House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  He walked into the living room and sat down. Phyllis remained standing.

  “When Amy was raped at the party—” he began.

  “I doubt very much that she was raped,” Phyllis interrupted.

  He didn’t bother responding, didn’t care whether she meant that nothing had happened or that whatever happened wasn’t rape. “Do you remember the man who showed up and more or less took charge of things?”

  “You mean Mr. Fiore,” she said.

  “Right. Fiore. And there was a reporter there. Noel Garver. Fiore made sure he didn’t write anything about what happened.”

  “How could he do that?”

  “He’s a gangster, Phyllis. You’re the one who told me that.”

  Phyllis stiffened and walked away from him. She didn’t like being made to feel stupid. She sat down and carefully crossed her legs. “What does any of this have to do with our daughter?” she asked, her voice icy.

  He told her about his dinner with Fiore. About the unpublished article Fiore had shown him, and about Fiore’s claim that the boy from the party was with Jessica at Truro.

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Phyllis said. “She’s staying with the Goldschmidts.”

  “What did she say when you talked to her?” Jeffrey asked.

  “I didn’t talk to her. She was out,” Phyllis admitted. And then quickly added, “But that doesn’t mean anything. She didn’t go up there to sit in the house all evening.”

  Jeffrey didn’t tell her what Fiore wanted from him, his price for their daughter. And she didn’t ask.

  Jessica’s plane was due in at LaGuardia at ten forty-five. They hadn’t spoken to Jessica, but Phyllis talked with Clarissa Goldschmidt around midnight and Clarissa assured her she’d have Jessica on the plane. Clarissa said she was sorry to be breaking up the group. “They’re like sisters,” she said, but in fact she was thrilled to have the girl go and already had been considering calling the Blaines when they called. She asked if anyone was ill and Phyllis told her it was nothing like that, just that something had come up and they needed Jessica at home.

  Phyllis hung up the phone certain Jessica would call to protest but the phone didn’t ring until seven-thirty the next morning, and then it was Clarissa calling from her cell phone to say she had just dropped Jessica at the airport.

  Jeffrey canceled all his morning appointments and had Martin drive him to the airport. Phyllis had a hair appointment and a New York City Ballet board luncheon and didn’t go with him. “I really don’t need to listen to her lies,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll get to hear them when I get home.”

  “She doesn’t lie,” Jeffrey said. “She won’t do what we tell her, but she doesn’t lie.”

  He checked the monitor inside the terminal. Her plane was due in five minutes. After a whole night to think about it, and the drive to the airport, he still wasn’t sure what he would say when he saw her. Oh, yes, he would let her know unequivocally, and without any discussion of the matter, that she wasn’t to see Eddie Vincenzo anymore, and he would let her know how angry he and her mother were over the deception.

  Well, perhaps deception wasn’t quite right. She hadn’t told them she was seeing the boy, but she hadn’t told them she wasn’t either.

  The display on the monitor changed, announcing that her flight was in. He went as far as the metal detectors, which he couldn’t pass without a ticket. But he could see down the long corridor leading to the boarding gates. After a few minutes a stream of incoming passengers started toward him from one of the gates. He tried to pick out Jessica but couldn’t see her. She’d probably be the last one off the plane, just like her mother, never missing a chance to dramatize her displeasure. In another minute even more people were milling in the corridor, emerging from another gate, this one closer to him, blocking his view. A steady stream of people walked toward and past him. An elderly man stood at his shoulder, waving to someone down the hall. “Wonderful. She looks wonderful,” he said to no one in particular.

  There was no sign of Jessica.

  The phone in his pocket rang and he pulled it out quickly and put it to his ear, knowing whose voice he would hear. This was no call from the office. “Yes?” he said, trying to ignore his premonition.

  Jessica’s voice came at him. “Daddy, it’s me,” she said. There was something tentative in her voice, yearning. She sounded like a kid.

  “Where are you?” he asked sharply.

  “Never mind that,” she began, but he cut her off immediately.

  “Yes, I will mind that. Where are you?”

