“So … I just made up my mind: to hell with it. Forget about it. And it went away. I don’t know just how it came about, but pretty soon I could see it was an accepted thing: the Fat Man ain’t into broads. Something like that. And then, it’s funny, the babes started coming around.”
Helen didn’t get it. “Coming around? You fell in love?”
“No, no,” he said, with a snort of laughter. “Get over this falling in love thing. No, they saw … I guess … that I was safe. It was okay to horse around and be a little flirty, because it wouldn’t come to anything. I was the Fat Man, right? I didn’t like babes, not that way. I liked to kid around, but nothing funny. Right?”
She saw it, all right. It sounded awful, but she didn’t say anything.
“And it was all right,” he went on. “It didn’t bother me. I forgot about it. But now …” He looked at her in a strange way.
Oh dear, she thought. This is it. She’d been afraid of this. But if he’d gotten over sex, a long time ago…. Maybe he was thinking of something else.
He was. Nonetheless, he took a breath and launched into a little speech. He had deep feelings for her, he said. Yes, very deep feelings. It went beyond their former relationship. He wanted her to forget about that. This was different. He wasn’t her Unca Umby, see? But before she got any ideas…. He raised his hand, to stop her from replying. Just let him finish. He wasn’t some dirty old man.
He actually used those words. “I’m not some dirty old man,” he said. “I’m not interested in that kind of stuff. Oh, maybe a little kiss, a little squeeze.” He laughed uncomfortably.
She sat there, gazing at him, wondering. Was she supposed to jump up and kiss him, hug him? She liked him. She thought he was smart, a strong, deep, mysterious man. She thought that, if it came to that, she would go to bed with him. She had long ago decided that sex didn’t commit you to anything. But what did he want?
What he wanted, it seemed, was an intimacy. He felt they were practically there already. He wanted, he said, someone he could level with.
Well. That wasn’t much, she thought, at first. But then she began to see what he meant. He hadn’t had anybody for some time with whom he could talk unguardedly, someone he could trust and believe in. He was willing to eschew certain physical liberties to have this. He wouldn’t be pawing her, wouldn’t expect…. He left it unsaid.
Maybe he’d never had this intimacy, she thought. He’d had some kind of rapport with Carmine, his lifelong pal, almost a brother. That wasn’t the same, at all, couldn’t have been. He needed this intimacy with a woman, but a special kind of woman. Someone like her. Perhaps there wasn’t any other such woman on the planet, she thought. She felt strangely proud to be that one person, that woman. Her heart filled with empathy toward him.
He had stopped talking. The boat rumbled along, its powerful engine nearly silent, but felt. The water was blue and the waves were light. The sun danced on occasional sprays. It was warm on their backs. They had turned and were angling toward the distant shore, toward home. He must have given some kind of signal to the helmsman. She hadn’t caught it.
“So, whaddaya think?” he said, comically. He smiled sadly at her. He had brown eyes, she noticed. Well, she’d always known they were brown, but now she saw that they were. So this man wants me, she thought, gazing at him. She felt fond. He wants a—what was the word? morganatic? no—wife who can be intimate in a wifely way, but with a difference. An intimate. But not ultimately intimate. An arms-length romance.
“I could do that,” she said.
They both laughed. He gave her hand a squeeze and she kissed his cheek. “You’re sweet,” she said. And suddenly, she was filled with affection for him. She wanted to say, “You know what? I love you, you big lug,” or something coolly, movieish. But she didn’t.
“You’re great,” he said.
“I think we can be great together,” she replied. “But one thing. What about this what’s-her-name? Are you still pining for her? You know, I can’t have that.”
“Oh, no way,” he assured her, solemnly, shaking his head. “I’ve never even seen her again, I swear.”
“Well, you don’t have to swear,” Helen told him. “Anyway, for all we know she might be dead.”
He didn’t like that thought, she saw instantly. That had been a mistake. But then he seemed to brush the thought aside.
