Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  Harry came into the communal visitation room, a long bank of tables back to back with a ceiling-high sheet of toughened glass separating them. Some of the tables were taken. Beaten-to-fuck cons muttered as their wives nagged, as their children itched and wriggled and squirmed to leave; a young man, possibly no older than Harry himself, sat cowed and despondent as an elderly woman – presumably his mother – endlessly berated him about the lack of heating in her apartment, and how everything would have been fine had he not gotten himself ‘all mixed up with bad sorts.’ Harry listened without hearing anything at all, he told me, and when the far door opened and I appeared in denim jacket and jeans, my hands cuffed to a wide leather belt around my waist, he got up from where he was seated and felt the urge to push right through the glass, to throw his arms around me, to swallow me whole and carry me out into the real world. These things he would explain to me as best he could, but I knew whatever he might feel, however this place might challenge his sanity and his reason, it was nothing compared to what I was feeling. I had lost my life, and though I understood that being in Rikers was as much my own fault as ever it was Harry’s, there was nevertheless a deep-seated seed of resentment. I did not water the seed or tend it with any care, but I could feel it, and it was growing.

  We talked for a little while, exchanged words of little consequence. I had lost weight, and down the right side of my face a wide bruise was fading. Harry asked me about the bruise, how it came to be there, but I did not tell him. Even at that point I felt Harry Rose was tormented enough, and I did not want to fuel the fire of that Hades. I told Harry that he could bring money, as much as he wanted, but to be aware of the fact that whatever he brought I would receive only half. The remainder would be split between the duty guard at visitation and the block warden. Money is good in here, I told him. With money you can get a better cell, be a little more selective about who you might share it with, and when it comes to food there’s a few little extras that can be obtained by the man carrying greenbacks. Harry told me he would bring more money next time, and from his overcoat pocket he took a roll of ten-dollar bills amounting to little more than three or four hundred. I turned and nodded at the duty guard, the guard sauntered over, and after a few brief words with me the guard nodded at Harry and walked away. He’ll take it when you leave, I told him.

  Before Harry had a chance to say any of the things he had planned and rehearsed, the half-hour visit was over. I stood up and, looking directly at Harry, my eyes cold and emotionless, I said, You take care Harry Rose. Someday I’ll beat this thing, and I want you to remember what I did for you, okay?

  Harry told me he would remember, told me that he would never forget, and with that I turned and walked to the door.

  Harry stayed there – motionless, unable to think of anything – and though he hoped that I would turn and look back as I went through the door, he also hoped I would not. There was a look in my eyes, he told me later, not of a man defeated, but of a man fighting against tremendous odds to maintain his sanity. I went silently, I didn’t turn back, and when the door closed Harry Rose was left alone and confused in a strange room filled with lost lives and broken hearts.

  He came back to see me the following week. Brought a thousand dollars with him, three cartons of cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon. Won’t see the smokes or the bourbon, I told him, but the money’ll be good. Leave it a while now. Stay away for a month or two. Things’re looking up. Got myself moved into a better cell. Got some quiet guy with me who minds his own. I’ll be okay. Could be worse.

  Could be one helluva lot better, Harry wanted to say, but he didn’t say a thing.

  Harry went back on the ferry, bitter wind like sheet ice cutting through him. Buried his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and wondered how often he could come across here. Seemed like every time he came he died a little inside. We’d both killed Olson. Both of us were guilty. Harry felt he was paying for his sins in some bitter hole of personal torment, but my fate had been much worse. I would be in Rikers for the rest of my life.

  Or so I believed.

