Yes, Milano thought, with her sexual identity thus established he was indeed happy about it.
At the same time, a little uneasy.
Race.
Granted now there was no obstacle posed because he happened to be male. But white male? White? She had already pushed the warning button with that Mafia crack on their first encounter. She could have been putting down Italians with that crack, but no matter how you looked at it, it was Italian white. Hard to figure. The fact was that in his varied acquaintance with women none could be listed on a census form as black. And this one didn’t go in for hair-straightener, either.
As for himself, was J. Milano somewhat to his own surprise really color-blind, or was he seeing her as a heart-stopping ebony objet d’art posed against the oyster-white walls of J. Milano’s apartment? That this kind of surmise should even enter into the reckoning of the future spelled trouble in itself. If she wasn’t psyched out on race, how would you know it?
And if she was, what the hell, he had to acknowledge on her behalf, black as such had no more reason to cherish white than white had to cherish black, never mind Brotherhood Week. The best you could hope for was polite. When everybody settled for polite, New York City would have it made.
Matter of fact, given another two or three hundred years even tight-assed, white-assed paisano Bath Beach and Canarsie and Mill Basin might settle for polite, not that he was ready to bet on it.
The real deep-down trouble right now while he watched her drinking her tepid cappuccino which left a faint white trim on that marvelously curved upper lip was that he had no intention of settling for polite.
She put down the cup and licked away the white trim with the tip of her tongue. She said, “Those paintings you think Rammaert might be handling. What am I supposed to do about them? If I want to do something about them.”
“Oh that.” It took him a moment to switch over to this track. “Well, there’s a thin chance they’re in the gallery right now, and I’d need verification of that. Or, more likely, they could be on their way there, and I’d want to know when they arrive. I pass the word along to my client, and she arranges with Rammaert for their return. Meaning she’s ready to cover his commission without his even having to sell them. As I said, my client, Mrs. Smith, is very vindictive and very rich. If she can prevent her husband from cashing in on those paintings, it’ll make her day.”
“Whose paintings are they? I mean, who painted them?”
“Boudin. You know Boudin?”
“Yes,” said Christine, then thought better of it. “No, not really. I’m just catching up on that stuff. I was High School of Performing Arts, not Music and Arts.”
“You know the French Impressionist school?”
“Yes. Those I did catch up on. Some, anyhow.”
“All right, Boudin was a precursor and then sort of fellow traveler to the Impressionists. These two paintings are both beach scenes – people fully dressed strolling on the beach – on fourteen inch by seven inch panels with the signature very clear. Eugene Louis Boudin. You can’t miss them even across the room. There’s an exceptional use of sky over the scene. Seen anything like that around the gallery?”
“Not that I know.”
“There’s Rammaert’s office. And there must be a storeroom. I don’t think he’d hang those paintings, so they could be in crates. Smallish. With a West Coast shipping address. You have the run of the place, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the apartment upstairs where the Rammaerts live?”
“I’m in and out there. Mornings when the housecleaning service comes in I’m up there laying out the job for them.”
“Good. And you handle all incoming phone calls? And the mail?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then I’ll give you the names of some people who could be middlemen for those paintings. Any of those names pop up, all you have to do is let me know.” Milano reached into his breast pocket and withdrew the envelope with the five hundred in it. He placed it on the table before her. “As I said, this is just a down payment.”
Christine shook her head in a firm negative. “No money.”
“But I thought we just—”
“No money. A trade-off.”
“A trade-off?”
“That’s right. I help you do your homework, man, you help me do mine. From what I’ve put together between you and your secretary—”
“Mrs. Glass. She’s office manager there.”
“Whatever. And if any fat little old lady with gray hair could have hot pants, she’s got hot pants for you. But even allowing for that, I get the feeling you’re real good at your job. Like tailing somebody to find out what she’s up to.”
“She?”