“What about Joe?” he said abruptly. “You still carrying a torch for him?”
She almost gulped. She’d forgotten about Joe. Just thinking of him now made her feel like a fool. What had she been thinking of? Romancing Humphrey, imagining some kind of weird affair, and all the time…. What about Joe? Her foolish heart was wrenched.
“Joe?” she said, faintly. “Ah, well, Joe … I haven’t seen Joe. I don’t even know where he is, what he’s doing.” Firmly, she declared, “I haven’t given a thought to Joe in weeks. That’s over. That’s past.”
Humphrey looked at her closely, then nodded. He seemed satisfied. “Okay,” he said. “Good. I like Joe. I always liked Joe. Me and him, we got along. The best I ever saw at what he does. So it wouldn’t bother you to see him?”
“You’ve seen him!” She throttled back her sudden enthusiasm, tried to sound indifferent: “You heard from him?”
Humphrey elected to ignore her sudden excitement, she was relieved to see. “No,” he said, offhandedly, “but I got a feeling.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“A feeling like we haven’t seen the last of Joe Service,” he said. He wouldn’t say any more. He had a feeling.
They soon docked. It had been a fine day. Her mother stayed for supper. Roman stayed too, of course, but he acted kind of funny around Helen. He looked at her almost reproachfully, she thought, but he didn’t say anything. The new chef had prepared grilled salmon with two sauces, one of them a peppery one for Humphrey. Soke talked recipes. She sampled the peppery one. She used to cook with peppers, she said, Hungarian and Italian ones, but not this hot. This was too hot, she said. It was too much for the salmon. Humphrey disagreed, but politely. He had a theory that peppers never really masked other flavors but actually brought them out. Now, heavy cream sauces, he said, that could mask flavor.
After that day, things changed. There was a new intimacy. Not only did Humphrey begin to tell her inside things about the business, sometimes shocking her, but he began to act more possessive, in public. They would be talking to other men, his underlings, men with position, and he would insist that Helen be included in the talk. He’d ask her opinion, or voice “their” opinion—“We think …” or “In our opinion….” And he’d sometimes rest his hand on her shoulder, or her waist.
She liked it. She was beginning to know her way around. She would talk about business practices, informatively, authoritatively, and Humphrey would beam at her, agreeing with her. Telling the other men, “You see? She’s a bright one. That’s the ticket. That’s what we gotta do.”
The one area where they didn’t agree was the cigar business. He couldn’t see her scheme. He listened to her spiel, discussed it with her and Berta. Unfortunately, Berta wasn’t her best ally. She claimed that the problems were too intractable. Sure, Humphrey still knew people in Cuba, he could get tobacco, it could be smuggled in. But what was the point? They couldn’t make as good a product as the Cubans, or even the Dominicans. And where was the market? Guys weren’t going to pay the kind of prices they’d have to ask to make it worthwhile, not while they could get Dominicans and, even, smuggled Cubans. At best, over a period of time, they might build up a small, loyal customer base, but they could never be big while they couldn’t go public.
The problem was, their major market consisted of guys who liked Cuban cigars, and even liked the added sense of adventure and danger that went with smuggling them in from trips to Canada or overseas. They couldn’t compete with that. And these guys tended to know their cigars. They wouldn’t accept a homemade version, even if somehow you could convince them that this
cigar was what it was: a cigar hand-rolled by rollers from Cuba, using Cuban tobacco. It was not going to be a top-of-the-line Cuban cigar, not for a long time, anyway. But with the cost of production, her cigar— he called it “LaDonna Detroit”—would have to be priced up there with the real goods. It couldn’t compete. And once the embargo was lifted, as it had to be, someday, the whole game was up. Who could compete then?
He finally conceded that maybe, what the hell, if she really wanted it, they could make a cigar and sell it at a loss. He figured the quality of the tobacco would guarantee at least a five-dollar price, maybe a little more. The cigar business was booming, after all, crazier things were happening. They’d lose money on every cigar they sold, but he could afford it. If that’s what she wanted.
