“Well, actually,” Marlene answered, “most New Yorkers don’t show up at the places to be seen at.”
“What do you mean? They’re all New Yorkers. I’m a New Yorker.”
“No, in point of fact, Ariadne, you’re a hick from out of town, from where-was-it? East Crotchburg, Ohio?”
“Please, East Crotchburg, Pennsylvania.”
“Exactly, a hick in the City, like, I would guess, ninety percent of the people you hang out with. Me and Butch, on the other hand, are New Yorkers. This is my neighborhood. It’s Little Italy, not fucking SoHo. Both my parents were born less than a quarter of a mile from here, on Elizabeth. Butch’s mom was born another quarter mile uptown and east, on Rivington Street. This food we just ate, it’s from a store, my grandmother used to shop there. So, the thing is, we all don’t glitter that much. In fact, I guess for most of the City it’s a lot like East Crotchburg, with more crime and fewer plumbers.”
“Very impressive, Marlene! I am put in my place. Can I use some of that?”
Marlene laughed. “Be my guest. On the other hand, to be absolutely frank, I have lost a little edge, in a way.” She patted her belly. “This takes energy, which I have a lot of, but there’s a limit. The hormones are yelling, ‘Nest, nest!’ I decided not to fight it anymore.”
“As long as we’re being frank, tell the truth—don’t you fucking dread it? I mean the actual—uh!—event. All the pain and the fluids.”
Marlene leaned back and looked up at the skylight while she considered this. “No, I don’t think so. Not to mention that it’s Woman’s Highest Calling. At this point I’d want to get rid of it if it was going to emerge out of my left nostril. Another goodie, of course, is you get to see the kid and find out how you did in God’s big lotto.
“What else? Intense curiosity? One of the tickets you punch: I got laid; I did drugs; I graduated college; I graduated law school; I got a job; I got blown up; I roller-skated naked down a New York street; I killed a man. Fuck, what’s left? And you know what Isaac Singer says, something about ‘Women see marvels when they give birth, but they never tell men about them.’ Maybe it’s true, like he’d know.”
“Will you tell me?” said Stupenagel. She had a smile on her face, but Marlene, not for the first time, saw something odd flickering behind her eyes, like a reflection of some deep fracture, or an unfillable pit.
“I might,” said Marlene. “It depends on what you find out about the presumptive Mrs. Frankie Mack.”
“Oh, what a big meanie!”
“Well, we humble matrons must have our secrets,” said Marlene airily, “just like you big-time girl reporters.”
Francine was frightened now. It had happened so quickly that she still could not quite believe that the shaking, weeping body she now occupied was the same one that had, barely an hour past, driven so blithely into the Great Neck Plaza shopping center.
She fumbled at her pile of change, and some coins fell off the phone booth’s little shelf and rattled on the floor. She put a dime in the slot and dialed the number yet again. This time the phone was answered and she found out what she needed to know. She hung up and immediately dialed the number of a cab company, arranging to be picked up at a nearby intersection. Then she walked shakily out of the shopping center, avoiding the parking lot where her Toyota was parked, and where she knew the men were watching.
CHAPTER TEN
Not two hours had passed since Marlene’s lunch with Ariadne Stupenagel. She was stretched out on the red couch with The Mill on the Floss balanced on the crest of her belly and a jar of Jordan almonds within easy reach. She had promised herself to cover the classics during the last month of her pregnancy, and was enjoying it more than she had expected. Provincial Victorian England had become a lot more interesting, it seemed, since she was a girl.
The phone rang then, and Marlene immediately recalled the odd, questioning phone call she had received just before lunch, and was struck with the certainty that this call was the same person calling again.
It was the same voice, breathless but oddly familiar. “Is this Marlene?”
“Yes, it is. You called before. Please, who is this?”
“Marlene, this is gonna sound crazy, but it’s Francine Del Fazio.”
“Francine … ? Oh, my God! Frannie Ciccolino!” Marlene’s mind immediately filled with a memory from childhood: the chalk-and-floor-wax smell of a fourth-grade classroom, a nun droning away at the front, two dark-haired little girls in blue jumpers and gray stockings, seated at adjoining desks, Ciampi and Ciccolino, locked together since the first grade by the order of the alphabet, best friends.
