House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  She didn’t bother to pretend she was asleep. “What is it?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Just the alarm,” he said. “Miguel will take care of it.”

  He reached under the covers and put a hand on her thigh. Her legs were like steel. When he met her two years ago, when he married her a month and a half later, she had been a bit on the plump side, full-breasted, full-hipped, voluptuous. Her endless swimming had done wonders for her body, but in truth he preferred her the way she had been. Every ounce of muscle she added made him feel that much older.

  “I like your hands,” she said. “You have nice hands.”

  He was about to answer with a kiss when he heard Miguel’s voice outside. He propped himself up on his elbows to listen. Despite the open window—on the hottest as well as on the coldest nights Bolling slept with at least one window open—he couldn’t make out the words, but he was reasonably certain Miguel wasn’t the sort of man to engage in conversation with a stray buffalo.

  He got out of bed and slipped on a pair of jeans and his boots. “Let me check this out,” he said. “Stay here.”

  When he got to the front door he found Miguel aiming a shotgun at the chest of Rafael Ordoñez, a surly, muscular man who wore two handguns in shoulder holsters openly displayed outside his shirt. Miguel knew perfectly well what business this man came on although he had never been told, for what could such a man be except a drug dealer?

  “Where is he? Get him out here,” Ordoñez mumbled with his usual rudeness. “I didn’t drag my tired ass all the way out here to go back with what I came with.”

  He wasn’t in the least intimidated by Miguel’s shotgun.

  Bolling stepped forward quickly, before the confrontation in front of him ended in a show of force Miguel couldn’t possibly win, even with a shotgun.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Your help’s getting out of line,” Ordoñez snarled. “I brought you the stuff.”

  “He’s got a name, he’s not out of line, and I didn’t order any ‘stuff,’” Bolling said.

  Ordoñez looked down at his lizard-skin boots. “Yeah, you did,” he said.

  “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake,” Bolling said.

  “Hey, amigo, nothing to be afraid of. I give you the shit, you give me thirty grand. That’s what I was told to do, that’s what I’m gonna do.”

  Rafael Ordoñez was a highly paid and ostentatiously visible mule who worked for a Jew in Oklahoma City who in turn operated under the protection of an organized crime family headquartered in Tulsa. Their connections into the local police departments, sheriffs’ offices, and even state police command posts in Oklahoma and northern Texas were so secure and so pervasive that Ordoñez could afford to advertise his trade as publicly as he did.

  “You go back and tell that little hymie you work for I don’t want to see your ugly face around here unless I call him and ask him to send you,” Bolling said.

  “He says you did.”

  “No, that was me.”

  The voice came from behind Bolling. Fiore’s voice. He was standing in the front door. He posed there for a moment to let the impact of his unexpected appearance register, and then he strolled down the two steps from the deck and across the walkway to join the others. The banker was right behind him. Miguel stood only a few paces away, his shotgun still nervously at the ready.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Ordoñez asked.

  “That’s none of your business, is it?” Fiore said. “Are you going to get the stuff or do I have to climb up there and get it myself?”

  He stepped past the two men to the four-by-four and reached for the handle of the rear door on the passenger side.

  “Get your fucking hands off my wheels,” Ordoñez snapped.

  Fiore had turned his back to them when he reached for the door, and now, when he turned to face them, he had a gun in his hand, a small-caliber automatic pistol. In New York he never carried a weapon. He always had people around him who did that for him. And he hadn’t brought this one with him from New York. It had been delivered to him at the Will Rogers Airport while he was waiting for Blaine and Bolling to arrive.

  “I take it that means you’re going to get the stuff yourself,” he said.

  He opened the door and held it open for Ordoñez, who came forward warily. It is not normally a part of human nature to walk toward the open end of a gun that is pointed at one’s breastbone.

  Fiore didn’t move aside because he didn’t want to lose sight of what Ordoñez was doing with his hands when he reached into the vehicle. This meant that the drug dealer had to sidle past him, practically bumping up against him to get to the door. If Ordoñez had been dealing with a lesser man, he might have thrown a shoulder into him and made a play for his gun. But something told him this gringo knew how to use that thing in his hand and wouldn’t be reluctant to do so. Something told him he was being suckered into exactly such a move, which was reason enough not to do it.

  There was a plastic picnic cooler on the back seat. Ordoñez removed the top and came out with a small package tightly wrapped with the dark green plastic of a standard garbage bag. It was a bit smaller in all dimensions than a conventional fireplace brick.

  “Good,” Fiore said. “Now what do you say we all go inside where we can talk?”

  The meeting adjourned to a library in the west wing of the house. Fiore put his gun away. Miguel stationed himself at the door with his shotgun, feeling far more confident after having seen the stranger in the tailored shirt force Ordoñez to do his bidding.

  “Somebody mind telling me what the hell is going on?” Bolling asked, directing the question to Fiore.

  But it was the banker who answered.

  “I would have thought,” Jeffrey said, “that a man’s relationship with his narcotics supplier had to be confidential. It should be, don’t you think? Because that’s an area where you’re very vulnerable.”

