Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “Even I understood the signorina part,” she said.

  “He thinks you’re seventeen.”

  “Ho-ho-ho.”

  He raised his glass, held it suspended. “Here’s to you and to me,” he said. “Together. Forever.”

  She said nothing. He extended his glass across the table. They clinked glasses. Still, she said nothing. She sipped at the Scotch. He watched her across the table.

  “Does that scare you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this past little while,” he said. “About you. About us.” He took another sip of the drink, fished an olive from the glass, popped it into his mouth, chewed it, swallowed it. She had the feeling he was stalling for time. At last he said, “Sarah, you know I’m single, you know I’ve been seeing other girls …”

  She hadn’t known that.

  The admission hit her like a bullet between the eyes. What girls? Girls? Seventeen-year-olds like those the unctuous Carlo had conjured with his flattering signorina? How many seventeen-year-old girls had the “favored sir” brought here? She realized he was still talking, realized she had stopped listening the moment he’d …

  “. . . until I was out there in Kansas, a million miles away, in the middle of nowhere. I began really thinking out there. About you. About just what you meant to me. I couldn’t shake it. Even when I got back, it was with me. Thinking about you all the time. Trying to figure out what you meant to me, what we meant to each other. It was like having a fever and not being able to think straight, and all at once the fever breaks, and you’re okay, you can think clearly again. What finally happened, I said to myself who needs these other girls? Who’s the only person I really want to see, the only person I want to be with, the only person I love? And the answer was you, you’re that person. You’re the only person I want to be with from now on, from today on, this minute on, till the end of my life. That’s why I brought you here tonight, so I could tell you in public, right out in the open. I love you, I want to be with you forever.”

  “What girls?” she asked.

  “Well … is that all you have to say?”

  “Yes. What girls?”

  “Well … there was someone named Oona I was seeing, but that’s over with now. And there was a girl named Angela I knew from Great Neck, but I’ve already told her …”

  Sarah was still conjuring Oona. Great name for a cooze, Oona. Great name for a seventeen-year-old Irish cooze he’d probably been screwing in the very same bed he …

  “Did you take them there?” she said. “These girls?” she said. “To the apartment?” she said. “To … to … our …”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Andrew, Andrew, how could … ?”

  “But I’m telling you that’s finished. It’s done with, it’s over. Do you understand what I’m saying? I thought you’d be happy. I thought …”

  “Happy? You’re screwing,” she said, and then immediately lowered her voice, and repeated in a whisper, “you’re screwing I don’t know how many young girls, and I’m supposed to be …”

  “Was,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  “How many?” she said.

  “Two hundred and forty,” he said, and grinned.

  “Very funny, you bastard.”

  “I’m trying to tell you …”

  “How many?”

  “Half a dozen, maybe.”

  “You sound like my goddamn sister!”

  “What?”

  “Half a … !”

  “Sarah, I’m single! Before I met you, I was …”

  “Go to hell,” she said, furious now.

  She picked up her glass, drained it.

  “I want another one of these,” she said.

  He signaled to Carlo.

  “Another round,” he told him.

  “Si, signor faviola,” Carlo said, and scurried off again.

  “Favored sir, my ass,” she mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You gonna stay angry all night, or what?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  They sat in silence until the fresh drinks came. Carlo went through his presentation routine yet another time, and then said, “Alia sua salute, signore, signorina,” and backed away from the table again.

  “Some signorina,” she said, and pulled a face, and lifted her drink and took a heavy pull at it.

  “I’m leaving for Italy next week,” he said.

  “Good,” she said.

  “I want you to come with me,” he said.

  “Take Oona,” she said. “Take the whole dirty dozen.”

  “Half a dozen.”

  “Who’s counting?”

  “I can’t understand you, you know that?”

  “Gee,” she said.

  “I tell you I’m never gonna see any other woman but you in my entire …”

  “Girls, you said. Girls. And, gee, is that what you were saying? I thought you were confessing to multiple forni—”

  “You know it’s what I was saying. And now I’m asking you to come to Italy with me.”

  “And the answer is no.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like being part of a harem. Besides, there’s this little matter of my being married, hmmm?”

  “It wasn’t a harem. And anyway, I told you six times already, that’s over and done with.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Were.”

  “Were, are, this isn’t an English class.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “So I can cry myself to sleep tonight,” she said, and suddenly began weeping.

  “Honey, please,” he said, and reached across the table for her hands again. She pulled them away. “Sarah,” he said, “I love you.”

  “Sure,” she said, and lowered her head, still crying, shaking her head, looking down at the checked tablecloth, shaking her head.

  “I want you to come to Italy with me.”

  “No.”

  Shaking her head, sobbing.

