by Norman Green
Five seconds later, the van’s brake lights lit up just as the gypsy cab rounded the corner of Webster Avenue. She could hear the cab’s engine moan as it accelerated up the hill. There was a heavy metal trash can on the curb—she’d seen it on her way up the hill, it was the reason she’d picked this particular spot . . . She grabbed it, swung it high over her head, stepped out, and planted it in the windshield of the cab as it screamed past. The sound of exploding glass was followed closely by the noise of the cab sideswiping the row of cars on the far side of the street. Two of them had alarms that began hooting mindlessly into the uncaring Bronx night. The cab had hit the last car hard enough to climb up onto its trunk in grotesque metallic coitus, and its headlights were now pointing more or less skyward. The metal garbage can was still embedded in what was left of the cab’s windshield. Al walked across the street to survey the damage.
The driver’s side airbag had gone off, punching the driver unconscious. The front passenger had apparently planted his face on the inside of the windshield, because there was a head-sized impression in what was left of the glass, and the man lay back in the seat, just beginning to stir, blood seeping down out of his nose. One of the back doors was open, and the third guy was hanging out of the car, semiconscious. Al grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out, headed for the opposite sidewalk.
She heard Gearoid’s heels clicking on the pavement as he stumbled down the hill and skidded to a stop behind her. “Holy shit!” he said. “Holy mudder a Christ!” She ignored him and kept going, and he followed her between two of the buildings, down into a pitch-black alleyway lined with stinking garbage cans. There was a wrought-iron fence at the front of the alley with a gate hanging from one hinge. Al pushed her way past the gate and into the darkness. She dropped the guy when they were halfway up the alley and began patting him down. “No wallet,” she said. “No keys, no money. Got a piece, though.” She came up with it. It was a small gun, black, fit neatly into her hand with just the barrel sticking out. She could barely make it out, down in that unlit space.
“What is it?” Gearoid asked her.
She squinted at the pistol. “Throwaway, looks like a thirty-eight. Bet your house the serial number’s filed off. This guy was planning to hose one or both of us, drop this thing down a sewer, and then go home.” She bent down over the prone man. “Hey, asshole. C’mon, wake up.” She grabbed the guy by the hair and slapped his face, to no effect. “C’mon, dickhead. Wake up. Wake up, buddy.” She glanced back down the alley toward the street, her eyes adjusting to the gloom.
After a few more seconds, the guy rolled over on his side and groaned. Alessandra gave the guy a minute longer to come around, then stuck the pistol in his ear.
“All right, asshole. Who are you? What do you want?”
The guy looked up then, first at Al, then at Gearoid, then at the gun. His face twisted into a sneer. “Fock you.”
“Yeah, maricon? You think I won’t shoot you? How about I pop you with your own piece, you dumb bastard. How about I stick this up your ass and pull the trigger? They paying you enough for that, chica? Who you working for?”
“None of your focking business,” the guy said. He glanced at Gearoid again.
“Forget him,” she said. “He ain’t gonna help you. It’s you and me, baby. Tell me who you’re working for.”
“Fock you,” the guy said. His face still showed nothing but contempt.
“Yeah? How much did you get paid for this gig? Not enough to die for, am I right?”
“You ain’t gonna do shit. You gonna stand there talking all night.”
“Yeah, you think so? You don’t give me a name, and I mean right now, I am gonna shoot you right in the head.” She grabbed the guy by his collar and pulled him up onto his knees, stuck the gun back in the guy’s ear. “What you gonna tell them when you get to hell? You gonna admit you got wasted by a girl? Huh? Last chance, my friend.”
The guy’s face twisted into a sneer, and his eyes glittered. “Go ahead.”
“Don’t do it,” Gearoid croaked.
“Why not? Friend of yours?”
“No. But don’t do it. It’s not worth it.”
“No? How about I just shoot his dick off?” She pulled the pistol back, pointed it at the guy’s crotch. His eyes went wide then, and he swallowed, glanced at Gearoid one more time, his face showing, at last, a touch of fear. Alessandra cocked her head, listening to the sound of a distant siren. “Too late now,” she said. She turned back to the guy. “Your lucky night.”
They went out through the back end of the alley, through a dimly lit courtyard and into a building on the far side, then exited onto the sidewalk a block away from the car crash. Al had stripped their assailant, left him crouched naked in the reeking alley. She stuffed the guy’s clothes and his pistol into a trash can as she and Gearoid went up the hill. They turned the corner and headed toward the van just in time to see a police cruiser come down the hill and stop on the corner. Two cops got out of the car. One of them went down to look at the accident, the other one stopped Al and Gearoid when they got to the corner. He looked from one face to the other. “Who are you two?” he said. “And what are you doing here?”
Gearoid took a step forward, holding his hand out. “Hello, Officer,” he said. “We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses. We was just having a Bible study with a family right around the corner. We’re parked up the hill, there.” The cop didn’t shake Gearoid’s hand.
“You people are fucking crazy, you know that? I don’t even come down here in the daytime without a gun. You see what happened here?”
“No,” Gearoid said. “We heard the noise, though.”
