Gold Coast

by Nelson DeMille

  “Thank you for packing my bag.”

  “Think nothing of it,’’ she said.

  “Thank you just the same.’’ When husbands and wives get on this frigid roll, you’d think they were total strangers, and they are.

  Susan asked, “Did you see my note?”

  “Note . . . ? Oh, yes, I did.”

  “John . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “We really have to talk about it.”

  “The note?”

  “About us.”

  “Not us, Susan. About you.”

  She didn’t reply for a few seconds, then asked, “What about me? What is really bothering you about me?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “Did you call me last night? Did we speak?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, it was a dream. But it was a very realistic dream, Susan. Actually it was my subconscious mind trying to tell me something. Something I’ve known for some time, but couldn’t come to grips with. Has that ever happened to you in a dream?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, in my dream I realized that you were having an affair with Frank Bellarosa.”

  There, I said it. Well, sort of. She didn’t reply for a few seconds, then asked, “Is that why you’re in a bad mood? You dreamed that I was having an affair with Frank?”

  “I think it was more than a dream. It was a nocturnal revelation. That’s what’s been bothering me for months, Susan, and it’s what has come between us.”

  Again there was a long silence, then she said, “If you suspected something, you should have come to grips with it, John. Instead, you’ve become withdrawn. You’ve indulged yourself in playing Mafia mouthpiece and telling off all your friends and family. Maybe what’s happened to us is as much your fault as mine.”

  “No doubt about it.”

  Again, silence, because neither of us wanted to return to the issue of adultery. But having come this far, I said, “So? Yes or no? Tell me.”

  She replied, “You had a silly dream.”

  “All right, Susan. If that’s what you say, I will accept that because you’ve never lied to me.”

  “John . . . we do have to talk about this . . . in person. There’s probably a lot we’ve been keeping from each other. You know I would never do anything to hurt you . . . I’m sorry if you’ve been upset these last few months . . . you’re a very unique man, a very special man. I realize that now. And I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”

  Well, that was about as mushy as Susan ever got, and while it wasn’t a full confession of marital infidelity, it was something very like it, sort of like plea bargaining. I was pretty shaky, to be honest with you, and I found myself sitting on the bed in my room, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. If you’ve ever confronted your spouse with charges of sexual misconduct, you know the feeling. I finally said, “All right. We’ll talk when I get back.’’ I hung up and stared at the telephone, waiting, I guess, for it to ring, but it didn’t.

  You have to understand that prior to that day in court and the subsequent media exposure, I wasn’t ready to confront this other issue of Susan and Frank. But now, having put my old life behind me forever, and now that I felt good about myself, I was prepared to hear my wife tell me she had been sexually involved with Frank Bellarosa. What’s more, I still loved her, and I was prepared to forgive her and start over again, because in a manner of speaking, we’d both had an affair with Frank Bellarosa, and Susan was right that this was as much my fault as hers. But Susan was not yet at the point where she could tell me it had happened or tell him it was over.

  So, lacking a confession from Susan, I had to remain in that limbo state of the husband who knows but doesn’t know, who can’t ask for a divorce or offer to forgive, and who has to deal with the parties as if nothing were going on, lest he make a complete fool of himself.

  Or maybe I could just ask Frank, “Hey, goombah, you fucking my wife, or what?”

  • • •

  Later that morning, Bellarosa and I met Lenny and Vinnie with the Cadillac outside the Plaza. We drove back down to Little Italy where we stopped at Bellarosa’s club for espresso. The Italian Rifle Club had few similarities to The Creek, as you might guess, except that it was private and that men discussed things there that had to do with manipulating the republic for the benefit of the club members. Maybe there were more similarities than I realized.

  That morning Bellarosa had a series of meetings scheduled in his club, which was actually a large storefront with a black-painted picture window, dark inside, and divided into various dim coffee rooms and private rooms.

