Her turn to take a deep breath. “I didn’t say you were evil. I said you sounded stupid.”
“All right, educate me. Something happened up there, but all I get of it is a Raoul Barquin production. Neo-Cubist Constructivist. How about we try Gérome? You know. All the details down to the last shiny little button.”
He waited. At last Chris said, “All right, one big detail. Your friend thinks I’m a high-class hooker.”
“She said that?”
“No. But she let it be known. You don’t come right out with things like that to a high-class hooker. You just let it be known how you rate them.”
“Or,” said Milano, “is it possible that’s your reading of her?”
“Oh, shit. Look, you really want to be educated, Johnny? Then listen close. This is not the first time it happened to me with people that color. Want to know why? Because I am a real foxy lady. Great-looking and with a lot of style. And very black.”
“For chrissake,” Milano protested, but she wasn’t letting him off the hook that easy.
“Want some more education, Johnny? You know my mother? Grayhair, fat old lady? She goes to an apartment to do domestic and there’s the husband and wife. Caucasian, you know? The wife takes off for the supermarket meanwhile, and next thing, my grayhair, fat old mother with three grownup kids feels a hand on her rear end. Because it is a black rear end. Has to do some heavy wrestling sometimes before she can get back to the floor-scrubbing.”
A lot of style all right, Milano thought. Sugar Ray Robinson had that style. Jab, jab, hook off the jab, right cross. Bang.
He said, “That’s the big detail. What about all the little ones? Exactly what did happen up there?”
Chris held up her glass. “Refill.”
“Not yet. You are not going to hang me up like this, foxy lady, and then go all incoherent on me. No chance.”
“No? Do you believe what I just told you? Do you understand it?”
“Yes.”
“Hurt?”
“You must know goddam well it does.”
“If you say so. All right then. First your lady friend asked about me and I told her. I think she bought maybe ten percent of it. Then she asked about you. Real tough exam paper she handed out. Highly personal.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Oh—” said Chris. She scrutinized his face as if searching out blemishes. “You do have a way with bitchy old ladies, don’t you? The one runs your office, this one upstairs—”
“You were with her an hour,” Milano cut in. “You weren’t talking about me most of it.”
“Just some. Then she told me to get cards and chips from that cabinet there and she’d deal some blackjack, dollar a hand. So I told her I did not have the money to be a loser with, and the way she looked, that was one of the things about me she did not believe.”
“So you didn’t—”
“Yes, we did. She said all right, not to worry, she’d bill you for anything I lost. Only I didn’t lose. I took her for thirty-two dollars.”
“You took Gracie MacFadden for thirty-two dollars at blackjack?”
“Only on paper.” Chris smiled wickedly. “She said to collect from you. Said if you were going to pay for me losing, you could just as well pay for me winning.”
That thundercloud over her, Milano saw gratefully, was starting to dissolve. An edge of silvery moonlight was showing through. Thirty-two dollars, thirty-two hundred, name your figure, it was worth it to get that change in the weather.
He drew out his wallet, and Chris clapped a hand down on it pinning it to the bar counter. “No. I already told you that, Johnny. Never lay money on me.”
“It’s her money. Don’t worry, I’ll collect from her.”
“No. You just let her know I wouldn’t take it from you. Then anybody asks me about her, I can tell them all I know is Mrs. Grace MacFadden personally owes me thirty-two dollars. And when they ask how come, I will be happy to tell them. Including, you know, the media. If they ever get around to me.”
“Some day they will.”
“Oh yeah.” It came out half sardonic, half mournful, and the sound of it reminded Milano that two fingers of Jack Daniels in that wide-bottomed glass made a lot of Jack Daniels. “Only trouble is,” Chris said, “no singing, dancing, or Art Deco maids. And I do not do windows. You know what? I’m hungry. You have a kitchen around here, don’t you?”
“The doorman offers better. Quick delivery, too.”
“No, all I want right now is something to stop my stomach from talking.”
In the kitchen he watched her take inventory of the barren refrigerator. “Old Mother Hubbard,” she commented and helped herself to a tomato. She quartered it and ate it drippingly over the sink. She paper-toweled her face and hands. “Better,” she said. She leaned back against the sink. The way she regarded Milano, a faintly puzzled expression on her face, tongue out, the tip of it touching her upper lip, gave him the feeling that doctor was working out a troublesome diagnosis. At last she said, “I guess I’m sorry I dumped on you like that.”
“So am I,” said Milano. “But you know my intentions were good.”
“Talk about wooden dialogue. But I know. What I liked was the way you took it when I told you about my mother on the job. You looked real sick.”
“Anything to brighten up your day.”
“You know what I mean.”
She moved back to the living room and Milano followed. The existential life, all right, instant by instant, where the decisions were hers to make, and unless he was willing to have everything suddenly come apart, where all he could do was stand ready to deliver the response called for. And, if it wasn’t too paradoxical a thought, to keep himself braced for the unpredictable.
Fascinating, if that was the word for it.
Half his ancestors were Brescia Lombards from the far north, the other half Catania Sicilianos from the deep south. Right now, he told himself, every dead and buried male of at least the Siciliano half had to be spinning in his grave with outrage.
