House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  It felt good to be thinking through problems again, to be going straight for the solution. The old man would like this one. Blaine was too headstrong. He was a threat to all of them.

  What the hell was that thing he said about the Javits Center? A sideshow. Blaine had the nerve to call it a sideshow. Because he never saw the bubbles in the water, never saw Gus’s white ass floating to the surface when it was all over. Sideshow. Fuck him again.

  Jesus, Fiore almost said out loud, what the hell is the matter with me? He looked over to Jimmy, because he wasn’t sure whether he actually said it out loud or not. But Jimmy had that concentrated look on his face he always had when he was driving. For a minute Fiore almost wished he could have told Jimmy to pull over so he could talk to him. But what was the use? Jimmy wouldn’t have understood a single word he said. Fiore loved Jimmy like a brother, but not the kind of brother you could talk to.

  Ginny was surprised when he got home so early, and even more surprised when he grabbed her from behind in the kitchen and reached past her to turn off the stove. He was never playful like that, and she didn’t know what to make of it.

  Upstairs, while they were changing their clothes, he sat down on the bed and said, “Have you noticed anything different about me?”

  She stepped around to look at him from the side, with the light from the window behind her, and cocked her head to see him better. Then she realized that he didn’t mean different that way, so she sat down next to him. He was holding the socks he had just taken off in his hand, and she took them from his hand and dropped them on the floor. “You tell me,” she said.

  “I’m asking you,” he said.

  “Because you’ve noticed something. Tell me what you’ve noticed.”

  He was quiet for a long time, and she said, “Just tell me the parts you can tell me. I don’t need to know about things you don’t want me to know.”

  In all the years they had been together, the things he didn’t talk about simply didn’t exist inside these walls. She never asked about them and never thought about them. This was the first time she permitted herself, with a word or a look or a gesture, to let him know she knew there was something missing.

  “I don’t know,” he said, as though she were the one who had posed the question. “I went into a man’s house a while ago. There was a balcony all around the living room.” A sweep of his hands drew the picture on the walls around her. She could see it exactly, just in the way his hands moved. “There was a wall of books. It was morning and his wife came out in her nightgown after this man and I had been talking. I’m trying to think why I keep coming back to that…” He stumbled for the word, and in the end chose scene.

  He stood up quickly and motioned for her to say nothing. When he was on the other side of the room, he turned back to her. “It’s just envy, isn’t it?” he said, a sneer in his voice, as though he were disgusted with himself. “Because I don’t have a house like that.”

  “Because you don’t?” she said. “No, it’s not that. Because you can’t.”

  He knew in an instant that she was right, the way one recognizes a face, all at once, without thinking about it. “Because I can’t,” he repeated. Obviously, his lifelong compulsion to secrecy was absolutely obligatory in his line of work. That could never change. He thought with contempt about the coke-headed oil cowboy in Oklahoma who kept receipts for everything he did, leaving an easily followed trail, like a cow that shits as it walks. And yet there was something to be said for Clint Bolling’s way of life. Fiore lived the way he imagined queers lived in the days when queers married women to hide what they were. Chet Fiore couldn’t own anything worth owning because it would be evidence of wealth he couldn’t account for.

  “You know what I’m thinking, Ginny?” he said. “Even a dog marks his territory. I can’t do that. I can’t leave my mark. If I’m going to piss, I’ve got to piss water.”

  “And that’s sad,” she said. She was still sitting on the bed where he left her.

  “Here’s the part I don’t get,” he said. “I found a way to change that. I don’t have to live like that anymore. So why am I thinking about all this stuff now?”

  “Because if you change that,” she said, “you have to change everything.”

  He took a minute to think this through. Yeah, he decided, she’s right. He laughed, a warm, deep laugh, the first time he had laughed in a long time. He walked toward her and held out his hands. She took them and stood. “You know what we’re saying, don’t you?” he said. “All of a sudden Chet Fiore wants to be respectable.”

