by Lee Vance
“What?”
“I never moved to Moscow. I went over to check it out and stayed about two weeks. What I said before is the truth. The place is the pits. I’m staying in some dump apartment and freezin’ my balls off. I can’t eat nuthin, the food is merda. I go to Andrei’s office and tell him I’m not gonna do it, that I’ll put my papers in. We talked. He says we can work it out.”
Tony pats his hairpiece with his hands. I sure as hell never expected this.
“He asks if maybe I’d like to spend some time in Italy. My mamma’s in Salerno, an hour or so from Naples. He says, ‘Go live in Salerno. We’ll give you a computer and you can do your work from there. We’ll cover for you here. It’s no big deal,’ he says.”
Tony grins, feeling better with his secret out. Despite my apprehension, I force a smile to encourage him; this is serious evidence that Andrei was doing something bad.
“It was simple. Olga took the calls and put everybody in my voice mail. Somebody really needs me and she transfers them to my cell phone. The cell phones work real good over there. Nobody knew. Nobody called anyway. The paperwork was always clean, so they left me alone.”
“How’d you get the work done?”
“Pff.” He waves the question away. “No problem. I taught Olga how to do the local phone stuff. Confirms and whatever. Most of the fucks don’t speak English anyway. She faxed me down tickets and reports and shit. I dial Moscow on the computer and put everything in the system. I only had to go there two, three times maybe. Olga sent me the weather every day so I could bitch and moan to the guys in London.”
“Does Turndale know this?”
“Nah. I don’t think so. It woulda come up when they fired me.”
“Weren’t you suspicious?”
“Look, Andrei wants to send me to Italy and make my life happier, I’m okay with that. I don’t break the devil’s dishes. Everything ties together, the numbers are okay, so there’s no problem. Like I said before, maybe he had to get a little mobbed up to do business. Maybe he’s steering business to somebody’s girlfriend, maybe he pays too much for office supplies. Who the fuck knows. He was makin’ money for Turndale and takin’ care of me, and that’s all I cared about.”
The old Brooklyn guys are renowned for their pragmatism, but I’m still blown away by Tony’s apparent sangfroid. I wonder if he’s a lot smarter than I think or a lot dumber.
“Tell me how it ended.”
“Olga calls and says get your ass up here now. I show up the next morning and William fuckin’ Turndale himself is sittin’ in Andrei’s office. He calls me in and tells me I’m retirin’. Olga has a plane ticket to New York. I should go see Human Resources when I get home and they’ll straighten me out. Good-bye and fuck you. That’s all it was.”
“You didn’t ask him what was going on?”
“Another thing they teach you in the army,” he says, shaking his head at me. “Don’t volunteer and don’t ask questions. All I wanted was to keep my head down and collect my pension.”
It’s not likely William would have told Tony anything even if he had asked.
“Did he have any questions for you?” I ask, hoping to get some idea of what William was thinking.
“Just one. He said somebody swiped Andrei’s laptop, and he asked if I knew anythin’ about it. He seemed real interested in the computer, askin’ about it a bunch of different ways. I said I didn’t know nuthin about it, which was the truth.”
Tony gazes at me guilelessly, big brown eyes unclouded. I can’t imagine what Andrei was involved in.
“You said you had a reason for talking to me.”
“Yeah.”
Pongo swigs another inch of grappa, then sets down the glass and folds his hands over his face, like he’s praying. When he looks up again, his eyes are moist.
“The week after I come back, some big guy comes around to my place in Staten Island to see me. He’s full of questions about Andrei. Asks if I know where he is, or if I know how to get in touch with him, that sort of thing. A real tough guy.”
“What day was this?” I ask sharply.
Tony hesitates, thinking.
“I was gettin’ dressed to go out to the Meadowlands when this guy showed up at my front door,” he says. “My ex-brother-in-law had tickets to the Giants against Dallas on Monday night.”
A surge of adrenaline cuts my breath short. I watched that game in my room at the Harvard Club the night before Jenna was murdered.
