The Dogfather

by Conant, Susan

  Residents were there, too. Kevin ordered the immediate evacuation of my house, his own, and the two across the street. I obeyed the order and, as probably goes without saying, imposed it on my animals. A uniformed officer carrying Tracker’s carrier shepherded the dogs and me out my back door and down the driveway. As the officer tried to hustle Rowdy, Kimi, and me down Appleton Street, we passed close enough to the Bronco’s earthly remains for me to get a good look. Ignorant though I was about all things automotive, I did know that the Bronco’s engine was in the front. My view of the car was pretty good, albeit somewhat weird and melodramatic. In addition to the ambient brightness in any city, illumination now came from the windows of the houses along Appleton Street, and from the headlights and the flashing red lights of the emergency vehicles. Oddly enough, although Rowdy and Kimi often answer the call of sirens with malamute howls, the dogs remained silent m the midst of the cacophony, perhaps because they could see that its sources, although big and noisy, were noncanine and, indeed, inanimate.

  I’ve drifted from the point, which isn’t the intelligence and unflappability of my wonderful dogs, but the postexplosion condition of my horrible car. As I was starting to say, even my scant knowledge of automobiles led me to expect that if a Bronco’s engine combusted, the subsequent damage would be worse toward the front of the car. In fact, my Bronco’s hood was intact, but the rear and side windows were shattered, and jagged metal fragments framed a new and large hole in the rusty body behind the doors. Kevin’s reaction now made sense. The engine hadn’t exploded. Yet.

  I quit dawdling and gaping, and instead of ignoring the hurry-up shouts of the cop who had Tracker’s crate, I screamed back at him over the din, and with Rowdy and Kimi leading the way, ran down Appleton Street toward Huron Avenue. Fear drove me, fear inspired less by the sight of my ruined car than by hideous visions of the possibilities. My car hadn’t just exploded; it had been blown up; someone had rigged it to detonate. Deitz? Alternatively, the vaporization of my Bronco could have been a Mob favor. If so, it could easily have become no favor at all. Had the bomb been on a timer? What if there’d been a miscalculation and the explosion had occurred during the previous evening? What if I’d declared the car fit for use and Leah and her friends had loaded the love seat into it instead of into Steve’s van? What if Steve and little Sammy had been standing on the sidewalk next to the car when it exploded?

  Reaching the crowd at the far end of the block, I sank to my knees and wrapped my arms around my dogs. I could feel the strong beat of Rowdy’s heart. The initial boom, the excitement, the lights, the sirens, and the dash down the street simply must have elevated his heart rate. But what I felt through my fingertips was a steady, slow rhythm. Out of curiosity, I felt for Kimi’s heart. Its rate matched Rowdy’s. I let myself sink between the dogs. I like to imagine that I’m half malamute: rugged and brave. Unfortunately, I belong to a lesser breed. Proof: I was frightened and frantic. No matter how long I live with this breed of breeds, I’ll never become even half malamute. I’m incredibly uncool. The Alaskan malamute is ultimately Arctic, too cool for words.

  “You know what, guys?” I said. “If I’d set out to destroy that car and nothing else, I couldn’t have done a better job than this. And that, I think, is exactly what someone did.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Translated into English, the typical dog message takes the form of a single present-tense first-person sentence: I like that, I hate that, I feel sick, I feel stressed, I’m thirsty, I’m rivalrous, I need to go out. As a dog professional, I allow myself the freedom of rich interpretation. In particular, I’m willing to shift the canine present to the future. The change of tense inevitably entails— no pun intended—muddying the plainspoken all-about-me here-and-now of canine sentences with messy human attributions of conditionality and probability. If I reach toward a dog’s neck and he bares his teeth at me, what he means is I’m scared. According to my rich interpretation, he also means, Grab my collar, and I’ll nail you. To avoid getting bitten, I’ll act on my interpretation, but it will remain mine-, all the dog will actually have told me is that he’s desperately frightened.