  I was pretty much ignored most of the time, and sometimes they spoke in Italian, and sometimes when someone present didn’t speak any Italian, I was asked to leave the room with the words, “You don’t want to hear this, Counselor.’’ I was sure they were right.

  So I drank a lot of coffee and read all the morning papers and watched some old geezers playing a card game that I couldn’t follow.

  After an hour or so in the club, we left and got back into the car. Though there was a layer of clouds blocking the sun, the morning was getting hot, an urban heat produced by cars and people and yesterday’s sun still trapped in the concrete. Country squires can tolerate only about a week in Manhattan in the summer, and I hoped we wouldn’t be much longer in the city, but with this guy you didn’t ask questions about times and places.

  We made a stop at Ferrara’s, where Bellarosa picked out a dozen pastries for Anna, which were put into a nice white box with green and red string and which Bellarosa carried to the car. I can’t describe to you why the sight of this big man carrying that little box daintily by the string struck me as so civilized, but it did. It wasn’t exactly Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer, but it was a profoundly human act that made me see the man, the husband, and the father. And yes, the lover. Whereas I’d always seen Bellarosa as a man’s man, I saw now that my original impression of him as a man whom women would find attractive was accurate. Well, not all women, but some women. I could see Susan, Lady Stanhope, wanting to be debased and sexually used by this insensitive barbarian. Maybe it had something to do with her seeing her mother in bed with a gardener or stableboy or whoever it was. Maybe this is something that all highborn ladies fantasize about: taking off their clothes for a man who is not their social or intellectual equal, but is simply a sexual turn-on. And why should this be such a shock to men? Half the wealthy and successful men I know have screwed their secretaries, cocktail waitresses, and even their maids. Women have libidos, too. But maybe Susan Stanhope and Frank Bellarosa had a more complex relationship.

  Anyway, we spent the rest of the morning in Little Italy, Greenwich Village, and environs, making a few quick stops, sometimes for talk, sometimes for taking provisions aboard the Cadillac. The car soon smelled of cheese and baked goods, and some horrible salted codfish called baccalà, which I suppose couldn’t be put in the trunk because of the heat. Bellarosa explained to me, “I’m going to send all this stuff home later. This is all stuff Anna likes. You want to send something to your wife?”

  It annoyed me that he always referred to Susan as my wife, instead of by her name. What did he call her when they were alone?

  “You want to stop for something? Flowers or something?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll send these pastries from Ferrara’s like it was from you.”

  “No.”

  He shrugged.

  As we headed up toward Midtown, he said to me, “You called this morning? Everything’s okay at home?”

  I replied, “Yes. How’s your wife? You call this morning? Everything okay at home?”

  “Yeah. I’m just asking you because if you got problems at home, you don’t have your mind on business. And because we’re friends. Right?”

  “How was I yesterday in court?”

  “You were fine.”

  “Subject closed.”

  He shrugged again and looked out the wind
ow.

  We stopped at the Italian Sailor’s Club on West Thirty-fourth Street, and Bellarosa went inside by himself. He came out fifteen minutes later with a brown bag and got into the car. Now what do you suppose was in that brown bag? Drugs? Money? Secret messages? No. The bag was filled with small crooked cigars. “These are from Naples,’’ he said. “You can’t get them here.’’ He lit one up and I could see why you couldn’t. I opened the window.

  “You want one?”

  “No.”

  He passed the bag up to Vinnie and Lenny, who took a cigar apiece and lit up. Everyone seemed happy with their little duty-free cigars. Of course, today it was cigars, tomorrow it could be something else that came out of the Sailor’s Club. Interesting.

  Instead of stopping for a three-hour lunch at an Italian restaurant, we stopped at an Italian sausage cart near Times Square. Bellarosa got out and greeted the vendor, an old man who hugged and kissed Bellarosa and nearly cried. Without asking us what we wanted, Bellarosa got us all hot sausage heros with peppers and onions. I said, “Hold the mayo.’’ We ate outside the double-parked car as we chatted with the old vendor, and Bellarosa gave the man a hunk of goat cheese from Little Italy and three crooked cigars. I think we got the best of that deal.