No, she didn’t want that. She was too good a businesswoman. She believed that with Berta’s help she could get her girls to turn out a quality cigar. They could go two ways: her girls would slap labels on them, any label she wanted, and they could be peddled as “illegal” Cuban “seconds”; and they’d also work on a public, over-the-counter cigar, the LaDonna series. Five bucks. Basically the same cigar, quality tobacco from the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and so on; they’d be good cigars; they might lose money for a while, but they would slowly build a clientele. You could consider it a form of advertising, buying a market. Then, who knows, a year or two down the road … they could maybe jack up the price, get in the black.
She was satisfied, for now.
And then, Joe called.
11
Joe’s Nature
Dinah Schwind watched Joe from her apartment. He had been by the building at least twice, but she had a feeling that he had been by more than that. She stood at the fourth-floor window, gazing through the muslin curtains. She had to smile. He looked goofy as hell, she thought. Where did he get that outfit? He was in jeans, very fancy cowboy boots, and even a hat. His mustache was full, already, she saw, and it had a western look, too— kind of droopy at the corners. Goofy but also, she had to admit, attractive. She couldn’t imagine many men capable of carrying off this absurd drugstore cowboy look.
She had not liked very many men in her thirty-four years. She liked her dad. He was not what some would call a successful man—a finish carpenter. He didn’t make a lot of money. He took too long. He was not a union carpenter. He worked in upstate New York. A nice guy. A family man. Her mother was nice, but she seemed to favor Dinah’s older sister, who was pretty. Her sister had married a doctor, had babies, and that was her mother’s interest: Jennifer and the kids, and Dr. Swanson. Her mother almost never called Jennifer’s husband Glen, but Dr. Swanson. She was appalled that Dinah had become a federal agent. They sent her to law school for this? She’d done so well at the state university in Rochester. She had offers from many fine law firms but went into enforcement. What a waste.
Joe had disappeared. She moved the curtain aside, looked up and down the street. It was not a busy street, one of those north side Chicago streets with a store on the corner, a tavern, cars parked. Where had he gone? She let the curtain drop. Damn! Well, he’d no doubt come knocking when he was ready. But he must be pretty strung out, nervous as a cat. Although he hadn’t looked nervous down there.
Some people, she thought, seemed to have a kind of unself-consciousness. Certain athletes, for instance. They moved about with remarkable grace but didn’t seem aware of it. Joe had that. He’d looked natural as hell down there, a cowboy in a ridiculous outfit, perfectly at home on a residential street in Chicago. But he must be running scared.
She hoped he wouldn’t be long. She was cooking something that she hoped he would like, braised lamb shanks. It had to be something of that sort, something that could be kept warm, because she hadn’t been sure when he would show. It was a very tasty recipe; she’d picked it up in the Mideast.
She wasn’t sure why she’d bothered. Maybe she felt that she owed him something. She had tossed him into a losing situation, as she saw it, and he had come out smelling like a rose and making her look like a genius. From Joe’s point of view, of course, it was an opportunity. It had gotten him out of the hospital, headed off an indictment, almost certainly a long stretch in prison. But he’d hardly blinked. And now that she thought about it, she wasn’t so sure that she had actually saved him from anything. His budding deal with the deputy sheriff had looked lame, grasping at straws, but now she thought he might have made that work. He might have been better off.
The problem was the colonel. He had absolutely insisted on Joe. You’d have thought he would be pissed, the way Joe had snookered him. Joe had, in fact, left the colonel handcuffed to a pipe in a house the colonel himself had staked out. The hunter wasn’t supposed to be caught in his own trap. But the colonel was like that: extremely practical. No, the colonel just shrugged it off.
“Sometimes it’s not the horse,” the colonel said, “it’s the jockey. That doesn’t mean you want to trade horses, of course.”
She looked at the lamb shanks. They were getting pretty tender, but the onions and raisins and cinnamon …
“Smells good,” Joe said.
