by Norman Green
He was staring at her now.
“Hey, come on, Marty, what the hell. It was me did all the work on it anyway. I mean, I know you got shot and whatever, but I let the money come to you, Medicaid’s just gonna take it. What’s the point in that?”
Both of Stiles’s hands were clenched into fists, and he shook his head, just a little bit, almost as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“So anyhow, this broad comes in. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. From Valdosta, wherever the fuck that is. She says her brother is in this rehab, but he’s dogging it, won’t do nothing, won’t talk to nobody, poops in his pants. She wants me to check it out. I mean, it ain’t really what I do, so I tell her it’ll cost her two grand. Ain’t got it, she tells me. So take it out of your brother’s checking account, I tell her. I mean, why not? So basically, Marty, this is the most expensive bowl of rice pudding you never ate.” She laughed at her joke, rattled the spoon around the bottom of the bowl and finished it off. She leaned forward and stared into Marty’s face. She knew she was giving him a gap shot, but he was so mad he didn’t look once. “Tell me something, Marty. Can you still get a hard-on?”
He swallowed again. “Bitch,” he whispered.
“Didn’t catch that, Marty. Because anyhow, that nurse out there, the one with the cannons, she told me she gets wet whenever she has to change your diaper.”
Stiles lost control. “You fucking bitch!” He was much louder now. His hands, unused to sudden input from his brain, groped awkwardly for the nonexistent drive wheels on his chair. “You stole my business?” His voice got steadily louder. “You stole my business? You stole my money? What did you come down here for? You lousy fucking Rican cock-teaser! You took everything from me!”
Al stood up, arranged the hem of her dress. She was not in love with the dress, but she found she was digging the freedom of panty hose over the constriction of blue jeans. “Why the hell not?” she asked him. “It’s not like you’re going anywhere.” She tossed the empty bowl at him.
He swatted it aside as she walked out.
“Al! Goddam you, Al, get back here, you fucking bitch! Al, I swear to God I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I ever do! Al! AL!”
She paused outside the door. The Filipino nurse, drawn by the noise, stood ashen-faced, looked at Al while Stiles continued his tirade. “Baby’s first words,” Al said, and grinned. She cocked an ear to listen, although it was not necessary, probably everyone on the floor could hear Stiles now. Maybe the whole building.
“MARTILLO! MAR-TEE-YO! DID YOU COME ALL THE WAY DOWN HERE JUST TO BREAK MY FUCKING BALLS? GODDAM YOU, MARTILLO!”
Al looked at the nurse. “Minimally conscious, my ass,” she said.
She stood out front, called Marty’s sister while she waited for the car service. “I think he’s gonna be all right,” she said.
Two
Sarah Waters climbed the subway steps out onto the street and headed for home. She lived in the basement of her mother’s house in Bensonhurst, a largely Italian neighborhood down on the southern end of Brooklyn. She always found herself dragging when she got this close, the four blocks from the train station to the house always seemed the hardest part of the trip. You’re always so happy to get out of there in the morning, she told herself, and so bummed when you have to come back. Is the basement really that bad? But it wasn’t her mother’s basement she minded, not really, it was her mother, right upstairs, and all too often, downstairs and in her face. “Frank is a good man.” Her mother never got tired of saying it. “I don’t know why you two couldn’t work things out. Your father and I had our differences . . .”
Last night Sarah had finally had enough. “Frankie is only good for one thing, Ma.” She slapped her left hand into the crook of her right arm and pumped her right fist.
“AAAAGH!” Her mother squeezed her eyes shut and crossed herself. “Don’t talk like that in my house!”
“It’s the truth, Ma.” She glanced over her shoulder, but her son, Frankie Junior, was in his room with the door closed. She could just hear the sounds of his television. “Frankie could be fun sometimes, but you can only be doing that for about an hour a day, am I right? What am I supposed to do with him the rest of the time? When you have a family, you’re supposed to grow up, bring home a paycheck, you’re supposed to quit hanging out in the bar drinking beers and chasing the waitresses. Besides, he’s outa work two years now. I get back together with him, you’re gonna have him in your basement, too. You want that? He’s like a stray cat, you give him food, a soft bed, and a nice place to shit, you’ll never get rid of him.”
“Would that be so bad? Your father and I . . .”
“I don’t wanna hear it.” You can eat shit for forty years if that’s what you want, but not me . . . But she couldn’t tell her mother that, since his death her father had completely reformed his character and was now a saint.
Across the street, a guy pushing a small wheeled cart stopped at each ground-floor window he came to and rapped on the glass. “Eva?” he called. “Eva?” Sarah stopped to watch as the guy continued along to the next building. “Eva?” Looked normal enough, looked like a guy on his way home from the Laundromat, but apparently he’d lost his mind on the way. The world had become a different place since she’d started her new job. Or maybe, she told herself, maybe it had been like this all along and you never noticed. Even the sheltering arms of Bensonhurst seemed grittier than they once had, and she no longer fit there with the same degree of comfort.
