House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  He lurched backward and then came right back at Jeffrey. He kicked hard as the chair leg swung toward him again, catching him across the thigh, ripping through his pants. But he got a good piece of Jeffrey’s forearm with his kick and the chair leg clattered to the floor, skittering away. Fiore went for it, and Jeffrey grabbed for another, which turned out to be still attached to the bottom of the seat. He twisted at the seat, levering the joint until it separated.

  Fiore caught him across the shoulders as he turned. Jeffrey staggered but kept his feet. Now the two of them dueled across the room, slashing at each other with their awkward swords. Fiore, quicker and more agile, caught Jeffrey repeatedly across the upper arm, gouging his skin with the jagged edges of metal. But Jeffrey managed to keep his attack going, and for a moment he actually believed he was holding his own and could come out on top if he could only manage to get in the one good shot that would settle it. That would still leave the two punks to deal with but he’d worry about them later.

  He tried to duck under a forehand slash and didn’t quite make it. The metal tube caught him across the side of the head and for a moment, as he was falling, he may have even blacked out. He had a vivid sensation of flying through space, and then he was on the floor with only a vague awareness of where he was and what he was supposed to do. He couldn’t be quite sure if he was still holding his precious chair leg, and by the time he realized he was, it was already too late.

  Fiore’s foot came down on his wrist and the chair leg fell from Jeffrey’s grasp. Quickly, Fiore kicked it away and then for good measure added one more kick to the rib cage that sent an electric charge of pain through every part of Jeffrey’s body. While he was fighting, the pain hadn’t been important, but it seemed to be all that mattered now.

  There was no doubt in Chet Fiore’s mind that Jeffrey would stay down this time. He stood over him, breathing hard, his body more or less hunched together, vivid streaks of blood showing through his tattered clothing. He took a moment to let his breathing settle back to something more like normal and then flung the metal rod away.

  “You want your kid, she’s in back there,” he said, gesturing toward a door leading into the interior of the building. Then he turned and walked toward the door Jeffrey had come in. Vallo and Demarest followed him.

  As Jeffrey watched them go, he suddenly realized that it hadn’t been necessary for him to beat Fiore. All he had to do was go the distance, keep Fiore from beating him. And he had done that. He was still alive.

  In that moment he was certain he could see how the rest of the story was going to play itself out.

  As he came out into the sunlight, Fiore saw the two federal agents who made a scene in front of Blaine’s wife. He walked toward them, at a measured pace, with Georgie Vallo and Richie Demarest falling in step behind him. The younger agent, the one he hit in the face, the one who kept talking about Gus, took a step toward him. Fiore stopped walking.

  “You want a piece, you son of a bitch,” he called out, “come and get it.”

  The agent held his ground. He didn’t answer, didn’t move. The older one wasn’t even looking at Fiore. He was looking at his partner.

  “This is the only chance you’re going to get, asshole,” Fiore said.

  Wally Schliester grinned at him. He shook his head. “No interest in you, pal. Not now anyway.”

  “Then get out of my way.”

  He moved toward the passenger door of his car.

  Schliester opened it for him. “I thought you’d want to know,” he said. “Gus Benini didn’t tell us a thing. You killed him for nothing.”

  Awkward, turned the wrong way, his feet in the wrong place, Fiore lunged for Schliester but never got there. Georgie Vallo grabbed him before he could do anything. “You don’t wanna do that, Mr. Fiore,” he said.

  Fiore tried to shake him off but it was no good. Besides, the kid was right. The damned agent was trying to provoke him, and he fell right into the trap. He should have had the sense to walk away, and now he was standing in the slanted light of the morning with a jerk of a kid holding on to him as though he wasn’t Chet Fiore. He thought about Gus in the water and the hand on his head until the bubbles stopped, and then the way he floated with his face down and his ass up, like an empty thing floating away, and he felt a tightness in his chest and in his throat, as though the same dark cold water that closed in over Gus was closing in over him.

