Sons and Princes

by James Lepore

  Femininity, which is not the same as sexiness, although sexiness is essential to it, is a matter of attitude as much as anything else. There was a certain pride in the way Michele carried the ice cream, one blue bowl in each hand poised in front of her, into the living room. Chris knew that women were innately and rightly proud to be attractive to men, but did not expect Michele’s mental state to have progressed so far only four days post-withdrawal. Equally surprising was the fact that he was pleased to be the man she had decided to put herself on display for. This small surge of pride and femininity on Michele’s part, and minor rush of feeling on Chris’, came and went in a matter of a few seconds, but it is on such sudden and intuitive foundations that many relationships – good and bad – are built.

  “When can I go back to my apartment?” Michele asked.

  “I told you, never. You have to move. I’ll give you some money.”

  They were facing each other in the living room, eating ice cream between sentences, Chris still on the sofa, Michele across from him on an old rattan chair, her back to the kitchen, her legs drawn up under her. They had eaten a mostly silent dinner together, which Chris had made, consisting of a tossed salad and macaroni and cheese from a box. Outside they could hear the sounds of the city as its night life began. The light from the kitchen spilled a few feet into the living room and mingled with the muted glare from the lamp on the end table next to Chris.

  “Did Vinnie bring you a car?” Michele said. “I heard you talking about it.”

  “Yes, it’s parked in the twenty-four hour garage on Delancey. I may have to leave quickly.”

  “How quickly?”

  “I’m going out tomorrow morning. I should know more when I get back.”

  “I went to the woman’s clinic today at St. Vincent’s.”

  “You don’t have to account for your day.”

  “I know, I’m free to do as I please.”

  “Right.”

  “They gave me some Buprenorphine.”

  “What’s that for?”

  “To reduce the craving.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And some sleeping pills.”

  “Good.”

  “And they took blood, to test for AIDS and hepatitis.”

  “When do you find out?”

  “They told me to come back next Monday.”

  Chris said nothing for a second, wondering how he would feel if he were waiting to find out if he had either, or both, of these diseases.

  “Do you still feel like you were raped?” he asked.

  Michele, awake, silent, had holed up in the bedroom for most of the last sixty-odd hours, drinking soda, chain smoking, occasionally nibbling indifferently at the odds and ends of the packaged food Vinnie had brought over on Saturday. She came out to shower – four times – and once this morning to go to the clinic, although she did not tell Chris her plans. Instead, she said, just before leaving, “I feel like I’ve been raped.”

  “You should be grateful,” he had said.

  “Why? Because you did such a wonderful and noble thing for me?”

  “Because you’re clean.”

  “And humiliated.”

  “That’s a small price to pay.”

  “What do you know about prices? On your high horse.”

  Vinnie had knocked on the door then, and their first conversation since Saturday morning abruptly ended.

  “No,” Michele said now in answer to Chris’ question. “Violated might be a better word.”

  “If you have AIDS then you can really feel sorry for yourself.”

  Michele, her ice cream finished, the bowl on the coffee table in front of her, gripped the arms of her chair when she heard this and leaned forward as if to reach across and rake her nails – painted a bright red that afternoon – over Chris’ face. Chris, remembering his last clawing a week ago, ran the fingers of his right hand across his cheek bone, where the deepest of her frantic scratches had only recently healed.

  “I don’t feel sorry for myself,” Michele said, easing slightly her grip on the chair.

  “I think you do.”

  “I feel sorry for my son, who was killed in a fire that I started, and for my daughter, who was taken away from me. She lost her twin brother and her mother on the same day.”

  Chris had taken Michele’s anger over the last few days as a positive thing. He had expected post-withdrawal apathy and listlessness, but instead, there was the ebb and flow not only of anger but of other real feelings to be seen in her eyes. A raw mix of embarrassment and humility, pride and fear that was evidence, perhaps, of the character so sadly missing in general in junkies, who had endless excuses for their inability to stay clean. In the same way, the tragedy that Michele had just recounted so succinctly did not overwhelm him with pity or even sympathy. If she could stop seeing it as an excuse, she might be able to live without heroin. It was her ticket into and out of addiction.

  “When was this?” he asked.

  “Last year. An eternity ago.”

  “Were you high at the time?”

  “Yes. I was at a party across the street. I left a cigarette burning in the apartment.”

  “And your husband?”

  “We weren’t married. He left after the twins were born.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Right here, all my life on the Lower East Side – a loser who killed her son – a beautiful, innocent, five-year old boy.”

  Chris listened for a moment to the noises on the street below: people talking and laughing as they walked by, cars stopping, starting, now and again honking. A couple of hip restaurants had opened up around the corner on Clinton Street, drawing college kids and yuppies to mix with the native hookers and drug heads. They could find a lot of local color in this room, he thought, shaking his head slightly, collecting himself before answering.

  “I’m angry at other people, Michele,” he said. “Not you. I’m taking it out on you. I’m sorry.”

