by Norman Green
They all laughed, all except Helen Caughlan, who laid a hand on the speaker’s arm. “He’ll get a girlfriend soon, honey, they all do. You just need to make sure—” She couldn’t continue, though, she lost her audience when the lawn sprinklers just outside went on prematurely, spritzing about a dozen guests who’d been hanging around in front of the house.
They all seemed to take it well enough. The men trooped in through the front door, laughing it off. The women followed them, pretending not to care, but they made their way, one by one, into the powder room to check on hair and makeup. Al watched them emerge, repainted, looking a touch younger and fresher than when they’d gone in. It was an art that she’d never really mastered; her mother had died too soon to teach her, and there had been no one else. She supposed it was too late now, she was used to looking the way she looked and it was hard for her to picture what she ought to change. You can take the girl outta Brownsville, she thought . . .
Daniel Caughlan didn’t weather the sprinkler incident as well as his guests. One of the sprinkler heads was malfunctioning, and instead of a gentle shower, the thing was shooting a jet of water thirty feet straight up in the air. Caughlan stood in the grass staring at it, his jaw clamped shut, face red, visibly angry and growing steadily wetter. His wife stood inside one of the enormous windows flanking the entrance, watching him, but her back was to Alessandra. After a while someone got the water shut off. Probably O’Hagan, Al thought. Al watched from her seat in the balcony as Caughlan kicked the dirt and grass away from the offending sprinkler head. Someone, she thought, is going to hear some shit about that . . . To her left was the master suite where Caughlan slept, and where, presumably, he would soon repair for a change of clothes. She walked away, down the stairs, and out into the backyard. She took refuge on a park bench down by Caughlan’s garden.
Strange thing, she thought, for a man like him to grow vegetables. You would never refuse him if he wanted to give you tomatoes, she thought, but you’d probably think twice about eating them. About a quarter of the garden was ripped out. Whatever had been growing there had either lived out its useful life or had failed to please Caughlan, and now that corner was raw black earth. The rest, though, was thick and green. Al didn’t recognize all of the plants, but some of them were easy to identify: the tomatoes were staked to a wire trellis, the carrots had orange heads poking through the dirt, and a low, dark, densely growing vine produced either cucumbers or green zucchini, Al wasn’t quite sure which.
Daniel Caughlan found her there a while later.
He sat down on the bench beside her. “So?” he said. He looked at her, not the garden. “You have a good time?”
She nodded, mostly out of reflex. She chewed on her lower lip. “Keep asking myself why, though.”
“Why I asked you?”
“No.” Her father had drummed it into her: there was only one major motivation for men, it was why they did almost everything. “A house is your refuge, isn’t it? It’s the place you hole up, where you can shut the world out. I mean, look at this place. It’s beautiful, it’s more than I could imagine ever wanting, but you’ve got all of these characters here.” She looked at him. “You don’t seem like you’re enjoying yourself. This afternoon had to be a production, even for you. This couldn’t have all been for my benefit. Why put yourself through it?”
He shrugged. “Some of it’s business. You gotta show ’em you still got it. And when you grow up as poor as I did . . .” He stopped, looked at her. “Can’t use that line on you, I suppose.”
“No,” she said. “I never pictured you in a place like this, though. I had you figured more for a west side pent house. This place has got to be an enormous pain in the ass. I bet the sprinkler system is the least of your problems.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said with a sudden heat. “Feckin’ sprinkler, the landscape guy is gonna get a good kick in the arse about that, you can bet on it. I’ve thought about the other, though, I’ve thought about goin’ down that road. But I’ll never move back into Manhattan. I’ll never sell this house.” He glanced out at the square of raw dirt in front of the two of them. “If the missus is still around when I die, she can do what she likes with it, I suppose I don’t give a damn. Till then, I’m keeping it.”
“You’re dug in.”
“This is it for me, I’m not going anywhere new.”
“I couldn’t pay the light bill for this place.”
“Not to mention the house keepers, the feckin’ interior designer, the property taxes, the contractors, the pool guys, the gardeners . . . It never stops.”
“Gardeners? I thought you planted this garden.”