The cop shook his head. “You two should really do this, like, during the day.”
“God will protect us,” Gearoid said.
“Sure he will,” the cop said. “Get outta here, both of you.”
“Have a blessed day, Officer.”
“Didn’t I already tell you to get lost?”
Gearoid collapsed in the car seat, sick with relief. Al looked over at him and laughed. Gearoid shook his head. “That cop was right, you are crazy. Do you know that?”
“Me? You didn’t do so bad yourself. Bible study, that was priceless. Where’d you come up with that?”
“I don’t know.” Gearoid wiped his face and tried to sit up a little straighter. “Would you have really killed that man?”
“I wanted him to think I would.”
“He wasn’t going to tell you anything.”
“No. I think he was actually going to take a bullet.”
“God.”
“Yeah. I hate to say it, but he wasn’t posing, he was for real.” Another siren sounded somewhere in the distance, but it was the whine of an ambulance and not the racket of a police cruiser. “You recognize him?”
Gearoid shook his head. “Never saw him before in my life.”
Eight
Isn’t that just like you, she thought. You finally get up enough nerve to have a guy over and he’s unconscious the whole time . . . O’Hagan lay on the daybed, unmoving, in exactly the same position he’d been in when she left for morning practice two hours ago. She had considered blowing off the class, but it bothered her, losing something she’d already paid for. Besides, it was not something she could let go that easily. It wasn’t like she enjoyed the class, it was hard, it was early, and the sensei drove her like she was the world’s worst student. She’d felt, right from the beginning, that he disapproved of her, thought her previous training unorthodox and dangerous. For her part, she wondered how much real application there was for what she was learning. How well does this stuff work when you cross that door and get into the real world? She was too proud to ask, just as the sensei was too proud to ask who her previous teacher had been. She could feel it, though, he wanted her to place herself entirely in his hands.
She could think of a hundred reasons why she could never do it. She flexed her arm, made a fist, looked at it. It’s the only thing
your father ever gave you. How could you let it go?
She stopped for breakfast on her way back. She sat alone at a table, listened to the messages on her voice mail. One of them was the call she’d ignored when she’d been with Helen Caughlan. It was from someone who identified himself as a reporter. She called the number he’d left.
“Rod Benson,” the voice said.
Al decided to mess with the guy. “What kind of a mother,” she said, “would saddle a poor helpless infant with a name like ‘Rod’?”
Benson had that smoker’s laugh that ended with a cough, sounded like someone tearing a piece of rotten canvas in half. She could hear his breath rattle deep in his lungs. “Oh, now that’s a subject I could get lost in,” he said. “But it’s a boring story, when you get right down to it. I do think ‘Rod’ is a distinct improvement over ‘Rodney,’ which is what she called me right up to the instant I pushed her wheelchair off that balcony. So call me anything you like, as long as it isn’t ‘Rodney.’ Miss Martillo, I presume.”
“How did you hear about me? Can I ask how you got my number?”
“Well, I’m only as good as my sources. But thank you for returning my call. I thought perhaps the name of my employer had frightened you off.”
She couldn’t picture Marty telling Benson about her. Must have been someone on Caughlan’s end, she thought. “The SoCal Insider? Not so far.”
“That’s probably a good thing. Let me get right to it, Miss Martillo. Did you know that Willy Caughlan was, ahh, intimate with Shine before he died?”
“Heard the rumor,” Al said. “I haven’t confirmed it, though. All I’ve got is hearsay.”
“Well, if it’s good strong hearsay, we’ll print it. I’m just kidding, Miss Martillo. Sort of. I do actually have eyewitnesses who have verified the nature of the relationship between Willy Caughlan and Shine.”
“You have people claiming they saw what, exactly? Are these the same people who give you pictures of that three-hundred-pound baby?”
“That’s in the past, Miss Martillo. We have evolved since that story last ran. My sources may not have seen actual coitus, but they did observe plenty of face-sucking and general fondling. And where there’s fondling, I say there’s fire. But what I heard was that Willy actually filmed the two of them. En flagrante.”
“Tacky,” Al said.
“You’re only young once, Miss Martillo. But I do agree that one should exercise caution when it comes to the ways and means by which one chooses to immortalize oneself.”
“So you’re after the tape.”
“Darling, the world is after that tape. Mind you, I can’t say for a fact that it exists, but Shine’s camp has been singing all the usual songs.”
“What would those be?”
“Oh, you know. ‘Unconscionable invasion of privacy,’ and so on and so forth. Seeking injunctions to prevent the public display of something that apparently no one has seen yet. That is to say, they’ve been acting very guilty.”
“How about that? You suppose they’re worried about the effect this will have on her career?”
“Well now, that all depends on how good she looks naked, doesn’t it? If her people are very smart, and I am betting that they are, they might be banking on reverse psychology. Trying your damnedest to bottle something up is the best way to make sure everybody wants to see it.”
“Why would Shine want to appear in a porn tape? How much money could she make off that?”