“What’d this guy look like?” I demand.
“Clark Kent kind of asshole. Short hair, stupid glasses, wore his watch turned in like a military fuck. He had a tattoo on his wrist, Felix the Cat, if you can believe that shit. Polite in the way that means fuck you. And he had an accent.”
“What kind of accent?”
“Not Italian and not Russian. Somewhere in between.”
“Somewhere in between is half of Europe, Tony. You can’t narrow it down any more than that?”
He throws his hands up, looking wounded.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say quickly, giving his arm an encouraging pat. Offending Pongo isn’t going to help. “Tell me what happened.”
“I tell this guy to get lost and he warns me not to mess with him, like he’s gonna scare me into talking. He tries to give me a card with his number on it, sayin’ I should call him if I hear from Andrei, and that he’ll make it worth my while.” Tony chokes up for a moment. “I had a new Doberman pup,” he continues brokenly, “only a couple of months old. The dog’s gettin’ excited, barking at this guy. He’s only a puppy, but he wants to protect me.”
He covers his face with his napkin, tears now streaming from his eyes.
“And then?”
“And then this guy caught my puppy by the collar and broke his neck.”
12
THE HARVARD CLUB booked a car to the airport for me, the driver a quiet Rastaman in a Blues Brothers suit with an attaché case full of reggae tapes. He introduced himself as Curtis. We’re driving east on the Grand Central, the sun just set, slush spattering the windshield while Peter Tosh chants “Johnny B. Goode.” I’ve got my eyes closed, trying to relax, but I’m too wound up. Pongo’s story changes everything. Impossible as it seems, Tilling might be right. Maybe Jenna was murdered by some guys looking for Andrei, guys who found out that he’d sent a package to my house and wanted to know what was in it, or where it had been sent from. I need to get to the bottom of whatever Andrei’s involved in, and a trip to Moscow doesn’t seem like such a big price anymore. My phone rings and Curtis turns down the tape obligingly.
“Peter Tyler,” I say.
“Grace Tilling.”
“Is there some better way to reach you?” I ask angrily. “I’ve called you four times in the last three hours.”
“One better way would have been to call yesterday,” she says. “When you promised to call.”
“Yesterday I didn’t have anything to tell you.”
“And today you do?”
“I ran down a guy who knows Andrei. He said some goon turned up at his door the day before Jenna was murdered, looking for Andrei. This guy told him to get lost, and the goon killed his dog.”
“How?”
“Picked it up and broke its neck.”
“What’s the guy’s name?”
“He doesn’t want me to tell you.”
“It’s always great talking to you, Peter.”
The phone clicks and she’s gone.
“Shit.”
I heave the cell phone against the front seat, the phone, battery, and belt clip bouncing off in different directions. Curtis looks over his shoulder casually, eye hidden behind black shades.
“Problem, mon?”
I shake my head, annoyed by my lapse of control. My high school coach used to dress me down when I lost my temper. “Losers kick the watercooler when they’re behind. Winners work harder.” I reassemble the phone and dial Tilling’s number, getting her voice mail for the fifth tim
e.
“Grace. It’s Peter again. The goon who snapped the dog’s neck left a phone number behind. If you find him, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to persuade the guy I talked with to cooperate.” I read her the number and repeat Pongo’s physical description of the tough guy, wondering why I called her Grace. “I’m out of town for a couple of days, but I’ll be checking messages.”
I hesitate, tempted to apologize for not being more forthcoming, and then hang up. Curtis pops the completed Peter Tosh tape out of the player.
“Any more preferences, mon?”
“You got Natty Dread?”
He smacks in another tape and the car fills with the sound of Bob Marley wailing “Lively up Yourself.” Our senior year, Jenna and I drove from Ithaca to Brunswick, Ohio, to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my father, playing this tape over and over again on the car stereo. I rest my head against the seat, listening to the wipers carry a backbeat.
“You’re frowning,” Jenna said.