  “I want you to marry me.”

  “No.”

  Still shaking her head, still staring at the …

  It registered.

  She looked up and said, “What?”

  “I want you to divorce your husband and marry me.”

  She began shaking her head again.

  “That’s what I want,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  Shaking her head, her eyes glistening with tears.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “No, Andrew, please, you know I can’t …”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Andrew …”

  “I want you forever.”

  “Andrew, you don’t know me at all.”

  “I know you fine.”

  “All you know is making love to me.”

  “That too.”

  “I’m six years older than you are!”

  “Who’s counting?”

  “I’m not one of your little girls.”

  “I don’t have any little girls.”

  “I do. I have a twelve-year-old daughter, Andrew, remember?”

  “We’ll discuss that in Italy.”

  “I can’t go to Italy with you.”

  “Yes, you can,” he said. “Are you hungry? Shall I get some menus?”

  “Do you realize this is the first time we’ve even been in public together? And you want me to go to Italy?”

  “Wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “We had dinner in public in St. Bart’s. And we also had coffe
e and croissants in that little place on Second Avenue.”

  “That was all before.”

  “Yes. That was all before. Chocolate croissants. The day we had our first fight.”

  “That wasn’t a fight,” she said. “I simply got up and left.”

  “Because I kissed you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to kiss you now,” he said. “Don’t leave.”

  He leaned over the table and kissed her the way he had that afternoon long ago, the taste of the chocolate on his lips, the weather raging outside.

  “Are we finished fighting?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Good, will you marry me?”

  “I know you’re not serious,” she said. “We’d better eat.”

  “How can I convince you?”

  “Tell me all their names.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you. So I can cry myself to sleep.”

  “Don’t start crying again. Please!”

  “I’m not. I won’t. I want to know because … because then I can exorcise them.”

  “Exercise them? How? Walk them around the block on a leash?”

  “Exorcise,” she said. “Like you do with the devil.”

  “Oh, exorcise,” he said, and grinned. “Now I get it. You mean purge them.”

  “Don’t be such a wiseguy,” she said. “Yes, purge them. Get them out of my system.”

  “The way I got them out of mine.”

  “Sure,” she said skeptically.

  “But I had you to help me,” he said.

  “Their names, please.”

  “You sound like a cop,” he said.

  “Their names.”

  In a rush, as if he were reciting one name and not half a dozen of them, he said, “Mary Jane, Oona, Alice, Angela, Blanca, Maggie, that’s it. Carlo!” he called. “Could we see some menus, please?”

  “Sí, signor faviola, immediatamente!”

  “What’s that he keeps saying?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Favola? Faviola? Something like that. What does it mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I thought you understood Italian.”

  “Just a little.”

  “Where’d you learn it?”

  “At Kent. Why’d you call me a wiseguy just then?”

  “Because you were being so smart.”

  “I thought it might have had something to do with the movie I was telling you about.”

  “What movie?”

  “That time.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Then forget it,” he said.

  “So,” Carlo said, appearing at the table with the menus. “I will explain to you the specials tonight?”

  “Please,” Andrew said.

  She listened as Carlo reeled off the specials in Italian, immediately translating each one into English. She watched Andrew all the while. Watched him listening. What were those names again? How could she exorcise all those girls if she couldn’t even remember their names? And suddenly she realized they’d already been exorcised.

  “So,” Carlo said, “I give you a few moments, signor faviola, signorina, please take your time.”

  Bowing again, he backed away from the table like a ship leaving port.

  “He just said it again,” Sarah said.

  “Yes, I heard, him,” Andrew said. “What sounds good to you?”

  It wasn’t until Billy dropped her off on Lex and Eighty-Third later that night that she realized she’d forgotten to read him her poem.

  The detectives were telling Michael that even if they could get a court order for the surveillance of the newly discovered entrance on Mott Street, they couldn’t see any place they could do the job.

  “Because what it is,” Regan was saying, “there’s this restaurant-supply place on the northeast corner there, opposite that blue door …”

  “Mailbox says Carter-Goldsmith Investments,” Lowndes said.

  “Check it,” Michael said. “Find out if it’s a corporation, a partnership, who the principals …”

  “Already working it,” Regan said.

  “Good.”

  “The thing I’m saying,” he went on, hating it whenever anyone interrupted him, “is there’s windows upstairs facing that Mott Street entrance, but the restaurant-supply people own the whole building, and use the whole building, so there’s no place we can put in a camera, even if we did get a court order, which the court might find excessive, by the way, seeing we’ve already got one right around the corner.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Michael said. “We don’t know who goes in that other entrance. It might be …”

  “We figure the bimbos,” Lowndes said.

