I thought again about the meeting with the Baldinis, godfather and son. I thought about the withered old man trapped in a motorized wheelchair. “What does ‘Googled’ mean?” I asked my girl Friday.
“Where did you pick up ‘Googled’?”
“From Baldini’s son Ugo. He had computers on his desk. One of them told him who I was.”
She explained something about a search locomotive, whatever that was. I must have drifted off midexplanation because I still don’t know what ‘Googled’ means. What I do remember is that I fell asleep—we fell asleep—without consummating our divorce. How relaxed can you get, sleeping in the Clara Bow bed with a female of the species, especially an extremely attractive specimen, without making whoopee?
I can’t speak for Friday. For me it was an exhilarating experience.
At first light we rectified the lapse of the night before.
Fortified by steaming mugs of coffee and home-baked raisin muffins at the general store, we set out to explore the Mojave. I bought five plastic bottles of Poland Spring water (which I doubt came all the way from Poland but what the heck, they quenched thirst) and borrowed a desert kit from the hotel—a tire gauge and small compressor that worked off the Toyota’s cigarette lighter, a folding army shovel, two metal tire tracks and a tarpaulin—and we hit the road. I’d had three weeks of survival training when I joined the CIA, it’d been in the Painted Desert, north of the Mojave, but if you’ve survived one desert you survived them all. The dunes, the flora and fauna, the dry wadis that curl out of wind-weathered canyons, the highways of tamped-down sand with the treads of tires printed on them, the drifts of heat rising off the ground—holy cow, for a boy raised on the Jersey Shore, I must have been a desert rat in another incarnation. How else do I explain that I felt at home where there were no homes?
With Friday riding shotgun, we drove southwest to an abandoned Union Pacific railroad crossing called Kelso Depot. It had a long wooden boom from the days when passing steam engines needed a refill of H2O. We couldn’t resist inspecting the Depot’s abandoned hotel. Worn, torn shutters hung off rusted hinges, banisterless stairs wound up to the bel étage with gaping holes in its floorboards, a barrel of rainwater sat under a broken gutter on the half of the front porch that still existed. All of this only a few yards from the tracks along which long freight trains still passed.
Emerging from the hotel, Ornella had a faraway look in her eye. “What if…” she said.
“What if what?”
“What if we were to pool our money and buy this hotel. It’d probably go for a song. We could fix it up, turn it into a bed and breakfast, organize day trips into the Mojave on camels or jeep—”
We were standing on the good half of the front porch. I pushed a railing and it gave way, splintering off, falling onto the ground. “It’d go for half a song,” I said. Friday’s seaweed green eyes grew dark with disappointment. “Listen, I like pipe dreams as much as the next man,” I said. “Let’s keep dreaming them, the both of us.”
“You never told me your pipe dreams,” Ornella said.
“It’ll come, little lady. Give it time.”
I drove across the railroad tracks and pulled off the paved road onto a rise above Kelso Depot to let some air out of the tires, then went off-road onto desert trails, and then off-trail into the dunes. At one point a wind came up, nearly blinding us with sand. It felt as if we had driven into a wind tunnel, I needed both hands on the steering wheel to keep the Toyota on what I could see of the track. The wind died down as suddenly as it had come up. Except for an occasional exclamation—oh, wow, will you look at that!—Ornella was awed into silence most of the time, taking in the spectacular expanse with its ever-shifting horizon as if she was trying to memorize it. I pulled up on a flat deep in a canyon so we could give our backsides a rest and stretch our legs.
“You’ve been in the desert before,” Ornella said. “I could tell from the way you drive.”
“How do I drive?”
“You slalom over the dunes. You seem to feel where the steering wheel wants to go with your fingertips and don’t fight it.”
“I go with the flow,” I admitted.
“What would you do if the Toyota broke down? Now. Here.”
“I’d survive.”
“You know how to survive in the desert?”
“I was taught. Look at the dry bed of the wadi over there. If you dig at the edges, you’d find wet sand. If you squeezed it in a handkerchief, you could moisten your lips.”
