by Lee Thomas
I didn’t buy into the macho glamour of the mobs. I saw nothing honorable in the rackets, and the lifestyle they promoted—easy wealth carried over the bodies of the ignorant and unfortunate. They talked about respect and brotherhood and family, but it was all grease for the cogs, making sure the greed machine didn’t break down. Friends were as expendable as rivals if it cleared the path to a buck.
At the altar, the Bishop began a prayer in Latin. I shuddered.
Sylvia carries a photograph of her father in her purse. He is tall and wiry and his flat nose and lipless mouth call to mind the face of a python.
Sylvia is nine-years old. She is on the floor watching television when she hears her father shouting. Her body tenses and a web of ice-cold filaments locks to the back of her skull. Matt, her older brother, shouts and a great crash follows. Her father bellows, his voice shaking the thin walls of the house like an approaching train.
This scene is familiar to Sylvia. Her father is at turns sweet and doting and cruel and violent. Alcohol flicks the switch. At least once a week her father beats her siblings, laying them flat like a scythe moving through wheat. He has never raised his hand to Sylvia but that fact does nothing to alleviate her fear. Even so young she understands the indiscretion of blind rage.
Matt comes charging into the living room and barrels into the kitchen. He throws open the back door and vanishes into the night.
Sylvia’s father stumbles into the room, growling deep in his throat like an angry dog. He swings his head from side to side and then his eyes lock on Sylvia, causing the icy web at her skull to spread over her entire body. She crawls away from the man and climbs to her feet as her father stomps forward. Confused and frightened, she follows Matt’s path, but she stops in the kitchen. She doesn’t want to run from her father, shouldn’t have to run from him.
“You brats ruined my life,” he says. Spit foams at the corner of his mouth. His eyes are hard as glass and burn hate as if lit from within. “I could have gone places.”
Backed to the stove, Sylvia pulls a saucepan of boiling water off the burner. She ignores the too-hot handle, and splashes her father’s crotch with the contents, and when he bends over, howling in pain, she cracks the saucepan across his skull. He drops to his knees, and she hits him again.
Sylvia checks her hair in the reflection of the glass door before pulling it open. She enters Club Barlow like a movie star walking the red carpet—wearing the awkward smile of grief she has spent hours practicing in front of a mirror. Makes a show of waving at familiar faces, some of whom aren’t even looking her way. She walks through the room, her steps landing in perfect time to the bossa nova track pouring from the club’s speakers. She takes a small booth on the far side of the dance floor with a gilt mirror at her back, and when the waitress comes for her order, she says, “Martini. Dry.”
The dance floor is empty. Nobody dances anymore. Sylvia thinks that’s a shame.
As she sips her drink a series of men come to her table. They do not sit beside her. Instead, they lean in close and tell Sylvia they are sorry for her loss, and if she ever needs anything—anything at all—she should call them. She promises to do so, though she never will. Their definition of “needing anything” goes no further than her crotch. Louis’s murder has left her a pretty shell, vacant on the sand, and every fucking hermit crab on the beach would be trying to wriggle its way in. Sylvia expects this. In fact, she knows it will work to her advantage, but not with these men. None of them has what Sylvia needs. They run their numbers and sell their smack and boost electronics from the backs of trucks. Graceless. Useless. Before her first drink is gone, she has already tucked five business cards into her handbag.
Across the room she sees Mickey Rossini, the man she was hoping to find. He is a large man with thick salt and pepper hair brushed back from his brow in a lush wave. His suit is ash gray and cheap. With his arm around a bleach-job half his age, he looks as happy as a bear with a mouth full of honey. His overly broad grin and hooded eyes show he’s devoted much of his night to drinking. He has a reputation among the ladies—gentle, sweet, affectionate. Sylvia thinks that’s a shame, though she can live with it until she gets what she needs. She stands from the booth and smoothes the sides of her dress before lifting her handbag and crossing to Rossini’s table.