  “Who are you angry at?”

  “My father, because he was a killer. My brother, because he was a junkie; my mother, for making him a junkie. Myself, for living a good life while they suffered. They’re all dead now.”

  There were tears in Michele’s eyes, and running down her face, which was otherwise still as she stared at Chris.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, realizing what it must have taken to talk about her lost children.

  “You can’t die too, Chris,” she said. “You can’t. Please tell me you won’t. I can’t lose you, too.”

  The world, which had receded during their conversation, intruded before Chris could answer, in the form of yellow lights flashing at the apartment’s lone front window. Chris got up to look out, and saw, five stories below, a city tow truck double-parked across the street, its strobe light breaking the darkness in jagged swirls. The driver, a stocky black guy with his sleeves rolled up and a Mets cap tilted back on his head, was leaning into the driver’s side window of a car parked at the opposite curb. A light came on in the car, a black nondescript sedan, and then went off, and the driver backed away, tipped his cap and went back to his truck. His two-way radio squawked for a second as he tuned it in to report to his station.

  “What is it?” Michele asked.

  “Nothing, a tow truck.”

  Chris then walked the few steps to where Michele sat, and, standing behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, which were bare except for the thin straps of her blouse.

  “I won’t die if you won’t,” he said.

  Michele reached up, took one of Chris’ hands, and placed it against her cheek. Holding it there, she cried, and Chris could feel her tears mingling with her warm breath on his hand. Outside, the strobe lights abruptly stopped, and the truck could be heard driving off. Michele pressed Chris’ hand to her face as her sobbing – broken and childlike – subsided, and the room became silent. The world receded again, but they both knew that soon – tonight, tomorrow, soon – a cry would be h
eard in the night, or a fix offered, or a gun taken up, and it would return with a vengeance.

  7.

  The next morning, Chris was up early and had finished his coffee and was ready to leave by seven-thirty. On Sunday, after his meeting with the DiGiglio brothers, he had stopped by LaSalle Academy to ask John Farrell if he would be willing to lure Ed Dolan to a meeting at which Chris would kill him. As plainly as he could, he told Farrell that killing Dolan was not just a matter of avenging Joseph, but of stopping the prosecutor before he either killed Chris or brought him to his knees via a phony murder charge. Twenty-five years of bad blood and hate had to end here and now, and only by using a trusted intermediary would Chris have any reasonable chance of success.

  Sitting in a pew at the back of the school’s simple, boy-proof chapel, his hands folded in his lap, occasionally glancing up at the altar, the old man nodded when Chris finished, and said, Do you know The Maze? It’s the fortress prison in Long Kesh, outside Belfast, where the English lock away convicted IRA members. My brother Frank died there last year. He helped blow up a convoy of English soldiers in 1971. Combatants are fair game, Chris. I doubt I’ll burn in hell for helping you kill this madman. If I do, I’ll meet Frank and we can have a laugh. The hatred and bad blood between the Irish and the English, by the way, go back six hundred years.

  They planned to meet at eight this morning, in the chapel again, to discuss the details. As Chris was washing and putting away his coffee cup and spoon – an old habit – Michele appeared in the kitchen rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “I slept,” she said. “The sleeping pill must have knocked me out.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s just another drug.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. You need to sleep.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To see John Farrell.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I never asked you about your brother.”

  “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

  “You have beautiful eyes.”

  “You do too.”

  Michele, barefoot, wearing a short tee shirt and yellow bikini panties, with her arms folded across her chest, smiled on hearing this, at first tentatively, as if she had forgotten how, and then fully, revealing even white teeth and a light in her eyes that Chris guessed had not shined for a long time.

  “How tall are you?” he asked, assessing her from her feet to the vee of her crotch to the planed surface of her too-thin but lovely stomach to the top of her nearly bald head.

  “Five-seven, taller in heels.”

  “Are you going out today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have money?”

  “I still have all those twenties you threw at me.”

  “Why don’t you pick up something for dinner?”

  “I will.”

  Chris turned to leave, but before he reached the door, Michele called his name, and he turned around.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Nothing. Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  When Chris left, Michele stood staring at the door. What if I get addicted to you, Chris, instead of heroin? What if I fall in love with you – a man from a world as different from mine as the Earth is from the moon – and you break my heart, you laugh at me, or reject me because I sold my body, or fuck me and leave me, then what do I do? These thoughts propelled her to the front window, where, looking down she saw Chris a moment later emerge from the building and stop for a second at the bottom of the front steps to look at his watch. When he looked up, a blond man, his eyes blazing like a martyred saint’s, was approaching him rapidly from the opposite side of the street. Chris took a step back, but the crazy blond man, pointing a gun, was on him in a heartbeat, and sticking the gun hard into Chris’ side. Then, stabbing at Chris with the gun, he was leading him by the arm back across the street to the passenger side of a black car covered in dust and grime. First Chris and then the blond man entered the car through the passenger door, and Michele could clearly see Chris’ face in profile as he situated himself in the driver’s seat, and, after an exchange of words, buckle his seat belt, then slowly edge out of the tight parking space and drive away.