“No.” Caughlan snickered. “I have planted a thing or two here, meself, but I’ve got men doing most of the work.”
“Your personal finances,” she said, and she watched as his eyes came around and met hers. She stared at him evenly. “Do you use an accountant or do you tend to them yourself?”
“I got a guy,” he said, “but I sign the checks meself.”
“You keep all your records here?”
He nodded. “Upstairs, in the office.”
“All right,” she said. “Monday, I’ll come back out and go through what you’ve got going on.”
“I suppose it’s necessary,” he said, “but that don’t make it feel any better.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “Probably feel better than being in jail, though.”
“Good point. Listen, I’ve got a favor to ask of you.”
“Okay.”
“Stick around a while longer, then give O’Hagan a ride back to Brooklyn. He’s been drinking steady all afternoon. I already lifted his keys. I can’t have him killing himself on the drive home.”
“All right,” she said. “My pleasure.”
“You learn anything today?”
“Yes.”
He eyed her. “You wanna talk about it?”
“Not just yet.”
He nodded. “I tend to be a straight-line thinker,” he said. “A plus B equals C. Works well enough, most of the time. I used to think it was a male thing, and that women’s heads was foreign territory. Well, that may be, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Some people don’t bother too much with A, B, and C, they just watch, they keep taking in what they see, and then they make the leap. They reach right across the bog the rest of us are stuck in, all the way across to the answer that’s been staring at us all.” He looked over at her. “I’m thinking that’s the way your mind works. I hope I’m not wrong.”
Al shrugged. “Hard to say.”
Caughlan was right, Gearoid O’Hagan had drank enough so that the anger that lay beneath his morose exterior was showing through. Alessandra, sorry she’d promised to stay, ran into him when she wandered into Caughlan’s kitchen. She was growing tired of the place. There were empty glasses on almost every available surface, there were dirty plates shoved into potted plants, and the crowd that remained was deteriorating. This could get ugly, she thought, before it’s over. O’Hagan was leaning on the island in the center of the kitchen. Al rested her elbows on the side opposite him, and the two of them listened to a loud argument coming from the foyer about who was, and was not, going to drive home. The woman was the blonde who’d been complaining about her husband’s Cialis. Al took a step, peered down the hall to see the combatants. The man was Jerry Tomasino.
“How drunk are those two,” Al said.
“She’s drunker’n me,” O’Hagan said, “but not by a lot. Course, I’ve probably had a lot more practice at it than her. It’s these feckin’ amateurs, givin’ honnes drunks a bad name. But that bassard Tomasino, he’s as sober as when he walked in here.”
“Doesn’t drink?”
“He drinks, all right. But you’ll never see him show it. Part of his deal with the divil.”
“What’s he do?”
O’Hagan shrugged. “Chemicals. Real estate. Used to be a politician. Mayor of Union feckin’ City, twenty years ba
ck. Didn’t go to jail when he was done being mayor, neither.”
“How would he know Caughlan?”
“D’ese guys are all the same, Al. If there’s a buck, they’re all over it.” He looked around carefully, then glanced back at Al. “Himself owns a couple acres down on the Husson River. In Hoboken. Used to be a warehouse, back when the whole feckin’ waterfront wasn’t nothing but a unflushed toilet. Now, though, that empty buildin’ and the dirt it’s on is worth millions.”
“Serious?”
He nodded slowly, looked at her through half-lidded eyes. He looked like he was falling asleep on his feet. “Twenny million. Give or take. But firs’, you know, Tomasino has ta change the zoning for ’im. Thass the way of it in Jersey.”
“So? Won’t Caughlan just pay him off?”
O’Hagan inhaled and tried to stand up straighter. “Yeah, course. But fer how much, thass the question. There’ll be a lot of arse-sniffin’ and growlin’ and bared teeth before they settle it.”
“You’re working here, am I right?”
He grimaced. “Makin’ the attempt.” He looked at her. “You talk to Himself?”
She nodded. “He caught me snooping in his son’s room.”
“He’d be disappointed if you didn’t look. Be disappointed in himself if he missed you doin’ it.”