“Miss Martillo, please. It isn’t the royalties from the tape, as considerable as they might be. What we’re talking about here is ink. Publicity. The lifeblood of the entertainment industry. It’s everything. Ever since word of this tape leaked out, Shine has been all over the news. I’m talking about print, television, and the Internet. She’s gotten weeks over this! I heard she’s on Larry King’s most-wanted list. Name recognition and market penetration are the only things that matter here. If she could string this out for, say, another month or so, and then have the tape come out, it would vault her into a higher tier of celebrity. She’d be right up there with Pamela Anderson. As a matter of fact, having the tape go missing might be the worst that could happen, from her point of view.”
“Wow.”
“Exactly. So I want to make something clear to you: if, in the course of your, ahh, activities, you happen to stumble across such an item, I’m guessing it would be worth something in the neighborhood of half a million.”
“Dollars? Are you kidding?”
“I’m completely serious.”
“Why don’t you hire someone to go look for it?”
“Someone such as yourself?”
“I’m already booked. But I’m sure that there are plenty of talented people . . .”
“Miss Martillo, you surmise correctly, we do employ a number of your compatriots. And we have, in fact, tasked one or two of them to pursue the item in question through the usual channels. But we have a unique situation here. Somewhat of a problem. First of all, the person who would have been in possession of the video is unfortunately deceased. And second, his father is, ahh, how shall I put this? Formidable. And not without assets. He caught one of our reporters going through his trash recently, and the man was beaten severely. Quite frankly, no one on staff wants to tangle with him.”
“You think I do?”
“Miss Martillo, you’d have to solve that equation on your own. If, however, certain things or certain information were to, quietly, come into your possession, then you might consider passing them, quietly, along. I assure you, we can guarantee your anonymity. For whatever it’s worth, we do quite a bit of business in this fashion.”
“You sound as though you’re proud of that.”
He laughed, and again she winced at the sound. “Ah, well, listen, Miss Martillo, I don’t pretend to be the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, or even Hedda Hopper. But Americans love celebrities, and I make a fine living airing the soiled linens of the famous and semifamous. I assure you, there isn’t a journalist alive who wouldn’t strangle his own mother to get his hands on that video, even if he had to turn around and sell it to someone like me. Ethics, Miss Martillo, are far more popular when the price tag attached isn’t too hard to swallow. Anything over, say, a month’s pay, they become inconvenient.”
“I can’t argue with you, Mr. Benson.”
“I do hope you won’t forget me, Miss Martillo.”
“Not a chance,” she said. “I’ll call you if I find what you’re looking for.”
This is probably just another case of insufficient paranoia, Al thought as she ended the call. The girl had probably done it in innocence. She probably had fully intended to destroy the thing after she and Willy looked at it. Maybe she’d been confident that no one else would ever see it.
And maybe Rod Benson was right.
First, she made the video, assume that much. Second, someone leaked word of its existence. Third, her management team had denied the whole thing. Fourth, her lawyers had gone to court, giving everyone the impression that she was fighting to keep the thing off the market. Those were the steps that had already been taken. If the objective really had been to keep Shine’s name and face in the news, it had, according to Benson, succeeded admirably. So fifth, just as the next news cycle gets off the ground, the video hits the Internet, and Shine’s lawyers, surrendering to the inevitable, would demand a cut of the profits for their client. And if Shine were cold-blooded enough, she would tearfully and publicly cop to it all, mourning the loss of the love of her life, the late, great guitarist, Sean Willy Caughlan.
And if her next album was at all competent, it would hit like an atomic bomb.
Half a million bucks. What a thought! She couldn’t even imagine what that would feel like.
She wondered if Daniel Caughlan knew about the video.
She brought a large container of coffee home with her, left it, open and steaming, on the floor next to O’Hagan. She sat in a chair in the opposite corner and waited. It took a few
minutes, but the smell brought him around. He stirred, then put his hands up to his head. She looked past him at the two posters she had pinned to the far wall. The Aegean Sea, sky and ocean impossibly blue, bright white buildings on a hill sloping down to the water’s edge. I’ll go one day, she told herself often, but she didn’t believe it. Anyhow, it was the colors she really loved. They made her feel warm, almost peaceful.
“Mudder a Christ.” His voice was soft, muffled.
“So you’re alive after all.” What is it about this guy, she asked herself. In this unguarded moment, his hair all crazy, unshaven, a pained look on his face, he looked more like a man to her than anyone she could think of. Except Victor, maybe. Except her father.
“Don’t jump to conclusions.” Gearoid opened one eye and peered at her, moving his head carefully. “Al,” he said. “Al, is that you?”
“In the flesh.”
He rolled over slowly. “Ah, God, coffee. Martillo, you’re an angel of bleedin’ mercy.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
He pushed himself into a sitting position, bent down for the coffee. “God,” he said. “I’m drier than a cork leg. This your place, then?”
“Yep.”
He looked around. “Well, t’anks for not leaving me down there in Hotel Chevrolet.” He stared at her. “Last night really happened, didn’t it? Up in the Bronx.”
“How much do you remember?”
“I remember seeing you take out one car and three good men, all by yourself,” he said.
Great, she thought. Now whenever this guy sees you, all he’s going to think of is a Mutant Ninja Turtle. “And I remember you sweet-talking some cop into letting us walk.”