  He shook himself free of Georgie Vallo’s grasp and slid into the front seat of the car.

  Schliester slammed the car door. He watched as Georgie Vallo hurried around and got in behind the wheel while the other kid ran to the Dodge. He watched the two cars disappear around the side of the building, the Dodge leading the way. When they were gone, he turned to his partner.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said.

  Jeffrey didn’t even wait for his head to clear. He reached for the window sill above him and pulled himself to his feet. It felt as though he were lifting an immense weight, and his head, which was throbbing even before he tried to get up, felt as though it was going to explode. He was afraid he was going to black out again but his balance held. He stood there leaning against the grimy sill until he was certain he wouldn’t fall. He didn’t even have time to figure out what else hurt. The pain in his head was what was making it difficult to move, so he focused on overcoming that.

  As he started to pick his way to the door on the opposite side of the room, he heard footsteps outside moving to the door. If Fiore or one of his men was coming back to finish him off, there was nothing he could do about it, so he didn’t even turn. He kept going toward the door on the far wall because Jessica was somewhere on the other side of it.

  And then he heard Martin’s voice. “Oh, holy Jesus,” it said.

  Jeffrey stopped moving and turned his head, the way an owl turns, his body still. “Come on,” he said, and saw the blood drip from his mouth with the words. “She’s here somewhere.”

  Martin said, “I’ll find her, Mr. Blaine. You sit down.”

  Jeffrey lurched toward the door, getting there just ahead of Martin.

  “There’s two police outside, Mr. Blaine,” Martin said.

  All Jeffrey cared about right now was finding Jessica. He pulled the door open and stepped into a workspace of some sort, with partitions and odd fragments of wall dividing it into a bizarre maze. A few scarred tables and benches were all the furnishings that remained. The light was very dim, only what came through a few greasy windows on the far wall, so Jeffrey and Martin had to stop and look carefully because Jessica might be anywhere, behind any of the walls, behind any of the worktables, under stray lengths of timber lying about. If she was tied up, or unconscious, they could walk right past her without seeing her.

  Jeffrey called her name but there was no response. He and Martin circled around, moving behind tables, to make sure she wasn’t on the floor somewhere. His fear for her grew into heavy, suffocating dread.

  He rushed to a door on the other side of the workroom, moving quickly, ignoring the pain that shot through his body with each step, and found himself in a corridor with doors to either side, maybe four of them, and one more at the end that opened to the outside. He stumbled to the first and threw it open. The windows were boarded over or bricked over—he couldn’t see well enough to tell which. Only the feeble light from behind him seeped into the room, making a small dent in the darkness. He felt the wall by the door for a light switch and found one but nothing happened when he flipped it. He started into the room, saying Jessica’s name over and over, a kind of soft and prayerful mantra. “Are you there, Jess? Jess? It’s Daddy. Are you in here, Jess? Jess?”

  “Mr. Blaine! She’s here!” Martin called from another room.

  Jeffrey staggered back out to the corridor, grabbing the door frame to keep from falling. The walls seemed to be spinning around him, but he kept his feet moving, across the corridor and into the darkened room.

  Martin knelt at the far side of the r
oom. Jessica was lying on the floor, curled into a fetal position, covered with a sheet or a blanket of some sort. For a wrenchingly anguished moment, he was afraid she was dead. And then he heard her voice, softly, as though it were coming from a long distance away. “Daddy,” she said, not quite a question, not quite a plea.

  Martin stepped back, making room for Jeffrey.

  “Are you okay, baby?” Jeffrey asked, moving into Martin’s place beside her, kneeling on the floor, touching her face.

  “Can I go home?” she said.

  She sounded like his little girl used to sound when she fell asleep in the car and had to be carried into the house.

  “Right away,” he said. “Can you get up?”

  She laughed, a drunken little-girl giggle. “Daddy, I don’t know where my clothes are,” she said.

  His stomach churned with a wave of nausea, as though he had been hit again.