The blonde is the first to notice Sylvia. She looks up with a bright, wide-eyed smile, which quickly vanishes. The girl recognizes the threat and immediately scowls, knowing she will have to defend her territory from another predator. Sylvia is unfazed.
When Rossini’s eyes fall on Sylvia a noticeable amount of the intoxication clears from them. He’s wanted Sylvia for years, but she’d shot him down at every turn. Rossini was a thief; he jacked locks and cracked safes for Louis, making a fraction of a fraction of the money the things he stole were worth. She’d never needed him before.
“Hello, Mickey,” she says.
Rossini straightens himself in the booth, removing his palm from the bottle-job’s thigh.
He leans back in the booth and says, “Sylvia, it’s good to see you.”
“Is this your wife?” the blonde asks. She is sulking because Rossini’s expression tells her that she has already been subtracted from this equation.
“No,” he says.
“Then who the fuck is she?” the blonde wants to know.
“She’s a friend. Don’t worry about it.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, playing demure. She locks eyes with Rossini and dips her chin bashfully, knowing the effect it will have on the man. “I’ll let you back to your evening.”
“Wait. Wait.” He nudges the blonde and says, “Why don’t you go powder your nose. I need to have a word with Sylvia here.”
“Mickey,” the girl whines.
“It’s business,” he tells her. “Be a sweetheart and give us a couple of minutes, okay?”
He gives her a sloppy peck on the lips and produces a fifty-dollar bill and hands it to the young woman, who quickly drops the note into her purse. She scoots her butt across the booth, and as she stands, she fixes a glare on Sylvia, who pretends to ignore the girl’s attitude, but decides in that second to put a serious fuck you in the little cunt’s night.
These amateur bitches, Sylvia thinks. They didn’t understand the game, and that’s why it ate them alive, leaving them shaking their tits in low rent knocker shops by the docks to feed the bastard brats of sailors and warehousemen, waiting for some disease to slowly snuff their candles. Over the years, Sylvia had seen a hundred similar pieces of trash blown into the gutter, and she didn’t pity a single one of them.
“I really didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, sliding into the booth next to Rossini. “It’s just that since…well, you know…I’ve been a little lost.”
“I know,” Rossini says, placing his hand on Sylvia’s knee in a salacious move he masks as mere comfort. “It’s gotta be tough. How are you holding up?”
“Fine,” she says. Already she has managed to work tears into her eyes. She sniffs lightly and retrieves a napkin from the table to dab her cheeks.
“Oh now, Sylvia,” says Rossini scooting closer to her. He puts his arm around her shoulders and slides his hand higher on her thigh, recreating the pose he’d assumed with the bottle-job before Sylvia’s arrival. In a handful of moments, Sylvia has replaced the blonde in the booth, in Rossini’s thoughts, and in the thief’s plans for the night.
Rossini is typical, a man led by his ego and his cock, who believes himself the cure-all for a woman’s pain. His need to rescue her is an evolutionary blindfold, and though she finds his predictability unsatisfying, it serves her purpose.
Sylvia is twenty years old. For two years she has enjoyed an affair with Joe Tocci, a handsome and sophisticated man who would soon be named boss of his own crew. He is her lover and her employer, sending her on trips across the city, muling drugs and cash. Sylvia takes pride in her work, feeling she is paying her dues and earning respect wit
hin the rackets, unlike the other women who satisfy themselves in the roles of whore, wife, or victim.
One night she returns to the apartment Tocci has rented for her to find Joe and six of his friends three sheets to the completely fucked up, and before she can set down her handbag, a scrawny prick with buck teeth and the bumpy skin of a gourd by the name of Toady turns to Joe and says, “Mind if I take a ride?”
To her amusement, Joe replies, “I’d kind’a like to see that.”
Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.
