If her own life depended on it, she supposed she could, or if Coral’s did. But if it didn’t? Or if it wasn’t clear?
She thought with a shiver of the dead men she’d seen since this began—more in one day than she’d seen in her previous 18 years, if you counted the ones in the photos, and a tie even if you just counted the ones slain before her eyes. And there was a big difference between seeing her father or granddad laid out in their best suits, hair carefully brushed and cheeks touched with makeup, a preacher by their side, the church choir singing hymns, and seeing a man’s blood spill out of him onto the floor. Dead was dead—but the polite, quiet death of a funeral ceremony was worlds apart from the loud report of a gunshot, the acrid tang of powder in the air, or the snick of a blade unfolding and the desperate groan when it met flesh.
She wished she could get it out of her mind, but as she made her way toward Nicolazzo’s hideout the images kept coming came back to her, the dead men and their near cousins, the ones who’d survived the recent events but not unscathed: Stella with her branded cheek; O’Malley with his bandaged face; Clohessy in the alley where Charley had left him, bearing who knew what sort of wound. It frightened her to think of the blood that had been shed, the pain suffered, and all because of her—because of the book she’d written, the men she’d spurred into action. And women, too. Her own sister, a thief. Stella told me about this book she’d seen, Coral had said. That gave me the idea.
She had to make things right. She had to. Somehow.
She reached Van Dam, followed it south toward the huge green sward of Calvary Cemetery. It wasn’t the same size as the mammoth burial plots down by where the artists lived in Brooklyn, not quite; but it was plenty large and it loomed in the distance, a wholly unneeded reminder of mortality. Bring me your dead, it seemed to Tricia to be saying. Bring all you want. We’ve got room for more.
She counted blocks, referred to her map, drew near. When she reached the intersection, she didn’t recognize any of the buildings, but why should she? She’d had a bag over her head coming and going. But in this neighborhood of narrow, wedge-shaped blocks, only one corner could properly be called the corner of Van Dam and Greenpoint, and only one building could properly be said to be on that corner. And it looked about right: There was a front way and a back way in, there was gravel in the rear, and there were several stories, enough to require a staircase with 39 steps. The windows were shuttered from the outside and, where she could see between the shutters, curtained on the inside. As you’d expect—a man who had to smuggle himself ashore in a pickle barrel wouldn’t take any chances with his privacy. There were no sounds coming from the building, which might mean anything or nothing. Tricia couldn’t see any lights on inside, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to in the daytime even if they were on.
She circled the building, trying to divine the best way in. Front door, back door? Neither seemed great. A half-height window into the cellar held more promise. Using a stick she found on the ground for leverage, Tricia forced the shutters open, then squatted and peered inside. There were curtains here, too, but enough space separated them that she could see a sliver of the room. By angling herself this way and that she could make out that there was no one inside. She tried to open the window, straining the way Charley had at the Sun (only without spitting on her hands first—she didn’t see how that would help). When it didn’t budge, she took out the gun and, holding it by the barrel, swung it against the glass.
The pane cracked and pieces tinkled to the floor inside. Tricia ducked out of sight. A few moments later she cautiously crept back, looked in. There was still no one there. She wormed her arm in through the hole, avoiding the jagged edges, and felt around the frame. Sure enough, the window was locked. She unlocked it. It went up smoothly after that and she dropped through it to the cellar floor.
Glass crunching slightly underfoot, she made her way to the door of the room where she and Coral had been held. “Cory,” she whispered. She tried the knob. The door swung open.
“Cory?”
The room was dark. She groped for the cord to the hanging light and switched it on. Coral wasn’t there; no one was. The bunk in the back was empty.
Was she upstairs? Tricia wondered. Were they all upstairs, putting Coral through some horrible ordeal, trying to get out of her some secret she didn’t possess or information she didn’t know? Tricia listened for some sign that this might be going on. She heard nothing, but it gave her little comfort. They might have gagged her. She might be unconscious. She might, as Barrone had said, already be dead.
