House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  “By that point,” Garver purred, listing sideways so that his head was practically on Wayne’s shoulder, “the dear incompetent woman was so stressed out she actually called me to see if I was having better luck with the story. I told her that I wasn’t and that it was just as well. Or words to that effect.”

  A waitress approached the table, but Fiore waved her away with an impatient gesture. Garver went on to say that Sharon Lamm continued to work on the story for a while but came up empty. “Pathetic,” he concluded. “The woman has absolutely no journalistic competence whatever. At least I had a good reason for killing the story.”

  He laughed a quick laugh, like coins jingling onto a table.

  “Is there a point to this story?” Fiore asked.

  “Every story has its preface, young man, its preamble—its back story, as they call it,” Garver said. “Now the narrative moves into the present tense. This evening the intrepid Ms. Lamm called me, the first time she’s called in months. I was a bit under the weather, as you may have noticed when we spoke earlier. Wayne took the call.”

  Wayne was ready for his cue. “One of the girls from the party appears to have killed herself over the summer.” He produced a small memo book from somewhere under the table and flipped it open. “Laidlaw,” he said. “Apparently she was the one who screamed.”

  “She killed herself, nobody killed her,” Fiore said testily. “What’s the point?”

  The fate of the girls didn’t interest him. There must have been something wrong with her from before. A healthy girl doesn’t kill herself because someone fucked her at a birthday party.

  “The reason Ms. Lamm called,” Wayne went on, “was to tell me—well, to tell Mr. Garver—that one of the other girls has come forward. The girl told her everything.”

  Noel Garver added, “Including the fact that you were there.”

  Fiore did a quick calculation. He didn’t see how the story could hurt him at this point. No one would confirm it anyway, and even if they did, it had no significance.

  “According to this girl,” Wayne continued, “the whole thing had something to do with banking arrangements between you and Mr. Blaine.”

  Fiore’s hand flashed across the table, snatching the memo book from the young man’s hand. He looked down at the notes written there and then ripped the page from the book. A few other pages had notes as well, and he tore them from the book. He crumpled them in his fist and handed back the empty book. “All right,” he said, “from memory now. What else did she tell you?”

  The Blaine girl, he was thinking. It had to be. None of the other girls could have put it together. She couldn’t either, unless somebody told her. Who. Eddie? Impossible. He didn’t know anything. Then Blaine. But why? Did he want out? Was he ready to burn his bridges, with himself on them? It didn’t seem likely.

  Wayne looked lost without his memo book. He stammered for a moment. “That was the facts,” he said at last. “I mean, that was all the information she gave me. She said she was going to look into it.”

  Fiore had one more question. “Why did she call you?” he asked, addressing Garver.

  “Just to let me know she had broken the story,” Garver said. “So I wouldn’t think her such a pathetic little twit.”

  The phone call scared her witless, which she assumed is what it was intended to do. A man’s voice she didn’t recognize told her that someone would be wanting to talk to her about the story she was working on. “I’m working on a lot of stories. Who is this?” she said, and the man’s voice said, “Never mind that. We’ll be in touch.”

  Sharon Lamm had never gotten a call like that in her life. The vagueness of it was in a way more threatening than a threat would have been. She thought at first that the story was going to be about teenage sex and a cover-up of teenage sex, but as Jessica talked to her she realized that it went way beyond that. It was the story of a connection between Wall Street and Mott Street. She had already put it that way in a lead paragraph that kept forming in the back of her mind. A link between investment banking and organized crime was without a doubt the biggest story she had ever found or would ever find.

  Which is when the phone rang. The call not only frightened her, it made her feel stupid. Obviously, if you’re going to do a story exposing organized crime, you have to expect a call like that. Sharon hadn’t even considered the possibility. Her hand was shaking when she hung up the phone. She put cold water on her face in the ladies’ room and then reapplied her makeup, gathered her coat and purse, and hurried for the elevator. She wanted to be out of the office before the promise in the phone call was fulfilled.

  She knew when she saw a man getting out of a car and heading toward her that she hadn’t made it in time.

  “Sharon Lamm?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  Jimmy Angelisi knew that. She wrote columns and her picture was on them. She actually looked better in person. “I told you someone would be in touch,” Jimmy said. “Please get in the car.”

  She glanced toward the car at the curb, half expecting to see a big, ugly Lincoln. It was a Mercedes instead. She could see there was a man in the back seat. “What is this about?” she asked.

  “Just get in the car, please,” he said.

  Jimmy Angelisi was not a frightening man. He had a round face and a soft body. His hair was thinning, and he seemed almost to be smiling, although not quite. But that didn’t make the moment any less frightening, and she knew she couldn’t refuse him. Even at this hour, there were at least half a dozen strangers walking briskly along Park Avenue with that dark and hooded New York purposefulness. The problem was that if she saw them, then he saw them, too, and obviously they played no role in his calculations. Which told her what she knew already. She would be taking a big chance if she thought she could count on strangers.

  “Really, this isn’t the way to do this sort of thing,” she said, putting as much indignation into her voice as she thought she could afford under the circumstances.

