House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  “You missed your calling, boychik,” he said. “You should have been an actor. He’s gone. You ready to rumble?”

  Schliester hurried outside and jumped into the front seat of the van as his partner pulled in to pick him up. Gogarty was laughing and quoting his favorite lines from Schliester’s performance. “I’m gonna lose my jo-o-ob,” he moaned over and over in a singsong falsetto. “Please, Mr. Benini, I’m gonna lose my jo-o-ob.”

  “I didn’t say please,” Schliester said, and they both laughed.

  They made radio contact with the backup team and got their location. When they had Benini in their sights, they thanked the backups and sent them home. Schliester fiddled with the controls on a radio receiver he took out of the glove compartment and hooked the receiver into a tape recorder he set on the floor between his feet. He plugged in a set of headphones and put them on. He wasn’t getting any signal but that was no surprise. Benini wouldn’t be talking to himself in the car.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” Gogarty asked.

  Schliester was sure it would work.

  “You’re sure you gave it to him?”

  Schliester had had no trouble palming the card into Benini’s breast pocket while he was manhandling the guy. The theory was that even if Gus found it at some point he wouldn’t think it was more than a business card, and he wasn’t bright enough to wonder why he had taken the man’s business card. He’d probably figure he just did. Anyway, it didn’t matter, as long as he didn’t find it until after he went running to Chet Fiore to warn him that the cops were closing in on the Javits Center operation.

  A case is like a chain. One link connects to the next to the next to the next. They had Benini wrapped up like a mummy. One more link and Fiore would be part of the package.

  Benini went straight down Seventh to Grand and then turned east again. In Little Italy he parked at a fire hydrant in front of a restaurant on Elizabeth Street. When Benini slammed the car door, the sound of it over the headset practically punctured Schliester’s eardrum.

  “It’s working,” he said as he turned down the volume.

  Gogarty found a place to park around the corner and put on a second set of headphones. They heard Benini say, “Is he here?” They didn’t hear an answer but Benini said, “Where the fuck is he?” so they settled in to wait.

  It would have been better, since Fiore wasn’t there yet, if they could have parked on Elizabeth Street and eyeballed him going in so that later they would be able to verify his voice on the tape. But that would have been too risky. Two men in the front seat of a van would have been kind of obvious. On the other hand, there were always cops and agents all over Little Italy, monitoring wiretaps in one place or another. They were part of the scenery. The locals didn’t get too excited because there wasn’t anything they could do about it anyway except watch what they said on the phone. Which made for an interesting standoff, the feds and cops brazenly monitoring taps on telephones on which nothing was ever said.

  Room bugs, of course, were another matter. Ever since John Gotti got put away because agents actually managed to plant a room bug in the social club where he did business, which was a first at the time it was done, the interesting people were suddenly as careful about the rooms they were in as they were about their telephones. The Gotti case made it a good time to be in the security business, because anyone who knew what he was doing could clear a few grand a month for every room he guaranteed clean, which might be as many as a dozen rooms for a single client, counting restaurants, social clubs, apartments, and mistresses’ apartments. Rooms were swept every week, and no one ever found anything for the simple reason that, after Gotti, no one tried it again. There was no sense putting in bugs that you knew would be found and removed. In that sense, the security people working for the mob and the cops and agents working against them became mirror images of each other, sweeping for microphones that weren’t there and monitoring phone conversations that didn’t take place. Agents with college degrees called it symbiosis. Cops with high school diplomas called it a circle jerk. Everybody stayed busy and no one got hurt.

  A supersensitive microphone on a business card that a Fiore lieutenant brought into the place himself was going to change all that. Wally Schliester was sure of it. He and Gogarty were about to make law enforcement history.

  They waited an hour, and all they got for their trouble was Gus Benini chirping like a cuckoo clock every fifteen minutes, asking Where is he? and Where the fuck is he? and What do you mean you don’t know? Gogarty went out to pick up some food and came back with a couple plates of lasagna, a couple orders of garlic bread, and a couple salads. It was a known fact that no one who partnered with Gogarty ever went hungry.

