House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  The man said, “You always like this? A person wants to talk to you, you act like it’s the end of the fucking world.”

  “It’s not the end of the fucking world. I don’t know who the fuck you are, that’s all.”

  “If that’s all, the name’s Joey.”

  Joey held out his hand. Eddie didn’t take it. Joey said, “See what I mean?”

  Eddie said, “Look, I got stuff to do. You wanna get to the point?”

  “Mr. Falcone said he wants to talk to you.”

  Jesus, Eddie thought. The idea that Mr. Falcone wanted to talk to him took his breath away. He didn’t think that Mr. Falcone even knew who he was. “Why didn’t you say that?” Eddie said.

  Joey said, “I did say that, just now. Am I going too fast for you, kid?” But he kind of smiled when he said it and the two of them walked over to the car, where the second guy was still leaning against the door. He opened the front door and Eddie got in. Joey got in behind the wheel. The other guy got in back.

  Eddie didn’t know if he was supposed to ask any questions, so for a while he just sat there without saying anything. They drove down to Canal Street and across Canal and onto the bridge to Brooklyn. When they turned off at the first exit on the Brooklyn side, Eddie said, “Where are we going?” He didn’t see any harm in asking.

  That’s when he felt something around his neck and realized he had made a big mistake. It wasn’t piano wire or anything like that. It wasn’t going to cut right through his throat. It was more like a scarf all twisted up or a piece of rope. He reached up and tried to pull it off him, because it was choking him, but the guy was holding on too tight and there wasn’t a fucking thing Eddie could do about it. He tried to wedge his fingers in, just enough to give him a chance to breathe, and he realized that whatever it was felt kind of rubbery. It came to him, one of those stupid things that pops into your mind that doesn’t do you the least bit of good, that it was a hunk of electric cord.

  He thought for a second that he was putting up a good fight but he knew at the same time that he wasn’t really putting up any fight at all. Nothing he did, twisting one way and the other and kicking around with his legs, was helping him in any way. But he was so caught up with it that he didn’t even realize that the car was stopped.

  All of a sudden the door opened and the pressure on his windpipe went away, leaving him free to cough his head off. Joey was standing in the open door. He reached in with two hands and dragged Eddie out onto the street.

  Eddie landed on his back. The son of a bitch kicked him right in the ribs. Fuck! It felt like he was wearing steel-tipped boots. The foot went right into his bones with enough force to break everything there. And then the bastard said “Get up,” and the second guy was pulling him to his feet.

  Which told Eddie that this was going to be the worst thing that ever happened to him in his whole life. All Eddie could do was hope that he passed out as soon as absolutely possible.

  Joey punched him a few times, in the face and in the ribs, which hurt like a motherfucker because of the kick. And then Eddie saw that the other guy had a knife in his hand, and he wanted to cry. Whatever this was about, it didn’t require a knife. Eddie wanted to tell him, You don’t need a goddamned knife.

  Joey said, “Pretty boy, aren’t you? Is that what the girls like?”

  What girls? Eddie didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.

  Joey said, “Think they’re gonna like this?”

  The knife was so sharp Eddie didn’t even feel the blade on his face. But he felt the blood running down his neck and into his shirt. First on one side, then on the other. He thought he was being skinned alive. He managed to get his hands up, and when the knife cut his hands and his arms he could feel it just fine.

  He felt something hit him on the back of the neck and then he was on the ground again. He was starting to pass out. He could feel his own blood in a puddle his face was lying in.

  Joey said, “Just a warning, kid. Man wants you to leave his daughter alone.”

  Then he got kicked again, this time right in the cheekbone. It felt like his head was going to come off. He managed to get a hand up by his face to keep it from happening again, and the guy stepped on the back of his hand. Hard. Grinding.

  “Got the message, kid? Next time there won’t be nothing left,” the man said.

  Eddie could hear the bones of his hand breaking. And then he didn’t hear anything at all.

  Phyllis took a deep breath and waited for sleep to come back. When it didn’t, she turned onto her back again and lay there looking up, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. She heard a bus shift gears as the light changed down on Fifth Avenue, and wondered about the lives of people who took buses at three o’clock in the morning. If that’s what it was. She could have turned to look at the clock, but she really didn’t want to know.

  It was never dark in the city. Even this many stories up, light from the street lamps climbed the sides of the building and oozed in through the windows. Light like moonlight, pale and wasted.

  She threw her feet out of the bed, angry with herself for not being able to find her way back to sleep. It isn’t because Jeffrey’s not here, she told herself. It just happens sometimes that a person can’t sleep.

  She stepped into her slippers and pulled on her robe and found herself tiptoeing down the corridor, as if there was someone not to wake. She caught herself and changed her stride to a normal walk.

  Gin or whiskey? she asked herself. Whiskey seemed more sociable, but she wasn’t in a sociable frame of mind. Whiskey was for when you have someone to talk to. So she poured a few fingers of gin into a tall glass, ice cubes, tonic. She sliced a wedge out of a lime, squeezed the juice into the glass, and watched the juice spread around like smoke. She dropped in the wedge with a ceremonial flourish and stirred the whole thing by swirling the glass in her hand.

