House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  She had tried to sign herself out but wasn’t allowed to. It was ridiculous. She wasn’t a child.

  Phyllis went to the nurses’ station, where they directed her to an office, while Jessica returned to her room to get dressed. Her mother’s choices of clothing were appalling, a pair of powder-blue frocks that Jessica didn’t even remember owning, let alone bringing to New Haven. It was a fucking joke. Her mother must have imagined that if she left the hospital looking like something from a Girl Scout handbook, then the reason she was in the hospital would no longer be true.

  She didn’t bother with makeup or even with her hair, which was wildly disorganized. When she was dressed she carried her bag out to the corridor and set it down. There was no sign of her mother, and for a moment she weighed the possibility of sneaking out while her mother was stuck filling out forms in some office. She didn’t have a penny, or even her wallet with her ATM card. Packing a few practical things like that was beyond her mother’s capabilities.

  She was still weighing her options when her mother suddenly materialized beside her. “The blood tests were just fine,” Phyllis said. “Why don’t you get ready and we can go?”

  “I am ready.”

  She knew her mother meant her hair.

  Phyllis bit back the impulse to say anything and picked up the leather bag.

  “I can get that,” Jessica said, but she made no move to take it from her mother’s hand.

  Phyllis said, “That’s all right, dear.”

  Two of the nurses said good-bye to Jessica as she walked toward the elevator with her mother. They both called her dear. Jessica wanted to scream. Her mother said “Thank you” in that pointed way mothers fulfill the neglected courtesies of their children.

  “They weren’t talking to you, you know,” Jessica whispered harshly when the elevator doors closed behind them.

  “No,” Phyllis said, “they were talking to you. But you declined to answer.”

  “Because they’re a pair of condescending, supercilious bitches.”

  “They were just being polite, dear.”

  “If one more person calls me dear, I’m going to scream.”

  “Go right ahead, dear,” Phyllis answered as the elevator doors opened on the ground floor lobby.

  Jessica glared at her, shook her head, but didn’t scream.

  Martin was waiting on the other side of the revolving door. He came forward to take the bag as Phyllis preceded her daughter through. “Hello, miss,” he said softly when Jessica came out.

  Jessica liked Martin. He was the only servant her parents ever hired that she did like. She smiled faintly and lowered her eyes, embarrassed that he should be here now, that he should know, as he inevitably did because her parents talked about everything in the car, the whole story of her hospitalization. She wished he wasn’t here.

  Martin led the way to the car. There was a circular drive in front of the hospital. An abstractly prayerful statue with upraised steel excrescences that were meant to suggest arms rose from a bed of gravel and crushed stones that filled the center of the circle. Parking lots flanked the drive to either side, extending along the hospital’s north and south wings. The car was illegally parked at the far side of the circle.

  “You know this is ridiculous,” Jessica said. “I am not some goddamned drug addict.”

  “Lower your voice!” her mother shot back in the riveting whisper that had always commanded instant obedience in Jessica’s childhood.

  A pair of young doctors in scrubs looked at them, then looked away. A woman hurried by, dragging a child by the hand.

  “I will not lower my voice. I am not a drug addict. And I don’t give a damn what you and Daddy worked out without even thinking about it or discussing it with me. I am not going home. If you fixed it so I can’t go back to school, I’ll fix it back. Or I’ll stay here without going to classes. Do you like that better? That will be great, won’t it? I’ll bet you didn’t think of that in your planning.”

  She didn’t even wait for a reply, but turned instantly and bolted down the drive, running with reckless abandon, away from Phyllis, away from Martin and the car.

  Phyllis watched her run for a moment and then said, “Please get her, Martin.”

  The prospect of having to physically restrain his employer’s daughter filled the shy young driver with an unbearable sense of dread. “Ma’am,” he protested, “I can’t just—”

  “Martin,” Phyllis cut him off, “get her.”