  “Daddy, I’m not coming home now,” she said.

  He imagined she was in a phone booth somewhere on Cape Cod. He imagined Eddie Vincenzo standing beside her, coaching her. She never had been good at doing toughness or determination, but she was trying.

  “This isn’t subject to discussion,” he said. “You’ve still got the ticket. Use it on the next flight. I’m at the airport. I’ll wait here.”

  “Daddy, I am eighteen years old,” she said.

  “I’m well aware of that, Jessica. I was at your birthday party, if you recall. Along with your boyfriend and his nice little pals.”

  “I am not going to listen to this,” she said.

  He knew he was going about it the wrong way. He wasn’t bringing her any closer. But he didn’t know how to reason with an unreasonable child.

  “You don’t have to listen to anything,” he said. “You just get on that plane.”

  There was only silence at his ear. She had hung up.

  It took Martin less than twenty minutes to get from the airport to midtown Manhattan. Jeffrey virtually leaped out of the car in front of Stasny’s, hurried around to the service entrance, and rang the bell he found there. The waiter who answered the door, in shirtsleeves, his tie unknotted around his neck like an imitation of a lounge singer, was the one who had been at the door the night of the party, the one who left the door unattended so that Noel Garver could slip in.

  “Where’s Stasny?” Jeffrey demanded.

  “Is he expecting you, Mr. Blaine?” the man asked.

  There may or may not have been a touch of insolence in his tone. Jeffrey stepped past him, using his hand to push the man aside, and marched down the corridor that led to the kitchen. Half a dozen sous-chefs and sous-sous-chefs were at work with whisks and sharp knives, slicing, stirring. Two older men were scanning vegetables and cuts of meat as though they were reading them for omens. The moment they became aware of a stranger’s presence, all motion in the kitchen ceased. The knives seemed to hang in the air, the whisks hung poised between strokes. The eyes of the entire staff locked on him like the eyes of watchful dogs who weren’t used to company. The waiter who had opened the door for him was still at his shoulder, silent, like a shadow.

  There was no sign of Stasny but the door to his office was closed. It opened just before Jeffrey got to it, and Stasny stepped out, in his suit coat and tie, smelling of cologne. “Ah, my friend,” he smiled, “it is good to see you.”

  Jeffrey hadn’t been back to the restaurant since the party. He didn’t return Stasny’s smile.

  “How do I get in touch with Fiore?” he asked.

  “Fiore?” Stasny asked, as though he had never heard the name. He pronounced it fey-or-ee.

  “You don’t have to pretend with me,” Jeffrey said. “He told me he owns this place.”

  “That is as it may be, monsieur,” Stasny said, moving through the kitchen as he spoke. He stopped at the shoulder of a young man slicing leeks into half-inch lengths. “No, no, I have told you. You pull as you cut. The ends must be rough. So.”

  He took the knife from the young man’s hand and demonstrated with two deft slicing moves. Then the blade swept the sliced leeks off the cutting board and into a garbage pail. He handed the knife back.

  “I want to talk to him. Now,” Jeffrey said.

  The young man started over with a handful of leeks he removed from a wooden crate.
/>   “Monsieur Fiore,” Stasny said, “is not such a man one picks up the telephone and calls.”

  “You sure as hell knew how to call him the night of the party,” Jeffrey said. “What happened? Did he give you a number where he could be reached when the girl screamed?”

  “Very clever, Jeffrey. You’re getting the hang of this thing.”

  Fiore’s voice coming from behind Jeffrey startled him.

  “And you knew I’d come here looking for you when she wasn’t on the plane, didn’t you?” Jeffrey said.

  “Of course. Where else would you look? You can make us something for lunch, can’t you, Erill?”

  Two minutes later Jeffrey and Chet Fiore were seated at a table for two in the middle of the otherwise empty dining room. The waiter who had let Jeffrey in filled their glasses with a white wine neither of them had asked for. His tie was knotted now, his jacket on.

  “Let me explain something to you so we don’t misunderstand each other,” Fiore said. “She wasn’t kidnapped. She is where she is by her own choice.”