  Michele, standing rigid at the window, was so stunned by what she saw, it took her brain a few seconds to register that it was real. When this happened, she pulled on her jeans, raced down the five flights of stairs to the street and ran at full speed on the sidewalk toward East Broadway, the direction Chris and the blond man had taken. But the black car, when she got to the corner and looked frantically north and south, was nowhere to be seen amid the river of traffic that courses all day long on the city’s main avenues.

  Standing in the morning sun, oblivious to the pedestrians flowing by, she was seized by the same feeling of helplessness and despair that a year ago had gripped her outside her apartment on Henry Street as she watched firefighters smash windows and spray tons of water on the burning cauldron that was consuming her son. Turning back, she wished, as she had on that night, that she were dead, and decided that as soon as she got back to the apartment she would find a way to kill herself. About halfway back, near Grand Street, she was stopped and surrounded by four Asian teenagers, one of whom, a girl with orange spiked hair and several face rings, Michele had apparently knocked to the ground on her fruitless chase after the black car.

  “You crazy fucking bitch,” this girl said. “Are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy? We should cut you, bitch. Where’s your money? Where’s your stash?”

  “Where’s your money, bitch?” said another, a boy no more than sixteen, with tattoos up and down both arms. “You owe us.”

  Michele, breathing heavily, adrenalin racing through her veins where once there was blood, leaped on the orange-haired girl, grabbed her by the throat and ran her against a nearby brick wall. The girl, the back of her head opened up and bleeding, slumped to the sidewalk. The others, stunned, took a tentative step or two toward Michele, but without stopping to catch her breath, she ran at the boy with the tattoos and, closing with him, began clawing his face with her nails, digging in hard and with a fierceness and a feeling of satisfaction she had not before this confrontation known existed. The boy broke free, and he and the other two bolted, leaving the orange-haired girl moaning on the ground and Michele standing there in her bare feet ready to kill anyone who came near her. No one did. Indeed, if any of the dozen or so people walking along Suffolk Street had seen anything like a fight they were not acting like it, and so Michele, collecting herself, hurried back to the apartment.

  When she got there, she was no longer interested in killing herself. She had found and charged her cell phone the day before, and now she turned it on and put it on the kitchen table. Then she washed her hands, face and feet, put on an old pair of running shoes she found in Allison’s closet and sat facing the phone. She did not know Vinnie Rosamelia’s last name or how to get in touch with him, or John Farrell. Her parents lived in Queens, and would refuse to talk to her, thinking she wanted money. Her only friend in the neighborhood had been Allison McRae. The police were out of the question. She knew instinctively that Chris was in trouble beyond their reach, and besides, why would they believe an emaciated whore with tracks up and down both arms?

  She had come to Suffolk Street to die, believing that the God she knew as a child had long ago forsaken her. Clean of heroin only four days, absurdly in love with a man she barely knew and well beyond her station in life, her will to live returned with the force of a river breaking through a dam. With it came the ancient language of prayer, forgotten words that appear without effort in our hearts in times of crisis. She prayed that someone would call or stop by, and that Chris would somehow endure whatever it was the man with the blazing eyes had in store for him.

  8.

  As Michele began praying, Chris was driving the black sedan through the Holland Tunnel. Ed Dolan, turned in his seat, was aimin
g his .38 revolver at Chris’ rib cage.

  “How did you find me?” Chris asked.

  “Your friend Vincent went once too often to Suffolk Street.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “When you get out of the tunnel, get on the Turnpike going north.”

  “And then where?”

  “A nice place where we can talk.”

  “Let’s talk now.”

  “You want to try to talk yourself out of this predicament, is that it, Chris?”

  “Why not? What do you want from me?”

  “I want the tape you’ve been playing for me all week long.”

  “Let’s turn around, then. It’s at the apartment. I’ll get it for you.”

  “No, Chris, there’s more to it than that.”

  “If you kill me, there’s a copy in a safe place. It’ll come out.”

  Chris was bluffing, looking for leverage, but he could see from the deranged look in Dolan’s eyes, and the dried spittle around his mouth, that his one-time friend was very close to becoming untethered from the world of reason.

  “That’s one of the things we’ll talk about. There’s a service area up ahead. Vince Lombardi. See it?”

  “Yes.”

  They had just entered the New Jersey Turnpike, which was swollen with rush hour traffic. On either side of the eight-lane, mega-highway, stood reed-filled marshland – the New Jersey Meadowlands – a small brown and yellow ocean, stagnant under the sun’s hot eye, rimmed by the Manhattan skyline to the east and the fringes of North Jersey’s flinty old factory towns to the west.

  “Pull in and go all the way to the back, past where the trucks park. There’s a dirt road back there.”