Tricia knew she had to find out, had to go upstairs, had to face whatever was waiting for her there. But she was glad for any excuse to put it off, even just for a minute. So she went to the far side of the room, to the bunk where Coral had been sitting when Mitch had shoved Tricia in, the bunk where they’d sat together while Coral told her story. She hunted around the foot of the bunk, felt underneath it, looking for she didn’t know what. A message, she supposed. Some sign that Coral had been here. She knew she’d have tried to leave one for Coral if their positions had been reversed.
Conscious of the time slipping away—someone could come downstairs at any moment, and of course Barrone could also show up at any moment, with or without Charley in tow; they must have figured out by now where she’d gone—Tricia pulled the bunk away from the wall. And there, scratched into the brick with a nail or a stone or in any event something with a sharp edge, were a dozen words made up of ragged, angular, hastily formed letters:
GARAGE 15 ST AVE C
19H GLOVE COMPMT
MORE AT MOON, LCKR22
Tricia pushed the bunk back. More at Moon, Locker 22. ‘Moon’ had to mean Nicolazzo’s club, of course, the dimea-dance place Coral had worked at before she took up boxing. But more what? More photographs? Of whom?
Tricia backed out of the room, held the gun firmly before her, took off the safety, and climbed the stairs. At each landing she spun left and right, gun before her, solitary bullet at the ready, but no one appeared. The building really was completely silent, and dark, and by the time she made it to the top she knew there was a good reason for it.
The place was empty—abandoned. Nicolazzo had hared off to another location, one she couldn’t even begin to guess at. And he’d taken Erin and Coral with him, in whatever condition his interrogations had left them.
At least that was the hopeful possibility. The alternative was that he’d buried them here. That was the big question, really: Were they among the wounded or the slain?
Don’t you touch them, you bastard, Tricia thought as she headed down to the street. Don’t you dare touch them.
It felt more like a prayer than a threat and she kept repeating it to herself as she raced back toward the subway station, putting out of her mind the possibility that maybe he already had.
A block away from Queens Plaza she saw a limo heading toward her, pulling off the lower level of the 59th Street Bridge. Startled, she found herself frozen in place, unable even to turn away, but it passed without slowing, without the man on the other side of the open driver’s-side window even giving her a glance.
She glanced at him, though. Eddie. Sporting what looked, as he sped past, like a black eye.
Charley’s handiwork? she wondered. Or Renata’s?
Tricia heard her train pulling in then and ran for it.
Let Eddie and his passenger discover what she already had, that Nicolazzo was nowhere to be found—that he’d flown the coop, probably as soon as Charley had walked out the door without anything to prevent him from seeing where he was. Let them exercise themselves trying to find him. She had a lead to follow, however tenuous.
Like Gleason used to say, she thought. To the moon, Alice. Straight to the Moon.
32.
Blackmailer
Unlike the Sun, which famously crowned a midtown office building, or the Stars, which filled a two-story bunker of its own near the waterfront, the Moon almost invisibly occup
ied the second story of a squat Garment District tenement, sandwiched between a buttons-and-trimmings wholesaler on the ground floor and a battery of one- and two-man tailoring shops on the third. There was no nightclub banner flapping from a flagpole here, no doorman in livery to usher you inside (or to keep you out, for that matter). There was a front door and a staircase and, in one of the second floor windows, a neon image winking from full moon to crescent and back again, twenty-four hours a day.
On the sidewalk, wiry men heaved wheeled metal racks loaded down with dresses on hangers, one rack in each hand, while others scurried alongside, lettering tags on the run with swipes of a grease pencil. Even on a Sunday morning, the neighborhood was buzzing, in part to make up for the day many houses lost on Saturday (when the Millinery Center Synagogue on 38th was perhaps the busiest building in the neighborhood) and in part to prepare for the onslaught of orders that would roar in Monday morning.
