“Remember me?” Russell Thurston asked. Behind him was Agent Blodgett. “We were in the neighborhood, thought we’d drop in.”
“Yeah, I remember. Fed with a smart mouth. You came here to see me, too bad. I got no time for you.”
Thurston raised a hand and exhibited a space between forefinger and thumb. “This thick, we’ve got a file on you.”
“You guys got files on everybody, like the fuckin’ Gestapo. All you got against me are the vowels in my name.”
Thurston smiled with unlimited confidence. “I’ve got plenty on you. In a week, maybe two, I give it to the U.S. Attorney, and he passes it to a grand jury. In the meantime, my friend, you sweat.”
“You’re fuckin’ crazy,” Scatamacchia said with a degree of discomposure.
“You know why I’m taking my time? I want to make sure everything I got on you is perfect, air-tight. When that happens, there’ll be somebody wanting you to look at her, but it’s me you’ll be seeing. Me, Scatamacchia. You’ll come on your knees and ask to deal.”
Upsetting the Pepsi can, Scatamacchia rose from his desk and stood with a deadly stillness. “I’d stick my face in a bucket of shit first.”
“You’ll do that too,” Thurston said. “Then you’ll give me Gardella.”
Leaving the station, passing ranking police officials, who regarded them warily, Blodgett said, “Maybe you shouldn’t have warned him.”
“It’s the best thing I could have done,” Thurston said.
Anthony Gardella and his wife were in the sauna, wrapped in vapors, their bodies moist-to-wet, when Christopher Wade rapped tentatively on the door. “Come on in,” Gardella said cavalierly through a cupped hand. “Jane’s not bashful.” She shot him a look of surprise and distress.
“Stop it, Tony.” She grabbed a towel and twisted it around herself. He stayed naked. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Doing what?” he asked in a tone of innocence as her eyes lunged at him through the steam.
“The way you’ve been acting toward me. It’s different.”
“I wasn’t aware of it. Sorry.” He called out, “Hold up, I think she is bashful. You’ll have to wait.”
“I don’t want to come in,” Wade said. “I just want to know how long you’ll be in there.”
“Why?”
“Something’s come up.”
“You want to talk to me?”
“Yes.”
Five minutes later they walked down to the surf, where a young couple were frisking in the waves, the boy splashing, the girl squealing. Wade had a suburban newspaper under his arm. He unfolded the paper and passed it to Gardella, pointing to a headline. Gardella, squinting as dark clouds shortened the day, read only two paragraphs and said, “I swear to God, I know nothing about it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I lie when I have to, I never think twice about it. This time there’s no need. That’s the truth, Wade.”
“But you know something.”
“No, nothing, but I can make guesses.”
“What are they?”
“They’re not for your ears.” Gardella slapped the paper back into Wade’s hands. Wade looked at the young couple in the water. They had quieted down, as if the clouds had tempered their mood. The girl was floating on her back, hair awash. Gardella, also looking, said tightly, “Why do they do that?”
“What?”
“Show their stuff.” Gardella reached out. “Give me the paper back. I’m going to take it with me.”
“Where are you going?”
“Boston. I won’t be back until late tonight, maybe not until early tomorrow. Depends.”
“I’ll leave too.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Then I’ll stay,” Wade said.
Gardella sped from Rye through thunder and lightning but no rain and arrived in the North End within the hour, slipping out of the air-conditioned Cadillac into the savage heat of the street. He phoned Victor Scandura from the Caffè Pompei, waited for him at a table, and shoved the newspaper at him when he arrived. “Why didn’t I hear from you right away on this?” he asked in anger, watching Scandura quietly place the paper to one side.
“I’m sorry. I was tied up most of the day at Mass. General.”
“What were you doing there?”
“My stomach, Anthony. You know.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” The waiter came, and Scandura asked for milk and got it.
Gardella said, “Was it Scat?”
“Yeah.”
“That fucking fool,” Gardella said in a whisper. Scandura drank the milk, which gave him a creamy mustache.
“He said he didn’t have a choice. You know I don’t particularly like Scatamacchia, but I believe him on this. Too bad the body came up.”
“He did it right, it wouldn’t have. Otherwise, was it clean?”
“He says so.”
Gardella propped an elbow on the table and rubbed his brow against the heel of his hand as if he had a headache. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know what we can do, Anthony. I guess just let it lie.”
Gardella lifted his face and stared at a table of tourists, the children spooning up spumoni, the mother wiping mouths. “Would you like to be young again, Victor? Have everything to do over?”
“I don’t know,” Scandura said. “I don’t think about it.”
“Give me some good news, Victor. Make me happy.”
“The thing in Florida is better than ever. The new guy knows his stuff.”
“How about the people in Providence? They happy with their cut?”
“It’s fair, Anthony, they gave us the guy. We shouldn’t begrudge them.”
“I don’t begrudge anybody anything. Everybody should be happy. Rich. Have nice children.”
“You okay, Anthony?”
“Sure I’m okay. I was not okay, I’d be home in bed, thermometer in my mouth. You’re the one doesn’t look so hot. Go home, Victor. Sorry I dragged you out.”