  Bolling looked at him guardedly. He was beginning to understand the subtle but rather appalling message he was being sent. “Go on,” he said.

  “No, that’s all,” Jeffrey said. “Just a simple observation.”

  “What’s the point?” Bolling sneered. “That one guinea can pick up the phone and call another guinea who calls a Jew who calls this punk?”

  “Something like that,” Jeffrey agreed. “It’s interesting, don’t you think, the way these guineas help each other out from one end of the country to the other? I guess that’s why they call it organized crime.”

  Bolling didn’t say anything.

  Jeffrey said, “You’ve got a very dangerous habit. You ought to consider giving it up.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  “That gives you a lot to consider tonight.”

  Fiore hadn’t expected a performance like this from Blaine. It was Blaine’s idea to reach out to Bolling’s coke connection. It was Blaine’s idea to demonstrate that being two thousand miles away in Oklahoma didn’t get Bolling very far away at all. He came up with the ideas and now he was handling the scene all by himself. Christ. It was hard to square this with the guy who needed someone to pull his balls out of the fire the night of his kid’s birthday party. One way or another, he could see already, he was going to have his hands full with this guy.

  Bolling’s eyes narrowed. Earlier in the evening he had made up his mind that he wasn’t going to accept their offer. The illegality of it was just about the only aspect of the whole thing that appealed to him. Maybe it would do something to bring back the wildcatter’s thrill he hadn’t felt in years as his business flourished beyond anything he had ever imagined. But he had a rule that said that anything he got involved in had to be on his own terms, and that wasn’t in the cards with any proposal brought to him by Jeffrey Blaine and the slick dago he was working for.

  Now he realized that turning them down wasn’t an option.

  Unless he didn’t mind ending up dead on the bathroom floor with a coke spoon in his hand.<
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  The house in Belfast, Maine, was old and square, three stories tall, fastened to a rock that loomed over the ocean like a dark lighthouse. Amy hated the house and had always hated it, not just because the ocean below it was so cold and hostile, not just because it was an austere, unfriendly place, like something out of Hawthorne or Stephen King, but because her parents had never spent so much as a single happy weekend there, even in those summers, so hard to remember now, that always began with a wan and forlorn hope that their marriage would mend itself.

  From infancy through the sixth grade Amy had come here every summer with her mother, leaving New York with all the joy of two civilians packed off to an internment camp by an occupying army. Two or three times one of her little school friends came up to visit for a week or so, flying up with her father, who visited on weekends. But all of them hated the place as much as Amy did and none of them ever came a second time. One Wednesday, during the summer Amy turned eleven, her mother called for a taxi that took them to the train station. She didn’t lock the doors on her way out, or even close them. She left half a dozen lights on. After an endless train ride with a thousand stops to Boston and a thousand more to New York, mother and daughter arrived home well after midnight, where they received a chilly reception. Two months later, the week before Labor Day officially ended the summer, her parents were officially filing for divorce. Amy hadn’t been back to Maine since.

  Until this summer.

  Her father spent his time on the telephone conducting business while Amy passed her days either on the porch overlooking the water or in her room, where only the sound of the waves dulled her father’s high-pitched, obstreperous voice. Sometimes he cooked dinner, sometimes she did. They shopped together for food because, as he hinted more than once, he was afraid she might debauch herself with one of the bag boys at the supermarket if he let her go into town by herself.

  In the evenings they played board games. She knew that she was going out of her mind.

  Weary. Stale. Flat. Unprofitable. Hamlet said. Hamlet wished that his too too solid flesh would melt thaw resolve itself into a dew. Not dew. A dew. Why a dew?

  So that you could tell the dew that used to be him from the rest of the dew. That was a beautiful thought. Not mixing with everything else. Still himself.

  A note said that in the second quarto the word is sullied, not solid. O that this too too sullied flesh would melt. Sullied means dirty.

  That made sense, too. That made a lot of sense.

  Keats, who knew that he was dying, wrote, I have been half in love with easeful death.

  Amy called Jessica but Jessica wasn’t home. Mrs. Blaine sounded confused. She didn’t know where Jessica was. But that was nice for Jessica because there is something warm and snuggly, as cozy as a secret, about no one knowing where you are.

  Amy smiled when she thought about that. She imagined Jessica all curled in on herself.

  She was still smiling when she fell asleep because she knew that the sun would come up very soon and she wanted it to be light when it happened. She knew she would feel the sun on her closed eyelids and she would wake up. But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill. That was from Hamlet, too. In Maine the sun came up out of the sea, not over a hill, but still the lines were perfect. They had dew in them again, the dew that Hamlet is going to become.

  She walked out to the edge of the rock and looked down at the ocean.

  Which looked so cold and inviting that she didn’t even have to think about it before she dove in.

  15

  The next time Jessica called home she was more talkative than she had been all summer. She told her mother she had gone to a Kinko’s and used one of the store’s computers to get onto Yale’s Web page. She registered for all her classes online.