  Jessica was already halfway down the length of the south wing when Martin started after her. Even in stiff shoes, he began closing the distance quickly. She cut to her right, into the parking lot, and he matched her, forty yards behind. She wove her way, dodging among the parked cars, a zigzag that would bring her out to the street. Martin kept to a straighter path. A few right angles brought him into the same lane she was in only a couple dozen yards behind.

  All through the lot, people stopped, turned, followed their progress with alarm, a young black man chasing a white girl, a recipe for disaster in a town as racially divided as New Haven. Martin knew it, and he called Jessica’s name, hoping she would stop before anything happened.

  She heard his voice and glanced back. Why was he doing this? she thought bitterly. Why was he taking her mother’s side?

  She kept running, knowing with perfect certainty that she couldn’t outrun him, that there was no reason at all to keep going, except her rage at her parents and her stubbornness.

  From somewhere in the lot, somewhere behind both of them, a man’s voice called, “Hey! Leave her alone!” and a woman’s voice called, “Someone! Stop him!”

  Martin was only five yards behind Jessica, almost close enough to touch her. This wasn’t part of his job. It wasn’t hard for him to imagine a gun being drawn, and a shot fired. He didn’t even want to catch her. It was none of his business, what these people did. I tried, some people stopped me, he could tell Mrs. Blaine. She could see with her own eyes that he tried. What more did she want?

  He was just behind her shoulder when a different man’s voice called, “Hold it there, son,” grim and commanding, and Martin knew this was a cop’s voice at the very second he reached out and caught Jessica’s wrist on the backswing.

  Her momentum carried her forward as she spun back toward him and a car slid into the aisle ahead of her and she lurched into it.

  “No!” she screamed, so breathless she was afraid she hadn’t made a sound or only a sound so faint that the cop wouldn’t hear her as he leaped into the aisle behind Martin, gun drawn, three cars back.

  Martin flung his hands into the air, praying like he had never prayed before that it wasn’t too late, that the cop didn’t have his heart set on a shooting.

  Jessica’s whole body throbbed from her collision with the car but she reeled forward, getting herself between Martin and the cop. “It’s all right,” she gasped, “it’s all right, it’s all right.”

  “Step aside, miss, keep your hands up there, son,” the officer’s voice droned as he moved forward at a stalking pace, the gun unwavering.

  Martin didn’t move. He was terrified with the realization of how close he had come, as well as the fear that he wasn’t safe yet, although god knew he wasn’t doing anything and there wasn’t any reason to shoot him, not now.

  Jessica doubled over, her hands on her knees, fighting for breath. The officer ordered Martin to turn around and then to lower his hands behind his back. He didn’t holster his gun until the handcuffs were on. “Are you all right, miss?” he asked.

  Two more officers approached on foot and a third got out of a police car that Jessica noticed now for the first time. In fact, she realized, it was the police car she had run into.

  “He’s my mother’s driver,” Jessica said, in command of her voice now.

  The officer who had almost fired his gun looked at her with listless disinterest. Another one, probably the one from the car, took custody of Martin and started to lead him away.

&n
bsp; “Wait a minute, listen to me,” Jessica protested.

  “You’ll have plenty of time to straighten it out, miss,” the officer with the gun said. He was the only one who had done any talking.

  “No,” Jessica said firmly. “That officer pulled his car right in front of me. I could have gotten a concussion or broken a leg. If I’m hurt, it’s that man’s fault, not this man’s. My name is Jessica Blaine and I am a spoiled rich bitch from a very influential family. So let’s stop right here and listen.”

  The officer holding Martin’s arm stopped walking and turned to face her, possibly intimidated, more likely just curious enough to want a better look at this spoiled rich bitch with one hell of a mouth on her.

  “All right,” Jessica said in the tone of a schoolteacher who has been waiting for the kids to settle into their seats. “I was in the hospital. It was drug-related. My mother came to pick me up and I ran away from her. Martin is her driver and she sent him to stop me so she could take me home.”

  She looked from the officer with the gun to the officer holding Martin and then to the other two. She read confusion on all their faces.