  “I’m sure you and your young friend had something to do with that.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Fiore agreed.

  “I want her back,” Jeffrey said. “Now.”

  Fiore tasted his wine and scowled at the glass. He shook his head with an air of resignation. “I’ll bet people pay a hundred and a half a bottle for this dog piss,” he said. “You want to know the truth? Nobody knows anything about anything. And the less they know, the more they pretend they know.” And then, holding up his glass and raising his voice, “Excuse me, could you get us something else over here?”

  The young waiter practically ran across the room with another bottle of wine and another set of glasses.

  “Where were we?” Fiore said, back to Jeffrey. “Your daughter, yes. And you were showing me how smart you are, how much you’ve figured out. Let me see if I’ve got it all. You figured out that I more or less knew there was going to be trouble. You figured out that I arranged for Stasny to call me when it happened. And you figured out that I’ve been talking to Eddie Vincenzo wherever he is with your daughter right now. Oh yes, and you also figured out why I’m here now, which is to meet you. That’s all very good. Now let me ask you something. The last time we talked, correct me if I’m wrong, you said go ahead and tell Garver to publish his damn story. You said that, right?”

  Jeffrey didn’t answer.

  “Since you’re so good at figuring things out, Mr. Blaine,” Fiore went on, as though he hadn’t expected a response, “did you give any thought at all to what the fuck I would do after you said that?”

  His voice had turned suddenly sharp. It was the change itself, the unexpectedness and the completeness of it, that was more alarming than simply the fact of the cold, controlled anger it revealed.

  “I want my daughter back,” Jeffrey repeated, conscious now that he was having trouble getting the words out.

  Fiore smiled and nodded his approval of the second bottle of wine. The waiter withdrew, backing away from the table.

  “Oh, you’ll get her back,” Fiore said. “Not necessarily as good as new, but that’s the way it is with kids. You know that.”

  “When?”

  Fiore made an elaborate shrug. “It’s summer. She’s sowing some wild oats. I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not like she called you and told you she’s running off with the guy. It’s not like she said she’s dropping out of college, she’ll see you in some other lifetime.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Mr. Blaine,” Fiore said, “it would be nice to think she’s too bright to throw her life away over a putz like Eddie Vincenzo, who thinks he’s going to be a made man when this is all over.”

  “I don’t care about Eddie Vincenzo’s future. I care about my daughter.”

  “Good. Have you given any thought to what we talked about last night?”

  He half expected Blaine to tell him he hadn’t had a chance, that Fiore had given him too much to worry about these last sixteen hours. But Jeffrey answered with a simple “Yes.”

  He knew the moment he said it that there would be no turning back, but that didn’t concern him. Because he also knew that once he took the first step he wouldn’t be interested in turning back. He wouldn’t do it on Fiore’s terms. He would do it on his own. He knew he could produce millions of clean green dollars for the man, and when he had shown he could do it, he would get his daughter back.

  Once he had her back, there would be time enough to settle scores with Mr. Fiore.

  He felt a rage building in him that was unlike anything he had felt before. It felt good in a way. He had never imagined that rage could put things so clearly in focus.

  PART FOUR

  13

  Eddie Vincenzo was beginning to think it was a stupid idea taking the girl to New Orleans. It was hot as hell.

  The air was so clotted with moisture you could hardly see through it. They walked around for a little while on Canal Street and Bourbon and St. Charles, listening to the jazz that came from inside dark and cool-looking clubs. They went into three or four of them and had drinks in each, but neither of them had any interest in the music, so they left when the sweat on their bodies began to dry.

  The girl had one hell of a body.

  On the other hand, she bitched all the time. About the heat, about being bored, about their lack of plans. She was eighteen years old and she probably never had a second in her life when she didn’t know what came next. All of a sudden she walked away from all of it. Flew away, in fact. Eddie was hoping she wouldn’t come unglued.

  He suggested another stop for another drink but Jessica opted for a walkaway cocktail from the window counter of a bar they were passing. Even the heat at this point seemed preferable to more clarinets and saxophones.