  I can talk about things now, things I would not have realized then, and even had I realized them I would not have shared them with the world. Killing is in the commandments, but killing remains to be the one commandment that the vast majority of us never see from the inside out. How is it to kill a man? I’ll tell you how it is. Necessary. That’s how it is. Sometimes something happens that catches you someplace inside, someplace within the shadow cast by your own heart that you didn’t know existed. Someone does something that is beyond anything even close to forgiveness. What was done to Carol Kurtz was such a thing. Maybe we saw it the same way, me and Harry, like raping some poor schmooze was like raping our own mothers. Some bullshit psychology theory the head-shrinkers would have loved to share with us. Time and again I replayed the moment I stood in the county morgue basement looking down at that girl. She was naked, a paper tag tied to her toe. The big toe on her right foot. Paper carried a number. That was all she was to the world by that time. A number. But before she was a number she was a life. A real life, you see. She had a name and a heart and a voice to sing with; she had folks someplace outside the back of nowhere; she was pretty and smart and funny and crazy in some small kind of way, and hell, maybe she would never have amounted to anything more than Harry’s girl, but that would have been enough. Enough for her at least. Maybe that’s what she had always wanted: to be somebody’s girl. And then she wasn’t even that. She was a rape victim, a killing, a corpse and a number. Assholes down there didn’t even know her name. I didn’t tell them. They didn’t deserve to know. But I knew. That was enough for me. Went out of there touched in some place I’d never been touched before. Guy I killed for seventeen bucks and change wasn’t someone I’d known. Hadn’t known him from Adam. But Carol I did know. And when I found out who had done this thing to her it became necessary to see them wind up the same way. Blue and cold and stiff and silent with a paper and a number tied to their toe; big toe on the right.

  Seeing the asshole die was justice, a catharsis, a balancing of the scales. Killing him was just as simple as that.

  You look back on it in hindsight, look back on it from the inside of a Rikers eight by eight, and you don’t regret the killing. No, you never regret the killing. You just regret the getting caught. Like they say, you know the thing about the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt never get caught. Fucked the dog on that one. Fucked it good.

  I hung in there. Fingernails on the precipice. You shut down your mind, your thoughts, your feelings. You walk the walk and talk the talk and color inside the lines. They say ‘Jump!’ and you say ‘How high boss?’ Either that or you wind up in the cubes. Don’t go to the cubes, they tell you when you get inside. The other cons. Don’t get yourself in the cubes kid. Cubes are blackpainted, no windows, hole in the door through which comes your food. Once a day kind of food. Bucket in the corner to dump your guts and take a piss. Live in the stench of your own shit for a week at a time. Come out, you can’t see. Lights are bright, too fucking bright. Eyes can’t handle it. Come out once a week, stumble around like a punch-drunk bareknuckle prizefighter for fifteen minutes until your head screams to turn off the lights, and then they shove you right back in again until next Tuesday. Went there once. Three days only. Short shift. Long enough for me. Badmouthed the boss. Told him I saw his mother chasing a troop train with a mattress on her back. Model citizen after that. No shit boss. Didn’t tell Harry Rose about these things, not then. Told him another time, a long time after. Just gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, tightened my ass and followed the lines. Like a good kid. Momma’s boy.

  Time passed, slow and painfully.

  August of ’56 saw John Kennedy beaten by Estes Kefauver in his hope for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination. Eisenhower and Nixon were nominated by the Republicans to run for re-election. Harry Rose worked out of his apartment on Shore Boulevard, taking bets, collecting what was owed and paying what was due wi
th the same sense of exactness that had always been his trademark. It wasn’t the same however, and when he was approached in September by a man called Mike Royale, ‘King Mike’ to anyone who knew him he said, he was presented with a proposition that would take him out of Astoria, away from the stench of the Bowery Bay Sewage Treatment Plant and the ghost of Rikers Island on the other side of the channel. Harry Rose – always on the lookout for a route to greater things – listened very attentively to what the man had to say.