  If a man is known by the company he keeps, then Frank Bellarosa was sort of a populist, mixing with the masses the way the early Caesars had done, letting the common people hug and kiss him, venerate him, and lay hands on him. At the same time, he mixed with the highborn, but if the Plaza was any indication, he seemed to treat the powerful with cool contempt.

  The sausage man was not tending his cart and, in fact, shooed away a few people so he could better tend to his luncheon guests, dining alfresco in expensive suits in the heat of Times Square with the Cadillac blocking traffic. What a bizarre little scene, I thought.

  We wiped our fingers on paper napkins, bid our host buon giorno, and got back into the car. Still chewing on a mouthful of sausage, Bellarosa said to Vinnie, “You tell Freddie to hit these guys up for another fifty cents a pound on the sausage and let them pass it on to their customers.’’ He said to me, “It’s a good product and everybody eats it—your Spanish, your melanzane, they love this shit. Where they gonna go for lunch around here? Sardi’s? The coffee shops serve shit. So they eat on the street and watch the pussy go by. Right? That’s worth another quarter. Right? You like the sandwich? You pay another two bits for it? Sure. So we hit the vendors for another fifty cents a pound and they pass it along. No problem.”

  “Now that we’ve all discussed it,’’ I said, “should we take a vote?”

  He laughed. “Vote? Yeah, we’ll vote. Frank votes yes. End of vote.”

  “Good meeting,’’ I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Actually, I was impressed with Bellarosa’s attention to the smaller outposts of his empire. I suppose he believed that if he watched the price of sausage, the bigger problems would take care of themselves. He was very much a hands-on man, both in his professional life and his personal life, if you know what I mean.

  • • •

  We crossed the East River into the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn by way of the Williamsburg Bridge. After that, I was lost. Brooklyn is a mystery to me, and I hope it remains so. Unfortunately, I had a guide who pointed out everything to me, the way people do who think you care about their squalid little part of the world. Bellarosa said, “There on the roof of that building is where I got my finger wet for the first time.”

  I had the impression he wasn’t talking about sucking his thumb. I said, “How interesting.”

  Anyway, we stopped at a beautiful old baroque church covered with black grime. “This is my church,’’ Bellarosa explained. “Santa Lucia.”

  We got out of the car, went to the rectory, and knocked on the door, which was opened by an old priest, who went through the hugging and kissing routine.

  Bellarosa and I were shown into a large second-floor commons room where two more elderly priests joined us and we had coffee. These people drink a lot of coffee, in case you hadn’t noticed, though it’s not so much the caffeine they’re after, but the shared experience, sort of a wet version of breaking bread together. And wherever Frank Bellarosa went, of course, coffee was made and served, usually with something sweet.

  Anyway, we had coffee, and we chatted about this and that, but not about yesterday’s difficulties with the law. The three priests were old-school Italians, naturally, and didn’t use their first names, so there was none of that Father Chuck and Father Buzzy nonsense. On the other hand, they all seemed to have difficult first and last names, and with their accents, it sounded as if they were all named Father Chicken Cacciatore. I called them all Father.

  So the head guy was talking about how the bishop (the real bishop of the diocese) wanted to close up Santa Lucia unless it could become self-sufficient, which seemed unlikely since there were hardly enough Italian Catholics left in the parish to support it. The priest explained delicately that the Hispanic Catholics in the parish, mostly from Central America, thought that ten cents in the collection basket covered the overhead. The priest turned to me and said, “The old people of this parish can’t go to another church. They want to be close to their church, they wish to have their funeral Mass here. And of course, we have those former parishioners, such as Mrs. Bellarosa, who return to Santa Lucia and who would be heartbroken if we had to close.”

  Okay, Father, bottom line.

  He cleared his throat. “It costs about fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain and to heat the church and rectory, and to put food on the table here.”

  I didn’t reach for my wallet or anything, but while the priest was telling me this for the don’s benefit, the don had scribbled out a check and put it on the coffee table facedown.