  They were drinking rum, a different concoction at every place they stopped, rum and pineapple juice, rum and cranberry juice, rum in some kind of sugar syrup that carried the liquor to her brain so fast she could feel it moving up through her neck, her jaw, her lips, her eyes, the back of her skull. The one constant was the crushed iced that made the drinks as creamy as milkshakes.

  She rolled the cold beaded plastic cup across her forehead and smiled with relief. She dipped her fingers into the slush and popped a dripping snowball into her mouth just long enough to suck the juice and liquor out of it. She spit the compact little ball of ice into her hand and then put it under her shirt, between her breasts. If she were a skillet it wouldn’t have melted faster, forming a dark wet circle.

  “That is so fucking sexy,” he said.

  She looked down at herself. “If you like women with three nipples,” she said.

  She reached into the cup for more of the drink and this time she grabbed Eddie’s belt, jerked it forward, and dropped the ice ball down his pants.

  He yowled melodramatically, swore vengeance in Sicilian, then poured a quarter of his own drink into the palm of his hand, squeezed his fist around the ball of ice, and grabbed the elastic waistband of her skirt with his other hand. He jammed his fist down there. He felt the cotton-candy fluff of her hair before he got to the delicate lace of her panties, and then he was under her panties where it was hot and wet, and he deposited his little ball of ice and patted it home.

  All this was happening on a public sidewalk on St. Charles Street. A middle-aged woman gasped audibly and nudged her husband. But he laughed a pleasantly Midwestern laugh, more attuned to the innocence of the thing than the depravity his wife saw. Others watched, numbly expressionless, as though Eddie and Jessica were a team of clever mimes put there for their amusement.

  Jessica didn’t resist. Her eyes were locked on his, slate gray on black, her thin lips taut, waiting for the sensation as the coldness of his hand moved down her belly. When it came, more delicious than anything she had expected, she reacted with a convulsive shudder that started deep inside her body. Pinning his hand there, she pulled him to her, pressed her face agai
nst his, sighed like a woman in ecstasy, and then slowly and carefully poured the rest of her drink down the back of his pants. This time she earned the enthusiastic laughter of a dozen spectators. Three women, thirtyish, vacationing together, broke into applause.

  Eddie whirled toward them, indignant. His face turned red and his eyes darkened momentarily, warning anyone who might have noticed, though no one did, that he was a dangerous man to insult. And then, abandoning menace as quickly as he had summoned it, he ended the moment with a deep dance-recital bow.

  Earlier, when they checked in at the Lafayette, their room was as hot as an oven, stoked by the subtropical sun burning through the French lace curtains on the tall balcony doors. The bellboy dialed the air conditioner all the way up and pulled a heavy curtain over the lace, blocking the sunlight. But the hotel was old, the room old, the air conditioner old. Jessica doubted it would do much good. Eddie shrugged off the complaining and talked her into going out for a walk until the room cooled down.

  Now it turned out she had been right about the superannuated air conditioner. Her sullen petulance returned the instant Eddie unlocked the door and she was hit by a wave of tepid air which hadn’t been improved much for having been stirred. She headed straight for the bathroom, closed the door behind her, and turned both taps of the tub all the way on. Then she peeled off her sticky wet clothes and lay down on the cool porcelain of the tub, waiting for the water to rise around her.

  Even over the roar of the water she could hear Eddie talking to someone on the phone. She couldn’t make out anything he was saying, but the thought that a quick and rootless boy like Eddie might have parents he was calling struck her as utterly unlikely. Kids like the kids she knew did that, but Eddie wasn’t in the least like any of the kids she knew. With whom, she wondered, was he checking in?

  She stepped out of the tub and put her ear to the door. She heard him say, “I don’t know, a couple days maybe, whatever you want.” She heard him say, “She’s driving me fucking crazy. Because it’s hot, that’s why.” And then he said, “What about Vegas? At least they’ve got fucking air conditioning.” Then she didn’t hear anything for almost half a minute and she hurried back to the tub.