“Wow, it’s what—fifteen years!” said Marlene.
“Yeah, you went to Sacred Heart and I dropped out and got married.”
A vague guilt tugged at Marlene. Puberty had struck both girls like a thunderclap, and both of them had indulged in weekend activities not on the approved list for Catholic teenagers in late 1950s Queens. The difference was that Francie had been less discreet, less careful. St. Joseph’s had given her the boot in ninth grade. On Monday mornings, therefore, Francie had walked off to public high school, where she had become a fixture among the motorcycle-riding, car-boosting, leather-jacketed fraternity that the era called “hoods,” while Marlene, armed with a full scholarship, had hopped the train for Manhattan, garbed in the sober livery of the most prestigious Catholic girls’ school in the United States. It was inevitable that she should then see less of her friend, and then want to see less of her as her world expanded and she was invited to parties on Park Avenue and dances at the Biltmore and the Plaza.
“Yeah, well, so how are you, Francie?” asked Marlene after an uncomfortable pause. “You married that guy, Frankie, right?”
Francine laughed. “Yeah, the dream boat. I guess you don’t see much of the old gang?”
“No, not really,” Marlene admitted. “You?”
“I see your sister, Annie. We get together maybe once a month.”
More guilt. Anna was Marlene’s older sister, a housewife in Hempstead with four kids, with whom Marlene got together much less frequently. She vaguely remembered a relationship between the man Anna had married and Frank Del Fazio. Cousins?
But Francine went on, “Yeah, that’s what got me thinking about you. Annie said you were some big shot with the D.A.”
So that was it. Marlene had suspected that her old playmate had called her for something other than nostalgia or the gladness her voice might bring. She said carefully, “Yeah, I’m with the D.A., but just a little shot. Why, you in some kind of trouble?”
“Uh-huh. I mean, I haven’t done nothing wrong or anything, but … look, could I, like, see you? Now? It’s kind of complicated to talk over the phone.”
“Sure. No problem, Francie. Where are you, out in Queens?”
“No,” said Francine, “I’m in a booth on Lafayette, around the corner. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Joey came back to the car out of breath and smiling in a way that Carmine did not like.
“Where is she?” he asked. Joey grinned and said, “Hey, she’s right behind me. Maybe she had to stop off at the ladies’ room. Quit worrying, will ya? She ain’t gonna give us any problems.”
Carmine’s suspicions were confirmed. “You grabbed her, didn’t you? I fuckin’ told you just to watch her, but you hadda grab the bitch.”
“Hey, she spotted us anyway—what the fuck, Carmine! I just let her know what would happen to her if she talked. It’s no big deal!”
Not to Joey, in any case. “Talking” to her consisted of him throwing a choke hold on Francine Del Fazio in the parking garage, slamming her up against a rough concrete wall a couple of times, and, with a hand around her throat, hiking up her skirt, tearing her underwear and thrusting two fingers deep inside her vagina. After that he entertained her for ten minutes with a description of what he was going to do to the various orifices of her body when he got her alone. He urged her to say how much she would enj
oy this when it happened, and she did. He had left her in a weeping heap on the greasy floor.
Carmine was silent for five minutes, fuming and chewing on his cigar, now dead. Joey searched through the windshield for the returning woman. “Where the fuck is she?” he complained. “I swear she was right behind me.”
“She make any calls in there, Joey?” asked Carmine mildly.
“Yeah, she made two. What about it?”
The older man said nothing but headed for the mall entrance at a trot. Joey cursed and followed.
In the mall, Carmine got Joey to show him the phone booth the woman had used. He inspected the walls of the booth carefully and then looked through the Yellow Pages hanging there. He made several calls. Then he came out of the booth in a rush and headed toward their car. He still hadn’t said a word to his companion.
They entered, and Carmine started the Chevy. “Hey, you gonna tell me what the fuck is goin’ on or what?” Joey demanded.