  So, after a few more minutes, we made our farewells and embraces and got our God-bless-yous, and we left.

  Out on the street, Bellarosa said to me, “Nobody can shake you down like a Catholic priest. Madonn’, they hit me for fifty large. But whaddaya gonna do? Ya know?”

  “Just say no.”

  “No? How ya gonna say no?”

  “You shake your head and say, ‘No.’”

  “Ah, you can’t do that. They know you got the money and they do a guilt thing on you.’’ He chuckled, then added, “You know, I was christened at Santa Lucia, my father and mother was christened here, I was married here, Anna had the kids christened here, Frankie got married here, my old man was buried here, my mother—”

  “I get the picture. I’ve got a church like that, too. I give five bucks a week, ten at Easter and Christmas.”

  “It’s different here.”

  Instead of getting back into the car, Bellarosa turned and looked back at the sad old church and surveyed the mean streets around us. He said, “I used to play stoopball on those rectory steps there. You ever play stoopball?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Yeah. The slum kids played it. What did you play? Golf?’’ He smiled.

  “I played the stock market.”

  “Yeah?’’ He laughed. “Well, we played stoopball right there. Me and my friends . . .’’ He stayed quiet for a few seconds, then said, “Father Chiaro—that was the old pastor you just talked to—he used to charge out of the rectory and run us off. But if he got hold of you, he’d drag you by the ears into the rectory and put you to work on some shit job. You see those doorknobs in there? They’re brass, but they don’t look it now. I used to have to polish those fucking knobs until they looked like gold.”

  “He’s still got you by the ears, Frank.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. What a sovanabeech.”

  “A what?”

  He smiled. “That’s the way my grandfather used to say it. Sovanabeech. Son of a bitch.”

  “I see.’’ Well, I tried to picture fat little Frank Bellarosa on these streets, playing ball, making zip guns, kneeling in the confessional, getting his finger wet, kneeling in the conf
essional, and so on. And I could picture it, and I’m a nostalgic guy myself, so I’m partial to people who are sentimental about their childhood. I guess that’s a sign of middle age, right? But with Bellarosa, there was more to it, I think. I believe he knew then that he was going home for the last time, and that he had to take care of Santa Lucia so that the priests there would take care of him when the time came. There had been a few stories in the newspapers over the last ten years or so about problems with certain priests and churches providing burial services for people in Frank’s line of work. I guess this frightened Frank Bellarosa, who had assumed all along that he was dealing with a church that was under direct orders from God to forgive everyone. But now people were trying to change the rules, and Bellarosa, not one to take unnecessary chances and knowing he couldn’t take it with him, prepaid for his burial service at Santa Lucia. That’s what I think.

  Bellarosa put his hands in his pockets and looked down the intersecting street. “In those days you could walk down this street here late at night and nobody bothered you, but a lot of the old ladies would yell at me from the windows, ‘Frankie, get home before your mother kills you.’ You think anybody says that on this street anymore?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Yeah, me too. You wanna see where I lived when I was a kid?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  Instead of getting into the car, we walked from Santa Lucia in the heat, the way Frank Bellarosa must have done many years before. Lenny and Vinnie tailed behind us in the Cadillac. The area around the church was mostly black, and people glanced at us, but they’d probably witnessed similar scenes, and they knew this was a prodigal son with a gun, so they went about their business while Frank went about his.

  We stopped in front of a burned-out five-story brick tenement, and Bellarosa said, “I lived on the top floor there. It was a hundred degrees in the summer, but nice and warm in the winter with those big steam radiators that banged. I shared a room with two brothers.”

  I didn’t respond.

  He went on, “Then my uncle took me out of here and sent me to La Salle, and the dorms looked like a Park Avenue penthouse to me. I started to understand that there was a world outside of Williamsburg. You know?’’ He was quiet again, then said, “But I got to tell you, looking back on this place in the 1950s, I was happy here.”