“What about food?”
“Food’s not a problem. You can survive two, three weeks without food. You couldn’t survive two, three hours in the desert without water.”
“We could drink the water in the Toyota’s radiator,” Ornella said brightly.
“That’s a chemical refrigerant,” I said. “It’d kill you for sure.”
“Hey, people stranded in the desert can always drink urine.”
I had to laugh. “Urine is better than nothing. But if you didn’t have a container, you’d need to be two.”
“Oh! Ooohhh. Aw. I didn’t think of that aspect. It’s pretty sexual.”
“Best thing, if we were really lost in the desert, would be to make a still. Urine is ninety-five percent water. You dig a hole yea deep, you put your container—a glass, a pan, whatever—at the bottom and pee into it. Cover the hole with a tarp, a poncho, whatever you have handy. Weigh down the sides with sand or stones. Put one stone in the middle of the poncho so it sags down to the glass of urine but doesn’t touch it. The sun will do the rest. After a while the water in the urine will condense on the underside of the tarp. You could lick it off with your tongue.”
“Hey, if I’m ever lost in the desert, I want to be lost with you.”
“That’s the best offer I’ve had today,” I said.
She looked at me queerly. “Does that mean you accept?”
I looked back at her queerly. “I accept,” I said, “to get lost in the desert. With you. Now. Here.”
And I did. Slaloming down and around and up giant dunes, I lost track of time and place and direction. I drove into a dry gulch that narrowed too much to pass—to Friday’s delight I had to give up and back out. I pushed the Toyota up a stone slope and over the rim of one canyon, the sun slanting in over my right shoulder and then in my face and then over my left shoulder.
“You’re not the same man here,” Ornella announced as we crossed a washboard flat filled with wildflowers as far as the eye could see.
I understood what she meant. It was a different universe, which brought out a different side of anyone crossing through it. But I was curious to hear her take on this. “How, different?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right away. Finally, she said, “You’re not as angry. With the world. With me. You’re not as disappointed. In the world. In me.”
“What makes you think I’m disappointed in you?”
She smiled that smile. “I’ve got the antennas of a blind termite. I can feel your eyes on me when you suppose I’m not looking. I think you’re judgmental. You judge yourself. You judge the people around you. You judge the girls you sleep with. You judged those evangelicals back at Nipton.”
“You’re coming down pretty hard on me, Friday.”
“I’m not as hard on you as you are on yourself.”
“That’s a lot of insight considering you’ve only slept with me two nights.”
“Best way to know someone,” she said lightly. “That’s what fucking’s all about. You can figure out an awful lot about someone from the way he eats and dances and fucks.”
“I’m not comfortable with that word,” I said.
“When it describes what we do in the Clara Bow bed, I am,” she said. “I’m not a virgin, Lemuel. I’ve had sexual experiences where the word ‘fuck’ would be too genteel a description to be appropriate.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m sorry if I’m shocking you.”
“Si
nce Afghanistan, I think of myself as unshockable.”
In the late afternoon, when I finally was obliged to navigate, I raised my wrist with my father’s Bulova and aimed the hour hand at the sun—halfway between that and the Roman twelve on the watch’s face was due south. I turned my back on due south and, halfheartedly, pointed the Toyota in the direction of what some people think of as civilization.
Twenty-two
It was ladies’ night at the Baldini casino—a rabble of them had been bussed in from the Greater Los Angeles sprawl in the top-heavy double-deckers lined up like dominoes near the gas station. If one of them were to tip over, twelve or fifteen would definitely go over after them. To the exasperation of the doormen in livery, two very inebriated young pigwidgeons were washing their long hair in the man-made waterfalls on either side of the imitation bronze front doors. I was glad I’d decided to park Ornella in the Pullman diner because there wasn’t a free slot machine in sight inside. The sound of one-armed bandits paying off enough to keep the saps coming back for more reverberated from the loudspeakers overhead. I plunged through the perfume scents that contaminated the casino’s recycled air to the narrow door at the back. The same lean, mean thug was on duty. He looked daggers at me as the door clicked open before I could salute the long rectangular mirror over the tables. “You don’t cheer up,” I told him as I edged past his tuxedo bib, “I’ll think I’m not welcome here.”