  As a dog trainer, I’d never claimed expertise in decoding human messages. Now, as dog trainer to the Mob, I had no clear idea how to interpret the cryptic message delivered by whoever had blown up my car. According to Kevin, the culprit was no amateur. Like everyone else in dogs, I know hundreds of professional dog trainers, dog writers, dog photographers, dog artists, pet-food company representatives, veterinarians, vet techs, groomers, and handlers. By comparison, my acquaintanceship in the world of automobile exploders was pitifully small.

  “Not that I want to expand it,” I told Tracker, who wasn’t listening. It was Tuesday morning. I felt better than you might expect, shaken but also relieved: scared about what might happen next, but glad that my horrible car would never again endanger anyone. The dogs felt dandy. The emotional casualty was Tracker, who was in the kitchen huddled over the saucer of canned cat food I’d offered her in the hope of soothing her frayed nerves. The dogs were in the yard so that Tracker could have the run of the house. Instead of displaying a healthy curiosity about her surroundings, she alternately chomped at her Fancy Feast and glanced fearfully left and right.

  I kept talking, not because poor Tracker actually liked my voice, but because I couldn’t believe that any creature was impervious to my soothing tones. I said, “As to decoding the message, the problem, you see, is that I can’t tell what effect the explosion was supposed to have on me. Most people are about as delighted to have their cars blown up as they are to be shot at. I, as you know, am an exception. As I did not inform the insurance company when I called this morning, I am immensely happy to be rid of that damned rattletrap. Furthermore, I’d’ve had to pay a dealer to take it as a trade-in, whereas now, the insurance company is going to pay me for my supposed loss.”

  To hold my audience, I sprinkled Tracker’s food with Kitty Kaviar.

  “Ah, but not everyone knows that I’m the exception. Agents Deitz and Mazolla, for example. The Boston office of the FBI, my dear Tracker, has an impure record. Shocking! The corruption there consisted primarily of recruiting the notorious Blackie Lanigan as an informant. The quarry then was Enzio Guarini. The quarry now is Enzio Guarini. Asking me to spy on him didn’t work. Blowing up my car was, I remind you, a professional job. And FBI agents are professionals.”

  Having gulped down all the Fancy Feast and Kitty Kaviar, Tracker bolted for my study. I closed the door behind her. It would’ve been kinder, really, to let her enjoy the treats in solitude in that one little room. People newly sprung from prison are popularly believed to suffer from anxiety and disorientation induced by unaccustomed freedom. In the TV footage I’d seen of Enzio Guarini’s arrival home after his release, he’d looked relaxed and cheerful, probably because he’d already put down a deposit on an elkhound puppy.

  After letting in the dogs, I called Guarini, not to inquire about the power of puppy purchase to cure post-prison stress syndrome, but to cancel today’s puppy kindergarten. Before placing the call, I’d debated about how to phrase the tidings of my Bronco’s demise. The news wouldn’t necessarily be news to Guarini, but I in- j tended to present it as such. Unlike Deitz and Mazolla, Guarini knew all about my wreck of a car. So did his men. At Saturday’s show, in front of Zap, Favuzza, and the monster twins, I’d complained about discovering the rusted-out hole in the floor.

  Guarini was grateful to me. The steaks. The wine. The Bronco?

  I settled on saying, “My car’s out of commission. Per- < manently. It’s been towed off. I’m sorry to cancel, but I’m sure there’s a mess out on the street from it that I’ll have to clean up, and I have to figure out what I’m going to do.”

  Guarini was a model of paternal solicitude. “Rowdy and Kimi, they’re safe. You’re safe. That’s what matters.”

  As I’ve said, Guarini was a real dog person. His concern for my dogs and me, in that order, may have explai
ned his failure to inquire about the cause of the car’s demise.

  He went on to update me on Frey and to thank me for helping Carla with the horrible little Anthony. Horrible is my word, not Guarini’s. Guarini had nothing bad to say about Anthony, and on the subject of Carla, he was practically effusive. “Carla’s a nice girl,” he said. He repeated the phrase. “A nice girl. A beautiful girl. Too young to be a widow. It’s a shame.”