  “I’m sure my mother is still in front of the hospital,” she went on, pressing her advantage. “Why don’t we go back there and she’ll confirm what I told you?”

  The four police officers communicated briefly through an exchange of uncertain looks. The one who had been threatened with a lawsuit for blocking her path with his car settled the issue by suggesting they check out her story like she said. He led the parade, marching Martin, still in handcuffs, in front of him.

  All through the parking lot, and with greater frequency as they neared the front of the building, people stopped and stared. No one in Martin’s family had ever been arrested. No one. Ever. He was practically crying from the shame of it by the time they reached Jessica’s mother.

  After Phyllis confirmed everything that Jessica had said, one of the officers called his colleagues aside for a whispered conference and then went inside, presumably to confirm the part about Jessica’s hospitalization and release. He was gone almost half an hour, and Martin remained handcuffed the whole time. At least they let him stand with his back against the Blaines’ car, so that the handcuffs weren’t visible to strangers. Finally, the officer came back out.

  “All right,” he said, “cut him loose.” Phyllis actually apologized to them for causing so much trouble.

  When they were gone Jessica said, “Do you have any idea how stupid that was? You could have gotten him killed,” and Phyllis said, “I wasn’t the one running away, dear.”

  Neither one of them had much experience dealing with reality.

  Christ. The kid looked worse than death itself. His arm was in a cast that went all the way down and covered his whole hand. His face was all stitched up like a quilt and one of his eyes was completely covered with a bandage that wrapped around his head like a turban. There were big purple patches on his face, the kind that looked like they had been a lot bigger a week ago, when the borders of the bruises didn’t smooth evenly into the clear skin of the rest of his face. It broke your heart to look at him. Such a good-looking kid.

  He looked scared when Fiore walked into the room. Probably having nightmares about everything, Fiore thought. Even wide awake.

  “How are you doing, Eddie?” Fiore asked, slipping off his topcoat as he walked over to the bed.

  “You didn’t say I couldn’t see her, Mr. Fiore. I never woulda, I swear it, I wouldn’t’ve even called her if you said it. Honest to god, Mr. Fiore,” Eddie said, the words tumbling out with a desperate haste. It must have hurt him to talk. His voice was thick, his diction slurred, like someone talking when they’re eating.

  Fiore stood next to Eddie’s bed. “Hey, it’s me,” he said. “What the fuck are you talking about, Eddie?”

  “I figured, y’know, you said it’s over. Okay, it’s over. I just figured…”

  Fiore realized that he was talking about the Blaine girl. And that he must have thought Fiore had ordered the beating. Over the Blaine girl. At least that was what came through the fear and the panic. “What happened to you?” Fiore asked.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Eddie whined. “You said over, you never said I couldn’t—”

  “Never mind that,” Fiore said sharply. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. I am,” Eddie pleaded.

  “I know you are, Eddie,” Fiore said, keeping his voice low and even, no particular tone at all, offering just the plain reassurance of the words. “They told you this was about the Blaine girl, is that what you’re telling me?”

  Something changed in Eddie’s face. Fiore could see it just in the look of the one eye that wasn’t covered. Eddie knew that Mr. Fiore wasn’t mad at him, and that was all he needed to know. “That’s what they said, yeah,” he said.

  Fiore was fairly certain the boy was telling the truth. Which meant that Blaine was behind it, evening up the score for fucking with his daughter. Maybe that was all right, maybe it wasn’t. Certainly he was entitled to something for what happened to the girl, a nice, quiet kid who all of a sudden is running all over the country getting laid. If he had come to Fiore and said, Now that we’ve got everything worked out, I want that kid’s head on a plate, Fiore would have had to give serious thought to what needed doing, even though Eddie hadn’t done anything he hadn’t been asked to do.

  But this was different. Because Blaine went out on his own and got someone to do a major number on someone who works for Chet Fiore. An attack on someone who works for Chet Fiore is an attack on Chet Fiore. There’s no other way to look at it.