“She called a cab, Joey, and she went out the back after she left you. She would’ve taken the car if you hadn’t shown up, but she’s a smart lady and she set up another way out, so that when you did fuckin’ show yourself, she could double around out the back way and leave us sitting here like a coupla assholes.
“OK, so what I did was, I started calling local cab companies, starting with the top of the list. We got lucky on number three. I said I was a cop and did they pick up a woman at the Great Neck mall and where did they take her?”
“And they told you?”
“Fuck yeah, they told me. How the fuck they supposed to know who I am? You got the right voice and you know how cops do stuff, you can get people to tell you any fuckin’ thing you want on the phone.”
Carmine burned rubber getting out of the lot and exceeded the speed limit on the Expressway inbound to Manhattan.
“So, where’re we goin’?” asked Joey after a while.
“Spring and Lafayette. That’s where she told the cab to take her. Of course, if she gets there before we do, she could go anywhere.”
They rode in uncomfortable silence west on the expressway, through the Midtown Tunnel and south on FDR Drive to the Houston Street exit. Carmine was worried. If he had a whole outfit to command, finding the woman would have been a trivial task. But he did not, which made the task tedious and nearly impossible. He would have to trust that the fright that Joey had laid on the woman would suffice to keep her quiet until the whole misbegotten thing was over and done with. Carmine hated to leave things to chance, however, and thus, by the time they got to the correct intersection, he had worked himself up to a towering rage.
Joey yelled, “Look! Carmine, there she is! It’s her!”
She was just leaving a phone booth on the west side of Lafayette. She walked quickly south. Carmine parked the car instantly and illegally, and they both gave chase. Following her was easy on the crowded commercial thoroughfare. She turned left on Broome, and now they had to be more careful, letting her lead by half a block and hiding themselves behind the trucks unloading on the narrow street. She turned onto Crosby, where she rang a bell at a dingy factory building.
From their vantage point deep in a doorway, they saw a window in the building’s fifth floor open. A woman’s head appeared in it and some words were exchanged with their quarry. Then Francine Del Fazio entered the building.
“Now who the fuck is that?” asked Joey aloud.
Whatever had gotten into the New York Hustlers in Boston stuck with the team in Buffalo, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. They pulled into Chicago behind four straight, with Karp playing ten to fifteen minutes in each game and racking up double digits in points and assists.
Now that he had shown that he was a clown who could play basketball, he started to get a more sympathetic press. The sports columnists wrote a spate of sentimental columns about the All-American who had lost his career and become a famous crime fighter and then picked up his sports career again, thus verifying the classic American myths of It’s Never Too Late and Anybody Can Be Anything. The sportscasters started calling him “D.A. Karp” right off, as if those were his personal initials, and of course, whenever he stole the ball, which was more than occasionally, there was a little witticism about a life of crime.
The team, relieved to see that Karp was neither a drag on their chances nor, of course, a threat to their jobs, accepted this odd notoriety with good humor; they were constructing their own myth: zany, murder-haunted, unpredictable, raffish; hard-luck kids making good. Karp’s story fit perfectly into this larger tale. Beyond that, the players understood what Karp had contributed to the team, something only the more perspicacious sportswriters mentioned.
“Listen here, D.A.,” said Doobie Wallace, flapping his newspaper into position, “this is about you. And me, of course.”
The team was breakfasting in the Chicago Hyatt on the Monday morning before their game with the Bulls. Karp was sitting at a table with Wallace, Croyden, Lockwell, James, Kravic and McDoul.
This had become something of a ritual: Wallace ate faster than anyone else and devoted the end of the meal to the edification of his teammates, reading from the morning paper. Sometimes it was a comic strip or some editorial matter, but most often he did the sports pages.
“ ‘Why have the Hustlers become so hard to stop?’ ” he read. “ ‘Several things come to mind. Of course, the teamwork has vastly improved. The young front line, led by Fred James, is moving the ball well, getting the rebounds and getting them away down court. Doobie Wallace has taken the team spark plug role over from the slain Marion Simmons: he could always shoot, but now he’s passing as well, as witness the triple doubles he racked up in the last two games. But what really makes the difference is the unexpected strength the Hustlers have found in their bench—’ ”
“Yo! Let’s hear it for the bench!” said Kravic.
