Night Life

by David C. Taylor

  “Carlos Ribera, Cuban modernist,” Cassidy said and looked to Dylan for confirmation.

  She was taking protective leather chaps and a heavy cotton jacket with leather sleeves from hooks near the elevator, and she looked over at him in surprise.

  “I read about him in the Times a couple of months ago when the Museum of Modern Art had one of his pieces—Explosion #4. Out in the sculpture garden near the Rodin. I like it.”

  “You’re kidding. A cop who likes modern art.”

  “Hey, don’t get me wrong. I still like to give a prisoner the third degree, but a man’s got to spend his graft someplace. Why not on art? Besides, a museum is a great place to pick up women using the two basic approaches. One is to act dumb and get her to tell you about the painting she’s looking at. Or play it the other way and offer her some wildly esoteric explanation of what the artist was up to. I tend to go with the first. There’s less heavy lifting.”

  She offered him a Bronx cheer. “I’ve got to go to work. You can watch or go home. Whatever you want.”

  He heard it as a challenge. “I’ll stick around for a while.”

  She smiled and turned away from him and studied the sketch and the diagram next to it while she pulled on leather gloves. Her concentration was so intense that he ceased to exist. When she had seen what she needed to see, she lowered the helmet’s faceplate and turned the valve that sent acetylene to the torch. Gas hissed. She hit a striker near the torch nozzle and flame popped. She adjusted the valve until the flame stopped smoking and then let in oxygen from the second valve until the flame turned from yellow to blue and developed defined edges. She selected a bent piece of metal from an old kitchen table nearby, checked it against the diagram, laid it into a gap in the sculpture, and dipped the flame to the join. Cassidy admired the way she worked. Her movements were precise and economical. She checked the diagram before setting in a new piece and checked again before the weld took and adjusted it if she felt it was off. The flame hissed. Sparks showered from the welds. The room smelled of burned metal. He could not tell if she ever looked at him through the thick glass plate on the helmet, but he did not think so. The work engaged her completely. What would it be like to be with someone who was that focused?

  He roamed the studio. There was a kitchen in one corner. The sink was full of dirty dishes. A pot of green soup scummed over on the stove. The icebox rattled and groaned. The walls were wood-paneled to eight feet and then gave way to exposed brick. Paintings and drawings of all sizes were pinned to the paneling. There were oils, pen-and-ink drawings, delicate watercolors, and bold canvases slashed with color, and it was clear that many artists were represented. There were also charcoal and chalk sketches of sculptures already made or planned for the future, and Ribera’s strokes seemed to have been applied to the paper in a fury.

  Cassidy pushed open a door near the elevator and found a windowless bedroom. He turned on the light. There was a king-size box spring and mattress on the floor, its top sheet and blankets kicked aside. Clothes were piled on a chair in the corner and hung from hooks in the wall. A painting hung on the wall opposite the bed. As Cassidy moved to see it more clearly, the elevator rumbled down the shaft. The painting was a life-size nude of a young woman. She stood on a tropical shore and was partly turned from the observer, hip cocked, one foot pointed to test the water that licked the edge of the beach, both hands lifted to tie back her black hair with a red ribbon. The figure was so realistic that Cassidy thought he might be looking at a large photograph, but when he was close he could see the brushstrokes in the paint.

  The elevator rumbled up.

  She was a Latina and her body was the color of dark honey. From her smile she understood that a man was watching her, a man who wanted her, the painter and whoever saw the painting.

  The elevator doors clashed open.

  When Cassidy stepped into the main room, the man closing the elevator doors turned and looked at him and then raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and said, “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my house?” He was a big man, bull thick through the chest and shoulders. He had a heavy, big-featured face and a mass of wild thick gray hair that sprang from his head in tangled curls.

  “Michael Cassidy. I followed her here. I’m hoping she’ll keep me.” He nodded toward Dylan, who was bent over the sculpture oblivious of all else.

  “Hell, yes. An ass to follow anywhere,” he said in a thick Cuban accent. He carried a brown paper shopping bag in the crook of one arm, and when he moved, the bottles inside rattled. “I told her after I hired her that we should become lovers, but she laughed and said no. Laughed at me. At Ribera. Can you imagine?” He laughed. “Come on, let’s have a drink. I told her that in a week with me she would learn more about being with a man, more about being a woman, than she could learn in a year with any other man. She laughed again. Said no. Again.” He shrugged at the foolishness of women. He put the sack down on the counter near the icebox and pulled bottles out with a flourish like rabbits from a hat. “With most women, ‘no’ is just the beginning of the dance. With Dylan, no means no. Yes means yes. Very unusual woman. Do like tequila?” He held up a bottle of pale amber liquor. It carried no label.

  “I do.”