  I was tempted to utter a platitude about the heartbreak of heart attacks, thereby demonstrating my acceptance of the boss’s declaration that Joey’s murder hadn’t happened. But Guarini wouldn’t want mere compliance; he’d want obedience. Consequently, I said nothing about Joey’s death. In that respect, this conversation was typical of every interchange I ever had with Enzio Guarini: Except when we talked about dogs, everything important always went unsaid. In that sense, my relationship with the Dogfather bore an unsettling resemblance to my relationship with Steve Delaney. And just what would Rita have to say about that observation?

  “Anthony is a challenge.” I said. “Retraining him is going to be slow. I hope Carla understands that.”

  “Carla’s got a big heart,” he said. “She’s just got to learn to say no.”

  “That’s hard with a cute little dog.”

  It’s hard with a notorious crime boss, too. As I didn’t add, but wanted to: “No, don’t send food! No, don’t send wine! And don’t you ever again try to influence an AKC judge!”

  After hanging up, I gathered the supplies I thought I’d need to clean up the area where the Bronco had been parked. As I did so, I wondered, as I’d done before, whether Guarini’s men had carried out his orders in trying to influence Harry Howland or whether they’d acted on their own. Many years earlier, Guarini had finished two elkhounds. He hadn’t handled the dogs himself, but he’d owned them, and he understood the rules of the dog show game. The clumsiness—the plain stupidity—of the effort to sway the judge pointed toward Guarini’s underlings; one thing no one ever called Guarini was stupid. At a guess, Guarini had told his thugs to help me out at the show, and they’d interpreted the order in a way Guarini hadn’t intended. Had Guarini ordered his henchmen to “help” me with my car, too? I liked the possibility, mainly because it let me read the explosion as a message of thanks rather than as a threat of worse to come.

  “But we don’t know, do we?” I said to the dogs. “All we know is that I’ve got a mess to clean up.”

  The firefighters had sprayed my car with chemicals. I intended to hose down the street and sidewalk and to sweep up any auto glass that might remain. To my amazement, there was nothing to clean up. As I stood gaping at the tidy, clean, and wet space on Appleton where my car had been, Mrs. Dennehy backed out of her driveway, lowered her window, and called out, “My Kevin sent them.” Before I had the chance to tell Kevin’s mother to thank him, she drove off. When Mrs. Dennehy speaks of they and them in reference to Kevin, she means city employees, whom she views as her son’s employees. I’ve never had any reason to think that Mrs. Dennehy overestimates Kevin’s power in this city. Anyway, as I was standing there with a dopey, appreciative smile on my face, along came the ever-so-Cantabrigian owner of Kimi’s attacking dust mop. Today, the dog wasn’t with her, and she was riding a bicycle. I’d seen her on it a few times before. It was an old black three-speed women’s bike with a basket in front that at the moment held three hardcover books in plastic jackets. The Observatory Hill branch of the Cambridge Public Library was right around the corner on Concord Avenue, directly across from the front door of my house. The books weren’t the volumes of poetry I’d have expected, but they weren’t a surprise either: novels by Mameve Medwed, Stephen McCauley, and Elinor Lipman, all of whom are, I think, literary descendants of Jane Austen by way of Barbara Pym, and somehow deeply Cambridge even though Lipman neither lives in Cambridge nor sets her novels here.

  Pointing to the books, I smiled and said, “I loved every one of those.”

  To my disappointment, the woman just nodded and kept on pedaling instead of stopping to play the great Cambridge game of exchanging book recommendations and information about which authors were signing when at nearby bookstores. Even so, the little encounter, combined with the unexpected absence of broken glass and chemical foam, left me happy with everything about Cambridge, everything being town and gown. In this instance, Gown, in the person of the dust mop woman, hadn’t supplied me with the title of a book or the name of an author I just had to read, but Town, in the person of Kevin Dennehy, had more than compensated for Gown’s lapse by sparing me a nasty clean-up. And if I wanted recommendations for novels, I could stop any stranger on the street. In the vicinity of Harvard Square, Read any good books lately? is recognized as the urgent question it is and always receives the thoughtful, enthusiastic answer it deserves.