  Phyllis could scarcely conceal her excitement. All summer catalogues and letters from the college had been piling up with no one to answer them. This phone call was the first time she was able to feel confident that Jessica would be coming home and would be going to school. It all sounded so normal it made it easy to forget for a minute that her daughter had become, in fact, virtually a stranger.

  Phyllis forgot to give her Amy’s message until the two of them had said good-bye. She remembered as she was hanging up the phone and shouted Jessica’s name. Twice, three times.

  “Yeah? What?” Jessica said, putting the phone back to her ear, annoyance in her voice.

  “I almost forgot,” Phyllis apologized. “Amy Laidlaw called a few days ago. She wants you to call her. She sounded like it was important.”

  Of the four inseparable friends, Amy and Jessica were closest. Still, all Jessica said was, “Yeah, all right,” and she said it in a tone that left some doubt that she would call.

  “She’s not home, she’s in Maine.”

  Phyllis gave her the number.

  That night Jessica took her mother’s breath away, and her father’s, too, walking into the apartment as if it was the most normal thing in the world, as if she had just gone out a half hour ago for a slice of pizza. Phyllis and Jeffrey were sitting in the living room with guests when it happened. She just leaned in through the doorway and said, “Hi, I’m home,” and then disappeared in the direction of her bedroom.

  They were both on their feet at once. As soon as Jeffrey came home that evening, Phyllis told him about her phone call from Jessica and they both agreed that it seemed to mean she was planning on being back in time for school. They certainly didn’t expect her to show up the very same day.

  “Our daughter’s been away,” Jeffrey said. “You’ll have to excuse us.”

  The guests, Chloe and Bill Todd, smiled and said they understood perfectly, although Phyllis could tell from the way Chloe glanced over to her husband that she really didn’t understand at all.

  Phyllis hurried back to Jessica’s room while Jeffrey saw them to the door.

  “Let me look at you,” she cooed enthusiastically as she came through the door Jessica had left open.

  Jessica turned around and seemed almost to strike a pose, putting herself on display for inspection, turning her head to the side, holding her arms out in a way that seemed to mock the moment.

  Phyllis stopped right there, not quite sure anymore that she was supposed to rush forward and give her daughter a hug. She wanted to, but she also wanted Jessica to rush to her. Posing like that, making a joke out of it, Jessica seemed to be saying that she didn’t want an emotional scene.

  Well, Phyllis thought, she was certainly well tanned. Her hair was wild and ruined, but that was to be expected. “Oh, honey, I am so glad to see you,” she said.

  Jeffrey knocked on the open door and stepped in. Jessica had spent the long flight from Las Vegas dreading this moment.

  “Welcome home, baby,” her father said.

  He noticed the bruise on her cheek, a faded circle of discoloration, when she turned to face him, but before he could say anything about it, Jessica took a deep breath and said, “Amy’s dead. Her funeral is tomorrow. I think you and Mom ought to go.”

  Her face looked like a stone mask, rigid and emotionless. Her eyes were locked on her father’s, but when he took a step toward her, all the muscles of her body seemed to melt at once and she fell into her mother’s arms and let her mother hold her while she cried. All that was left for Jeffrey was a superfluous hand lying on her shoulder, offering little consolation.

  The service was held at a Presbyterian church on Broad Street at the very southern tip of Manhattan, barely a block and a half from Winston Laidlaw’s office. It wasn’t the family church, to the extent that the family had a church at all. They weren’t even Presbyterians. Their only connection with the Broad Street church, if you could call it a connection, was that Winston Laidlaw married his second wife there, a marriage that ended bitterly about two weeks short of its first anniversary.

  “For god’s sake, Winston, she was never there in her life,” Carla Laidlaw pleaded when she was
told of the arrangements. “Why does she have to be buried out of a church where she’s a complete stranger?”

  Grace Tunney was waiting on the sidewalk for Jessica when Martin dropped her off with her parents in front of the church. The two girls ran to each other and hugged each other and cried together on the sidewalk while mourners filed in around them.

  As he stood at the curb with Phyllis, giving the girls room for their grief, Jeffrey realized that his daughter was eighteen years old and until this moment had known nothing at all about death. His parents were both still alive. Phyllis’s father died when Jess was just ten, old enough to understand, perhaps, except that he had been so vacant and diminished the last three years of his life that Jessica, like Phyllis herself for that matter, seemed hardly conscious of a loss. Amy’s death was different. It was real.

  Grace said, “Her mom called me last night. Yesterday. No, it was at night. She asked me to say something at the service. She thought it should be you but she didn’t know where you were, none of us knew where you were, she didn’t know you were going to be here. I can do it, I guess, but it really should be you.”

  Jessica said, “Yes.”

  She hadn’t slept all night, or if she had slept, it was so fitfully that she wasn’t aware of drifting into sleep or drifting back to wakefulness. She watched the numbers on the clock by her bed change, and it seemed to her she had seen them all. Before going to bed she spent what felt like hours with her parents, the three of them sitting together in the kitchen enveloped in a large and aching silence. Phyllis asked at one point how Amy died, and Jessica looked at her with burning red eyes before she said, “She killed herself. All right?”