It was all Martillo’s fault.
Alessandra Martillo and Sarah Waters had grown up only a few miles apart, but they came from separate worlds. The small brick houses, tiny green lawns, and wrought-iron fences of Bay 19th Street were Eden compared to Brownsville, where you had to walk with your attitude showing, where on garbage days you had to watch out for big black plastic bags that sailed down from the upper floors to land in the gutter. Kids from Brownsville, it seemed to Sarah, had no faith, they were natural skeptics.
They had seen it all.
Theirs had been an uneasy partnership at first, and in some ways it still was. Sarah had begun to wonder what could have happened to Al when she was a kid, what had shaped her, put her on the road to becoming what she was. It wasn’t so much that she was so hard, physically and emotionally, it was that she was almost reptilian in her approach to other human beings. You could never surprise her, if you pulled out your ice pick and tried to stick her with it you would only confirm what she’d already thought about you. Martillo did not trust you. She might, in time, suspend her judgments of you and your motives, but such suspensions were conditional and temporary. It made Sarah uncomfortable, but things had gotten easier between the two of them after Sarah had decided to quit trying to make friends and let Martillo think what she wanted.
Still, it had been something of a shock to her system, becoming the only student in the Alessandra Martillo School of Human Nature.
Sarah had been hired by Marty Stiles, hired to take Martillo’s place, but it had only been a matter of days after that when Stiles had gotten shot. Sarah had not seen him since. And in the meantime, Marty’s corporate clients had continued to call and make their demands. She remembered the morning she and Alessandra had faced up to one another, and to the situation they were in . . .
The room smelled of the man, it was a little bit rancid, a little bit damp, and had been too long between washings. It was not dust that lay in the corners, but crud. “This place stinks,” Al said, wrinkling up her face. “Smell like crack up in here.”
Sarah Waters sat in her chair behind the receptionist’s desk, elbows tight, hands in her lap, felt the worry eating at her gut. The chair had, until very recently, been Al’s. She looked at Alessandra, who was probably five or six years younger than her, maybe in her late twenties, taller, more meat and less fat, nicer butt, better looking if you went for the dark, moody, and maybe slightly psychotic type. “Yes,” Sarah said. “It does.”
&
nbsp; “When Marty hired me,” Al told her, “he sort of automatically assumed I was going to clean it.”
Sarah could not picture Al doing something like that. “I think he was figuring the same when he hired me.”
“He figure incorrectly?”
Sarah sighed. “They outlast you,” she said. “They beat you down. Guys like Marty, you think you can wait them out, but you can’t. He would have gotten his way in the end. He kept asking me to clean up and I kept on saying ‘yeah, yeah’ but not doing it.” She looked around the room in distaste. “Eventually I would have given in,” she said.
“Too nasty, huh?”
“Well, yeah,” Sarah told her. “That would be part of it. But the other part is that if he found someone to do what I do and they promised him they would clean, he would have let me go.” She struggled to keep the emotion out of her voice. “I need this job.”
“You figured Marty out pretty quick.”
Sarah nodded. “He’s a small man. And sour.”
Al walked across the room, stood in the doorway to the inner office, and stared inside. “So what do we do now?”
“Have you thought about it?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yes. Ever since he called me. It was back when he was still in the hospital, before they shipped him down to the rehab. He told me you were unstable. Ah, what else? Temperamental, irresponsible, and rash. Said no one had ever taught you how to act.”
Alessandra turned, leaned against the doorway, and nodded. “I guess that’s mostly true,” she said. “But you gotta admire the guy, he saw this moment coming, this conversation. He got here before you and me.”
“I suppose,” Sarah said. “He must have figured that we would get together to try and screw him, and he was doing what he could to keep us from trusting each other.”
“Like I said.”
“Yeah, okay,” Sarah said, feeling her face grow red. “So what did he tell you about me?”
“Very good,” Al said with a small smile. “Didn’t take you long at all.”
“So?”
Al inhaled, stretched, let it go. “Doesn’t really matter,” she said.
“Go on,” Sarah told her. “I can take a punch.”
Al shrugged. “Marty was never happy,” she said, “unless he knew you thought he was the smartest guy in the room. And the baddest. And had the biggest dick. And all that.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it,” Sarah said. “Go on, spit it out.”
She watched Al’s eyes, waited while Al decided how much of Marty’s vitriol she really needed to pass on. “Well,” Al finally said, “all right, he said you were nothing but a housewife. Said you’d never amount to much.”
“Asshole,” Sarah said, with heat.
“Well, yeah,” Al said.
“I have never,” Sarah said emphatically, “been married to a house.”
“Okay,” Al said. “So what do we do?”
“Whatever Marty really told you about me,” Sarah said, “do you believe it?”