He stood by as Chris appraised the living room. “Nice,” she decided at last. “But kind of bare, isn’t it?”
“All the essentials are here.”
“Hmm.” Forefinger pressed to her chin, she did some more appraisal. “That’s what it is. Nothing on the walls. On purpose?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But for somebody like you? No paintings, no prints, nothing? The way you are about art?”
“I know. But what I want on those walls I cannot afford. So it’s better this way.”
“Poor-mouthing? You could always trade in that Mercedes.”
“Yeah, but it wouldn’t help much, not even for a small down payment.”
“On what?”
“Oh, the three Degas portraits I’ve got on the shopping list. And Seurat’s Grande Jatte. You know it?”
“I know that much. It was mostly scenic design at Performing Arts, but we got into a lot of art history that way.”
“Well, La Grande Jatte centers on the wall right there. And my two Turners go right over there. Late Turners that fit the Impressionist ambience. One Renoir. Trouble is it’s a vertical seventy by thirty-eight, so those bookshelves have to be cleared away. And that’s all temporary. Because after a couple of months we switch over to some of my Spanish school biggies. Featuring Velasquez, El Greco, Goya. Then the Italian show. The primitives are in the bedroom, but here we’ve got Caravaggio. Two of them. One way we save room, no Raphael. Do you know what it would have to feel like to stick a finger into one of Raphael’s people?”
“You tell me.”
“Like sticking a finger into the Pillsbury Doughboy.” Milano pulled up short. “Does all this strike you as being a little weird?”
“Sure. Isn’t it?”
“I guess. So just keep it to yourself. I mean, not make table-talk of it with anybody.”
“Trust me,” Chris said. She reached out a finger and traced a small circle in the middle of
his forehead. “Nothing more recent in there? Like, not even Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and such?”
“No room. Anyone breaks completely with representational is just giving me a close-up of his brain cells. Artists don’t have much in the way of brain cells.”
“Your opinion.”
“I’m the one doing the collecting,” Milano pointed out.
She was looking at him speculatively. In silence. She had a way of turning on these long silences which hummed in the ears. She said, “Sometimes you find things out backwards, know what I mean?”
“No.”
“No. Well, when you told me in the gallery about meeting Grace MacFadden tonight, that was a real high. But I was also pissed off some, because I could see what was coming. You both lived in the same building, we’d visit her, then we’d drop into your place and I’d be owing you a big one, and there would be the bed waiting. Your way of operating. Kind of simple-minded but, like, highly workable. You still with me?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to get uptight like that. Because while I was thinking just how hard to put you down when you tried aiming me at that bed, it came to me that I was all ready to hop into it with you. And if we didn’t make it together somehow after Grace MacFadden, I would really be pissed off.”
“I’m simple-minded?” said Milano
“Some ways. That’s all right.” She languorously draped her arms around his neck, and he, with the feeling that he was about two steps behind the parade and running to catch up, found his arms around her waist.
Then, during the exploratory meeting of lips and teeth and tongue, he moved one arm high, the other low, and there was a straining together as tight as possible of every square inch of body surface. She finally drew her head back. “In case you don’t know,” she said, “you got my timer all set and ticking.”
In bed, it was the same exploratory trip to start with, a long, voluptuous exploration, and then a series of variations on the old basic theme, none especially inventive, but all, as far as Milano was concerned, dazzling. The noisy, rampaging finale left him replete and thoroughly winded. His partner, he was pleased to see, appeared to be just as replete and just as thoroughly winded.
After awhile she sat up, drew her legs under her, and used a corner of the sheet to wipe the sweat from her face and chest, so that he had the pleasure, from just about the right distance, of studying that gleaming back from the roundness of the buttocks resting on her heels to the narrowness of waist and width of smoothly curved shoulder. That skin, he saw as he slowly drew his thumb up along the arc of spine, was not black. It was the whole palette under a sheen of blackness. The crisp hair was black – soot black – but alive with a glitter of pinpoint lights seemingly woven into it.
He worked his fingers deep into that glittering crispness, and between the fingers it seemed as magically alive as Medusa’s serpents.
“Brillo-head,” said Chris.
Milano gripped the hair and pulled her head back. She didn’t resist.
“Bailey,” he said, “don’t ever pull that kind of crack again.”
“What kind?”
“You know goddam well what kind. That putting yourself down clown kind.”
“Oh yeah?” She dropped her head farther back and looked at him upside down. “Well, it is like Brillo, didn’t you notice? And down here” – she reached around for his other hand and planted it against the dampness of her mound “—it is just like watchsprings. Little tiny watchsprings.”
He could feel that familiar frustration building up in him again. And that upside-down face was making him dizzy. He released her almost roughly. “Let’s talk about the weather,” he said.
She pivoted around on her knees to face him. “You have got to get one thing straight, Johnny. I never put myself down.”
“No? Then why that kind of talk?”
“Because I felt – you made me feel – like doing you kind of a favor. I was taking you inside, so you could look outside with me.”
It took Milano a few seconds to get a handle on this. “I see. And outsiders are all those terrible white people. And their buzz word is Brillo-head.”