She somehow prevented herself from whirling about. She looked over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “It’s an old recipe,” she said. “Want some?”
“I’m starving,” he said. He smiled.
White teeth. Some people were born with even, white teeth. That would be Joe. She was willing to bet that he’d never been to a dentist in his life, that he did not floss regularly.
He was leaning against the doorjamb, facing into the kitchen, his hands in his jeans pockets. He seemed totally at ease. For a man who had spent weeks in the hospital, he looked as fit as a gymnast. Good color. He appeared taller than five-whatever. Maybe it was the high heels of the cowboy boots. But he had such an elegant shape; even in the floppy ER greens he’d escaped in, he’d looked taller. He had a swimmer’s build: wide shoulders, slim hips.
Dinah Schwind was suddenly shocked. For the first time in her life she had looked at a man and wondered what his belly was like, what his thighs were like, his penis. She had never had such a reaction in her life.
“Something wrong?” Joe said.
“I have to put on the rice,” she said.
“I should have called to set a time,” Joe said. “Put it on! I’m starving. Do you need some help?”
“No, no, I’ll get it. I already made the salad, and I bought some flat bread. I saw you hanging around on the corner.” She turned to her tasks, eager to be busy.
“Not too cool, eh?” Joe said. “Well, I came by earlier, but I guess you weren’t here.”
“Came by?” She looked at him. She was stirring the rice in the oil, before adding the stock. “You mean, you came in?”
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” he said. “We’re partners, eh? I thought it was better than getting a place.”
“You’re not thinking of staying here?” She poured the hot stock over the rice and set it on a low burner.
“Whatever you say,” Joe said indifferently. He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat on it, casually. “We going to eat in here? Or do you want me to set the dining table?” He nodded toward the nearby dining room.
“Open the wine,” she said. “Will this Oregon pinot do? It’s kind of full-bodied, but it has a dryness that should go with the lamb and the sauce.”
He thought it sounded fine and he opened the bottle and poured for both of them. They tasted it. She was right. It was good, a solid wine, but a little young.
She didn’t ask him how he’d gotten in. She might later. It was worth knowing. In the event, he volunteered the information: he’d told the super that he was her brother. Just back from Paris. Very friendly guy, the super. Thought Joe and Dinah were very much alike, not in looks, so much, although the nose…. She laughed. Later, she considered that he obviously had conned the super, but there were still a couple of details, field craft … that hadn’t been the whole story.
The lamb was very g
ood and they ate it all, and all of the rice and the salad. They drank two bottles of the wine. She couldn’t wait to tell him how pleased they were with his work.
“It was surgical,” she declared. She said it several times, with an enthusiastic emphasis on the first syllable, surgical.
“Just luck,” Joe said. “Five minutes before the bell, I was ready to bolt. But then … everything worked out.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. “You seemed cool.”
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Inside the fence,” she said.
Joe doubted that, but he didn’t say anything. There was nothing she could do inside the fence. Unless … “You were set to pop Echeverria when I didn’t?” he said.
She shrugged. “We considered it. If the operation didn’t go well.”
But then, he thought, you would be inside the fence. Maybe that would be all right, but he was skeptical. “Well, luckily, everything went well.” He raised his brows. “How is Mr. E?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t make it,” she said. “You didn’t know?”
“You did a good job of press management,” Joe said. “Anyway, I did what I could. If I didn’t succeed, well, that’s life. Have to wait for another chance.”
She was amazed. She thought she’d seen just about all there was on offer, killers, robbers, con men, revolutionaries, high-rolling mobsters, hardened janissaries … but she had never seen anyone so cool. “Do you enjoy this … work?” she asked.
Joe looked puzzled. “It’s fun,” he said. “It’s exciting. Besides … well, what are we talking about this for? You know what I can do.” He leaned forward, suddenly. They were sitting not across from each other but across a corner. “You know what I’d like to do?”
She shook her head, flustered. “What?”
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