Tricia picked her way through the chaos, stepping up into doorways or down into the gutter as necessary to allow men in an even greater hurry than she was to pass. She knew where the club was—it was no secret. The Times and the News had both written about it. But she’d never had reason to go herself. It was widely known to be a place only men frequented, and mostly a certain type of man: an older man, perhaps, or one burdened with some minor deformity; the halt, the lame; the shy, the scared, the slow of tongue, the foreign accented; those men whose appetite for female company, in short, exceeded their ability to procure any for themselves absent a fistful of tickets and a roster of women whose job it was to not notice the defects in their dancing partners.
It wasn’t prostitution, though of course you heard stories; and many a feel was copped in the name of close dancing. That Coral had passed her first years in New York working here saddened Tricia. She’d pictured her sister headlining in a rooftop revue, or at least enlivening the chorus, not letting herself be tooled around a dance floor by a succession of sweaty-handed romeos with a buck to spare.
But better that than where she was now. Better a lifetime of sweaty embraces under dim lights than the deadly attentions of a man like Nicolazzo.
Tricia climbed to the second floor, where she found the club’s door wedged open with a doorstop. The music playing sounded languorous and soporific, almost as if the record player were set at too slow a speed. Connie Francis’ voice came on, asking who’s sorry now, and the two women working at the moment went round and round with their charges in time to her plaintive query. Two other women seated on chairs against the wall looked up when Tricia walked in, then looked down again when they saw her. No trade here, just competition.
A man in dungarees and a button-down shirt came over, quickly taking Tricia’s measure as he approached. She recognized him from one of Nicolazzo’s photos—this was Paulie Lips, recognizable at a glance from the prominence not just of his lips but the entire lower portion of his face, which culminated in a shovel-shaped jaw with a darkening shadow of stubble just below the skin.
He had the self-confident walk and attitude of a man in charge and gave the impression of being the manager here. Tricia could see his eyes darting about her person, noting her wrinkled dress, the missing buttons, the perspiration on her forehead and under her arms, the circles under her eyes. A job seeker, he must’ve been thinking; and perhaps if there’d been more business to go around he’d have entertained the notion or at least strung her along, but Tricia could see he was getting ready to send her on her way.
She didn’t give him the chance. “Hey, are you Paulie?” she said. He stopped, looked at her more closely. “My sister used to work here, and she left something she asked me to pick up. In her locker.”
“Oh?” he said, taken aback. “Who’s your sister?”
“Colleen King.”
A smile unfolded on his face but it had all the sincerity of a Halloween mask. “Colleen,” he said. “That would make you Patty, right?” He took her hand and squeezed it. “I guess she mentioned me?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “So, what, you just get into town?” His voice dropped and he edged closer. “Do you need anything? Some money? You look a little...”
“I’m fine,” Tricia said. “I just need to get into my sister’s locker.”
“Actually,” Paulie said, “she doesn’t have a locker here anymore. You have to work here to have a locker, and she doesn’t. Hasn’t for a good long time. Think she’s, ah, boxing now. You know.” He playfully threw a few punches in the air. “Though she still comes by now and again to chew the fat with her old friends. Isn’t that right girls?” The two seated women nodded when he directed the question at them, though it wasn’t clear they knew just what they were agreeing with, or much cared.
“Maybe it’s not her locker, then,” Tricia said, “but it’s a locker, and she told me to come here and empty it out for her. Locker 22?”
Paulie’s smile grew more strained. “She told you that?” he said. “Locker 22?”
“She left me a note,” Tricia said.
“Can I see it?”
“I’m afraid not,” Tricia said. “I don’t have it with me.”
Paulie shook his head in an unconvincing pantomime of helplessness. His palms turned up and his eyebrows rose along with them. “Sorry to say, you got some wires crossed somewhere. The lockers here only go up to 20. Maybe ask your sister to come by, she and I can figure it out—”
“I can’t,” Tricia said. “She’s...not available.”