There were two different proctologists in the elevator vestibule on this visit. They proceeded to frisk me as if I was registered with the FBI as a Ruggeri soldier. When the elevator doors parted at the first floor, Ugo was waiting, a quizzical expression on his pinched face. He wasn’t standing to attention. There was no opera playing on the hi-fi. An empty wheelchair was parked next to the trestle. Giancarlo Baldini was astride the horse’s saddle set up on it. He wore a short cream-colored cape over a dark suit several sizes too big for him—or was he several sizes too small for it? His cuffed and creased trousers were tucked into felt ankle-length zipper slippers. “My doctor ordered me to exercise,” he called across the room, “so I climb into the saddle and remember what it was like to ride a horse.” He was wheezing more than I remembered, which made me think he’d overdone the exercise bit. Ugo waved me to a straight-backed wooden chair that had been dragged over to the elevator side of the mahogany desk. He walked around it to settle into the swivel chair and did a slow three-sixty until he was facing me again. The accountant type from the night before, minus the green eyeshade, lifted the old man off the saddle, lowered him into the wheelchair and tucked a tartan quilt up to his hips. The motor whirred. Mr. Baldini senior almost collided with my legs in his eagerness to pick up the conversation where it had left off.
“Whistlestop,” he rasped.
“Whistlestop,” I repeated.
“Whistlestop is not a person. It is a goddamn place. It’s the name of the fancy bar at a new Ruggeri spin-off the other side of the Arizona border in Bullhead City. ‘Whistlestop’ as in ‘stop and wet your whistle.’”
“My dad doesn’t miss a trick,” Ugo said from behind the desk. “It’s a closed-door, invitation-only, high-stakes Texas hold ’em poker operation run out of the top floor of what used to be a house of ill repute—”
“What is this ‘house of ill repute’ crap,” Mr. Baldini snapped. “A whorehouse is what it used to be until the Ruggeris fancied it up with a permanent poker game.”
“Silvio Restivo is in there somewhere,” Ugo said. “He’s a dealer, he’s a house gambler, he’s a floor boss. He must have been going stir-crazy in the FBI witness thing. So he broke out of their protection prison. Maybe he’s dealing, maybe they put him in charge of the hold ’em poker tables to pay him back for setting up Salvatore. Whichever.” He leaned closer to the screen of one of his computers. “I Googled this new Ruggeri joint. The business runs out of a four-story building right across the Colorado River from Laughlin. Says here it was put up in the 1950s when the Bullhead Dam was being constructed and the town—all six blocks of it that ran north-south along U.S. 95—was crawling with workers looking to spend their paychecks.” Ugo manipulated a small rodent-sized contraption on a pad next to the computer. “Okay, here we go. First two floors are the Whistlestop bar and a river-view restaurant. Third floor is roulette, blackjack for the hoi polloi. Fourth floor is where the play is. Only big rollers with invitations get past the small army of Ruggeri soldiers guarding the door.”
“Baldinis do not need an invitation to get past any door,” the old man wheezed.
“From the sound of it,” I said, “you’d have a truckload of corpses to dispose of if you tried to force your way in.”
The old man squinted at me. “We have a certain experience in disposing of corpses,” he said.
“Last time we talked,” I reminded him, “you were on board for me to bring in Restivo.”
He shifted into reverse. The gears made a grinding noise as he backed away from me. “Damn thing is only good for forward motion,” he said. He said it in a way that made me think he had a certain amount of patriarchal savvy squirreled away in that Palermo-thick brain of his. He confirmed this intuition with the instructions he gave his son. “Fit Gunn out with five thousand in cash. Use newly minted large-denomination bills. He needs to be able to flash some significant hard currency to have a hope in hell of getting up to the Texas hold ’em floor.” The old man observed me with watery eyes. “Consider it a down payment on the vigilante bounty you get for bringing in the rat Restivo. I need you to refund the money if you do not bring home the bacon. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
Ugo looked at me across the desk. “You ever been to Bullhead City?”