The wind was roaring off Lake Erie, buffeting the car with great gusts that threatened to push us into the next lane. We’d had dinner before we left, about three hours earlier.
“I thought you’d fallen asleep,” I said, turning down the music.
“Just drifting.”
“There’s a good truck stop right off the expressway, but I can’t remember which side of Dunkirk it’s on. I was thinking about a cup of coffee, and maybe a slice of pie to go with it.”
“Think about this,” she said teasingly, reaching over to caress my leg. “You’re twenty-one years old, you’re driving a car down a dark highway through the middle of America, you’ve got the king of reggae on the tape deck and a willing blonde in the front seat, and you’re distressed because you can’t remember where some truck stop is.”
I glanced to my right. She was lying cocooned in a red wool blanket on the reclined passenger seat, hair gathered in a makeshift ponytail with a rubber band, only the neck of her white Shetland sweater exposed. The sweater had been a birthday present from me, blowing a huge hole in my budget. Headlights reflected off the roof liner, partially illuminating her face. Looking at her took my breath away.
“They fresh-bake their pies,” I said.
Pushing herself half-upright, she whacked me on the arm.
“That’s from me and Bob Marley both. Philistine.”
“Ouch. Wrong response, I guess. Should I pull over?”
“You missed your chance,” she said dismissively. “Anyway, car sex was more of a high school thing.”
“For other girls, you mean. I was your first, right?”
“In third grade, a boy named Timmy Telljohan gave me a peck on the cheek and then stuck his tongue out and licked me. An older boy gave him directions and he got mixed up. It felt kind of nice, though.”
“I’ll find the fucker and kill him.”
“So now you’re not thinking about the truck stop anymore?” she said. “You only focus on me when you think your property rights are threatened, and otherwise you’re consumed by pie lust?”
“The whole pie thing was just sublimation. You know you’re the only one. Although your story about Timmy has me thinking. Would you like it if I rubbed pie on your body and licked it off?”
“Gross,” she said, laughing. “Don’t think I’m not seeing through you here. This is kind of a two-girl fantasy, isn’t it? Me and the pie both in the sack at the same time. And then eventually it will be just you and the pie in bed, listening to me leave long weepy messages on your answering machine. No way.”
“Fine,” I said, pretending to pout. “Wait until you want to do something kinky. See what I say.”
“You’ll say yes in a heartbeat. Men are all pigs.”
“True. Tell me one of your kinky fantasies, and then maybe I won’t need to stop for coffee.”
“Ha,” she said scornfully. “You couldn’t handle it. You’d get all hot and bothered, and I’d have to spend the next three hours slapping your hands off my firm white body.” She rolled onto her side, facing me, and tucked one leg up. I was already all hot and bothered. “I’ll tell you what, though,” she said, suddenly serious. “I’ll play truth or dare with you.”
“Dare. You want me to take my clothes off now?”
“Not so quickly,” she said, holding up a finger. “I wasn’t finished. You have to go first, and you have to take truth.”
“Only if you promise to take dare. And I’m warning you, car sex is a definite possibility.”
“Agreed,” she said. I took one hand off the wheel and we shook solemnly, her touch stirring me.
“So what’s the question?” I asked, confident that I’d out-traded her.
“I want you to tell me your fantasy.”
“This could get kind of graphic,” I said, embarrassed and titillated. “You prefer to hear about Princess Leia or the Doublemint Twins?”
“Boring,” she said dismissively. “I want to hear your real fantasy. Where you see yourself in fifteen or twenty or fifty years, and what you will have done or achieved that’s important to you.”
I glanced over again, but Jenna’s expression was shadowed. I’d lied before when I told her why I was frowning. I’d been wondering why she’d agreed to come home with me. The past eight weeks had been an uphill struggle to insinuate myself into her life. She was spending one or two nights a week in my room, but she never left anything behind, and I couldn’t figure out what she was thinking. The nights she wasn’t there I lay awake until the small hours, tormenting myself with the thought that she might simply drift away. Her question struck a familiar chord: She was always emphasizing how different we were. She was right, but I couldn’t see why it mattered. I was afraid she only wanted to hear me talk about my future to remind herself why she intended to be somewhere else.