  I did not, however, go back inside to cozy up with a good book. Rather, I phoned Steve’s clinic to cancel Sammy’s visit, and accepted condolences on the loss of my car from the vet tech who took the message. After hearing that I needed groceries, she offered me the use of Steve’s van. I said no thanks. Next, I called Leah. My emotions were bouncing back and forth between relief and fear. Fear was now on the rise. In spite of the professional skill that had gone into blowing up the Bronco, Leah might have been maimed or killed. Even before last night, my Mob connections had crept disquietingly close to my cousin. At the show, the creepy, vampirish Favuzza had ogled Leah. The memory made me queasy.

  I caught Leah as she was about to leave for a class. “I’ll be quick," I said. “I just wanted you to know that my car’s dead. It, uh, blew up, more or less. In the middle of the night.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. It’s just that I can’t stand to think how close everyone was to it last night. You, your friends, Rita, Steve, Sammy. I feel unnerved. I just wanted to touch base with you. That’s all.”

  “Well, I’m fine. I wasn’t in your car.”

  “Also, Leah, I wanted to mention... those, uh, people who were at the show...”

  “The ones you were so unfair about?”

  “I was not! Leah, you haven’t heard from...?”

  “No, but if I do, I won’t be a snob like you.”

  “Leah! That is—”

  “Holly, the first time I met that man—what’s his name? You know. The one with the widow’s peak. When I met him was outside the Museum of Fine Arts, you know what he really wanted?”

  “You,” I said.

  “He wanted to know whether there were real mummies in the museum, and he wanted to know what you had to do to get in. I told you before. He did not understand that he could just walk in. Holly, it’s a terrible thing that anyone should feel so marginalized, so excluded from society! Can you imagine that? And here you are—! Incredible! Not everyone has had your advantages, you know.”

  There ended the conversation. Leah went off to her class. The subject, it so happened, was sociology.

  CHAPTER 20

  Edward Zappardino possessed multiple disadvantages. For once I’ve not referring to dogs. It’s true, however, that he’d never owned one. Too bad, because a dog wouldn’t have minded his lack of such physical and mental attributes as a handsome face, a fine physique, high intelligence, and a charming personality. Zap’s dog, had he ever been blessed with one, would have seen him as altogether admirable in body and mind. As proof that my psyche has not gone entirely to the dogs, let me say that unlike the proud canine Zap might have owned, I was embarrassed to be seen with him, especially in so public a place as Loaves and Fishes.

  You will recall that Loaves and Fishes was the natural foods supermarket in back of which Joey Cortiniglia had been murdered. Zap and I were not, however, on a sentimental revisit to the scene of the crime. I was doing my grocery shopping. Zap had driven me because Enzio Guarini, taking pity on my earless state, had insisted on sending me his limo and, with it, his driver. When Zap had pulled into the supermarket parking lot, I’d assumed that he’d wait behind
the wheel while I shopped. Unfortunately, he’d said, “You mind if I come along?”

  I’d lied in saying, “Not at all.”

  By way of thanks, he’d said, “It gets boring as shit being stuck in the car all the time.”

  As I’ve mentioned in passing, Loaves and Fishes is a temple devoted to the worship of wholesome holistic organic purity in all things: food, vitamin supplements, cosmetics, detergents, paper products, and esoteric personal-care devices, such as peculiarly shaped toothbrushes and spiked wooden implements designed to clean and massage your feet while moving you toward Oneness with the Infinite. As Zap remarked while we strolled amidst the fruits and vegetables, “This shit’s friggin’ weird.”

  Actually, he was referring to avocados. He’d never seen them before and had no idea what they were.

  Sounding ludicrously like Julia Child, I said, “They’re perfectly delicious.” I felt entitled to sound at least a little bit like Julia because once my new book was released, I’d be a cookbook author, too, although granted, 101 Ways to Cook Liver wasn’t exactly Mastering the Art of French Cooking. For a start, the recipes weren’t French. There were other trivial differences as well. Still, in researching the book, I’d finally learned to cook and on occasion did so for myself as well as for the dogs. Liver was no longer in my repertoire. Julia was probably tired of coq au vin, too.

  Zap didn’t recognize fresh ginger, either. I managed to silence him when he started to say what it looked like. It was easy to understand why Al Favuzza was always telling Zap to shut up. I did, however, see Leah’s point about marginalization and disenfranchisement. When I put a bunch of fresh basil in my cart, Zap asked me what it was. This from a guy named Zappardino!