“ ‘… especially the amazing old man of the team, “D.A.” Karp,’ ” Wallace continued. “ ‘With Karp and Wallace on the floor, New York has two credible three-point threats. Although Karp can’t move or jump much, he doesn’t have to. Get him the ball and it goes in.’ ” Wallace put the paper down and grinned. “There’s more, but I don’t want the second team to get big ideas.”
“That’s a true thing about Karp’s legs,” said James. “The bionic man, but his warranty run out.”
There was more good-natured joking of this sort as the team finished and drifted out to the lobby. Karp thought the columnist had been right about Wallace being the team spark plug, and he felt an affinity for the other player for that reason. Although Karp had never owned the pure athletic skills Wallace possessed, he was essentially the same all-around sort of player. Even Wallace’s previous no-pass chuckmanship sounded an echo from Karp’s own high school career. It was a kid’s failing. In Karp’s case, a sharp personal shock, the death of his mother, had matured him at fourteen. He wondered what had changed Doobie Wallace.
Karp decided to ask him. He had meant to get with Wallace to ask him about Marion Simmons’s sex life. He figured that the team’s premier swordsman would have a reasonably good idea of who was getting it and from whom. He finagled his way into a seat next to Wallace on the bus out to the practice gym.
“So, Doobie,” Karp said, “you like what they’re saying about you now? The next Elgin Baylor, right?”
Wallace grinned engagingly, showing gold. “Yeah, man. You had any legs and Jamesie had any smarts, we could win sixty-five games this year.”
“Fuck you, Wallace,” said James sleepily from the seat behind.
“I couldn’t help noticing you looked a lot better the last couple than you did against the Sixers.”
“Yeah, we were fucked up then, man. Marion getting killed—it did us all in. I mean, you know: it was like the Sixers getting Dr. J. killed, or the Lakers losing Kareem.”
“He must have been something,” said Karp. “I don’t think I ever saw him play.”
Wallace looked at him strangely. “You never
saw … ? Where were you, man? Afghanistan?”
“No. I kind of turned off basketball for a while. Anyway, I hear he was real good.”
Wallace looked out the window at the slushy roads of Chicago, as if contemplating the lost goodness of Simmons. “Yeah, he was. More than good. You know it’s a joke, ‘Basketball is my life,’ when we say it. But Marion, he really meant it, you know?”
“That’s just what McDoul said. Devoted to the game, as they say?”
Wallace laughed. “Yeah! It was like he was only alive when he was playing. He wanted to play every forty-eight minutes, every game. On a practice, he would stay on, taking shots after everybody else left for the showers, you know? Had to drag him out of there.”
He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Now, you know and I know that the game is fucked up. We got all these white coaches go into the ghetto, ‘Hey, boy, you want to go to college? You want you a Thunderbird? All the pussy you can eat?’ It’s show biz, right? A fucking game. Four years of kindergarten and you get the shot at the pros. OK, then you’re on TV, making half a mill, a mill every year, playing a kid’s game for whitey, plus endorsements. Hey, I’m not complaining, but I’m realistic, you dig?
“Not old Marion, though. It was like basketball was fucking church for Marion. Pissed people off too.”
“How so?”
“Oh, you know—somebody fucked up a play, or he thought they weren’t hustling a hundred percent. Didn’t matter if we were ahead by fifteen with a minute left. He didn’t actually say shit, but you could feel it, you know?”
“That must have made him unpopular,” Karp observed.
Wallace shook his head. “No way, man. Funny thing. We all thought Marion was right on. More than the coach, if you know what I mean. A classy dude. Weird maybe, but classy as hell.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah, like he was always writing in this little book. Like part of it was an appointment book and the other part was a notebook. Scratching away all the time. We asked him, What you writing, Marion? And he would say, ‘Observations on life and the game.’ Never showed it to anybody that I heard of.”
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