  Hookers, King Mike told him, sitting there with his gut busting out of his vest and his shirt collar tight enough to choke him. Wide face, teeth like stumps of broken chalk, hair slicked back with pomade so’s it looked like it’d been spray-painted on his head. Everything about him was fat, even down to the stubs of his fingers, and on those stubs were jammed rings that looked like they’d stem all possibility of blood-flow to his fingertips. That’s where the money is these days, he said, his voice a little breathless like his neck was too swollen for the words to get out properly. And I’m not talking your five-dollar alleyway hand-job hookers, face like a bulldog licking piss off a poison ivy … no siree, I’m talking uptown, class-A, clean girls who work out of respectable hotels, a manager and a couple of heavies to take care of the miscreants. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking, you know? Where your blue-collar Joe Public can come and spend an hour or so in the company of a girl he’d never have a hope in hell of getting if he was out on his own. We got a coupla places sorted out already, and we’re looking for some investors if you know what I mean. You seem like a smart kid, and from what I’ve heard you carry a little money and your word’s as good as it comes. Heard you ran a three-way for Benny Schaeffer a month or so ago, heard he hit for you for three big ones, and neat as paint you showed up at his place and paid up. Even told him thank you for his business and you were hoping to do more business with him real soon. That so kid?

  Harry told him it was so. Didn’t mention the fact that Benny Schaeffer was one of the stupidest gamblers Harry had ever met, and in the previous fortnight alone Harry had taken back the three big ones and a couple more besides.

  So this is the kind of thing we’re talking about, King Mike went on, and seems to me you’re the kind of guy we’d want to have come down and see our places. If you like what you see we can cut you in for a ten-percent share, okay?

  The cost? Harry had asked him.

  A businessman, King Mike said. I like that kind of attitude. Straight as an arrow and right to the point. You come down, you check it out, and if you want in we talk figures. Deal?

  Deal, Harry said, and they shook hands.

  The following day King Mike sent over a car, and they took a trip across the Triborough into Manhattan.

  Harry felt at home almost as soon as he set foot on the sidewalk. Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, Rockefeller University, the Cornell Medical Center, the Whitney Museum and Jack Jay Park. Names that meant something, places he’d heard of before, and when they stepped up to a tall brownstone building, a discreet sign in the window that read Gentleman’s Hotel & Bar, Harry felt he had perhaps lucked into something that carried a little more class than Benny Schaeffer and his cohorts.

  Inside, the walls were covered in velvet-embossed paper, the floors were wooden, the recliners and chaise-longues out of something by F. Scott Fitzgerald. There were fresh flowers in crystal vases, an antique grandfather clock ticking like a gentle heartbeat and echoing down the corridor, and when they turned the corner at the end and entered the reception lounge Harry took in his breath and held it like it was his last.

  The girls were right out of Harper’s and Vogue. Tall, blonde, elegant, brunette, slim, olive-skinned, redheaded, legs that ran all the way to their waists, bodices and bustiers, silk stockings and suspenders …

  King Mike appeared with a throng of half a dozen women and walked towards Harry. He was grinning, seemed in his element, and when he clapped Harry on the shoulder and shook his hand Harry felt as if he’d been led into paradise by Hasan-i Sabbah himself.

  So this is one of three places we run, King Mike told him, and before you take a look around we figure it would be appropriate to sample the goods, so to speak. Go meet the girls, take your pick, two or three of them if you like, and then we can look at whether or not you want in.

  So Harry met the girls – Cynthia, Mary-Rose, Jasmine, Louella-May, Claudette, Tanya, others whose names he couldn’t remember. But the afternoon he did remember, would have remembered it for the rest of his life regardless of what else had happened, and when he came down again to talk with King Mike in a small office to the right of the reception lounge, there was little he could do but listen and nod and confirm that yes, he would be very interested in some kind of investment plan.

  Tend to turn over somewhere in the region of fifteen to twenty grand a week in each hotel, King Mike told him. We have three right now, hoping we can set up another three before the end of the year. That’s something like forty-five to sixty grand a week, and with an initial investment of a hundred grand we can cut you in for ten percent for the first twelve months, and then depending on the number of places we have going we can renegotiate further investments for the future and work out new profit-sharing schemes. You like that? Profit-sharing schemes. Got ourselves a real honest-to-God accountant here and everything.