  “Bueno, hombre, you are going to have something wonderful.” He found two glasses on a shelf above the sink and wiped them with a towel of dubious cleanliness. He pulled the cork from the bottle. “I have a friend who smuggles this in from Mexico. You cannot buy it here. It comes from the highlands above the town of Tequila in Jalisco where the big blue agaves grow. The soil there is very red, and the blue agaves grow very big and the tequila they make from them has a delicate sweetness. This is añejo, which means old. They age it in wood casks to make it smooth. Taste.” He shoved a full glass at Cassidy and raised his own glass. “Amor y pesos, love and money. What else is there?” He answered his own question. “Art. Of course, art.” He drank the tequila quickly and banged his glass on the counter.

  Cassidy drank his. The liquor was smooth with just enough bite, and the taste was vegetal rather than grain.

  “Good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Another.” He poured two more, and they drank. “You were in the bedroom looking at Carmen.”

  “Yes. Beautiful.”

  “Do you know why I painted her?”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the critics. They said I was an abstractionist, because I had to be, because I could not draw. So I did that to show them what fools they were. And I was in love. In love and worried about what the critics thought. The problems of a young man. What do you do, Michael Cassidy?”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “Ah, the ultimate critic. ‘Stop or I’ll shoot.’” He laughed and drank again. “I hate cops. They guard the towers of the monsters who rule over the people. Without the cops, the towers would fall and the monsters would be crushed.”

  “Without cops there’d be someone standing over you with a gun taking your wallet with the other hand.”

  “Always the same argument. But who protects the people from their protectors?”

  “I do.”

  Ribera peered at him. “Hmm, a good-hearted Fascist? Well, maybe there is one. Me, I’m a Marxist-anarchist. Not a Communist, mind you. Fuck the Communists. The dictatorship of the proletariat is just another dictatorship. I believe in the central tenet of Marx: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, because I have extraordinary ability and extraordinary needs.” He turned away abruptly and went to examine Dylan’s work.

  Cassidy liked him and liked his liquor.

  Dylan saw Ribera approach. She straightened from the last weld, turned off the torch, and took off the helmet. Her face shone with sweat. She peeled off the gloves and ran her fingers through her matted hair and shook her head hard.

  Ribera looked closely at the work she had finished and then stepped back to look at the whole. He scrubbed his face with his hand as if to wipe out what
he had seen and then looked again. “It’s wrong.”

  “I checked the diagram and the sketch. It’s what you drew there.”

  “I don’t give a shit what’s there. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. Can’t you see it? Can’t you feel it? Goddamn it, I knew it. I knew it was wrong, but I did not listen to the voice. I did not pay attention. I just went ahead, because I am an arrogant shit who does not learn. Fuck!” He whirled, saw a sledgehammer leaning against the table, and picked it up and swung it hard into the sculpture. The head struck with a clang, and some of the new welds broke. Pieces of metal flew like shrapnel. Ribera swung the hammer up and drove it into the sculpture again, and again, smashing welds, breaking pieces loose, bending others.

  The fury flamed out. He dropped the hammer and stepped back, his shirt dark with sweat, his chest pumping, and assessed the damage and took one last deep breath and let it out. “All right. There.” He looked at Cassidy and Dylan standing together. “There is no creation without destruction. Now we start again. Go home, Dylan. I’m going to get drunk.”

  The streets were deserted except for an occasional taxi or delivery truck pulled by its headlights through the night.

  “What did you think of him?”

  “Too wishy-washy for me. He’s soft. I like men with strong opinions.”

  “Hey.” She punched him on the arm. “He’s a genius.”

  “He wouldn’t argue with you on that.”

  “Why are men so prickly with each other? They always swell up when they first meet.”

  “Women. Women confuse us. They make us act strangely.”

  “Why is it always our fault?”

  “I don’t know. God’s design, joker that he is. No, I like him. I like his liquor. I like what he makes. I like his taste in welders.”

  “Okay, then.”

  They walked home through the warm evening, and after a couple of silent blocks she slipped an arm through his. He felt a surge of pleasure, the giddiness, hope, and confusion of a teenager on a first date, and he wondered at that.

  He followed her up the stairs. Bless the man who invented tight blue jeans. Ribera was right, an ass to follow anywhere. She stopped in front of her door and turned to look at him with big eyes and a smile tugging the corners of her mouth, and he wondered if she could hear his thoughts. They looked at each other for a moment without saying anything, and then both leaned in at the same time and met in the middle. He put his hands on her waist and pulled her in, and her arms went around his neck and the length of her body pressed against him and he could feel himself rising against her.

  She pushed away from him, breathing hard. “No. Too fast.”

  “No.” His heart raced. He tried to pull her back to him, but she put her hand on his chest and held him off while she searched his face.

  “I do what I want,” she said.

  “All right.”

  “Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do. I do what I want. Do you understand?”

  She was telling him something important, something beyond this moment, but he missed her meaning. “Sure. It’s okay.” God, he wanted her.

  “Nobody.”

  “No.”