“You think he’s a shark.”
“You ain’t met the real Daniel Caughlan,” he said. “Back him into a corner, he turns into Dracula.”
“Maybe so.”
“No maybe about it. So now you’ve seen ’em in their native habitat, all of these flaming arseholes he’s got crowded around. What do you think?”
Before she had a chance to answer, she heard Helen Caughlan, her voice strident, yelling at one of the waitstaff. O’Hagan wiped his face with both hands. “Better go,” he said.
Seven
It wasn’t a big thing. Maybe the car’s driver wasn’t even aware of it, but the guy had a headlight loose. Alessandra would feel the Astro go over a rut, and four or five seconds later, the light on the driver’s side of one of the cars behind her would flicker in her mirrors. She drove south, through the affluent little towns clustered on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, and the guy stayed with her, a few cars back. Gearoid O’Hagan was slumped in the passenger seat beside her, floating in that creamy dreamworld halfway between consciousness and oblivion.
“Gro, where do you live?”
“Huh?” He rolled his head in her direction, tried to focus.
“Your address. Where do you live?”
“Brooklyn,” he said.
“I know that. Where in Brooklyn?”
“Red Hook,” he said. “Right offa the BQE.” His head rolled back and his eyes closed.
She knew the neighborhood. It was in a state of flux, clawing its way back to respectability, but it was still a dicey place at night, half-industrial and too deserted for her taste. Even if she knew few of the inhabitants, she felt more comfortable living in Brooklyn Heights, a crowded place. There was comfort, for some reason, in the middle of the swarm. Plus, if the people in the car following them knew that Al and Gearoid were going to Red Hook, they might have a welcoming committee set up. Being too predictable would be a mistake. She glanced over at O’Hagan. The guy looked like he was too far gone to be a lot of help. She piloted the Astro through the streets of Englewood, New Jersey, past the dark and shuttered windows of the downtown stores. Fancy handbags, expensive dresses, fur coats . . . She couldn’t imagine herself shopping in any of them. They’d take one look at you, she thought, they’d hear your voice, see the color of your skin, and they’d write you off. What you doin’ in here, girl? This shit ain’t for you . . . “Hey, Gro,” she said, glancing in his direction.
He didn’t look like he’d heard her.
“I ever tell you where my father lives?” The entrance ramp to Route 4 was on her right, and she got on. It was a couple miles up the hill to the toll booths at the George Washington Bridge. She watched her mirrors, trying to see what kind of car it was that was following, but it was too dark and the guy stayed too far back. Couldn’t count heads. No way to tell how many in the car. Big sedan, though, she could see that much. We ought to be safe for the moment, she thought. If they didn’t try anything on the quiet streets of the Jersey suburbs, they’re not likely to make a move on the highway. Too many eyes. They’ll wait until we get to Brooklyn . . .
“Hey, Gro.”
“Hmmph.”
“You ever been to the Bronx?”
His chin came up off his chest. “Bronx?” He stared at her stupidly. “Wass in the Bronx?”
“My father. Wanna meet him?”
He seemed to come out of it a bit more. “Takin’ me home to meet the folks? I ain’t even kissed you yet.”
“No, you haven’t.” The guy didn’t lack for confidence. She remembered when she’d caught his eyes, back at Caughlan’s house, remembered seeing his face light up. “What are you waiting for?”
He swallowed once, blinked, squinted at her, then looked around. “Ahhh . . .”
Talking to a drunk, she told herself, is like talking to a child. “You wanna see the Bronx?” She glanced in her mirror, watched until she picked up the car. It was still back there. Gearoid’s head rolled back, rested against the seat.
“Whatever you wan’,” he said.
She eyed the mirror. You guys want to play poker with me, she thought, we’re going to play by my rules . . . “We’ll show ’em a card,” she said. “See how bad they want it.”
Gearoid’s eyes were closed again. “Mmm.”