  Fiore said, “Don’t worry about anything, Eddie. You’re going to be all right. I’ll talk to the doctors. Whatever you need, you’ve got it.”

  He touched the boy’s hand, the good hand, the one that wasn’t all wrapped up, and then he left the room.

  His brain was burning. He had to do something about Blaine. There are very few rules in life. Taking care of your own people is one of them.

  He found a nurse and told her he wanted to see Eddie’s doctor. The doctor, an old Jewish guy named Fishbein, said that Eddie’s cheekbone was broken like crackers you drop on top of a bowl of soup. He said all the pieces were back together but it would take a long time for them to turn into anything like real bone. Fiore asked about scars, and the upshot was that a plastic surgeon would come around to talk to Eddie. Fiore intimated that he would be responsible for the expense, but he didn’t leave a number where he could be reached.

  When he walked through the revolving door at the hospital’s front entrance, he saw the headlights of his car come on. Jimmy was already rolling forward to pick him up. By the time the car got there, Fiore had already realized that he was no more entitled to take action against Blaine on his own than Blaine was entitled to exact his revenge on Eddie Vincenzo. Because Blaine was Gaetano Falcone’s banker, Mr. Falcone was owed the courtesy of an explanation.

  Fiore didn’t say a word on the long drive out to the Island. He didn’t even tell Jimmy the purpose of the visit. “How is he?” Jimmy asked when Fiore got in the car.

  “He’ll be all right,” Fiore answered.

  That was the end of the conversation. Jimmy knew his boss well enough to know when his silences could be broken and when they couldn’t.

  “I think we’ve got a problem, Mr. Falcone,” Fiore said when he was seated in Gaetano Falcone’s brightly lit living room overlooking the Sound. “Somebody did a number on Eddie Vincenzo. I’m reasonably certain the banker’s behind it. Blaine. I’ve got to do something about it but he’s holding your money, so I wanted to clear it with you first.”

  “I’ve been wondering how long it was going to take you to get here,” Falcone said.

  “You know about Eddie?” Fiore asked. He could feel the room spinning away from him. He felt the way he imagined people feel when they sense the first tremors of an earthquake. Even if very little has been change
d just yet, it won’t be long before nothing is in the right place anymore. By far the biggest shift in the landscape was the fact that Blaine had a direct line to Mr. Falcone. Fiore needed time to sort all this out. “You know you could have come to me,” he said.

  “I could have,” Falcone agreed, in a tone that seemed to end the possibility of taking the discussion further.

  Fiore turned to go, but then he stopped and turned back. “They didn’t have to break his hand, did they?”

  “They did what they were supposed to do,” Falcone answered, settling back in his chair. “Don’t question my judgment, Charles. That’s never a good idea.”

  21

  Gus Benini lived in half of a little postwar two-family in the Rego Park section of Queens. His neighbors thought he was in real estate because that was what he told them when he moved in twenty-five years ago. His wife didn’t know what he really did but she knew it wasn’t real estate and she knew better than to ask. His daughter, who was twenty-two years old and had just graduated from Queens College, had a pretty good idea but kept it to herself. When she was in junior high some of the other kids started teasing her about her father being a gangster but she put a stop to it real fast. “You want your legs broken, just keep that up,” she said.

  All in all, she had no problem with her father being a gangster. He was home a lot, which she liked, because he never yelled at her and he said funny things all the time. They took two-week vacations in the car every summer, just like a normal family, driving around and seeing the country, Niagara Falls and the Corning Glass factory in upstate New York, the battlefield at Gettysburg, and some really beautiful caves in Virginia.

  She had her own apartment and a job at a company in Queens that manufactured dental appliances, but she was home the morning two federal agents rang the doorbell while her father was still in the bathroom. She was home because her mother was sick with the flu and someone had to make her father’s breakfast.

  For years she had known that sooner or later this day would come. She gave a lot of thought to what she would do if she was home when it happened. She would plead for him, or she would tell them he wasn’t home in a loud enough voice for him to hear and get out the back door. When the time came, she didn’t do any of those things. She let them in.