  She looked at him one more time as if to be sure of something, and what she saw must have satisfied her, because she came back against him, pressing into him, and kissed him. They broke, and he took her hand and they went up bumping hips in the narrow staircase. He fumbled the key into the lock with one hand, unwilling to let go of her with the other. They went to the bedroom without speaking. He stripped off his jacket and threw it and his gun rig on a chair and went to her and unbuttoned her shirt while she unbuttoned his. He unsnapped her bra and cupped her breasts while she unbuckled his belt. She hooked her thumbs in her waistband and pushed off her jeans and panties in one motion while he kicked the rest of his clothes to the floor. They went to the bed. He ran his hands over her and she bucked up against them. He kissed her nipples and went down and tasted her and when he went into her she rose against him.

  When he woke in the morning, his arm was over her waist, and they were pressed together like spoons. He could feel himself get hard against her, and she murmured something and shifted so he could slip into her and then pushed back against him and he held on tight while she moved.

  Afterward he lay on his stomach with his head pillowed on his arms, and she sat cross-legged next to him and traced the scars on his back with a finger. “What did this?” His back was ridged as if scourged by whips.

  “Shrapnel.”

  She waited. “Is that all you’re going to tell me?”

  “Outside Bastogne. We were pinned down in the snow. A guy named Markowitz got hit. He was out in a forward listening post. He couldn’t make it back alone, so I went out to get him. They dropped a shell near us before we made it back. He got most of it. It killed him. What was left did that to me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.” He wasn’t going to tell her about Markowitz’s screaming, or about the prayer litany that ran through his own mind when he went out to get him, the prayer they all shared: “Not me. Please, not me. Not me.”

  She leaned down and kissed his back. “Lucky you. Lucky me.”

  When he got out of the shower, she was gone from the bedroom. He got dressed and found her drinking coffee leaning against the black walnut counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. She was wearing one of his shirts, which just reached her thighs.

  “What are you smiling at?”

  “You. You’re beautiful.”

  “Ah, well. Okay. Thank you.” She kissed him lightly on the mouth and she tasted of coffee.

  There was another cup on the counter waiting for him.

  “It’s black. I didn’t know how you like it.”

  “Black’s fine.” He drank some and lit a cigarette.

  “It’s only the beginning of what I don’t know.”

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Nothing more now. I don’t have to know it all at once. Do you?” She searched his face the way she had the night before on the landing in front of his door.

  “No.”

  She smiled. “We’ll explore. Okay? Little by little.”

  * * *

  As he walked toward the subway, he suppressed the urge to skip. How could this have happened? Who was she? Where the hell did she come from to suddenly appear in his life like a miracle? Is this what he had always been waiting for? It felt like it. No, it felt like something he’d heard rumor of but never expected to find. No warning. Just suddenly there. Wait. Don’t get ahead of yourself. When you come back in the evening, she could be gone.

  8

  Cassidy agreed to meet Leah at Carmine’s on Mott Street. While he waited for the light, he pulled the envelope from his inside pocket and took out the fifty-cent piece he found in Ingram’s locker and examined it again in the sunlight. Nothing. It was just a coin. Fifty cents. A couple of hot dogs. A short ride in a cab. Is this what the FBI was looking for? Why? There must be a reason, or Ingram wouldn’t have hidden it. He flipped it in the air, caught it, and put it back in the envelope, and thought about where he could hide it.

  Leah was waiting at a table against the brick wall at the back of the long room of wooden tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Three hoods in sharkskin suits were drinking espresso at the bar. They made him as a cop when he came in, and as he went back toward Leah, they scooped their change and started to leave until the bartender leaned over and said something in a low voice, and they settled back on their stools.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi, yourself,” she said as he leaned over to kiss her. She smiled brightly, but he could tell she was nervous. She fiddled with her glass of red wine, drank some of it, and then started to speak but stopped when the owner arrived with menus.

  “How’re you doing, Mike?”

  “I’m okay, Aldo. How are you?”

  “Good. Good. Leo’s getting out in a week. Good
behavior and all. Best thing that ever happened to him. He’s coming to work for me. A year from now, it all works out, I’ll make him a partner.”

  “Is that going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. I really think it is. And what am I going to do? He’s my brother. I’ve got to try to make it right.” He put the menus down. “I’ll give you a couple of minutes.”

  “What was that about?” Leah asked.

  “I busted his brother on an armed robbery charge about five years ago. Leo was a hophead. They put him away for five to eight. Apparently he cleaned up, found Jesus. Aldo thinks I did the family a favor.”

  “And those guys at the bar?”

  Cassidy glanced over. “I don’t know them personally, but at least one of them works for Joey Adonis. You know who he is?”

  “A gangster. I read the papers. Isn’t he a friend of Uncle Frank’s?”

  “I wouldn’t call him a friend. A business associate.”

  They ordered.

  Leah rolled the stem of her glass between her fingers. “Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, think you’d be here?”

  “Lunch at Carmine’s?”

  “Don’t be dense. A cop. Gangsters who know you. Are you carrying a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Carrying a gun.”

  “My wildest dreams? No.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on.”

  “For a while, pitching for the Yankees. Then the greatest jazz pianist in the world.”

  “What? You can’t even play the piano. You hated piano lessons. You used to hide when Miss Schoenfeld came to the house.”

  “Dreams aren’t about what you can do. They’re dreams.”

  “Jazz pianist, wow.”