“Well, when she’s available again, have her call me. We’ll work it out. Maybe the three of us can get together for a drink sometime—”
He must’ve felt the barrel of the gun poking into his gut then, through the fabric of her dress pocket, because his face fell. He looked confused first and then fear crept into his expression. “Are you serious?” he said, his voice low. “You think you can pull a gun on me in my own place?”
“I don’t think anything,” Tricia said. “I’ve done it. Now take me to locker 22, Paulie, or I swear to god you won’t live to hear the end of this song.”
Connie Francis’ voice drawled on in the sudden silence between them.
Could she really do it? Could she pull the trigger in cold blood, leave this man sprawled and dying on his well-worn parquet? She doubted it—not least of all because it would mean using up her only bullet. But she made an effort to keep this from showing on her face. To look at her, you’d have thought her a hardened jailbird.
Paulie bristled with hostility. He was bigger than she was—but the gun more than evened up the sides. “Follow me,” he said and led her through the long, narrow room to a curtained-off section in the back. The walls were lined with lockers and the numbers on them, Tricia saw, went up to 28.
“Are you even her sister?” Paulie asked.
“I don’t see why you’d believe me,” Tricia said, “but I am.”
“And she really told you to come here.”
“She left word I could find something in locker 22.”
“She didn’t tell you what?”
“She didn’t have the time to go into much detail,” Tricia said.
He stopped in front of 22 with one hand on the lock. “Why didn’t she have the time?”
“Just open the locker.”
“What if I told you I don’t have the key?”
“I’d shoot you,” Tricia said, “and take the key out of your pocket.”
“Just asking,” Paulie said. He pulled out a ring of keys, opened the padlock, and stepped aside.
Tricia drew the gun out of her pocket, leveled it at him, used it to shoo him back a few more steps. She opened the locker door without taking her eyes off him, then swiftly shot a glance inside. There were several stacks of papers—mainly letters, it looked like, along with a pile of photographs and a telegram or two.
“What is all this stuff?” Tricia said. “And don’t say you don’t know.”
“Colleen called it her nest egg,” Paulie said.
Tricia reached
in, grabbed the first batch of photos off the top, thumbed through them one by one. A couple slipped onto the floor. She didn’t pick them up.
Coral was in most of the pictures, though not all. She was younger in them—these dated back a few years, clearly, maybe to when she’d first come to New York or a little after. She’d been even prettier then and her figure had looked terrific, even in candid shots like these with their bad lighting and blurred portions where one of the subjects had moved as the shutter closed. There was a man in each of the photos, not the same one every time. By and large their figures didn’t look as fine as Coral’s, but like her they seemed not at all bashful about showing them off, at least in what they’d clearly thought was the privacy of a bedroom. They were the sort of photos you could be arrested for taking, or selling, or sending through the mails, and she felt her cheeks reddening as she looked at them. She stuffed them in her pocket, waved the gun at Paulie. “What are you looking at?” she snarled. “You just stay there and don’t move.”
“Calm down, lady,” he said. “I’m not doing anything.”
She reached into the locker again, grabbed a handful of the letters. They were on onionskin, carbon copies of letters whose originals had been written in ballpoint pen.
The handwriting was Coral’s.
She glanced down at the first letter and up again at Paulie, reading it in snatches so she could keep an eye on him.
Dearest Royal—Artie is growing up so quickly! You’d be proud of him. He’ll be a real Barrone man someday—commanding and virile, like his father. But Royal, he needs so much, and money’s so very tight. Even a small amount would help...
She peeled back the top sheet with her thumb, crumpling it slightly.
Robbie, the next one down began. Artie’s growing up so quickly! You’d be proud of him. He’s going to be a real Monge man someday—strong and talented, like his father. He’s a growing boy, though, and needs so much. I hate to ask you to help, but money’s tight...
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