“Oh, do not play word games, man. I said I’m trying to do you a favor. Could be I’m trying to do me a favor, too, because this does not look to be any one-night stand. Or does it?”
“No, it does not.”
“I thought not. But you still do not know what favor I’m talking about, so I’ll make it real simple. You have got a mother and a sister, right? You know hypothetical? Well, this is hypothetical. What happens if you feel like showing me off to your mother and sister?”
Oh yeah, Milano told himself. On a scale of one to ten for conversation stoppers, we have just come up with an authentic number ten.
Melanzana. The Bath Beach, Mulberry Street, paisan word for her division of sad humanity. Melanzana. Eggplant.
Hey, did you hear about Johnny’s melanzana?
Chris said, “And they’re not terrible people, are they, Johnny? Or the people in your office? Or your friends? Just people, right? Only when you see them from inside where I am there is something about them, you know? And if you can’t see it that way when we’re together with them, you could come off stupid and I could come off hurt. And maybe you can live with stupid, man, but I will not live with hurt.”
Milano carefully did not reach out a hand toward her. “Are you hurting now?”
“No.”
“Well,” said Milano, “that’s not a bad start, is it?”
They had shared the last remaining tomato and container of cottage cheese and were on the floor of the living room sorting out record albums when the collect call came. Sullie, on the line from Miami.
Milano took the call in the bedroom, closing its door behind him.
Sullie started right off with, “You know that double or nothing deal, John? No dice. We’ll have to make it the regular five hundred.”
“Couldn’t you get close to Barquin?”
“Let me tell it my own way, John. What happened, there’s no Raoul Barquin listed anywhere on the Beach. So I tackled what Barquins there were, all by doorbell, no phone. About an hour ago, I hit pay dirt. Guy name of Adolfo Barquin. Runs a carpenter shop way downtown in the low rent section here. South Beach. Almost solid Cubano now. And this Adolfo lives upstairs over the shop.
“Anyhow, he’s Raoul’s uncle, and he was ready to spill his guts to anybody who said hello. Seems Raoul came over in that big Mariel boat-lift, and it was Adolfo and some others in the family sponsored him here. Guaranteed the government they’d take care of him, even get him a job. So Adolfo took him into the shop where it turned out he was no use with the hammer and nails, but he was one hell of a salesman. Went out and got a lot of business, plenty of it fancy, high-price jobs.”
“A salesman,” Milano said. “Not an artist.”
“No way. But a lot more than a salesman. Three days ago, the cops walked into the shop with a warrant for him and Adolfo and a search order. Seems Raoul is a hot connection to the cocaine cowboys here, and when some of those high-price jobs went out of the shop they were loaded with coke. Picture frames, little wood statues, stuff like that, and all loaded up. And it turns out he was never any political prisoner in Cuba, the way he claimed to be. He was just one of those scummy jailbirds Castro dumped on us here.”
“Where is he now?”
“Nobody knows. Or is saying. He must have been tipped off, because he got away clean. That’s why Adolfo is so talky. His story is that he never knew what was going on, that Raoul doublecrossed him by involving him in the racket after all he did for Raoul, and he’d like to find the guy himself and beat the truth out of him.”
“You believe that?” Milano asked.
“Nah. He’s lying all the way. But what other story could he tell? He’s out on bail himself right now. And that’s it.”
“It’s plenty, Sullie. Just bill the office for that double-or-nothing thousand and addres
s it to Shirley. By the way, what’s Adlofo’s address?”
“Two-ninety Jefferson Court, right near the marina down there. You’re all right, John. Drop in whenever you’re in town. Don’t forget your Spanish dictionary.”
Milano put down the phone.
Home free.
No, he warned himself, not yet.
Two Boudins waiting, lowgrade security, Rammaert nailed to the wall no matter how you looked at it. But time was now of the essence. The L.A. police might have kissed off those paintings, but if the Miami police were scouring through Barquin’s shipping orders, they could wind up at Rammaert’s door ironically checking out cocaine connections. It still wouldn’t be a case of ripping open those canvases, not with some smart lawyers yelling desecration of art, but sooner or later there would be X-raying, what with the evidence on hand. And Pacifica – and collector Henry Grassie – would sooner or later get their paintings back without any obligation at all to Watrous Associates.
Lucky it was the weekend. It meant a little head start.
Unlucky that there was no way to move alone on it any further.
Like it or not, it was Willie Watrous time again.
Milano picked up the phone distastefully, touchtoned the number, and was both irritated and relieved when there was no answer. He tried Shirley Glass’s number, and her immediate response was, “If it isn’t a fire drill, it must be John Milano.”
“Good guess. I can’t raise Willie, Shirl. Where is he?”
She had to know from his tone that this was serious business. She said, “Chicago, Johnny. That retired cops organization he belongs to. What is it, Pacifica?”
“On the stove and boiling over. You know where to reach him in Chicago?”
“Yes, of course.”
“All right. Call the airlines now, book him for a flight back here tomorrow morning. Then call him about it and tell him we meet in the office as soon as he gets in. What time would that be about?”
The Dark Fantastic Page 22