  She kissed him lightly on the lips. “Good,” she said. “You’re respectable.”

  He kissed her and he thought, Yes, of course. It makes sense. He started out trying to change Jeffrey Blaine and ended up changing himself in the process.

  They went out for clams and scallops and lobster at Angelo’s, a little restaurant on a pier at the end of their street. Everything was good at Angelo’s. Fiore and Ginny ate there whenever he wasn’t in the city. Angelo’s son was married to Ginny’s brother.

  The last thing in the world he expected was for Jimmy to walk into the restaurant before they were finished with dinner. He practically ran up to the table. “Mr. Falcone called. He’s got to see you,” Jimmy said.

  “Now?”

  “He said right away.”

  “Why did he call you?” Fiore asked.

  “He must’ve called you, you weren’t home.”

  That was too bad, because if he had been home to take Falcone’s call, he would know what this was about. His mind was racing. Maybe the old man had taken ill. He hadn’t looked good.

  “How did he sound?” Fiore asked.

  “He sounded okay.”

  “We’ll drop Ginny at home,” Fiore said, but Ginny said she’d walk because she wanted to talk to Angelo and hadn’t finished her coffee.

  “You don’t have to talk to him tonight,” Fiore said, but Jimmy took her side.

  “If she wants to talk to him, why can’t she talk to him?” he said, making more out of this than it was worth. So Ginny said she’d go, and Jimmy said, “See? You talked her out of it. Now she can’t do what she wants.”

  “She’s doing what she wants. That’s what she said. She wants me to drop her at home.”

  Jimmy said, “That’s because you said—” and Ginny said, “It’s all right, Jimmy. It is.”

  They had had a whole bottle of a nice wine with their dinner. Fiore left a hundred on the table. They told Angelo that everything was wonderful and said good night to him.

  The restaurant was actually out on the pier, with the tides lapping under it. The channel was deep and a good-sized cabin cruiser was tied up just outside the front door of the restaurant, its deep-throated engine growling a steady growl. That’s a beautiful boat, Fiore was just about to say to his wife when he noticed the two men on the foredeck. As they turned toward him, Jimmy dove onto Ginny, knocking her to the plank floor. Fiore heard the sound of the two shotguns like bombs going off and he heard Ginny’s scream, and he felt his chest ripping apart as he started to fall. Two more shells blew through him on the way down and his blood spilled through the planks to stain the water.

  He just had time to think, Oh Jesus, why did they have to use Jimmy?

  Epilogue

  A few weeks into the new year Jeffrey Blaine bought the Astor mansion. There was a prodigious amount of work to be done, bringing a nineteenth-century house into the twenty-first century without compromising its intriguing idiosyncrasies. Elaine Lester came there with him often, for meetings with the contractor and the architect. For both Jeffrey and Elaine, a large part of the appeal of the place was the haunting and tragic story of uncompromising love that went with it. Born to riches, the young heiress for whom the house was built threw everything away to follow her heart. Four years later, at the age of twenty-eight, she was found dead and penniless in an unheated flat in the Cockney district of London.

  One night, after the cont
ractors had finished their work on the upper floors, Jeffrey met Elaine there for a tour of inspection. He brought wine and sandwiches. They sat on barrels and drank from plastic glasses while they ate. When they were satisfied with everything they saw, Jeffrey asked Elaine to marry him once his divorce was final.

  She said yes.

  Phyllis learned that her husband was buying the Astor mansion when she ran into Emily Rudin at Buccellati’s. I can’t believe you’re really buying it, Emily gushed, and when Phyllis answered with a look of blank incomprehension, she said, Oh, I hope it’s not a surprise. I’ve ruined it, haven’t I?

  “Jeffrey and I aren’t together anymore,” Phyllis said, and walked out of the store.