  “Can you stand up? Can you walk?” he asked.

  “I’m okay, Daddy,” she said bravely. “Really, I am.”

  He sent Martin out to the car to get a flashlight and then he helped Jessica to her feet. She stood unsteadily. He picked up the blanket and wrapped it around her nakedness. She smelled of whiskey.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll get out of here. Martin will come back with a light. He’ll find your clothes. Do you think they’re here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not wearing them.” She giggled again.

  He put his arm around her. He could feel the warmth of her body through the thin blanket.

  When she spoke again, she sounded less drunk, more in control of herself. “I thought you were in some kind of trouble,” she said. “Because of me. I wanted to get you out of it.”

  “Is that why you went to the newspaper?” he asked.

  “I guess it didn’t work. He knew I went there right away. He called me. I went down to this restaurant.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want,” Jeffrey said.

  Fiore had come back to the kitchen office when she didn’t come out. She had found a case of liquor on a storage shelf and was drunk by then. This time when she offered herself, he didn’t say no. Then, afterward, he had someone carry her out to the car. That must have been when her clothes got lost. She didn’t remember being taken outside and so she figured she must have passed out.

  She didn’t tell her father any of this.

  She let herself lean on his shoulder, taking short, mincing steps, still unsteady but managing better with each step. They made their way back to the room where Jeffrey fought with Fiore. A flashlight beam caught Jessica full in the face and she turned away, shielding her eyes.

  A voice Jeffrey didn’t recognize said, “Is she okay?”

  “Get that light off her,” Jeffrey snapped. “Where’s my driver?”

  He couldn’t see the man behind the light beam.

  The beam lowered, shining at their feet. “Is she all right?” the voice repeated. “Does she need an ambulance?”

  “No.”

  “What about you?”

  “Her clothes are missing,” Jeffrey said. “If you want to be useful, see if you can find them.”

  “I’m not interested in being useful, Mr. Blaine,” the man said.

  Jeffrey tightened his grip on his daughter’s shoulder and they resumed walking. When they reached Schliester, who was standing in the doorway holding the flashlight, Jeffrey said, “Please get out of the way.”

  Schliester didn’t move. “I know what you’ve been doing, Blaine,” he said. He looked at Jeffrey steadily for what felt like a long time.

  “If you’ve got a case, make it,” Jeffrey answered, keeping his voice level and toneless, as though he were simply giving directions. “Otherwise, go fuck yourself.”

  The federal agent was younger than Jeffrey imagined he would be. There was something about his coloring, his hair, the easy regularity of his features, that reminded Jeffrey of himself at another time. Then the man stepped to the side and seemed to vanish into the gloom of the building.

  Outside, Jessica said, “Jesus, Daddy” when she saw her father’s battered face and bloody arms and chest in the daylight. She cried. Jeffrey walked her to the car, while another officer, a heavy, dour man, watched without moving. The motor was running and Martin came out from behind the wheel to help them in, first Jessica, then Jeffrey. The blanket she was wrapped in turned out, in daylight, to be a checkered tablecloth.

  They had driven almost a mile before either of them said anything. “Are you going to be all right?” Jeffrey asked.

  “You mean for someone so fucked up? Maybe. I don’t know, Daddy. I really don’t.”

  27

  Schliester and Gogarty were back in the office by noon. Gogarty typed out an application for a warrant to examine Jeffrey Blaine’s business records. Schliester wrote the supporting affidavit. It was only two pages long, which was rather skimpy as those things went. There was the fact that a known member of organized crime was seen attending one of Mr. Blaine’s social functions. There was the fact that a reliable informant, now deceased, had referred on tape to a new banking arrangement being used by the organized crime family for which he worked. There was a reference to a “meeting” between Mr. Blaine and an organized crime figure at a warehouse in Brooklyn. There wasn’t a whole lot more.