  “No Chianti?” Schliester asked.

  “Fuck you,” Gogarty said. “You want, I can go back and pick up a couple of beers.”

  Finally they heard what they were waiting to hear. It was Jimmy Angelisi who spotted Fiore the moment he walked into the restaurant. “I told you he’d be here,” he said. “Wait here a minute.” And Gus said, “You’ll tell him I’ve got to talk to him, right?”

  A little while passed and then they heard Chet Fiore saying, “All right, Gus. What is it this time?”

  The two agents looked at each other with grins a mile wide. They could hear every word. “That’s our man,” Gogarty said.

  Benini said, “Someone went to the cops. They came around asking Linkletter a lot of questions.”

  Fiore had never heard the name Linkletter. He never bothered Benini about details as long as things were running the way they were supposed to.

  “Who’s Linkletter?” he asked.

  “My man,” Benini said.

  “Say Javits Center,” Schliester coached him under his breath.

  “The kid at the Javits Center,” Benini went on, almost as though he had heard. In the van, Schliester and Gogarty exchanged high fives. “He’s the one what’s giving me the names,” Benini said. “I’m keeping him out of it. Some asshole from Michigan or something, one of those states around there, he sells knives. I took six grand off him and he went to the cops. They went to the kid.”

  “Linkletter?”

  “Yeah. Linkletter.”

  “Is he a stand-up kid?”

  “So far he’s a rock. But he’s scared. He thinks he’s going to lose his job.”

  “Why do you give a shit whether he loses his job?”

  The question confused Benini. Right. Why should he care if Linkletter lost his job? There was a long silence, long enough that Schliester and Gogarty might have started to think their microphone had stopped working if they hadn’t heard a steady drone of background noises from the restaurant. And then they heard Fiore’s voice again.

  “Listen to me, Gus,” he was saying in a very level tone, like a man talking to child. “First thing, you shut it down.”

  “I thought I’d slip the kid something,” Benini suggested. “A grand, y’know, something like that.”

  “I could get myself a nice set of speakers,” Schliester joked.

  “You’re not listening,” Fiore said. “Shut it down. You give him something, that’s just going to tell him you’re scared and that’s just going to make him scared.”

  “Hey,” Schliester said, “that’s my money you’re talking about.”

  Gogarty had to laugh. Everything the St. Louie kid did cracked him up.

  “This isn’t a problem, Gus,” Fiore said. “We shut it down, we’ll find something else for you, that happens all the time.”

  “Yeah, I know, but…”

  “You did the right thing, Gus. As soon as you saw a problem, you came to me. If the cops had any line on who you are, they wouldn’t have bothered with this kid, whatever his name is.”

  “Linkletter.”

  “No,” Fiore said firmly. “It’s not Linkletter. It’s not anything. He doesn’t have a name. Because he’s not important. If he’s worried about his job then he’s not very worried. He’s more scared
of you.”

  “He just about fucking strangled me,” Benini protested. The thought struck him that his boss might be missing the point.

  “That’s good,” Fiore said. “He got mad, he acted a little crazy. Now he’s got something to think about. He’s going to think about it all night, Gus. He’s going to wake up in the middle of the night just thinking about all the things that could happen to a nice kid like himself if he starts laying his hands on important people like you. He’s going to get out of his bed and get down on his knees and say a long and very serious prayer so that maybe, if god’s in the right mood, Gus Benini won’t send someone to disconnect his legs. He made a mistake and that’s going to scare him, and so he’s going to promise himself not to make any more mistakes. You’re all right, Gus. You did the right thing. Go home. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure, Gus,” Fiore said.

  In the van, they could almost hear Fiore’s hand coming to rest on Benini’s shoulders. That’s what his voice was like, smooth and reassuring. Schliester thought it was too bad Chet Fiore didn’t have any kids because he sounded like he would make a great father.

  And then he heard a voice he didn’t recognize say, “Can I talk to you, Mr. Fiore?”

