sum of money.”
I finally got her figured out. “You aren’t by any chance a lawyer, Ms. Tosco, are you?”
“I am an attorney, yes,” she said, switching to the term lawyers think dignifies their profession, even though it’s usually used incorrectly. “If that has anything to do with it.”
“It helps explain why you have trouble following plain English. Money, to repeat, isn’t the point. The photographs are non-negotiable. Manzetti’s threats couldn’t buy them, your money can’t buy them. Luxury yachts, real estate, women—all the same. No sale.”
The old man sat back in his chair and studied me like a chess board. I drank some more coffee. Finally he spoke. “I don’t understand your attitude,” he said.
And he was serious. It was sort of a refreshing question. I gave it some genuine consideration. �
��I don’t expect you to understand it, Mr. Gunnelli,” I said slowly. “I don’t understand it myself, at least not completely. I’m no crusader, no do-gooder. I’m not even a guy just doing his job, really. Maybe I’m only someone who’s seen too much slip away—jobs, friends, dreams, a wife. So maybe I have to do whatever I can to preserve something. The girl in the pictures? Her old man, and the sort of things he stands for? An image I carry of me when I cared more strongly about those things, too? I don’t know. What I know is that I’m not turning those pictures over to anyone—unless I’m backed into a corner, in which case you can bet I won’t be turning them over to anyone you’d like to see have them.”
It was quite a moving speech, let me tell you. Made me wish I still had those pictures, just so I could not turn them over to anyone.
We sat in silence a while. I looked out across the immaculate lawn that rolled away from us and ended against eight-foot-tall hedges through which, at intervals, the tall brick wall could be glimpsed. A rabbit appeared under the hedge. He must’ve had a secret entrance/exit under the wall. He watched us in that curious way rabbits have of watching you while pretending not to. Shortly he tired of it and bounded off—quick as a bunny—diagonally across the velvet blanket. I couldn’t see where he thought he was heading, but he spotted a gap in the brush and, without breaking stride, disappeared into it.
As if he’d been waiting for the animal to leave, Gunnelli spoke as soon as it vanished. “I fail to see how you think your gesture will help,” he said measuredly, as if each word were precious. “Manzetti has some of the negatives already. He can use them at will, he can use them to destroy utterly that which you feel you must preserve. You cannot stop him.”
“Can you?”
The pale eyes narrowed. “That,” he said, “is problematical.”
“And I’m to believe that if I turn the pictures over to you I’ll be taking positive steps toward cutting off Manzetti between the water and the wind? Come on, Mr. Gunnelli, I’m not entirely dense. There’s nothing I can do about Manzetti. That’s lamentable, but there it is. What I can do is not add fuel to the fire. The extent to which everyone seems het up over those negatives—the extent to which no one seems ready to act until he gets his hands on them—is the exact extent to which I’m inclined to keep them hidden away.”
The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1) Page 12