Scandura stood up, his face gray, his eyes small behind the spectacles. He wanted to leave. “How about you? You going back to the beach?”
“I got more business to do,” Gardella said.
At the health club in Cambridge, members gravitated to the handball court to watch the match, which almost looked as if it were being waged for blood. The play was furious, the ball a blur ricocheting off walls and ceiling. Bets were made. The woman who gave rubdowns said, “The older guy’s going to win, you watch.”
Russell Thurston made an impossible return and said, “You can’t beat me, kid. I’m on a roll.” He had lost the first game after playing out a tie but was winning the second with demon energy and uncanny moves. It was no contest. In the middle of the final game he turned an ankle and lamed himself, but he continued to play and continued to win, exhausting his opponent.
“I don’t believe this,” the young man gasped.
“Believe it,” Thurston said and executed an unreturnable serve.
As they left the court, Thurston limping, they were applauded. In the locker room the young man said, “Will you take a check?”
“No checks,” Thurston said, inspecting his ankle. “Make it dinner.”
The young man hovered. “I just want to know. How’d you do it?”
“Willpower,” said Thurston.
“Something’s different between us,” Jane Gardella said from a high-back deck chair on the patio. The clouds had long passed, and the beach lay refulgent in the moonlight, seeming limitless in its stretch. The air was sea-drenched. “I don’t know what it is,” she said in a hollow tone, as though something had died deep down inside her. Christopher Wade, from his chair, peered at her.
“Maybe you’re imagining it.”
“Maybe,” she said, “he knows.”
“No,” Wade said immediately. “We wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Her eyes were hard upon him, an eerie smile passing
across her lips. “He likes you, you know. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Yes,” said Wade, “it bothers me.”
“But not enough,” she said, and he did not reply. She tightened her hands on the arms of the chair. “He loves me, but I don’t kid myself. It’s a narrow love, no room for the unexpected. All of this is bizarre, isn’t it, Wade? If only it could be unreal too.” Her unnatural smile returned. “I wonder if he feels it sometimes, the knife in his back.”
“Why don’t we talk about something else?”
“There’s nothing else to talk about.” She drew herself forward and sat erect, her blond hair quivering in the light breeze. “Would you like to go for a swim, Lieutenant. Would that please you?”
He shook his head.
She said, “Do you mind if I do? I have a small thought of swimming beyond the buoys.”
He looked up with alarm. “Are you joking?”
“Fantasizing.”
He reached over the side of his chair for her hand. She gave it impassively and sat quietly with her private uninfringeable thoughts. He found the silence haunting, as if a physical part of her had drifted off. He said, “Maybe I can help you.”
“Why should I trust you? And what could you do? Nothing. Thurston is everything.” She pulled her hand away and forced herself from the chair. When she raised her arms over her head to tie her hair, he felt entrusted with an intimate moment.
“You need me.”
“That’s for me to decide,” she said and kicked off her sandals. “I’m going for that swim.”
“Don’t do anything foolish,” he said.
Agent Blue was returning to his apartment building from the drugstore when a voice called to him from the dark of a car. A man climbed out the driver’s side and came onto the sidewalk where Blue could see his face in the lamplight.
“Do you know who I am?” Anthony Gardella asked.
“Sure I know who you are,” Blue said.
“Do you know my wife?”
“Personally? No, I don’t know your wife.”
“But you’ve got pictures of her.”
Blue smiled. “We’ve got lots of pictures of her, all on your arm, mostly coming out of restaurants. You live well.”
“I’m talking about the pictures in your desk.”
“I’ve got none in my desk. What are you talking about?”
After a long hesitation Gardella whispered, “I should’ve known better.”
Blue threw him a curious look. His mind moved fast, but he spoke slowly. “I think I get it. Something my boss said?”
“Yeah, something Thurston said.”
“You’re right,” Blue said. “You should’ve known better.”
There was a TV in the room, and Wade was watching it. He lay atop the bed in his undershorts, one arm crooked under his head. He could hear the occasional sound of traffic but nothing of the ocean. The room was on the boulevard side of the house. There was a knock on the door, and Jane Gardella looked in on him. When he reached to cover himself, she said, “I’m not embarrassed.”
She advanced into the room, letting the door close behind her. “Is that wise?” he asked.
She said, “Tony wears the same kind. They don’t keep him in either.”
She stood with her head tilted and rose up on her toes as if to keep her feet from sticking to the hardwood floor. The wrap she wore was damp and clung to her.
“You want me, don’t you?” she said.
“Of course I want you,” he replied, “but the question is whether you want me.”
“No,” she said, “that’s not the question.” She looked at the television. “What are you watching?”
“Nothing.”
She switched it off, which put the room in darkness. He tried to keep sight of her, but she paled away. Then he felt her settling beside him, relapsing on her side. “Who am I?” she murmured. “I’m not sure I know.”
“Honey,” he said as she lengthened herself. “You’re Honey.”