  “If that’s all, it’s not worth the trouble. But if we’re getting people who for some reason or other don’t want to be seen going through the tailor shop …”

  “Yeah, that’s possible,” Regan agreed dubiously.

  “So why can’t you plant a truck on the street?” Michael asked. “We won’t need an order for that.”

  “Mike, I’ll tell you,” Regan said, “this ain’t Greenwich, Connecticut down there, a bunch of rich assholes can’t tell spinach from crabgrass. This is Little Italy. We put a truck across the street from that blue door, we paint it like a bakery truck or a telephone company truck or a Con Ed truck or whatever we want to call it, the whole neighborhood’s gonna know in ten seconds flat there’s cops in that truck taking pictures of what’s going on across the street.”

  “Mmmm,” Michael said.

  “Now so far, we got a good thing going here. We got the whole place bugged, and we’ve got a camera on the front door of the tailor shop gives us movies of every cheap hood going in and out of the place. The camera picks them up going in, the bugs upstairs pick up whatever they’re saying, it’s a sweet setup. We also got a wiretap in place, we know everybody he calls, and we can dope out most of the people who call him. We’re gathering lots of information, Mike. What I’m saying is we put in a truck, the truck’ gets made, we might blow the whole surveillance. Is what I’m saying.”

  “Yeah,” Michael said, and sighed heavily.

  It was peculiar.

  In America, if you stopped any native-born son or daughter whose ancestors had long ago immigrated from Ireland or Italy or Puerto Rico or Serbia, and you asked them what nationality they were, they did not say they were American. They said they were Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Serbian, Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, Albanian, whatever the hell, but they never said they were American. Jews called themselves Jewish wherever their ancestors had come from. The only people who called themselves Americans were WASPs. You never heard a WASP say he was anything but American. Oh, yes, he might make reference every now and then to his illustrious mixed British-Scottish heritage, but he would never tell you he was British or Scottish because he simply wasn’t; he was American, by God.

  Andrew and almost everyone else he knew had been born in America. He’d never met his grandparents’ parents who’d come over from Christ knew where in Italy, and the occasional ancient relatives who still spoke broken English were promptly dismissed as “greaseballs” by his mother, who insisted with every other breath—but why did she have to?—that she was “American.” He was American, too, even though if anyone asked him what he was, he answered automatically, “I’m Italian.” But this was merely a handy means of reference, this meant only that somewhere way back in a distant past of chariots and togas and arenas and laurel leaves, some relatives he’d never known had sailed for America to become citizens here. Even if he said he was Italian, he knew he was really American, and everyone else knew it, too. Anyway, that’s what they taught him in elementary school and in junior high; he was Ameri
can, the same way Grandma and Grandpa and his father and his Uncle Rudy and his Aunt Concetta and his cousin Ida were American.

  Sure.

  It wasn’t until he got to Kent up there in woodsy waspy wealthy Connecticut that he met a different sort of American for the first time. Until then, he hadn’t known so many blue-eyed blonds even existed. Kids with names that didn’t end in vowels. Kids with last names like Armstrong and Harper and Wellington. Kids with first names like Martin and Bruce and Christopher and Howard. Well, so what? His own blond hair had turned a little muddy, true, but his eyes were still blue, weren’t they? And his first name wasn’t Angelo or Luigi, it was Andrew, wasn’t it? Which should have made him as American as all the other blue-eyed kids with names like Roger, Keith, Alexander, or Reid. But it seemed there was a catch. It seemed that his family name was Faviola—oh yeah, right, the Italian kid playing quarterback.

  Somehow—-and he didn’t know quite how—but somehow the American dream they’d taught him in elementary and junior high had been denied his grandparents and his parents, which was why he guessed his mother insisted so vociferously and so frequently that she was American. And now that same dream was being denied him as well. Somehow, in this place where he’d been born, in this land of the free and home of the brave, in this his country, in this his America, he had become something less than American. Somehow he had become just what he’d said he was all along—but, hey, folks, I was just explaining my roots, you know?—somehow he had become, and would always remain, merely Italian. And whereas he didn’t know who the real Americans were, he knew for damn sure he wasn’t one of them. Moreover, he knew they would never allow him to become one of them. So he said fuck it and went gambling in Las Vegas where Italians like himself were running the casinos.

  Now, this was the peculiar part.

  Here in Milan …

  What they called Milano …

  Sitting at a little outdoor bar …

  What they called una barra …

  Talking to a man his mother instantly would have labeled a greaseball, he felt American for the first time in his life. Here he was not an Italian. Here he was an American. The man he was talking to was Italian. He thought it odd that he’d had to come all the way here to find out he was American. He wondered if the moment he got back home again he would begin feeling not quite American.