  The voice had that hushed quality that comes with urgency. “Who’s this?” Schliester said. Gogarty shrugged his shoulders.

  “Just a minute, Georgie,” they heard Fiore say.

  Schliester said, “Georgie?” and Gogarty said, “Georgie Vallo. Minor punk.”

  “It’s Eddie, Mr. Fiore,” the voice that belonged to minor punk Georgie Vallo said.

  “What about him?”

  “Who’s Eddie?”

  “Could be a couple guys, I don’t know,” Gogarty said.

  “Somebody beat the shit out of him. He’s in the hospital. Been there a week, week and a half.”

  Fiore said, “Are we finished, Gus?”

  He was inviting Benini to leave. Benini said, “Yeah, I guess so. You don’t want me to do nothin’, right?”

  If Fiore answered, it wasn’t audible in the van. Schliester and Gogarty could just barely hear Georgie Vallo say, “They fucked him up real bad,” and then they didn’t hear any voices for almost a minute. Then they heard a voice call Benini’s name and Benini said, “Hey, later maybe. Take care of yourself,” and they knew from the sounds around the voices that he had left the restaurant and was out on the street.

  “Not a bad night’s work,” Gogarty said.

  “Not bad at all,” Schliester agreed.

  He turned off the tape recorder and unplugged his headphones.

  It would be nice to know who Eddie was and what he did to get himself majorly hospitalized.

  The woman at the information desk looked up Jessica’s name on her computer and sent them to the fifth floor. When they got off the elevator, Barbara was already hurrying toward them from a waiting room just across from the elevators. “Okay,” she said, as though one of them had asked a question, “she woke up and she’s okay but she’s back asleep now. Not unconscious, just asleep.”

  She took them to the room.

  Phyllis gasped when she saw her daughter. There was a slackness to Jessica’s face that made her look like a middle-aged woman. There was sweat on her forehead and her hair stuck to it darkly.

  “The doctor said maybe you should just let her sleep,” Barbara suggested as Phyllis practically ran across the room to the bed. “He said he’d be back to talk to you in a little while.”

  Jeffrey moved up beside his wife and the two of them stood there looking down at their daughter, side by side like figures on a wedding cake. With her fingertips, Phyllis brushed the hair back from Jessica’s brow. “Jeffrey, she’s cold,” she said.

  He had been about to stop her from touching the girl because the doctor said she should be left to sleep. But now he reached down to feel for himself, lightly touching Jessica’s cheek. She wasn’t cold, at least not in any alarming way. Her skin was cool and damp, that was all. Phyllis made it sound like she was touching a cadaver.

  “We have to get her a blanket,” she said. “Do you think there’s one in the closet?”

  She hurried to the closet and opened the door. There were no blankets.

  Barbara said, “I’ll get one, Mrs. Blaine,” and left the room. She came back in less than two minutes with a scratchy, mustard-colored blanket. Phyllis helped her spread it out over Jessica, whose eyes remained closed.

  Half an hour passed. Jessica sighed in her sleep and rolled onto her side. Her eyes opened, and then she blinked with the effort to keep them open when she saw her mother sitting by the head of the bed.

  “You can sleep, baby,” Phyllis said.

  Jessica answered with a wan smile that seemed to require a certain amount of effort, as though this were all she could manage. “That’s all right,” she said.

  Her voice sounded dry and scratchy. Phyllis asked her if she wanted something to drink, and then Barbara ran off to fetch some juice.

  Jeffrey said, “How do you feel?” and she seemed to take a moment to locate him in space.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  Phyllis asked her what happened, and Jessica answered by asking if they had spoken with the doctor.

  Jeffrey stood up and walked to the window to look out. Jessica’s evasiveness was all the answer he needed. She hadn’t tried to kill herself. It was just a drug overdose, plain and simple. He felt his hands knotting into fists and he had to fight off the impulse to turn and tell her how stupid she was, how reckless, how…

  But he knew perfectly well it didn’t matter in the least what he said. If she was still playing games, answering questions with questions and readying her lies, she wasn’t prepared to deal with any of the realities of the situation. On the other hand, she had her wits about her. That was good. He made up his mind right then that they would take her home as soon as the doctor gave his permission. She certainly wasn’t going to be permitted to continue the life she had been leading.