Christine said as if unwilling to say it, “My kid sister. Really a kid. Won’t make sixteen until next month. A good kid. A pain in the ass forty different ways, but up to now nothing that couldn’t be handled. Now we don’t know.”
“Who’s we?”
“Family. My mother and my two brothers. One of them’s college, one’s finishing up high school. Honor high school. Brooklyn Tech. And you better know these are strictly no-foolin’-around people. Lorena – my sister – lives with them out in Brooklyn. And naturally she’s the baby, everybody’s little prize package. Now she’s scaring the shit out of them. And me.”
“Drugs?”
“No. I guess she smokes a joint now and then but who doesn’t? No, it’s not that. It’s stealing, possibly. Shoplifting. Not nickel and dime either. She makes fifteen dollars a week doing some part-time office work, and that’s supposed to take care of lunch money and movies. Meanwhile she’s piling up stuff in her closet that takes a lot more than fifteen a week to buy. Designer jeans. Fancy-label shirts. Top quality shoes. She’s got a pair of joggers that goes at least eighty or ninety dollars. Get the picture?”
“Yes. But you folks must have given her some hard questions to answer about that. What’s her story?”
“She lays it on about some mysterious character named Jimmy. No other name, just Jimmy. He’s crazy in love with her, he looks to marry her, he buys her things just to make her happy. She’s lying. My brothers went into that and while there’s some Jimmys around, they couldn’t turn up any Jimmy like that.”
Milano thought it over. “Is it possible that while she’s not into drugs or pills or acid herself – or at least not showing signs of it – she might be dealing in them?”
“No. I don’t believe she’s dealing any more than she’s making out with some invisible Jimmy. What she does mostly with her free time is head down to those stores on Fulton Street and come back loaded. You figure it out yourself. Possibles don’t mean anything here. It’s probables that count.”
“Could be. By the way, where does your family live?”
“East Flatbush. Witter Street. Near Erasmus. She goes there.”
“I gather you don’t live with the family?”
“No, I’ve got a room over on Sixth Avenue. Are you listening to me? Or just looking?”
“Listening and thinking,” Milano said, not quite lying about it. “You understand I’d have to see Lorena. Clearly identify her. No photos either. A live close-up.”
“And afterward suppose she identifies you away from home and starts wondering?”
“My worry. Leave it to me.”
“Not altogether,” Christine said grimly. “The family’s got a great big worry about this. Lorena’s real uptight now about the pressure on her. Last blow-up about it, she said if there’s any more of these question and answer games, she just takes off where nobody’ll bother her. This is not just loose talk, man. She did it twice last year. Almost sent my mother to the hospital with a heart attack. You let that kid find out who put you on to her, you will wind up with real trouble on your hands. For starters, I’ll let Rammaert know what you’re up to. That’s why this is a no-money deal. This way I keep my options wide open.”
“Fair enough. Where’d Lo
rena wind up those two times?”
“First time, the Port Authority bus terminal. Lucky the cops moved in when some mean stud started bothering her. Second time she made it out to New Jersey. Friend of a friend there. The mother had sense to turn her in to us after three days. Trouble is, now Lorena knows you don’t trust friends of friends to hide you out. Next time it’ll have to be strangers.”
“Scary,” said Milano, and meant it.
“Very. Enough so I’m getting into a deal with you I don’t even like that much. But you have got to move fast. Like, you want to see Lorena? Tomorrow’s the time.”
“You don’t work Saturdays? I’ll need you along first time out.”
“I’m off from the gallery Saturdays, but I’ve got a matinee at two, then the evening show. So it has to be tomorrow morning. Now tell me what happens tomorrow morning about getting to see her and all. What’s your moves?”
“Your mother rent or own?” Milano asked.
“Own?” Christine looked startled at the idea. “It’s rent. A beat-up apartment house.”
“For sale?”
Christine shrugged. “Could be. The owner’s the old man next door Lorena does some office work for. Can’t say he comes on all that happy about owning. Why?”