  Harry was in, up to the hilt, and the following day the same driver came with the same car, and Harry went to the Gentleman’s Hotel & Bar with a hundred grand in cash. Claudette gave him head while King Mike counted the bills, and once they were done they shook hands. First payment will come in a week, King Mike said. But if you wanna come down and party with any of these ladies you feel free. Investors have an open ticket seven days a week.

  Nothing to sign? Harry had asked him.

  Sign? King Mike said. What the hell would you wanna be signing anything for? This is as big an operation as you’re gonna find in Manhattan, and the less that’s on paper the better. You figure any of the families around here want us to be taking the best part of three mill a year?

  Harry understood. They shook hands again, and the driver took him home to Astoria across the Triborough Bridge.

  A week passed. No-one came. Harry left it another two days and then he couldn’t take it any more. He went out there, crossed the river into Manhattan, and after a little unwanted sightseeing tour of the lower end of Yorkville, he found the street, found the Gentleman’s Hotel & Bar, the front door unlocked, the hallway empty, the reception lounge nothing more than an empty shell of nicely painted walls and a broken packing crate in the middle of the room.

  He kicked his way into the small office where he and Mike had done their business, and he found the same thing – an empty room.

  Panicking, his heart thundering in his chest, he charged up the stairs, burst through the door of each of six rooms on the second floor, and found the room where he had been entertained on his first visit – the only one decorated. The rest were empty, not even a rug on the floor, and then he sat on the top riser of the stairwell and buried his face in his hands.

  He’d been taken for a hundred grand by a fat guy and half a dozen hookers.

  Harry Rose was gutted, mentally and emotionally devastated. He sat on the stairs of that house with his head in his hands and he cried – not out of self-pity or grief, but at his own stupidity. Stupidity that had made him blind to everything but the way those girls had looked, and the way they’d taken his teenage dick and sucked it dry. He’d let his balls rule his head, and that had been the biggest mistake of all. He thought less of the hundred grand and more of the work that it had taken to make that hundred grand. He thought of how that money had been his future, and now it was nothing more than a memory. Had he been a weak man he perhaps would have drunk himself to death, or sucked a .38 and blown the back of his own head off. But he was not a weak man. He had survived Dachau, had seen his own mother beaten and tortured and raped, had killed a man with his own bare hands and carried the ligh
t of that man’s eyes in his own.

  Harry Rose believed he’d learned a lesson. Manhattan wasn’t Queens, and it sure as hell wasn’t Astoria. Manhattan was where the big boys came to play. Wanted to play up this side of the park then you came with the same artillery and the same intention. Didn’t matter a fuck who you were before, it was who you were now that counted. It happened to be King Mike Royale, but sure as shit it could have been anyone. Harry had been taken for all he had, and now he was back to the beginning again. Broken down he might have been, but he’d been down on his bare ass before and made it back. He would do it again. If anything, he had learned resolve, a willingness to fight against whatever came his way and make it through. The scam with Mike Royale had made him stronger, he had to believe that, for to believe anything else was to succumb to fate and destiny. Such things did not exist in Harry Rose’s vocabulary. Destiny was what you made it, good, bad or indifferent, and fate was something the weaker guy blamed when things went belly-up and bad.

  A fortnight later he left his apartment on Shore Boulevard. He didn’t take a trip out to Rikers Island, didn’t tell me where he was going. He just vanished. He took with him eleven thousand dollars – all the money he possessed in the world – three suits, a pair of loafers, a good pair of hand-made cordovan wingtips, two white shirts, a collection of ties, and a .38 caliber snubnose with four shells that once belonged to me. He put some money down on a small apartment in midtown, moved in the same day, and when he sat down at the beat-up kitchen table, a bowl of chicken soup and a half-dozen crackers for his evening meal, he made a resolution. The day would come when he’d find King Mike and his pretty girls, and once he’d hung the fat bastard out to dry he’d fuck Claudette in the ass while he choked her with her own silk stockings. That was the way it was going to be, and that was the real deal.