Al walked back around to the front of the desk, sat down in the client chair, stuck her feet up on the desk. “Marty twists things around so that he can get what he needs,” Al said. “You gotta remember that. So you and me, we kinda got thrown into this. You didn’t pick me out, or anything. Maybe you don’t like me too much. Question is, can you work with me? Some of that stuff Marty told you, maybe it isn’t exactly like he said, but I know I got a short fuse. I know I don’t always think before I do something. We don’t have to be girlfriends here, anyway. We just have to be able to work together. You know what I’m saying? If you wanna try this, I’m ready to give it a shot. I promise I won’t lie to you or try to screw you over.”
The light went on in the back of Sarah’s head. This person on the other side of the desk, no matter how bad or how fine she looks on the outside, she might be a cast-iron bitch just like Marty said she was, but she’s just as insecure as you are . . . maybe more. “Yeah,” she said. “Same here.”
“Okay,” Al said. “How do we work it?”
“I figure it like this,” Sarah said. “I can do all the paperwork he hired me to do in about three hours a day.”
“Reports? Bookkeeping? Phone calls? All that shit?”
“Three hours,” Sarah told her. “Four, tops. So say I come in at noon. I clear the phones, I do the billing and the reports, I’m done by four in the afternoon. That leaves me the next four hours to handle all the corporate stuff, you know, you know, the repeat stuff at the hotels and restaurants.”
“Think you can handle that?”
“You could show me,” she said. “Come on, how hard can it be? I been typing up the reports all along and it’s the same bullshit over and over. ‘The bartender wrote up a tab.’ Or he didn’t. ‘The waitress was courteous and prompt.’ Or she wasn’t. ‘The food was tasty and well-prepared.’ Or not. You could teach me how to do all that.”
Alessandra was nodding. “Yeah.”
“And that would free you up to handle the rest of it.”
“Sweet. What do we do about Marty?”
Sarah looked down at the neat stacks of paperwork on her desk. “He’s never getting out of that wheelchair.”
“Probably not.”
“But we can’t just take it over. It ain’t right. Even if he is a dick.”
“I suppose not,” Al said.
“Besides . . .”
“Go ahead.”
“This is a dirty business,” Sarah said. “I mean, some of it is downright creepy. Marty is perfect for it.”
Al nodded. “The guy is good at what he does. You figure we need him?”
“I figure, a guy like Marty, we’re better off having him on our side than to have him out there trying to get even. Besides, you’re not like him,” Sarah said, looking into Al’s face. “I mean, I hope you don’t mind me saying. You might think you are, but you’re not, if you were I wouldn’t be sitting here. You still have a conscience. Listen, I’m a mom so I know about these things, okay? So yeah, we need him. But he needs us, too. Shit, Al, he can’t even get in here, this place isn’t wheelchair accessible, how’s he gonna get down the frickin’ steps? So I figure, the easiest and most fair way to do this is thirds. One for me, one for you, one for him. If he ever gets his shit together.”
“He might not go for that,” Al said.
“Maybe not,” Sarah said. “But at least we can say we tried.”
“Guess you been thinking some about this.”
“I need the job, Al, I live with my son down in my mom’s basement and if I don’t get us out of there I’m gonna cut her gizzard out with a kitchen knife, I swear to God.”
Al ran her tongue across her teeth. “Okay, well, there is one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a dirty business, you said so yourself. It can also be, ah, hazardous. You understand what I’m saying.”
Sarah nodded. “I thought about that, too. Look, Al, I know I’m not like you, I don’t know kung fu or any of that, and okay, I didn’t grow up in the projects, but it hasn’t been all that easy for me, neither. I been slapped, punched, kicked, cut, knocked down, spit at, and pissed on. I can do this.” She saw the doubt in Al’s eyes. “Look, some people’s lives can’t be summed up in a two-page résumé. Not yours, and not mine, either. I can take care of myself.”
Al nodded. “All right. One condition.”
“What’s that?”
“We keep you out of harm’s way.”
“I can take care of . . .”
“Listen, I can’t have some little kid running around hating on me for getting his mother killed or fucked up. That’s my condition.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “Deal.”
A day later Martillo had taken Sarah out to her first job in the field. It was the Sheraton in Midtown.
“Watch the bartender.”
Sarah had already known what to look for, she’d typed the reports over and over. “He didn’t rin
g up that guy’s tab,” she said after a minute. “He just made change out of the cash he’s got sitting on the register.”
“You see how easy this is?” Martillo said. “You’re a natural. Take us a week or so to get you up to speed on this shit, then I’ll never have to set foot in one of these joints again.”
“Doesn’t seem so bad.” Sarah was mentally adding up the bill she would send to the hotel’s corporate parents. “But I’ll never be able to drink Cutty Sark as fast as you.”
“You’ll be surprised,” Martillo told her, “what you’ll be able to do.”
In an hour and a half they had it all, the bartender with his hand in the till, the salesmen ripping off their expense accounts, the prostitutes working over the drunks, the concierge retailing coke in the lobby. Once Sarah would have only seen a nice hotel where she and Frankie might have splurged for a room on a Saturday night, and now she saw a snake pit.
All on her first job.
“Do we tell Sheraton all of this?”