I turned and headed back down the hall, but stopped where there should have been a coat closet. Instead, there was a small alcove with a cushioned bench and a coffeemaker. I turned to Roxana, my eyebrows raised.
“Security,” she said tiredly “Guards. To protect zuh girls.”
My jaw flapped in the breeze.
“Armed guards? With guns?”
She nodded, and I decided I’d seen enough. The entire day had been one big reality bender, and all I wanted was to get back to the safety of my own apartment, which seemed a hemisphere away.
“Zepheer.” Roxana put her hand on my arm. “I’m skerd.”
EIGHTEEN
DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY FRIGGING TIMES I’VE DROPPED everything and come running?” Mercedes hissed at me over the phone a few hours later. “Hayden stands you up, you freak out, I’m there. Hayden tells you he wants to go to Paris with you, your head disappears up your ass, I’m there. For the first time in my life, I need to talk to you about a relationship and you avoid me. You suck, Zephyr. You really suck.”
“I know, Merce, I know,” I wailed from my doorway as two more men in thin, nylon FBI jackets wrestled another box of James’s oil- soaked, kitty litter-encrusted stuff up from the basement, a box the Sterling Girls and I had painstakingly filled and stored just six days before. I watched as they dropped it next to other boxes already stacked on a tarp in his living room.
“I can’t believe you’re so small that you’d be this jealous of me.”
“Mercedes!” I yelled into the phone. “I’m dying to hear about you and Dover. Dying,” I said truthfully. “There’s nothing I want more. But you have no idea what’s been going on over here today. I just can’t come over.”
“If it involves Hayden, I’m never speaking to you again. That man makes you an assho—”
“It has nothing to do with Hayden,” I assured her.
“You got the contents of the bedroom?” Agent Mulrooney shouted down the stairs at two men in NYPD jackets. “We needa label those!”
“We know, we know,” one of the detectives crabbed. If this little petri dish was any indication, interagency rapport had not vastly improved since 9/11.
“Excuse me?” Mercedes said.
I took a deep breath. “You remember the staircase?”
“The pink one or the regular one?”
“Pink. The old super built it so that johns could get upstairs to visit prostitutes. Roxana’s a madam and the whole operation is run by the nice folks whose party Tag and I crashed at the St. Regis three weeks ago. I can’t come to Lucy’s tonight and hear about Dover because I need to cooperate with the FBI and the NYPD and get them to protect me from the Spanish mob.”
Silence.
“Spain has mafia?” she finally said.
“Turns out.”
More silence.
“Do you need me to come over?”
I exhaled with relief. “No. Look, when we finish up here—” Mulrooney overheard me and laughed. “If we ever finish up here,” I said with determination, “I will make a beeline to Lucy’s. I swear.”
“Zeph?”
“Hmm?” I said, grimacing as another duo dinged the wall with a box of flatware.
“I’ll be right over.”
I wandered through James’s apartment, surveying the hive of activity. In the bedroom, agents were setting up a makeshift surveillance command center, showing Roxana how to work her wire and instructing her on what to say when a member from the Pelarose family next paid a call. She nodded wearily and sipped silently at a chalky orange protein drink my mother had foisted upon her.
Near the closet door, a young female agent was going through a box of handcuffs, tagging and recording everything. I recognized the purple pair Tag had clipped on Mercedes the week before.
“This guy would have given Pleasure Chest a run for their money!” I joked lamely, referring to the novelty shop down Seventh Avenue.
The agent looked at me over her glasses and said nothing.
Inside the staircase, agents were traipsing up and down the pink steps, swabbing, studying, photographing. My heart sank as I watched them. When was the next time I’d have such a weird and sordid secret? When was the next time I’d have a man to share it with?
I headed back to my apartment and collapsed on the couch, next to my parents, who had brought their sherry and whitefish downstairs to enjoy courtside seats. Technically, though, my dad was on the clock.
“So this is what it’s like to work from home!” he chortled, running his eye over a wiretap request that a rookie prosecutor had put in front of him. He clapped his hand over the nape of my neck and shook me proudly.
“ Da- a- a- d,” I said, feeling like an over- loved puppy.
“I’m so impressed,” he said for the tenth time.
“ Da- a- a- d,” I said again, hoping he’d continue.
“Not only did my daughter here have the courage to break up an assault—” he said to the young attorney, who nodded dutifully.
“Dad, it wasn’t an assault,” I protested, wondering, not for the first time, how his fondness for hyperbole hadn’t hampered his career.
“Did you or did you not have a gun pointed at you?”
My mother shuddered and downed her sherry.
“I did,” I admitted.
“Not only,” my father continued, “did she have the courage to break up an assault, but she, she”—another ragdoll shake of my neck—“she made the connection between the Pelarose family and the prostitution ring.”
The A.U.S.A. nodded again, murmured respectfully, then darted out the door and across the hall clutching her paperwork.
My mother poured herself more sherry. “In whose business plan,” she demanded, “does a kickback scheme serve as a front for a money- laundering operation?”