“Because I might be interested in buying. Maybe that building, maybe others like it in the neighborhood. I’m very high on urban redevelopment. Buy up some of those old buildings, get some long term, low interest government funding to help polish them up, help out the neighborhood. So it makes sense if I’m here and there around the neighborhood, doesn’t it?”
Christine regarded him curiously. “You just come up with that?”
“Well, it’s not all that original as a cover. Now, suppose I pick you up tomorrow morning and drive you out to Witter Street so I can size up properties. Maybe ring your mother’s bell while you happen to be there, so I can get the tenant’s slant. Nine o’clock all right?”
“To get a look at Lorena?”
“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. But maybe you don’t know how smooth you come on, mister. I was beginning to wonder if you didn’t look to buy that building.”
“No chance. Nine o’clock?”
“All right with me.” She pushed the envelope back across the table toward him. “That’s all yours. Better put it away before somebody picks it up for a tip.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather—”
“No,” said Christine, “I’m not all that sure. But for cash I might feel I’m selling out Rammaert. This way I don’t have to feel that.”
A nice point, thought Milano. Proving that the Jesuits didn’t have any monopoly on casuistry.
He gave her a handshake farewell at her address, Sixth Avenue near Tenth Street just a few doors away from Balducci’s Market, that fantasyland for the well-heeled fatso, and took a cab to the office. Not altogether deserted despite the hour. Lights showed beneath a couple of doors along the corridor, and there was the clacking of a typewriter being pecked at. No use dropping in to say hello; odds were he couldn’t even identify these midnight laborers in the vineyard. Couldn’t keep count of the payroll any more – fifty, sixty, whatever. Personnel came and went but somehow, like rabbits, kept multiplying. Willie loved numbers, so that was Willie’s business, keeping count.
Milano pulled the photos of the Boudins from his files and Xeroxed a couple of them. Then he phoned the car service and set up a date for the morning. David’s car, David at the wheel. No trouble there getting exactly what was asked for. The service was a sideline of Maxie Rovinsky, operator of the co-op’s garage, and David was Maxie’s nephew in from Israel to make his fortune in American dollars.
Or, since Uncle Maxie was an old bachelor, at least to inherit it.
Charles Witter Kirwan
A WEEK OF SMALLDEFEATS, LARGE TRIUMPHS.
Yes.
Precisely a week ago – last Saturday – when I recorded my opening statement on these tapes I had a schedule for the grand event fixed in mind but I was not all that sure I’d be able to meet the date. A Thursday night that was to be, allowing a full three weeks for preparation.
Now, after yesterday’s very large triumph, I believe I can reduce that schedule by a few days. Under any conditions, the event will take place on a week day. Weekends are out. Some of my Bulanga tenants wander afield weekends. But on midweek nights most tend to gather in the kraal, so to speak, for sessions with the deafeningly electronic tom-tom. Or to squat before whitey’s marvelous glass-eyed box, its volume also turned up sufficient to make my own windows across the courtyard rattle. Home is the hustler, home from the hill, the racket of his entertainment punctuated only now and then by the crash of a bottle or the clatter of a can in the courtyard, the handiest disposal system when one moves toward the end of the sixpack.
But at the very end – however briefly – one ten-thousandth of a second? – they will hear a clap of doom that will out-thunder all the collective noise they ever manufactured since they seized this territory.
When he wants to, my friends, whitey can make a noise to deafen this entire planet.
Oh yes.
Yesterday’s triumph.
To explain it I must explain the method of destruction planned for 409 Witter Street in some detail. Bear with me.
Dumbwaiters.
Are they still in use in any residential buildings in our fair city? Anybody remember them? Remember their use?