  She stepped across the sidewalk to the car so quickly and unexpectedly that she had to wait there a moment until Jimmy Angelisi hurried up behind her and opened the door. She certainly wasn’t going to open it for herself.

  She had never seen a picture of Chet Fiore that she could recall, but he was always described as dashingly, darkly handsome, or words to that effect. The man beside her in the back seat of the Mercedes certainly fit the bill.

  “I’m glad we’re going to have this chance to talk, Miss Lamm,” he said, his voice smooth and pleasant, as though she had just joined him at his table for a perfectly normal business lunch at the latest in restaurant. It would be a rather nice lunch, too. His suit suggested carefully developed tastes.

  The other man hurried around and got in behind the wheel. She heard the door locks click down a second after he closed the door. The car slid smoothly from the curb.

  “Don’t be so polite,” she said. “You didn’t exactly give me much of a choice.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I think there are always choices.”

  She could see his smile as they passed under a streetlight. It seemed a surprisingly benevolent smile, with no malice, no trace of the sneer she had expected to see there.

  “That’s probably true,” she said, “but I imagine some of them are not very pleasant.”

  “Admittedly. But if that weren’t the case, how would we ever make any decisions? My name is Chet Fiore. I assume you know what I want to talk to you about.”

  “You’re going to have to tell me,” she said.

  Fiore let a few blocks pass before answering her question.

  “Jeffrey Blaine,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  His eyes darkened and he turned to look her full in the face. “Don’t play games with me, Miss Lamm,” he said. “I’m not someone you can do that with.”

  She felt a chill run down her back, as though a window had just opened. She felt her jaw trembling.

  “Yes, you’re r
ight,” she said, choosing her words carefully, afraid of making a mistake. “I have some information about Mr. Blaine.”

  For a moment he considered probing to find out how much she knew, but it was better, he decided, to let her think it didn’t matter. So he said simply, “Miss Lamm, you know that information like that is worthless without corroboration. And if you start looking for corroboration, you’re going to get a lot of people upset.”

  “Are you threatening me, Mr. Fiore?” she asked bravely, even though she didn’t feel in the least brave.

  “I am definitely threatening you,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve had time to think about this yet, Miss Lamm, but you’ll have plenty of time when you get home. After you’ve closed all your windows and locked all your doors, you’re going to start to wonder how the hell I knew you had this story just a few hours after you got it. And you’re not going to come up with the right answer. Do you understand what I’m saying? If you pursue this story in any way, if you start asking questions, I’m going to know about it as quickly as I found out about this. Just so there are no mistakes about it, I want you to know right now that if any of the information you have or think you have compromises my interests in any way, it’s not going to be published. You can accept that as a fact.”

  And then he said, “Tell the driver where you want him to drop you, Miss Lamm.”

  Fiore figured that Georgie Vallo might know the Blaine girl’s personal number, so he had Jimmy send for the kid. There was no telling what might come unglued as long as this girl was running around out of control, shooting her mouth off about things she didn’t understand or even, really, know. He tried to get a grasp on how her mind worked, what she thought she was doing, but there was no way he could make any sense of it.

  Jimmy made a few calls and reported back that Georgie Vallo would be there in a few minutes. A few minutes turned out to be almost half an hour.

  Georgie Vallo had that funny, loping walk that kids nowadays picked up from the black kids they saw on TV, their feet flat and wide apart, rolling a little from side to side, an insolent kind of walk, without purpose. Georgie always came in like that, and then he stopped just inside the door and looked around like he was counting the house. Fiore was always at the same table, toward the back, so he didn’t have to look around, but he did.

  “You wanted to see me, Mr. Fiore?”

  “Do you have a number for the Blaine girl?” Fiore asked.

  “I think so. I’d have to check at home,” Georgie said.

  “Check at home,” Fiore said. “Call her. Tell her I want to see her. Now. Here. As soon as she can make it.”

  Georgie nodded his head but didn’t move. He was like a car. First you had to start him and then you had to put him in gear. “If she doesn’t answer, don’t go leaving any messages on any machines,” Fiore said. “Now get going.”

  Jessica was in bed when she got the call, lonely, unhappy, and unable to sleep. Her first thought when she heard Georgie’s voice was that it was another message from Eddie. But Georgie said exactly what Fiore told him to say and then hung when she said she’d come.

  She was dressed in a minute, except for her shoes, which she carried in her hand as she made her way down the bedroom corridor. She could see from the light under her mother’s bedroom door that she was still up, so it was a good thing she was being careful about making noise. She put on her shoes out in the hall. All that remained was to make it down in the elevator and out onto the street without running into her father on his way in.

  Out on Fifth, she walked quickly down to Eighty-ninth and broke into a run after she turned the corner. The light was against her when she got to Madison but there was nothing coming up the avenue so she sprinted across, then steadied her pace to a rapid walk. She alternated walking a block, running a block, until she was all the way over to Third Avenue and all the way down to Eighty-fifth. A coffee shop was open. Everything else was closed. It wasn’t hard to find someone who had what she wanted. She was going to the most important meeting of her life. She had to be calm. She had to be on the highest possible plane.