Before she knows what is happening, the men approach her. They grab her arms painfully and hoist her from the floor. Then she is pinned to the dining room table, men holding her arms and her legs while Toady rips away her clothes. Sylvia screams and Joe Tocci slaps her and tells her to keep her, “whore mouth shut.” Toady climbs on her first and as he begins the rape, Sylvia spits in his face. Toady balls up his fist and punches her in the mouth. The violence so thrills him he hits her again and again. Dazed by concussion, Sylvia squeezes her eyes closed. She imagines herself in an ocean, except it is a sea of stones. She is batted this way and that by granite waves that stink of men. Opening her eyes Sylvia sees a series of faces hovering above her, blurred and monstrous in their lust. One man kneels on the dining room table and lifts her head by a fistful of hair before forcing his cock in her mouth, and the scents of urine and sweat fill her nose and she thinks she might drown in them. Hot spray lands on her face and thighs and belly, and they turn her over so that her burning cheek is momentarily soothed by the coolness of the polished wood, and then she is afloat again, tossed about like flotsam on fever-hot swells of stone. And later, so much later, as a dozen muffled aches throb across her body she hears Tocci laughing. He says, “I guess I better get a new one. This one’s broken.”
Sylvia rarely thinks of this night. She tells herself the memories were scraped away with the brat one of those cocksuckers had put inside of her.
Morning light streams through thin curtains, bathing Sylvia’s face. She wipes her eyes and hears footsteps. Rossini enters the bedroom holding two mugs of coffee. He is naked and though bulky, his added pounds are solid and intimidating, and she likes the way his body looks.
He hands her one of the mugs and sits on the edge of the bed beside her.
“So tell me what you’re doing here,” he says, taking her off guard.
She holds the mug in both hands, like a little girl sipping cocoa and offers Rossini an innocent gaze, which makes him laugh like a mule. His reaction annoys her but she refuses to let the lie fall.
“Look Syl,” Rossini says once his amusement is under control, “You think I’m a dumb Wop fucker, but I’m not that dumb. I saw the way you twisted Louis around your finger. You drove him out of his fucking mind. I never saw anything like it. So while I can play along with some horseshit to get a roll, and maybe even believe you were lonely and needed a bit of hard to make it through the night, the fact you’re still here tells me you want more than my cock.”
“Maybe I like you,” Sylvia says over the lip of her coffee mug.
“And maybe I’ll sprout tits and be the happiest girl in the whole USA,” he says, still exhibiting great amusement at the game. “What do you think? You think I’m going to sprout tits?”
“Fine,” she says. She places her mug on the nightstand and leans back on the headboard. “I want you to help me with a job.”
“That’s more like it,” Rossini says. He drinks from his mug and looks out the window.
“Are you angry?”
“Relieved,” he says. “I like to know where I stand. What’s the job?”
She hesitates because Louis and Mickey had been close. She doesn’t know if the thief retains loyalty to his dead boss, but she cannot drop the subject now. If Rossini declines, she will find a way to convince him as she has convinced other men in the past.
“I want to hit Louis’s house,” she says.
The night after the funeral Mary Towne, Louis’s widow, called me to say she was in Miami with her two sons. I was sitting on the sofa with my arm around my wife, and we were watching an animated film about dogs, and when the phone rang I thought it might have been our daughter who called frequently from her college dorm. To hear Mary Towne’s shrill voice—instead of my daughter’s—irritated the hell out of me.
“It’s those papers you gave me,” Mary said.
“About the estate?” I asked.
“Well, what other papers did you give me to sign?” Her voice was like a scalpel scraping bone.
Mary had insisted on reading Louis’s will the day after his murder. The fat widow had spent two hours in my office going over the details of Towne’s financial holdings, picking and pecking at the numbers like a starving bird, instead of staying home to comfort her children. At the funeral she’d put on a fine show of grief. Empty. Meaningless. I’d been appalled and wondered how a human being’s moral compass could waver so far from true north.
Not that Towne was a man who deserved authentic mourning from his wife. I’d told him a hundred times I had no interest in his sexual conquests, but Towne was a braggart and insisted I endure his tales of whoring and perversion. I’d always felt sorry for his cheated wife. And then I met her.
“What about the papers, Mary?”
“I signed them the way you said, but we were running late for our flight.”
“So you didn’t have them messengered to my office?”
“I told you, we were late for our fight. I didn’t have time. Just go by the house in the morning and pick them up.”
