by Norman Green
She called up Google Earth, looked at the satellite view. Big house, swampland out behind, not a lot of other houses around it, truck parked in the driveway.
And so what, she thought, quit wasting time. She refocused her searches, trying to get more information on the other sale on Staten Island, the warehouse on the opposite side of the borough. Eventually she tired of that and went back to what she’d really come to the office for, which was to catch up on invoices, and then, around dinnertime, she checked her list of hotel restaurants pending investigation, picked one, locked up, and left for the day.
Alessandra Martillo paused at the top of the hill on Atlantic, two blocks from her building. The cab had just pulled to a stop, half on the sidewalk, right outside the bar on the first floor. A guy got out, from the distance she could not be positive, but the dude looked too much like the man who’d been looking for her over on Pineapple Street.
You’ve got to be kidding me, she thought. When am I gonna catch a break? If it was the same guy, he was still using the cab, which stood to reason, he could drive it anywhere, park it anywhere, and no one would think twice about him, and there were thousands of other taxis to help him blend in. But when she thought about the old guy driving it she could not believe this cab had been hired by The Harkonnen Group, whoever the hell they really were, whatever the hell they were really after. She’d been thinking of them as The Rectangle State Brigade, and a fat old Irish guy flying under the radar definitely did not fit their mold.
A government contractor, being paid by the Homeland Security department. And why the hell would the goverment use a contractor, anyhow? Maybe because you could get a contractor to go where cops wouldn’t or couldn’t go and, more important, do things a cop wouldn’t or couldn’t do.
All right, she thought, if this guy isn’t with Harkonnen, what the hell does he want? Could he have something to do with Daniel Caughlan? Caughlan was in prison, true, but while she had been on Caughlan’s payroll Al had annoyed some rather unpleasant people, including, at times, Caughlan himself. It was not outside the realm of possibility that one of them might have paid for a hit, but it was difficult for her to believe they’d hire a gunman who looked like an Irish Saint Nick . . .
Not that it mattered at the moment, out on this dark and cold evening. You’re gonna have to deal with this guy sooner or later, Al told herself, but it had been a long day and she was tired. All I really want, she thought . . . Yeah, sure, okay, but I’ll settle for a nice warm bed. She walked over and stood in a restaurant entryway to get some shelter from the cold damp wind blowing up the avenue off Upper New York Bay. You really need to find a safe place, she told herself, but how are you gonna manage that when you can barely swing the rent for one lousy room over a bar? But insecurity, both financial and personal, seemed to be the price she had to pay for her independence.
Which did not make her feel any warmer.
She turned and walked east on Atlantic, away from the cab, away from her bed, away from warmth. Her cell started ringing, but when she looked at the screen she did not recognize the number so she didn’t take the call. Her paranoia in high gear, she searched until she found a working pay phone. They were much less plentiful than they used to be.
She didn’t need to look at her cell, her memory gave her the number she wanted to call. As she punched it in she was flooded with sorrow, because the man whose number this had once been, the man she really wanted to talk to, was gone.
A familiar voice answered. “Hello?”
“Hi, Ant.” It was about all she could manage.
“Al! Is that you? Alessandra?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Are you all right?”
“Well . . .”
He knew. Maybe it was because he knew her so well, or maybe it was because she only called him when she was in trouble. “Al,” he said. “Come home. Do you need a ride?”
“I can make it,” she said.
Anthony opened the door of his brick house in Queens and stood aside for her to enter. Alessandra, embarrassed, stood on the stoop. “Oh, come on in,” he said with a faint smile. “Come inside.” She entered, took off her shoes in the entryway, then went in and took the seat he offered her at his tiny dining room table. “Just a moment,” he said, and he vanished into the kitchen.
She could smell tea. He knows I hate that stuff, she thought, but when he came out bearing a tray laden with a daintily flowered china teapot and matching cups, the kind with handles too small to stick your finger through and saucers to match, she relented. He took so much pleasure in the acquisition, preparation, and serving of his favorite beverage that she would drink it just so she didn’t spoil it for him. And it was the real thing, too, no tea bags in this house . . .
He sat down opposite her. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” she said, dispirited. “I’m okay.”
He smiled again. “Really?”
“Ah, you know, it’s just work.”
He laughed at that.
“Well, you know what I mean,” she said. “Somebody wants to talk to me and I’m not particularly interested in hearing what they have to say. When I got back to my building tonight, the guy was camped out on my doorstep.”
“When I don’t feel like talking,” Anthony said, “I don’t answer the phone.”
“Well, this guy seems a bit more persistent than that.”
“Oh, well, you know you can’t be too careful.”
“You’re messing with me, aren’t you.”
“I?” He went all wide-eyed and innocent. “Alessandra, please, you’re a trained investigator, I would never dream of attempting to mislead you in any way. Besides, I know you can take care of yourself, but after all, honey, you are still a woman all alone in the big city, you have to be cautious and use your head.”
“Now I know you’re messing with me.”
“Perhaps a bit,” he said. “Now I’m going to ask you a serious question, so don’t get all proud and insulted, because I want a serious answer.”