“Bella, honey, that wasn’t their plan. The oil company itself was the money- laundering operation, but then James decided to steal from that, and it looked to the investigators like it was just kickbacks in an otherwise legit business. They didn’t even realize until our daughter”—a proud hair tousling—“figured it out, that the entire oil company was a mob front.”
In fact, I hadn’t gotten quite that far in my detective work, but it couldn’t hurt to let the details slide for now. I was glowing under the floodlight of my father’s praise.
My mother shook her head. “I’ve seen lemonade stands run better. Ollie, are there any women in the mob? Because things would be a lot smoother if they had some female capos. Capas?” She munched thoughtfully on a cracker. “I don’t suppose the mafia would pay for MWP to offer their wives—or sisters or mamas or whoever—some training seminars, do you?”
My father took away my mother’s sherry glass.
“I know!” my mother shouted. “I know how to help Roxana! I’m going to hire her!”
“Honey?” said my father, who was normally my mother’s biggest fan.
“Can you imagine the revenue she could generate for us? Name one other financial consulting business that can offer a seminar by a former madam!”
We couldn’t.
“Ha!” my mother said, as if she’d won an argument.
“Mr. Zuckerman?” An agent popped his head in. “We still need your signature on the tap request before we bring it downtown. Could you come across the hall?”
My dad slapped my thigh and stood up. “Come on, Zephy Let’s go do this together.” It was Take Your Daughter to Work Night here on Twelfth Street.
As we started across the hall, some new arrivals in NYPD jackets headed through the front door, chattering loudly, and made their way up the stairs. I glanced down at them, then did a double take. I’d only known it for two weeks, but I’d have recognized that soft, chestnut hair and those slightly sticking- out ears anywhere.
Gregory felt my gaze and looked up, pausing mid-sentence.
“Go on inside,” he told the guy he’d been talking to. “Tell Mulrooney I’ll be right up.”
&nbs
p; Excuse me? I tried to say it aloud, but my lips wouldn’t form the words.
Is that Ridofem’s new uniform? I wanted to say. Again, nothing came out.
Oh, Gregory, if you didn’t waste your time rigging very complicated pranks such as this one—because this had to be a joke—we might actually have a chance …
“Hey!” my dad said. “It’s the exterminator! The washer-dryer fix-it man extraordinaire.”
“Dad.”
“What are you doing here?” my father continued easily, as if the world wasn’t standing on its head. Gregory looked at me with genuine apology. I’d never seen him look humble, and it was actually quite attractive. Too bad I was going to have to kill him.
My father, never one to be hindered by social convention, took Gregory by the shoulders and turned him around to get a better look at the stenciled letters announcing him as one of New York’s finest. Either that, or he’d been cold and one of New York’s finest had generously offered this random exterminator his jacket.
“I knew it! Zephy, I told your mother he didn’t look like an exterminator.”
“Mr. Zuckerman?” an agent said gently, entreating my father to follow him.
“Right, sure. But I knew it. I knew it,” he muttered, disappearing into James’s apartment. “I have a very finely attuned sense of character …”
Gregory and I stood alone on the landing.
“Zephyr, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you the truth.”
I put my hand on the banister, feeling my face do acrobatics as it tried to land on an appropriate expression.
“That you’re an undercover cop?” It sounded absurd. It was the kind of thought that was better off staying in my imagination.
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
I flipped through the last two weeks, trying to see everything through this lens, but all I saw were sunspots.
“So how do you know about Harvey Blane?” I finally sputtered. Gregory pressed his lips together, dimples appearing in both cheeks.
“Don’t laugh at me!” I said threateningly.
“I’m sorry, it’s just—that’s what you want to know first?”
“Are you really in a position right now to question my questions?” If I couldn’t kill him, maybe I could at least kick him in the knees.
“I really was a grad student studying Shakespeare at NYU,” he said soothingly. “I really did have a fight with Professor Blane. I really did begin a thesis about Christopher Marlowe theorists—”
“What?”
“People who think Kit Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”
“And?”
“And it turned out, a couple of hundred pages later, I thought all of them were completely off their respective rockers. And I got really depressed, and I was on the subway, and there was a recruitment ad for the police department.”
“The subway ad? You called one of those subway ads?” I’d always fantasized about answering that ad, of taking the exam, of being the one person who could beat Hayden to a crime scene.
“Yep.”
“Yep? And then you became a cop? That’s it?”
“Yep.”
“I need more, Gregory,” I said, shaking my head, but unable to resist a surge of joy at merely being this close to him again.
“Well, as you and your friend and your mother and your father have all repeatedly pointed out, I don’t look like much of anything besides a Jewish academic. I don’t look like an exterminator and—”
“And you don’t look like an undercover cop,” I concluded, taking a deep breath. Then I pulled back and whacked him on his shoulder as hard as I could.
“Ow!” he said, glaring at me. “What the hell was that for?”
“What wasn’t it for, you …” I felt tears spring to my eyes. “You made me feel like shit this whole time for not believing you were an exterminator. You left the second that schmuck on the skateboard made random accusations. And I don’t even know why you’re here at all—this is a federal case. And …” I was crying now, and my nose was running, and I didn’t care. I felt like I was being given another opportunity to get Gregory, to get to him, but I had no idea how to pick my way across this new minefield.