The aged possibly. My uncherished tenants, the Friedmans, most certainly. When the dumbwaiter door in their kitchen was permanently sealed up they went into Semitic convulsions. Why must two such deserving cases be condemned to lug their daily garbage downstairs to those cans in the courtyard just because They made filth in the dumbwaiters? Because They were the ones who threw unwrapped scraps down the shaft. And They were the ones who left the disgusting remnants of their stew meat and chicken bones and fish heads soaking through flimsy paper bags in the dumbwaiter overnight. And so They were the ones who bred the vermin overrunning the building. If I lived right here in the building instead of in that fancy house next door, would I have even thought of renting to Them?
They? Them?
The Bulanga.
The Friedmans – like my pharmacist, Irving Saphir, like the scattering of other ancient Israelites still afloat on this dark tide – use They and Them in shuddersome reference to the Bulanga.
“You know how They are.”
“You know what They do.”
“Do I have to tell you about Them?”
And there is a body language involved. A casting up of the eyes to a merciless God, a wrinkling of the nose as if one could actually smell a reek of pomade and beer and frying fish emanating from those magic pronouns.
The dumbwaiters.
Midway between floor and ceiling of each kitchen wall of 409 Witter is what appears to be a large steel-jacketed pantry door. At one time, if you slid back its bolt and opened it, you would find yourself looking at the naked brickwork of a shaft that extended from basement to roof of the building. Under the skylight of the shaft was a pulley from which was suspended a long rope. The rope was attached to a four-sided box – front and back exposed. The dumbwaiter.
Pull on the rope – the janitor in the basement attended to that every evening after pushing a buzzer warning you of it – and when you opened that door you would find the box rising to your level and waiting there for you to deposit your garbage in it.
Yes indeed.
Four dumbwaiter shafts provided for eight series of kitchens, ground floor to top floor. Donkey work for the janitor.
Who was glad to get it for a few dollars a week and free rental. And whose wife would lend a callused hand to that prickly rope without complaint.
Irish mostly. But I remember a Polish couple. And a Ukrainian couple.
But it takes a certain minimal intelligence to occupy an apartment with a working dumbwaiter and not to convert that simple machi
ne into a pollutant. Not to heap that box any time of day with sodden and stinking filth. Not to bury the bottom of the shaft under it. I imagine a chimpanzee might display such intelligence after having been advised on the rules.
But the Bulanga?
Let me put it this way. The gods of the Bulanga detest a clean and orderly area as nature abhors a vacuum. So it is a necessary appeasement of the gods to cast filth – to pollute – any clean and orderly area. Fortunately, whitey’s civilization with all its wrappings and containers and whitey’s food stamps which provide cheap and readily wasted edibles offer the devout tribesman all the materials needed for offerings anywhere he roosts, everywhere he goes.
Brown-bagging.
Have any of you wide-eyed whiteys ever observed the desperate need of the Bulanga on the move to absorb enormous amounts of fluid along the way? Have you ever witnessed that fascinating scene where a Bulanga orders a bottled or canned drink at the counter, has it placed in a brown bag, straw included, and then leaves the store to down its contents outside?
Where he then drops bag and emptied bottle to mark his trail?
I can see a grand banquet celebrated by the Bulanga. A magnificent room. A lavish table. More than lavish. There is a bottle of champagne at every setting. A full bottle, mind you, for each celebrant. And each bottle is, of course, in a brown paper bag.
Not one drop is consumed during the banquet. Not a drop. But when the tribe leaves, each member carries his bottle to the street and only then does he consume it.
And leave bag and bottle there to the greater glory of his gods.
So.
So, as the Bulanga came to occupy 409 Witter Street, its dumbwaiter came to be their altar to those gods.
That clean, scrubbed, deodorized wooden box – obscene really – but how much improved now with the sodden, reeking filth bestowed on it at any hour of day or night. Shoved into it, flung down on it, so that the mice and roaches rejoiced, and at last the dumbwaiter, vestige of whitey’s chauvinistic ways, had to be taken out of service. Seal the doors, advise all tenants that henceforth they must carry their deposits direct to the courtyard and place them in that array of cans there.
The Dark Fantastic Page 8