  She drank it down at once, like it was medicine. Jeffrey always made the drinks, and she didn’t realize how much gin she had put in until she was already mixing herself a refill.

  Refill. That sounded social, too. Bartender! Have a refill here, with just the right wave of the hand. She practiced the wave in the empty room, saying the words to herself. That’s what they should have, she thought. A bartender. Fire the maid and hire a bartender.

  Wouldn’t Jeffrey be surprised.

  Jessica had never been so frightened in her life. She stood on the corner of Orange and George, just a couple blocks south of campus, exactly the way she had seen Eddie do it. She imagined everyone she saw was an undercover police officer. Eddie was always the one who did the buying. He would go out, and then he would come back with the stuff, knowing where to go even in cities where he was a stranger. She asked him once, and he said, “Hey, you just look around.” Sure, she thought. Look around. But don’t you have to know where to look?

  If he hadn’t taken her with him once, leaving her in the car while he got out to conduct his business, she never would have imagined that this was where you go. Orange and George.

  She wished she remembered what the man Eddie dealt with looked like. She should have paid more attention. He seemed young, very young, she remembered that, and he was taller than Eddie, but she hadn’t really looked because she was frightened just being there. He was black but that didn’t help because everyone on the street here was black.

  She didn’t even know how much the stuff cost.

  She thrust her hands deeper into the pockets of her windbreaker, clutching the bills she had just gotten from the ATM in the student center. She had made up her mind when her father told her about Eddie that she wouldn’t see him again. She even made it her business for most of the next week to be out every evening, staying in the library until it closed at midnight, so that she wouldn’t have to deal with him if he came by or called. But he didn’t come by and he didn’t call, and with each passing day her anger mounted as she felt more and more used and misused.

  No one on the street looked at all
familiar. She scanned the intersection, up the street and down, then stepped around the corner onto Orange Street to look both ways again.

  “Temple, babe,” a deep voice said practically in her ear.

  She jumped back in alarm, whirling around. A heavyset black man with a shaved head had just passed behind her. It must have been he who spoke, but he gave no sign of it as he hurried away from her, walking quickly with a flamboyantly athletic precision to his gait.

  She wasn’t even sure what he said or what it meant. Maybe, she thought, he was just talking to himself. And then she realized he had said Temple and Temple was a street near here. It ended at the campus. Yes, that made sense, she thought. These people would have to move around, to keep ahead of the police. He was telling her where to go.

  She hurried to the intersection of Temple and George, not even thinking about how conspicuous she must have looked to be delivered such a message by a stranger.

  She saw the boy she was looking for from half a block away. Even by the dirty yellow light of the streetlight, he wasn’t hard to recognize. She quickened her pace.

  “I need some stuff,” she said. (Why did she say need? It made her sound like a drug addict.)

  His insolent eyes ran the length of her body and then back up to her face. He didn’t look more than fifteen years old, except for those eyes, which were an old man’s eyes, shallow and indifferent. “I don’t know what you need, kid,” he said, “but I’m betting I ain’t got it.”

  She thought of half a dozen things she could have said but heard herself simply saying, “Please.”

  This time his eyes stayed on her face and he seemed to be asking himself a question. Then the answer came to him and he said, “You’re Eddie’s chick, right?”

  She felt a surge of anger. Her face burned with it, and she wanted to tell him that she was not Eddie’s chick. She was not Eddie’s anything. Eddie was out of her life. She was here because she found her way here herself. Did that sound like anyone’s goddamned chick? But before she could say any of this, a voice in her head stopped her and she realized that she had to swallow her dignity and smile and say Yeah, that’s right, I’m Eddie’s chick, because he wouldn’t sell to a stranger.

  “Eddie got stuck in the city,” she said. “He asked me to pick it up.”

  Inside, she boiled with outrage that that arrogant Italian bastard hadn’t even had the decency to call. He was finished with the assignment, so of course he didn’t call. Eddie, we’ve got a job for you. Get with that dumb little cunt and fuck her silly till we tell you to stop. You think you can do that, Eddie? And her own father never even warned her till it was over. He was as bad as the lot of them, working out his own damned salvation while Eddie Vincenzo, that egotistical little prick, turned her into a complete fool. He got stuck in the city. The words scorched her ears like a scream.

  “Cool,” the kid said. “How much you want?”

  “I’ve got a hundred dollars,” Jessica said, pulling the bills out of her pocket.

  Even to herself she sounded like a little kid plunking her change on the counter to see if it was enough for an ice cream cone.

  “Christ, bitch, put that away,” the kid snapped, actually slapping at her hand as though he were shooing a fly. She jammed her hand back into her pocket.

  “C’mon,” he said.

  He turned with the crispness of a soldier doing a drill, a startling movement in someone so loosely strung together, and walked toward the entrance of a small apartment building just a few paces up from where they had been standing. He didn’t even glance back to see if she was following.

  She was.