The traffic on the boulevard grew more intense for a time, or perhaps they merely became more aware of it, the danger. At one point a number of motorcyclists thundered by, some shrieking, as if a few crazies were among them. Then a quiet settled, as if the hour dictated it.
“What if he walks in on us?” Wade asked, lying skin to skin with her, a part of him drying on her. His hand curved and slid over her.
“Then we die,” she whispered. “It will solve everything.”
The fear he felt was vital but did not make him move. “You’d rather have him think you betrayed him this way than the other?”
She did not move either, her drawn knees still pressed under him, her silence her answer.
Anthony Gardella did not return to Rye until the morning. On his way into the house he saw Wade on the beach and waved. In the master bedroom, treading on quiet feet, he approached his wife, drew the sheet from her shoulders, and gently raked his fingernails down her long, bare back, giving her a chill.
“Wake up,” he whispered.
“I am awake,” she said, not moving, her eyes open.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly into her ear. “Sorry about a lot of things.” His hand slipped into the small of her back. “Sometimes I’m such an idiot.”
She spoke into the pillow. “Why are you saying that, Tony?”
“Sometime when we’re lying together on the beach I’ll tell you,” he said and straightened up. She lifted her eyes. He was undressing, smiling. He winked at her. “You have to go to the bathroom, go now.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to make love to you,” he said, and she began to cry.
Two hours later, eating breakfast on the patio, he said to Wade, “I’ll tell you something, I’m fifty years old, and I still don’t understand women.”
23
DECKLER, the private detective from New York, waited in the car while the two men working for him went into the attractive brick apartment building where Russell Thurston lived. The man who lived alone in the apartment next to Thurston’s was an electrical engineer twice divorced and deep in debt from court orders requiring him to support two families. It was his bell that the two detectives rang from the foyer and his door they went to. He let them in after they flashed identification, Internal Revenue Service. He suspected the identification was false but didn’t care. They were offering him five thousand dollars for the use of his apartment for a week, with the provision that he would keep the entire amount if they vacated the place sooner, which they said might well happen. Having presumed he would agree, they had booked a room for him at the Colonnade, the tab prepaid.
“Jesus,” the man said. “As long as what you’re up to is legal.”
It was, they assured him and helped him pack.
“I don’t want to get into any trouble.”
“You won’t.”
Deckler climbed out of the car and unlocked the trunk when he saw the man drive away. In the trunk were suitcases of special equipment, which he and his two assistants carried up to the apartment. When they began sorting things, he wandered into the kitchenette, poked about, and, though he would have preferred something better than bologna, made himself a sandwich. Eating it, he went into the bedroom, where his assistants were waiting. A dresser had been pushed away from the wall. He picked up the bedside telephone, tapped out Thurston’s home number, and after many rings hung up.
“Okay,” he said, “start drilling.”
• • •
Outside the State House a hand dropped down on Senator Matchett’s shoulder and a voice said, “That’s a nice tan you’ve got, Senator.” The senator spun around with an automatic smile that slipped when he saw who it was.
“Ah,” he said, as if he needed to jar his memory to put a name to the face.
Russell Thurston said, “This heat wave won’t quit. You should’ve stayed at the beach.”
“Can’t abandon my duties,” the senator said jauntily and felt his arm being t
aken, the grip surprisingly firm, almost frightening.
“Can we talk?”
“Now? Right now? I’ve got a vote to cast.” He struggled in protest but felt himself being guided out of the sun, toward the shade of the building, to a rail, which he clutched.
“Listen to me, Senator, I don’t have time to waste, and neither do you. I have friends with the New Hampshire state police. In twenty minutes, if I make a phone call, troopers will raid your place in Rye, grab all the pornographic material, and book your wife. I have a buddy at Channel Nine in Manchester who’ll have a cameraman there.”
The senator went red with pure anger. “You’re a lunatic.”
“I know the stuff is there, enough to charge your wife with possession with intent to distribute. You’ve got quite a collection. There’ll also be a warrant out on you, of course.” Thurston quietly cleared his throat. “By the way, I have you both on tape, not for evidence, simply for my own amusement. Lieutenant Wade gave it to me.”
The senator stood firm, though one hand twitched. “Nothing will hold. Everything will be thrown out of court.”
“What do I care?” said Thurston. “The damage will be done. No?”
“You bastard.”
“Senator,” Thurston went on smoothly, “I know Gardella washes money for you and at least a half dozen of your colleagues. I know he does it for a superior court judge, some people in the tax department, and a fair number of blue-blooded businessmen who more or less run this city. I’ll tell you what else I know, Senator, they funnel the money through you, huge amounts, and you pass it to Gardella. You don’t do it directly, but it gets to him. At the moment, Senator, I can’t prove any of it, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“This is insane. I think I’d better talk to my lawyer.”
“You walk away from me, Senator, and I’ll make that call. When I do, don’t hold me responsible for your wife’s emotional stability. You know it better than I do. Also consider your own. It’s your career and reputation that’s going.”
The senator’s lips faltered, then closed. He did not crumble as Thurston thought he would, and he did not weep as Thurston had hoped. Finally, simply, he said, “It’s my wife I’m thinking of.”
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