  When she got home, she called Jeffrey at the office, the first time she had called him there, or anywhere else, since he moved out. Jennifer said he wasn’t in, which may or may not have been true. “That’s all right,” Phyllis said in a pleasant tone of voice. “Can you just give him a message for me? Tell him he is the most despicable cocksucker on the face of the earth.”

  She had been through a lot and this felt like the last blow. Months earlier, when the newspaper headlines blared Charles’s death at her, she was inconsolable but had to hide her grief from her daughter. Even before Fiore was gunned down in front of his wife—and the damn newspapers were full of pictures of the wife—Phyllis had begun to grow tired of the relationship, with its constant and tedious insistence on maintaining an implausible level of passion. Still, ending an affair and having it ended for you with such garish and brutal finality were two entirely different things, and for weeks she found it almost impossible to think of anything else. She even went back to the hotel room where they used to meet. She took off all her clothes and lay down on the bed, but after a few minutes her awareness of where she was and why she was there jolted her back to her senses. She got dressed, went home, and made arrangements to go to Europe for a month, taking Jessica with her. She couldn’t very well leave the girl alone and she wasn’t about to pack her off to Jeffrey.

  What haunted Phyllis above all was her awareness that there was some sort of connection she couldn’t even begin to fathom between Jeffrey and Charles. She was absolutely certain that Charles was somehow involved with whatever happened on that hideous day when Jeffrey brought Jessica home wrapped in a checkered tablecloth. Jessica wouldn’t tell her a thing, and Jeffrey never talked to her again. She asked Charles about it one night, but he got out of bed without answering. He was dead before she ever got around to asking again.

  Schliester and Gogarty were the first federal officers to respond to City Island when word came over the radio that Chet Fiore was dead. The NYPD tried to keep them out, claiming that the entire area had to be quarantined for forensic purposes. It was a big case and they wanted it for themselves.

  Schliester had to put in a call to Elaine Lester, who called Greg Billings, who called his opposite number on the city side before the two agents were permitted onto the island. Where they found every newspaper and television journalist in the city already hard at work. The first colorful phrase the reporters came up with was SHOTGUN SHOWDOWN, because the use of shotguns in organized crime bloodlettings was an interesting touch the public didn’t get to see all that often. Then someone started calling the hit men COMMANDO KILLERS after the police leaked the word that they had come and gone in a boat.

  In a conventional homicide, family, friends, and witnesses all line up to tell you who did it even if they don’t know. In a mob hit, everybody knows everything and no one says a word. It was obvious to anyone who knew anything about the workings of the New York mob that no one other than Gaetano Falcone could have authorized a hit on Chet Fiore. But that’s not the same thing as having a case against Falcone. Fiore’s widow obviously didn’t see a thing. She was knocked flat the second the shooting started. Fiore’s driver, who had had the foresight to dive for cover even before the shooting started, didn’t see a thing because he was lying facedown on the pier.

  The police and the feds set up a joint command post inside the restaurant. It was Schliester who noticed that the table, which hadn’t been cleared, was only set for two, which meant that Jimmy Angelisi hadn’t been a member of the dinner party. The owner of the restaurant confirmed this. But when a New York City detective named Lou Galamante asked Jimmy what he was doing on City Island, Jimmy said that he had been having dinner with “Mr. and Mrs. Fiore.”

  Angelo Monte, the owner of the restaurant, called the next day to correct a misunderstanding. He hadn’t meant to give the impression that the Fiores had dinner alone. Their friend Mr. Angelisi was with them. There was no receipt to confirm this because the Fiores were relatives. Relatives don’t pay.

  At about the same time the witnesses who saw the killers fleeing in a boat weren’t quite as sure as they had been that the boat was involved at all. Or even that there was a boat.

  Schliester and Gogarty stayed with the case for almost a month, working with the NYPD’s Organized Crime unit. Their initial suspicion that Gaetano Falcone was behind the murder was confirmed when week after week passed with no other bodies turning up. If anyone other than Falcone had ordered the death of Falcone’s right-hand man, retribution would have followed quickly.