  Her feet felt like they were flying half a foot above the pavement when she grabbed a taxi and settled into the back seat. She closed her eyes and could still see through her lids the pulsing alternation of light and darkness as the cab cruised steadily down the avenue, timing itself to make all the lights. She felt rather than saw the streetlights sailing by over her head like leaves on a stream. Dead leaves. Autumn leaves. She was completely in control of herself, completely in control of everything that was about to happen.

  When the cab stopped on Canal Street she opened her eyes and looked around. She felt like a little kid waking up in the back seat when the car pulls into the driveway. In a second the cabbie would ask if she wanted to walk or wanted him to carry her inside. The cabbie was a bearded Russian. She laughed at the thought, paid him with a twenty, and got out without waiting for change. On the sidewalk she looked around to get her bearings. She felt as though she had been dropped off in a strange city. It was a nice feeling. Like a dream.

  She and her friends never went to Little Italy, or even Chinatown, for that matter. That was something from her father’s generation. The tacky neon signs in every storefront looked like something from the distant past when neon was the latest thing. Oh please, she thought, laughing to herself. When Mr. Fiore showed up at her birthday party, with that gorgeous suit and that luscious shiny black hair, taking command like a general, she thought he was one of the most handsome men she had ever seen. Now it turned out that the world of this glamorous gangster was a grubby Italian restaurant with a gaudy neon sign.

  Good. That made everything she was going to say easier. It was her turn to be in command. She was capable of anything she wanted to do.

  She saw Mr. Fiore at the corner table as soon as she walked in. It was late and most of the tables were empty, and the few people at the few occupied tables looked like they came here every night. Except for Mr. Fiore, everyone in the place looked old.

  A pot-bellied Italian guy in an apron came toward her, peeling off the apron as he walked. “You’re looking for someone?” he asked.

  She had already started toward the back, but she stopped. “Mr. Fiore,” she said.

  Mr. Fiore was on his feet, coming around from behind the table. The guy saw that, and so he said, “Yeah, okay.”

  Mr. Fiore was smiling. She thought he was going to kiss her, but he didn’t. He put a hand on her arm and said, “Come on, we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  He led her to the table and then right past it. They went into the kitchen, where three young men were sitting on the counter, their legs dangling above the floor, smoking cigarettes. A fourth guy, the only one working, was cleaning up. At the back of the kitchen was a door with frosted glass on it and the word OFFICE actually stenciled across the glass. Like people wouldn’t know it was an office without that. That’s where they went.

  “I can get you some food if you want,” Mr. Fiore said. “Everything’s good here.”

  I bet, Jessica thought.

  The room looked more like a storeroom than an office. There was a desk, but there were also shelves stacked with canned goods and crates of vegetables on the floor. There was a lamp on the desk, which was lit, and a globe light dangling from a post in the middle of the ceiling, which wasn’t. There wasn’t anywhere for more than one person to sit. For the first time since she got Georgie’s phone call, Jessica felt uncomfortable, and even more uncomfortable when Mr. Fiore closed the door. She heard the click as he turned the bolt, and that was when it hit her that he had said, We’ve got a lot to talk about. Until that moment she thought she was the one who had things to talk about.

  “Nice place,” she said, wrinkling her face. She wanted to sound cool and superior, like a tough lady in an old movie. Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. She wasn’t sure if she was dizzy or not.

  He moved closer to her and said, “Do you want to tel
l me what it is you’ve been doing?”

  “Well, I’m not in school,” she said. “I guess I’m not doing very much.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  She didn’t say anything. The desk lamp was behind him, so that his face was all in shadow. He didn’t look at all like the man who showed up at her birthday party and she couldn’t remember why she thought he was so good-looking. His head looked big and flat, like a carnival mask, and even more like a mask because his eyes seemed to glow from somewhere inside.

  He said, “You’ve been talking to reporters.”

  It had never dawned on her that the reporter she talked to might be working for Mr. Fiore. She felt stupid for not even considering the possibility. Well, she thought, if he knows, then he knows. That didn’t scare her. In fact, it helped. Because if he was as powerful as all that, then he didn’t really need her father.

  She managed a smile and tipped her head to the side. “Yes,” she said. “About my father.”

  “What about your father?”

  “That you used me to get him to do something for you.”

  “I did that?” he asked, in an almost quizzical tone.

  She was a lovely girl, tough and defiant. Blaine, he figured, had his hands full with this one.

  “Yes,” she said. “You did that.”

  “I’ve never even talked to you. How did I use you?”

  “Eddie.”

  “And you figured all this out?”

  “He told me.”

  “Eddie?”

  “My father.”

  “What else did your father tell you?”

  “That was the important part,” she said. “I don’t want my father working for you.”

  She reached out and with just one finger touched his shirt just inside the lapels of his jacket. “Eddie was in love with me, you know,” she said, her voice very low. “Did he tell you about that?”

  Fiore said nothing. Her finger traced a line down his chest.

  “Did he tell you I was worth getting beaten up for?” she asked. “He got beat up, you know. Over me.”