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Are you afraid of this person?”
He’d been right to prick her balloon first, he’d given her a way to put her pride aside and give him an honest answer. “No, I don’t think so,” she told him.
He steepled his fingers, rested his chin on them. “This isn’t like you, Alessandra,” he said. “Normally you would have . . .” He searched for the correct word. “You would have discouraged the gentleman first, then repented later when you discovered he was only the Fuller Brush man attempting to leave off some coupons.”
“Come on, Ant, I told you guys I was sorry. How long am I gonna have to keep paying for that? That had to be ten years ago, at least—”
“Really? Seems like only yesterday. But still, you haven’t found a way to properly communicate your lack of interest to this gentleman, such as rupturing his spleen, for instance. Why not?”
“I just wanted to go lay down, you know what I mean? And there he was. I guess he was just the last straw.”
“Bad day?”
“It’s been a lot more than a day. Ever since Roberto died . . .” She looked up, sorry at once that she’d said it, sorry to have caused more pain, but Anthony just regarded her gravely. His self-control was cast in steel and he would do his mourning in private. The face Anthony wore was the one he wanted you to see, and it was probably all of him you would ever see. She had never gotten past it. She wondered, growing up as an outcast the way he had, a gay child in a straight world, if that had been the only way he’d found to survive.
Talk about lonely . . .
“In my job,” she told him, “I don’t get to see the good side of anyone. You know what I mean? Most of the people who come to us, it’s like they’re on fire, they’re all worried the other person is going to get over on them. ‘Find the money,’ they say, and then it becomes ‘Find my money. And catch him with his whore.’ And when I do it they hate me, too. Plus, I have a new part
ner now, all the time she’s out there, Ant, I’m scared to death that something bad is going to happen to her. And her ex, he got involved with some bad guys from Palermo, I’m pretty sure they’re smuggling something into the country, I don’t know what yet, and I don’t know what they did to him, either, but he’s missing. So his chances of seeing his kid ever again are not too good.”
“Palermo, Italy?”
“Yes.”
“Heroin?”
“Probably,” she said. “Most of the time the easiest answer is the right one.”
“I suppose,” he said. “But you think your partner’s ex stumbled across what they were doing and they killed him for it.”
“That would be the charitable assumption,” she said. “I mean, you take this guy, never had any money, he’s waiting for his big break—”
“I get it,” he said. “So all you really need to do is just get through with what you’re doing now, and then take a few days off. You deserve a break.”
“I don’t know, Ant, it isn’t just the case, it’s everything. I mean, I wanna call my father, but I can’t, it’s like trying to talk to a bag of walnuts. My boss is an asshole, he’s in a wheelchair in this place down in Coney Island and I really think he’s gonna sit there in a puddle of his own wee-wee until he finds a way to die, this guitar player I was seeing is fucking the singer in his new band, I’ve got these pricks from the Department of Homeland Security trying to put me on a leash, I can’t sleep anymore, I haven’t been eating right, when I moved I lost my fucking winter coat . . .”
He was smiling at her. “A sea of troubles,” he said.
“I should know who wrote that, right? I guess they must have covered that in English class after I dropped out.”
“Don’t get huffy,” he told her. “I’m sure you’ve encountered the principle somewhere along the line, all the great writers have covered it, Buddha, Jesus, Shakespeare, Popeye the Sailor. Life is suffering. When you ask God to take all of your problems away, what you’re really asking for, when you think about it, is to die. Because right up until the very moment of that unhappy occasion, you will have problems. So do you gulp down your spinach and fight with Bluto or do you lie there while he carries Olive Oyl off into the bushes somewhere to have his way with her? That is the question. When Hamlet finally decided to fight back he was all but too late. I always thought if he had acted with a bit more dispatch he might have survived the play.”
“I never liked Olive Oyl,” Al said. “I didn’t mind her being all skinny and whatever, but that voice would drive me out of my mind.”
“Well, yes, if she had only shut up once in a while.” He eyed her. “You already know all of this, Alessandra. Why don’t you tell me the real problem?”
He waited while she wrestled with it. “Roberto was my anchor,” she finally said. “With him gone, there’s a hole, and I don’t know how to fill it.”
“I miss him, too.” Anthony’s control might have slipped just for a second, ever so slightly, but then he had it back. “Your uncle was never one for a lot of introspection, you know. I’m sure you can tell me what he’d say to you if he were here.”
She nodded. “Turn off that television,” she said, making her voice as low and raspy as she could. “Get out of here and go do something.”
“Give it hell,” he said. “That’s the way he lived his life.”
She nodded. “He didn’t seem to worry about much.”
“Thank you,” Anthony said, “for drinking the tea. I know you are just indulging me, but you know this is the first chance I’ve had to use my new tea service. It was Lady Di’s favorite, you know.”
“How the hell did you get your mitts on it?”
“Not this exact one, you cretin.”
“Ah. And you couldn’t use it before now because . . .”
He held the dainty cup up to the light. “Perfectly acceptable when one has company,” he told her. “But I could never use it when I’m here alone. Too gay.”
“You know something, Anthony, I can never be sure whether or not you’re jerking my chain,” she said.