  He could hear Jessica and Phyllis talking in hushed voices, but he had little interest in whatever it was they might be saying. He didn’t turn from the window until he heard the door open.

  Barbara stepped in carrying a glass of apple juice. The man with her wore a hospital tunic. He looked to be no more than thirty years old, dark-skinned, with yesterday’s shadow of a beard. He introduced himself as Dr. Agarath. “You’re Jessica’s parents?” he asked, and then, not waiting for an answer, addressed Jessica. “I see you’re awake. That’s good. How are you feeling?”

  Barbara deposited the juice glass on the table by the bed, mumbled something about waiting outside, and hurried from the room.

  “I don’t know how much Jessica’s told you about her problem,” the doctor said.

  “She hasn’t told us a thing,” Jeffrey answered brittlely.

  The doctor took a moment to appraise the sharpness in the father’s voice, a moment that was long enough for Jeffrey to reach his own conclusions about the young physician. He knew what was coming. A lecture on understanding that drug use was a treatable illness. Jeffrey listened and nodded, as he was expected to do, as Phyllis did.

  When the doctor asked if they had any questions, Phyllis asked him if he thought Jessica was addicted to cocaine.

  “I’m glad you asked me that,” Dr. Agarath said, in the tone of a man who is in perfect agreement with himself. “We’ve found, that is, the medical community has found, as our understanding of these problems deepens, that addiction isn’t a very useful model. It doesn’t tell us anything. We say this one is addicted, this one is not addicted, and it has no bearing on the outcome.”

  “Outcome?”

  “Recurrence. Relapse.”

  “I see,” Phyllis said, although it hardly seemed likely that she did see. It all sounded like a speech the doctor had given before, honing the sentences with repetition until he convinced himself that all those idiotically nested clauses m
eant something. There was a kind of singsong lilt to his recitation, which was probably no more than the lingering traces of a Pakistani or Indian accent. It added to the sense of ritual performance.

  “And you, Mr. Blaine. Do you have any questions?”

  “She seems to be alert,” Jeffrey said. “Is there any reason we can’t take her home this afternoon?”

  Jessica’s eyes locked on his. She knew what he meant by home. She looked surprised. What had she expected? That they would drive her back to her dormitory? If she was prepared to argue the point, she was not prepared to argue it in front of the doctor, and so she looked away, as though whatever was going to be said between these three people didn’t concern her.

  The doctor agreed that there was no reason to keep her. He wanted to let her have lunch and then do a blood test. It would take only an hour or so to get the results, and if they were what he expected, she would be free to go. He suggested that she enroll in a counseling program and then excused himself, after shaking hands with Jeffrey and Phyllis as well as his patient.

  “I’ll do that,” Jessica said, trying for a preemptive strike even before the doctor closed the door on his way out, “I’ll sign up for a counseling program. They have—”

  Jeffrey didn’t let her finish. “You’ll sign up for one in New York,” he said.

  “That’s ridiculous. I’m in the middle of the semester.”

  “I’ll talk to the dean,” Jeffrey said. “Maybe you’ll be able to try again next semester. Don’t bother to say anything. It’s not subject to discussion.”

  It seemed to him, as he looked back over eighteen years of raising a child, that she had never before been confronted with a situation that wasn’t open to discussion. That was undoubtedly a mistake, but not a mistake that was going to happen again.

  While Jeffrey went to talk to the dean, Phyllis and Barbara went to the dorm and packed a few bags with some of Jessica’s things. When they got back to the hospital, Jessica was waiting for them in the corridor. “They said you’re going to have to sign me out,” Jessica said, taking the red Louis Vuitton leather bag from her mother. “I’ll get dressed.”