“What makes you think I have any specific fantasy about the future?” I asked, hoping to draw her out.
“Sorry,” she said gently. “No explanations. The rules say you have to answer my question as best you can. If you haven’t got a fantasy about the future, that’s your answer.”
I turned the tape deck off, the Doppler wailing of an east-bound truck underscoring the abrupt silence. A memory surfaced, a recollection I’d normally have suppressed as a matter of course. I wanted to be with Jenna more than I’d ever wanted anything.
“This might not be what you’re looking for,” I said nervously. “It’s more of a kid thing, something I used to think about before high school.”
She didn’t reply. I let a few seconds pass and then began to speak, my confidence faltering.
“I told you my mom died in an automobile accident when I was fifteen. I didn’t tell you that she was an alcoholic. My dad traveled a lot on business, but when he was home, they were always fighting. Sometimes, after they had a big fight, my mom would lock herself in their bedroom to cry, and my dad would come up to my room and tell me to load his telescope into the car. He’s interested in astronomy. We’d drive to a hill about twenty minutes from our house where it was darker, set up the telescope, and look at the stars. Some nights we’d stay out almost until dawn. The thing is, I loved being there with him, but I could never really enjoy it. I always felt like I’d betrayed my mom by leaving her.”
It all flooded back with surprising vividness: the smell of my dad’s cigarettes, the chirping of the crickets, and the hollow, sick feeling I used to get in my stomach.
“That wasn’t the worst thing,” I said, hearing my voice quaver. “The worst thing was that I never wanted to go home. I just wanted to stay on the hill with my dad, where it was dark and quiet and I didn’t have to deal with my loud, drunk, awful mother. And I felt terrible about that. I felt terrible about not loving her.”
I wiped my face with one hand and took a couple of deep breaths.
“So I used to fantasize when we were up there. I’d imagine myself coming to that same hill when I was a grown-up, accompanied by my own little boy. And we’d look at the stars ju
st the way I did with my dad, and he’d love it just as much as I did, but it would be better, because at the end of the evening, we’d both really want to go home. We’d want to go home because his mother was there, and she wasn’t a drunk, and we both loved her, and she loved us. That’s it,” I said, afraid to look at Jenna. “That’s the fantasy I used to have about my future.”
Jenna said nothing. I turned the tape deck back on low with a trembling hand.
“I’m not sure why that came to mind,” I said, pretending to laugh. “And, you know, I’m not trying to say that it should be a son up there with me instead of a daughter, or that my wife shouldn’t be up there with us.…”
“Shut up,” Jenna said. “Just … shut up.”
I looked over and saw she had the blanket drawn up around her head like a cloak. I flipped the dome light on and saw tears on her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?”
“Put the light out.”
“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said, touching the switch again.
“You don’t get a question,” she said, voice thick in the darkness. “Remember? You insisted on a dare. Are we going to do this car sex thing or not?”
“I dare you to tell me why you’re crying,” I said, convinced I’d fucked everything up somehow.
“Not fair.”
“Not fair?” I said, getting angry. “We’re driving along in the middle of the night, kidding back and forth, and you suggest we play some children’s game, and then all of a sudden—bang—you ask me some big life question, and I tell you something I never told anybody else before, and now you’re crying, and I don’t know what the fuck is going on, and you won’t tell me. You won’t tell me anything. I don’t know why you’ve been sleeping with me, or why you’re coming home with me, or what you’re thinking about us. That’s what’s not fair.”
She sobbed loudly.
“I’m giving this my best shot, Jenna,” I said, desperate to understand her. “You’ve got to tell me how I’m doing.”
“Dare me again,” she said brokenly.
“I dare you to tell me why you’re crying.”
She took a moment to collect herself, drying her eyes with the edge of the blanket as I braced myself for her response.