“There’s a comfort,” he said. “Your bedroom, madam, is where it has always been. I do wish you would use it more often.”
“Thank you. Did you really like Popeye when you were young?”
“Honey, when I was young all the sailors were crazy about me . . .”
Seventeen
Al sat in her uncle’s van with the engine running. She was parked next to a hydrant on Smith Street in Brooklyn and it was cold out, cold, cold. Even with the defroster running, the windshield was rimmed with ice. There were no legal parking spots available anywhere on Smith Street, but she sat there waiting, working on the theory that someone would eventually have to come out and drive somewhere, otherwise why have the car? Twenty minutes later she had a shot when a spot opened up on the opposite side of the street, but she got aced out by a bread truck. She tried to be angry and curse the guy, but he was just doing his job, after all, so she circled the block, meaning to go back by the hydrant again, but she happened upon someone leaving in a minivan on one of the side streets and she outgunned a Toyota Camry to get the spot. The guy behind the wheel of the Toyota honked his horn and yelled at her, but when she got out of the van and began walking in his direction he pulled out and drove away.
The business card Bobby Fallon had given her was in her bag. She’d tried calling the number on it, but her call was taken by someone who claimed, with definite traces of irony in his voice, that he’d be happy to take a message to relay to Mr. Fallon. She thought about hanging up, but she gave him the message instead. Please tell Mr. Fallon that I remembered something about the parking valet from that night at Costello’s, no, I’d much rather talk to Mr. Fallon about it myself, please have him call me back and I’ll be happy to discuss it with him . . . The man’s tone left no doubt in her mind that he felt confident Mr. Fallon had more important things to do with his time.
Hey, I tried, she thought.
It was too cold to lurk somewhere nearby and wait for her guy to come out so she walked up to the building, paused in the urine-scented entryway to look at the broken mailboxes, then pushed open the inner door, which should have been locked, and stepped into the first-floor hallway.
Right then she realized that it was going to be tougher than she’d planned on, because while the entryway had smelled bad, the first-floor hallway was worse. To Alessandra, it smelled like poverty. It smelled like a communal toilet down the hall, like too many people in too small a space, like bad food, dirty diapers, mice, misery. It smelled like her aunt Magdalena’s place. The reek wrapped itself around her senses like a wet bedsheet. Living on the street, she thought, would be better than this. She had made that choice, once.
At the far end of the dimly lit hall a fat woman with thinning hair pushed herself through a doorway on a wheeled office chair. “Who are you looking for?” Her voice was a hostile screech that went high and thin with fear as Al, suddenly angry, strode in her direction. “What do you want? What business do you have here?” She shoved with her feet and she and her chair disappeared back from whence she’d come. “Leave us alone!” she howled, and the door slammed behind her.
Al pounded on the door with a fist when she got there. “Open up!” she shouted, enraged. On her way down the hall she had looked through an open door and seen what had been done to the building. The apartments had been chopped up and what had once been individual rooms was now a warren of tiny cubicles crudely fashioned out of two-by-fours and particleboard. A one-bedroom apartment that had once housed a small family was now home to dozens of men. These places spring up in the viler corners of the outer boroughs, and they are generally patronized by immigrants sending money home to families in China, Central America, or India, families which they might not see again for years. Newspapers and police call them illegal rooming houses, but the term falls far short of accurate description. They are firetraps, diseased carriers of blight and human mis
ery, sinkholes of despair. Al had seen them before, and as always she was incensed by the poverty of human spirit that would lead a landlord to do such a thing to fellow human beings, let alone a building. “Open this fucking door or I’ll be back here in ten minutes with a housing inspector and a warrant for your arrest!”
Empty threats, but they got the door opened a crack. “These are poor people who live here! We have nothing for you! Leave us alone!”
The woman’s accent troubled Al, she was not Hispanic or Italian. Al put a shoulder against the door and shoved as hard as she could, knocking the woman’s chair over. The woman sprawled on the floor next to her overturned chair in the doorway of what was probably the only real living room left in the building. She flopped over onto her stomach in an attempt to get to her feet, but Al put a knee between the woman’s shoulder blades. The woman squalled, sounding more like a crow in distress than a human. “Shut up!” Al told her. “Shut up!”
Shutting up was apparently not high on the woman’s list of life skills. “Get out! Get out! We are calling the police!”
“Yeah, sure you are,” Al said. “You know what would happen if the cops ever came to this shithole.” The woman’s use of the word “we” bothered her, though, and she looked around. There was a door to one of the inner rooms that had just begun to ease open, and Al saw the yellow wooden baseball bat before she really saw the man holding it, and she leaped up off the fat woman just as he emerged. He held the bat vertically, the business end up next to his ear, all Al had to do was slap the barrel of the bat at his head, which she did, stunning him. She got him twice more in the same manner and he went down, without his bat. He lay where he’d landed without moving.
Al turned back to the woman, who had made it up to her hands and knees, still squalling. Al calmed herself, walked over and laid the head of the bat next to the woman’s temple. She went silent at once.
“Better,” Al told her.
“We have no money!”