Manhattan is just a sharp, narrow sliver of an island where the George Washington Bridge hits it, only seven blocks wide. Alessandra stayed on the highway and the Astro was across in an eyeblink, from the Hudson River, which separates Jersey from Manhattan, and then over the Harlem River, which separates Manhattan from the Bronx. On the far side of the Harlem River, Route 95 becomes the Cross-Bronx Expressway. It is a place where you do not stop unless you are forced to do so, you do not leave the highway unless you are sure of your ground. Al passed by the first three exits. She got off at the fourth, Webster Avenue, a wide, fourlane road. She caught the green light at the end of the ramp and turned right, headed deeper into the South Bronx. The car behind her, trailing by about two hundred feet, ran the yellow light and fell in behind them. She eyed the side streets as they drove past, looking for the right one. “Gearoid,” she said. She reached over, grabbed his shoulder and shook him. “Hey, Gro, wake up.”
“I’m awake,” he said. He sounded like himself for the first time in a while. “Where are we?”
“South Bronx.”
He looked around, his face clenched into a frown. He looked like a man who knew he’d forgotten something important. “What the hell are we doing here?”
“We’re gonna step on a cockroach. Put your seat belt on.”
He looked at her, steadied himself, then complied. He stared at her then, black eyes in a dark face. “What’s up?”
“We’re being followed,” she said. There were no other cars moving on Webster Avenue, just the Astro and the car following. The traffic lights began turning yellow, then red. Al ran the first light, pulled to a stop at the next, her eyes on the rearview mirror.
“G’wan,” Gearoid said, sounding almost sober. “Go away out of that.”
“Two blocks back,” she told him. “Sitting at the light.”
“Caughlan,” he said, breathing a world of distaste into the word. “Or someone wanting to mess with him.” He kicked himself a little more erect. “What the hell’d you come down here for? You’ve played right into their hands. You should have went to a police station. That would have scared them off.”
“What good would that do?” she asked him.
He stared at her. “You’re crazy,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said. “You sounded, just now, like you hated Caughlan. Why? Is it the religious thing? Him Catholic an
d you Protestant? Something like that?”
“Could be,” he said. He was sounding progressively more awake. He turned to look at the car behind them again. “Maybe it’s that he’s my boss, maybe it’s that he’s married to a beautiful woman and he treats her like dirt. Or maybe it’s just in my blood to hate everyone that’s got a little more than me. Martillo, what the hell are you going to do?”
The light turned green. Alessandra winked at him. “Hang on,” she said, and she turned the wheel all the way to the left, then stomped on the gas. The Astro’s rear wheels howled, then caught, and the van spun 180 degrees and rocketed back north. It was a gypsy cab, Chevy, red and black. Three guys inside. The one in the backseat gesticulated wildly as the driver fought the steering wheel, turning the big sedan to give chase.
“We’re trying to get away. Right?” Gearoid’s voice was incredulous, uncomprehending.
“Hell, no. We are gonna have a conversation with those guys before we let them go. How far back are they?”
Gearoid turned to look. “About three blocks. There’s three of them, you know.”
“Tell you something that most guys don’t understand,” she said. “There are plenty of equalizers in the world. Anyhow, don’t worry, we’ll be fine. Here’s what’s gonna happen: I’m gonna turn up one of these side streets, and a block or so in, I’m gonna stop and get out. You jump behind the wheel and drive straight up about two blocks, park this thing, and walk back for me. Got it?”
“Yeah,” Gearoid said, “but what—”
“Don’t worry. Just get behind the wheel, drive up two blocks, park, walk back. No big thing.”
“All right.”
“Great,” she said.
“Oh, yeah, grand,” he said.
She found the side street she’d been looking for, jerked the Astro into a skidding right turn, and stood on the gas. Only one or two of the streetlights on the side street were lit, leaving most of the first few blocks in gloom. Cars were parked thick and close on both sides of the street, which ran sharply uphill. Whatever had been built on the left side was gone, razed to a large, brick-littered empty lot behind a chain-link fence. Up ahead, at the top of the hill, dark on dark, some empty and deserted project buildings rose straight up into the night. Jesus, she thought. How bad must they have gotten? She jammed on the brakes, shoved the gearshift into park, and got out. Gearoid leaped out, ran around the front of the Astro, got in, and took off up the hill.