“Mary, that’s highly irregular.”
“Well, you’d better do something. I don’t want those papers sitting around for two weeks holding everything up. There’s a key in the planter on the back porch and the security code is Louis’s birthday—day and month. You can bill me for your precious time.”
Then she hung up, cutting off the protests climbing up my tongue.
Sylvia sits in the passenger seat of a stolen sedan. Rossini finishes a cigarette and grinds it out in the ashtray and turns in the seat to face her.
“He’s got no real security,” the thief says. “Obviously he’s not going to have cameras recording who comes and goes. He’s got a simple contact system that will take all of a minute to kill.”
“He wasn’t very cautious,” Sylvia says.
“He was scary enough that he didn’t have to be. No one was going to fuck Louis over—no one that wanted to stay alive anyway. The guy was more than connected.”
“What does that mean?”
“You telling me you don’t know about Louis’s hobby?
“You mean his oogedy boogedy mumbo jumbo?”
“It was a hell of a lot more than that,” Rossini says. “He put the fear of god, or the devil, or whatever he worshiped into the whole crew. Guys that crossed Louis ended up dog food. You heard about Joe Tocci, right? Last year he disrespected Louis at a meeting and his men found Tocci shredded like barbecue pork in the john of his apartment. They said he wasn’t in there for more than a few minutes, and there was no other way into that crapper but the one door. Louis got to him anyway.”
“Tocci got what he deserved,” Sylvia mutters.
“We all get what we deserve,” Rossini says. “But the thing is, Louis Towne was not a made man. He was never going to be a made man because he didn’t have the blood, but Tocci was a made man. You hit a made man and you’re landfill, but no one retaliated on Tocci’s behalf. No one. Not his crew. Not the organization. They knew Louis did it, but they knew what Louis was capable of so they let him alone.”
“Until someone put two in his head.”
“Over a year later,” Rossini says. “I’m just saying he didn’t have security because he knew he was scarier than anything that could get in his house.”
Sylvia follows the thief into the dining room and through an opulent living room. She feels anger, seeing the statuary and the silk-upholstered sofa, and t
he crystal vases on marble tables. This should have been hers. She should have been sitting on that sofa with a glass of champagne, not prowling the house looking for scraps. She follows Rossini up the stairs and runs a hand along the ornately carved mahogany banister.
“His safe is in his study,” Rossini says.
After his words fade, Sylvia feels uneasy. The air grows thick and envelops her, and she believes she can feel it jostled, hitting her like ripples on the surface of a lake. Even the subtle movements of Rossini on the stairs ahead play over her skin, but there is another body at work, displacing the air. She remembers a similar sensation she had felt whenever Louis entered a room, a heaviness as if his presence curdled the atmosphere.
Uncertain, with her skin alit by anxiety, Sylvia follows the thief to the landing and down a black hallway. The sharp ray of a flashlight momentarily blinds her. Rossini offers a rapid apology and puts the cylinder in his mouth. At the center of the beam, is a deadbolt lock. Rossini attacks it with his picks and in a few moments he has the bolt retracted. Then he sets to work on the cheaper, less-complicated lock recessed in the knob.
After opening the door, Rossini leaves Sylvia on the threshold and starts across the room, his silhouette playing against the bobbing disc of light from his lantern. She watches him open a closet door and is surprised to see a shining metal panel beyond, a panel with a combination dial and a three-pronged handle. Louis’s safe takes up an entire closet. Sylvia’s trepidation turns to excitement as she anticipates the sheer volume of wealth such a vault could hold.
“This is going to take some time,” he tells her. “I helped him pick this model, so I know what I’m up against. You might want to keep an eye on the window.”
Sylvia does. She pulls back the drapes and leans against the wall. The landscape beyond the window is carved of shadows. The only light comes from the far end of the drive, beyond the gate, where an arc lamp hangs over the street. Everything between this illumination and Sylvia is gloom. She looks into it and finds nothing. She looks back at Rossini and considers her choice of accomplice.