Mulrooney appeared at James’s door. “Hey, schoolboy! You finally got here. Man, you gotta come over to the Feds. We got cars that go over thirty! I keep tellin’ him, he gotta come over to the Feds,” Mulrooney said to me as if their camaraderie didn’t look like an alien do- si- do from where I stood. “When the guvament goes on strike, you getta six- week vacation!”
Gregory rolled his eyes.
“Seriously, Samson, you gotta come see this stairway. It’s fuckin’ hilarious.”
Gregory had the good grace to blush. He cleared his throat.
“I’ve seen it. Dude, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Mulrooney headed back in, chuckling to himself. “Six fuckin’ weeks. Man, that was all right.”
“ ‘Dude’?” I said. He shrugged. “You’re such a man of the people.”
“Okay, take it easy.”
“So your name is actually Gregory Samson?”
“Yes. Have dinner with me.”
“We tried that once. It didn’t work,” I said, wanting him to insist.
“Then lunch. A picnic on the Charles Street Pier. To morrow. I’ll answer every one of your questions. Every single one.” He took my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. I blushed at the intimacy and looked around quickly—my mother was still just a few feet away, inside my apartment.
“Fine, but not a picnic.” A few days ago, I might have acquiesced to this romantic overture, but if all secrets were coming out, big and small, I wasn’t going to pretend anymore. “I hate picnics,” I told him defiantly
“That’s un- American.”
“I hate sitting cross- legged—it makes my back hurt,” I told him. “No one brings a sharp enough knife and the tomatoes get all drippy. You wind up carting dirty dishes home, and everything stinks.” I felt ridiculous.
“You’ve thought a lot about this.” He burst out laughing and I almost protested, but then he drew me to him. “We’re going to start again, Zephyr.”
He planted a quick, soft kiss on my lips and turned to go to work.
FINALLY, AT ONE IN THE MORNING, EVERYONE EXCEPT THE two men and one woman camping out in James’s apartment manning the surveillance operation had cleared out. The remaining agents were a quiet bunch, subsisting on bags of Chex mix and my mother’s energy drinks, which they were imbibing with gusto.
I lay in bed, exhausted but wired. I was as excited about my second chance with Gregory as I was about the fact that Operation Barcelona was going down in my home. Watching Gregory at work that night, as he conferred with colleagues and spoke gently with Roxana—both of us catching each other’s eyes and sharing knowing glances in the direction of the staircase—I thought I would combust from sheer longing. I couldn’t stand that he was insisting on having a proper date before we could jump each other again.
I got out of bed after a third failed attempt at sleep and padded into the kitchen, where I lit the stove under the kettle and sank down on the step stool. I wondered how Roxana was doing upstairs. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. The successful prosecution of the Pelarose family for prostitution—and her own evasion of jail time—depended entirely on her. She had to pretend to Ferdinand/Alonzo that she had changed her mind, that she wanted to keep working for his family, and get him to say incriminating things either on the phone or in person. The FBI also wanted her to catch Senator Smith—who turned out to be a school district superintendent in Queens—in the act of handing over money. Thanks to James’s pre- existing photo and video setup inside Roxana’s apartment, surveillance would be a technological piece of cake.
I had felt sorry for Roxana, watching her trudge upstairs that evening as nothing more than a puppet in the hands of various men. She was a lon
g way from starting over again, a dream she’d thought was within reach when she’d woken up that morning. Now it looked like the FBI and the police would be hanging around for weeks. I tried not to think about what this meant for my cash flow.
The kettle boiled and I took my tea into the living room, curling up in the dark to watch night owls make their way up and down the block. I cringed when a boisterous group passed by, knowing Mrs. Hannaham would renew her request for triple- pane windows the following morning.
Mrs. Hannaham had, in her usual way, made everything worse that evening.
“I knew it,” she kept crowing gleefully to the various law enforcement officials who had questioned her as a witness. For the occasion, she’d put on her dead husband’s white, ballooning collared shirt; her white sequined pants; and ankle- high white leather boots that I’d never seen before. The effect was that of the Michelin Man if he had sat on Prince and one of the Bangles two decades earlier.
“I told the Zuckermans that there were unseemly people traipsing in and out of that woman’s apartment at all hours. I told them. And I told James, though, of course, now I see why he didn’t do anything about all those awful people. He was one of them.” She glared at Roxana, sitting across the room.
Roxana roused herself from her defeated stupor long enough to erupt in a string of beautiful French curses, bestowing upon Mrs. Hannaham a long- overdue tongue- lashing. The cops made a dilatory show of chastising Roxana, clearly enjoying the performance.
My breath caught as someone started up the stoop in the dark, but it was only Cliff, lugging his bass home from a late-night gig. He’d missed the whole thing.
I squinted at him suspiciously through the window as he fished for his keys. What did we really know about him? I was no longer certain there wasn’t a dead body crammed into that case. The “ponytailed jazz musician working late nights” bit had to be a cover. After all, how did he afford the rent here?
Super in the City Page 24