  Elaine read the search warrant application and the affidavit. When she was finished, she dropped them on her desk and looked up at Schliester and Gogarty, who sat next to each other on the other side of the desk. “This is perjurious and misleading. I’m not going to endorse it,” she said flatly.

  “Every word in it is true and you know it,” Schliester said.

  Gogarty kept his mouth shut. He had the best seats in the house and he wanted to see how this was going to play out.

  “You’re leaving out material facts,” she said. “You’re leaving out the fact that Fiore had an affair with Blaine’s wife. Which the two of you witnessed and photographed. You’re leaving out the fact that Fiore kidnapped and traduced Blaine’s daughter, after which the two of them went after each other with metal pipes. I don’t think it’s accurate to call that a meeting. Put those facts in and see if a court will believe that Chet Fiore and Jeffrey Blaine are bosom buddies and business partners.”

  Schliester was on his feet. “Oh, Christ, Elaine, you know what happened as well as I do. Fiore was using the kid to make Blaine jump through financial hoops.”

  “Show me some evidence.”

  “How else can you explain—”

  She cut him off sharply. “How else is not evidence. Do you have any?”

  He glared at her but didn’t answer.

  “Do you have any evidence?” she repeated.

  Schliester snatched the pages off her desk and headed for the door. Gogarty got up to follow him.

  “Just so we’re clear on this,” Elaine said before they could get out the door, “I am explicitly notifying both of you that you are not, repeat not, authorized to go tramping in and out of the life of one of the city’s more respectable citizens just because his wife can’t keep her panties on. Are we clear on that?”

  “Let’s find a judge,” Schliester suggested when he and Gogarty found themselves downstairs and out on the sidewalk.

  Sometimes it worked. Some judges didn’t ask too many questions. They would sign a warrant on the skimpiest of evidence, even without a prosecutor’s endorsement. Even though Elaine had ordered them to discontinue their investigation, she didn’t have the authority to keep them from executing a duly authorized warrant. It was worth a try, Schliester thought.

  “It’s not going to happen, boychik,” Gogarty said. “Haven’t you learned anything yet?”

  Yes, Schliester thought, he had learned plenty.

  The only thing he hadn’t learned was how to walk away. He couldn’t say that to Gogarty, because Gogarty would laugh at him. And why shouldn’t he laugh? It sounded ridiculous.

  I am not giving up. I am
not walking away. I owe it to myself.

  That was the kind of thing you couldn’t say out loud.

  Jeffrey used the service elevator to bring Jessica home, still wrapped in nothing but a tablecloth. Phyllis gasped when she saw them. She threw her arms around her daughter. “Are you all right, baby?” she asked with an urgency that was near hysteria.

  Jeffrey had barely stepped through the door, and now he stepped back out. His clothes were shredded and his face was a mess. Although the cuts on his arms and chest had stopped bleeding, he was covered with bloody stripes.

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Jeffrey,” Phyllis said, her voice dripping exasperation. Walking away in his condition struck her as a hostile and melodramatic gesture.

  Downstairs, he gave Martin Elaine Lester’s address in Chelsea. He fell asleep in the back seat on the way down but woke when the car stopped. Martin opened the door for him and helped him out. “Let me help you inside, sir,” he offered.

  He had never taken Mr. Blaine to this address before.

  “I’ll be fine, Martin. I won’t be needing you,” Jeffrey said.

  He let himself in with his key. He thought he’d take a bath, get himself cleaned up, and take stock of his injuries before Elaine got home, but after he peeled off his tattered clothes, he lay down on the bed to rest for a minute and fell asleep again.

  The next thing he knew, Elaine was standing over the bed. “Oh my god, Jeffrey,” she said.

  His eyes opened. It was still light outside and he managed a wan smile.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I think it’s worse.”

  Schliester had told her that Blaine was badly beaten. She called her apartment a few times, hoping he had gone there, hoping he’d pick up the phone, but got only her answering machine. But she was too worried to work, so she came home early. If Wally Schliester had the gall to follow her again, there was nothing she could do about it.