  The tiny lobby had a rank, cabbagy smell. Very little light from the street penetrated here, and the single fixture in the ceiling wasn’t working. The space was only a few feet square, with a bank of about a dozen mailboxes on one wall, a graffiti-covered tile wall opposite it. A door, sprung on its hinges, led inside.

  She took the money out again, and this time he snatched it out of her hands, counted the five twenties, and stuck them in his pocket. He turned around and opened one of the mailboxes without using a key. He took out a plain white paper envelope and handed it to her. “Awright, get outta here,” he said.

  She thought she ought to look in the envelope, to make sure she wasn’t being cheated, but at the same time she thought she had better just leave.

  It took her no more than five minutes to reach the edge of campus. She didn’t run, but she felt like she was being chased the whole way. She stopped to calm the pounding in her chest, and then felt a sudden rush of confused thoughts. What if Barbara was there when she got back to the room? In fact, she would be. She was always in by this time.

  Well, in that case, she thought, any ladies’ room in any building on campus would do just fine. At any given moment, she remembered, eighteen percent of the freshman class was stoned and another twenty-one percent was drunk. A friend of hers named Aubrey came up with those numbers one night when a bunch of them were talking over hamburgers in the student union. He made them up in a long, hysterically funny monologue that sounded like the text of the latest study of student behavior. According to Aubrey, twenty-seven percent of female freshmen were virgins, but the figure dropped to eight if you counted sex with other female freshmen.

  For some reason the numbers all stuck in Jessica’s mind.

  The idea of going to a ladies’ room didn’t appeal to her. It was like drinking out of a bottle in a brown paper bag. She smiled to herself, amused at the notion that Jessica Blaine was too good for that.

  Yeah, right.

  She ended up on the grass behind the chapel. There was a nice little maple tree there, and a hedge that marked off the borders of the useless space. She sat on the ground with her back against the maple and took the envelope out of her pocket.

  She used a rolled-up index card. Which seemed a very Yale thing to do.

  This stuff was supposed to make her feel better but it didn’t. It made everything sharper, which it wasn’t supposed to do.

  The stone wall of the church seemed to throb like a membrane, systole and diastole, pumping like a machine. And the clouds above the maple circled like a pinwheel.

  She took another hit, hoping for something that didn’t happen and wouldn’t happen.

  She ran through the list of people she hated.

  Eddie Vincenzo.

  Jeffrey Blaine.

  Jessica Blaine.

  She lay on her back and cried while the church walls powered the still world with their endless pulsing. She could hear them now. Thwump-uhhh, thwump-uhhh, thwump-uhhh.

  Eddie Vincenzo. Amy Laidlaw. Jessica Blaine.

  Eddie Vincenzo. Amy Laidlaw. Jessica Blaine.

  PART FIVE

  20

  The night before Clint Bolling’s funeral, a captain from the state police called on his widow. He presented a business card instead of a badge. He had a thick, unkempt mustache but wore a dress uniform that managed to convey a sense of considerable dignity despite his sagging, basset-hound face, and he carried his hat before him as though he were in church. His name was Loving, a strange name for a man of his calling, for any man.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “the toxicology report showed a considerable amount of cocaine in your husband’s bloodstream.”

  She had known it would, so she said nothing.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “I just saw a draft of the report. It’s not final.”

  “This cocaine did what?” Rachel asked. “It caused his heart to stop?”

  “No, ma’am. There was strychnine, too. Sometimes it’s put in cocaine.”

  “For what purpose.”

  “To kill someone, ma’am. It doesn’t take much.”

  She didn’t say anything for almost a full minute while she considered this information. She turned and walked away from him, and she kept her back to him until she was ready to respond. Then she turned to him.

  “But his heart did stop, didn’t it?”

 
; “Yes, ma’am,” Captain Loving said.

  “Then why can’t your reports simply say that?” she asked. “That his heart stopped?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “Heart failure. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. It seemed to me you ought to know the truth.”

  “This is the truth,” she said. “His heart stopped.”

  Captain Loving looked down at the hat he held in front of his belly.

  “You’re very kind,” she said.

  The state police were invariably kind to local boys who stayed home and made the kind of money Clint Bolling made. Even, she thought without bitterness, when they married Mexican girls half their age.

  Captain Loving came to the funeral.

  Rachel watched her husband’s coffin descend into the dry, bare ground out beyond where the grass grew, so false and green, on the tended part of his estate. His first wife lay beside him, and Rachel watched as the workers filled the hole, shovel after shovel. Then she turned away and walked back to the house, closing the doors behind her, permitting none of the guests inside, even though they had come from Dallas and Houston and Norman and St. Louis, and of course the entire workforce from PetroBoll—his people, all of them, none of hers, because she had yet to notify her mother or her sisters that her husband was dead. She didn’t want condolences from anyone. She wanted to be alone in the house, where the earth-colored walls offered the only comfort she was willing to accept.

  And so the cooks, who had prepared a lavish spread of fresh bread and local game and cheeses and salsas, carried their tables to the back patio by the pool and set them up there, under umbrellas to keep the sun off the food. Rachel remained in the master bedroom all afternoon, pacing with long restless strides until the last of the guests was gone well after sunset and silence settled over the house like a warm, slow wind.