I pursed my lips no.
“Don’t blink,” he warned, “or you’ll miss it.”
Twenty-three
Ugo was wrong. You couldn’t have missed Bullhead City if you catnapped at the steering wheel. There were the never-ending acres of mobile home parks in the onetime alfalfa fields around the kernel of the city that took its name from the original dam on the Colorado River, which took its name (according to a historical marker) from the famous Bull’s Head Rock upstream. Turned out that what must have been thousands of mobile homes served as second homes for folks fleeing colder climes in winter. There were two old billboards on 163 and dozens of posters peeling off speed-limit and stop and school-crossing signs, all of them trumpeting McCain for senator. We crossed the Colorado River at Laughlin and turned around some before we spotted the four-story building just beyond the city-limit sign with a torn McCain poster on it. The former house of ill repute stuck out like a sore thumb on a spit of land that jutted into the Colorado. Which left only one paved road—pretty much a causeway—to reach the Ruggeris’ spin-off operation.
I had a game plan. Friday was a key player.
Since she’d been the one to meet with Silvio Restivo, a.k.a. Emilio Gava, when she posted $125,000 worth of bail for him, which turned out to be his get-out-of-jail-free card, I decided she needed to disguise herself so the perpetrator, if he was really inside this building, wouldn’t recognize her when she recognized him.
I made an illegal U-turn and we headed back to town, skirting a Wal-Mart and a K-mart, skirting a Home Depot. We got backed up in traffic passing a convention hall with a banner strung across the gate announcing the Bullhead Annual Chili Cook-off. It took us a while to reach the Sears lot. I waited in the Toyota while Friday went shopping. I was lost in pipe dreams that could have doubled as PG fantasies when someone tapped at the passenger window. It was a young woman, though not all that young. She had on more makeup than the receptionist at Fontenrose & Fontenrose. She wore a sleeveless art-deco print of a dress that was unbuttoned down to her solar plexus, along with very small oval sunglasses that obscured the whites of her eyes but not the charcoal black on the lids above them. Thinking she wanted a lift or, worse still, to turn a quick trick, I wagged a finger at her. Her painted lips thinned into a smile I thought I�
��d seen before. But where?
Curiously, she had the same silver astronaut knapsack as Ornella Neppi slung over one lean shoulder.
“Hey, it’s me. Open up, huh?”
I even recognized the voice, the intonation that often sent sentences spiraling off on a high note.
Of course it was Friday in the flesh (and there was more than a bit of it in evidence on her chest). It’s nothing short of startling how a woman can renovate herself in forty-five minutes flat. The young woman tapping at the window of my rented Toyota had nothing in common with the Friday who had set out with me that morning dressed in loose-fitting overalls and basketball sneakers. What a difference a credit card at a Sears can make.
“How the heck did you pull that off?” I demanded as she slid in next to me (and I spotted the slit up the side of the skirt). She’d even doused herself with a not-so-cheap perfume that had nothing in common with the odors that contaminated the recycled air in the Baldini casino.
“Tricks of the trade,” she said. She took off her sunglasses to edit some of the charcoal that had trickled into one of her lashes. I noticed the merriment dancing in her eyes. For an instant I could see what she must have looked like as a little kid on summer vacation in Corsica. “I told you I did miming gigs at birthday parties,” she said. “Besides a toothbrush and toothpaste, that’s what I lug around in my knapsack—disguises, a makeup kit, wigs, buck teeth, funny eyeglasses, a kazoo on which I play an almost unrecognizable version of ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ I even have a false nose for my act. Wait a sec, I’ll put it on.”
I put my hand on her wrist. “The false nose would probably be a nose too far,” I said. “For Pete’s sake, you could have waltzed into the Nipton general store at breakfast and I wouldn’t have recognized the woman I’d spent the night with.”
A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel Page 15