  Other than this bit of deduction, the investigation turned up nothing. The liaison between city and federal investigators was terminated and the city put the case on a back burner, reassigning its top detectives to more promising investigations. Schliester and Gogarty returned to their office on the East River.

  “We’re at square fucking one,” Schliester said sullenly.

  “I think we’re at square fucking zero,” Gogarty corrected.

  Jeffrey’s divorce had been final for months, but Elaine never quite managed to set a date for their wedding. There’d be time enough for that, she told him, when the house was ready. She had long since moved out of her position in the U.S. attorney’s Organized Crime unit, transferring back to an antiterrorist unit, which is where she had enjoyed her greatest triumphs in the office. She left while Schliester and Gogarty were still working out of an NYPD facility, so there were no good-byes.

  When the house was finally ready, Elaine knew she couldn’t put off a decision any longer. She promised to meet Jeffrey there for dinner on a Friday night and avoided him for the three days until then. She needed the time to think.

  A team of waiters and a sommelier from Jean-Georges served them dinner in the dining room as though they were in a private room at the restaurant. When dinner was finished and the staff was gone, Jeffrey and Elaine went out onto the rear balcony, from which, in slivers here and there, they could see the river. It was on a balcony overlooking the river on the other side of the island, Elaine remembered, that she had walked away from another marriage.

  “This isn’t easy, Jeffrey,” she said. “I’m leaving government service. One of my law-school classmates has a small defense firm in Chicago. I’m going to join her.”

  “I can’t picture you as a defense lawyer,” Jeffrey said, trying for gallantry, trying to avoid recriminations, to make it easier for her than it would have been if he let her know how much her decision hurt.

  His answer felt cold to her, and she said, “Oh really? Can you picture me as a prosecutor? I’ve forfeited the right to be that, don’t you think?”

  He put his arms around her, but she said she wanted to go. She asked him not to walk her downstairs.

  She looked up when she got out to the street, and she could see him silhouetted in an upstairs window. Then she turned and walked to the corner, where it would be easier to catch a cab. She didn’t look back again. She thought of the Astor girl, who never got to live in the house that had been made for her.

  When the term of Schliester’s transfer to the federal task force expired, Gogarty figured his partner would take the vacation time he had coming and then go back to St. Louis.

  “No,” Schliester said, “there’s something about failure. It gets under your skin. Y
ou just can’t get enough of it.”

  Gogarty sighed and ordered another beer. “Boychik,” he said, “the thing about banging your head into the wall is that it’s supposed to feel good when you stop. If it starts feeling good while you’re doing it, you’ve got a big fucking problem.”

  They both laughed.

  The next day Schliester submitted his formal resignation to the St. Louis Police Department and accepted a permanent position as an investigator in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

  With Fiore dead, there was no case against Blaine at all. Not even the beginnings. Schliester and Gogarty moved on to other things. But Schliester wasn’t ready to give up yet. On a brilliant but chilly spring afternoon he drove out to City Island, where he had no trouble finding Chet Fiore’s house. He knew before he got there that it wouldn’t be much of a house but it turned out to be even less than he expected. It needed paint in a few places. The wind came straight off the water, cold and salty. There was a wreath on the front door. It seemed to Schliester a long time to be still in mourning.

  He rang the bell and waited. In a moment Virginia Fiore opened the door. She had a friendly, open smile, which made him feel funny about flashing an ID. He slipped it back into his pocket and introduced himself like one person introducing himself to another. He said he was from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and asked if they could talk.

  She invited him in. As they walked to the comfortable, old-fashioned living room—at home they would have called it a parlor—she said, “It’s lucky you caught me in. My mother-in-law just passed away. Charles’s mother. It seems like I’ve been doing nothing but closing up her house for a week.”

  So that explained the wreath. Schliester couldn’t help wondering how little or how much her life had been changed by her husband’s death.