Act of Revenge Read online

  “I don’t believe this,” said Roland, batting the side of his head with the heel of his hand. “Guma watches PBS? What’re you, joining the ACLU, too?”

  “I watch nature programs, Roland. I watch every fucking thing they got, David Attenborough, Nature, National Geographic, Wild Kingdom, I watch fucking Nova, they got an animal program on. What, you’re surprised?” He finished the cup and put it down. “It’s no big thing. Assuming I don’t score with any beautiful young women, and you know they’re all out there just looking for fat, ugly fifty-eight-year-old lawyers with no money, I go back to my miserable, shitty apartment and I watch. It’s relaxing. There’s a whole world out there with no fucking money involved. Eat and be eaten, just like the goddamn city, except they don’t take a percentage. And the lion, or the fucking hyena, wants to get laid, he doesn’t have to make any conversation, he doesn’t have to develop his communication skills, he doesn’t have to respect her in the fucking a.m., he just does it, and the bitch gets the dinner, too. What can I say, it relaxes me.”

  “I knew it,” said Roland, “he gets off on the animal fuck scenes.”

  “Get back to the family, Guma,” said Karp. “What kind of family thing?”

  “Oh, yeah. The Bollanos.” He paused, as if in thought, or maybe, Karp imagined, the old cells weren’t firing quite as fast as they used to.

  “You know,” he began musingly, not yet ready to focus, “Phil Garrahy didn’t waste five minutes worrying about the Mob. He thought it was grandstanding, like Tom Dewey did. Fucking Dewey got Luciano deported for what? A nickel pimp charge, and that was the only racket Lucky wasn’t even in. Had a big impact on prostitution in New York, no more whores in town after that, which is not surprising because practically the only thing Luciano wasn’t involved in was pimping. Phil had a clear sense of what was important, and the wise guys understood that. They did their thing and Phil did his, because he knew that, whatever the fucking New York Times says, it’s better for the city to have vice organized, private, out of sight. Which is why in the old days, you didn’t have what you got today, with the drugs and the whores in your face all the time, and the punks blasting away out on the street. And this bum, Colombo, he’s got a hair up his ass, he wants to make sure nobody confuses him with the Mob family. I ask you one question: Did he play any ball, Colombo? No, he was on the fucking debating club. He was the kind of kid got his face pushed in the mud in the schoolyard, probably ran to the nuns with it. Never trust a D.A. didn’t play ball, they’re looking to prove something, they got a dick on them—”

  “The family, Goom,” said Karp patiently. Ordinarily he could listen to Guma talk about the Mob and the old days for hours, but he had things he had to do. Guma switched neatly into the new track without a bump.

  “Yeah, Eddie Cat. What I said up there in Jack’s, I was pissed, you know? Fucking Anselmo. What I’m thinking now is, is it reasonable to assume the don was in the dark here, and the more I think about it, the more I’m thinking he did know, not that he told Pigetti, whack this guy, but he let it out to Joe that maybe it would be a good idea. I can’t see Pigetti just whacking Eddie Cat without any cover at all, is why. If he wanted to move in on the Bollanos, he would’ve taken out the old man and the kid and Eddie. So the don’s not clean, is my thinking. You know Little Sally’s a nutcase, everybody knows that. But let me tell you something else: he’s following in the footsteps there.”

  “The don, you mean?” asked Karp. “I thought he was this icy calculator.”

  “Oh, I’ll give you icy calculator; shit, yes. But also the word is maybe the good ten and the three of hearts slipped under the couch while he’s playing, he didn’t notice it. Besides that, he’s—Big Sally, I mean—he’s not a nice guy.”

  Roland burst out laughing. “Oh, wait, stop the presses! He’s not a nice guy? Christ, Guma, he’s a fucking Mafia don! He’s supposed to be a choir boy?”

  Guma ignored this and continued talking to Karp. “These guys, they’re, when you get right down to it, real conservative. The family’s over in the corner there; they might whack each other, they might whack a girl gets in the way, but they leave la famiglia alone. You understand this, Butch, Sicilians and the family. They sell whores, they use whores, they sell dope, whatever, but they don’t think of themselves as bad guys. Okay, so there’s rumors about Big Sal, always was, that he’s like bent, from way back. Not short eyes, not a faggot, nothing like that, but there’s a twist there. Big Sally would go to some lengths to see it didn’t get out. With the big guys, there can’t be what they call an infamia, they won’t do business with a guy like that, and no business means . . .” He made a thumbs-down gesture, suggesting early retirement under a layer of paving material.

  “So, you’re thinking what?” Karp asked. “That Eddie was going to spill this whatever? That’s why he was killed?”

  “No, I’m not saying that, necessarily, but it was something like that,” said Guma reflectively. “You hear stories, too. They don’t have much domestic felicity at the Bollanos, which is not that common either, the cugines like peace and quiet they come home from a hard day at the rackets, and the girls ain’t into calling the cops they get rapped in the chops a couple times. So, that could hook up, too, someone’s fucking someone, I mean for real, in a bed. But we don’t know. It’s like I was saying about the prairie dogs and the hawks. There’s a message there for somebody, but we can’t read it yet. We don’t even know who’s eating who. But that kind of stuff, that’s where we should be looking.”

  Marlene, driving back to Manhattan on autopilot, thinking about selective amnesia, thinking Jesus fucking Christ I tried to kill my mother, and about her daughter, the ticking bomb. Of course, Marlene hadn’t actually connected with that hot iron, but on the other hand, the kid had access to more sophisticated weaponry. The pistol in the glove compartment was sending out malign rays. Wondering why your kids hate you is a winless game, but one with the addictive qualities of a slot machine. She turned on the stereo, cranked the volume up, punched buttons, rejected rock ’n’ roll, immature mooning after love, music of youthful rebellion, yes, she really needed more of that just now, settled on WQXR, Haydn sweetly blaring, a symphony. She blanked her mind, a necessary technique in many professions, including hers, and let the harmonies massage her. By the time she reached the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the yammering in her head had been reduced to the usual low buzz of demonic voices conveying the usual neurotic messages, familiar as road signs: you’re wasting your life, you’re making your family miserable, you’re going to end up dead in an alley or in prison; your kids will get shot by a maniac, bad mother baaaad mother, worthless, worthless, worthless . . .

  The traffic gelled at the entrance to the tunnel, and Marlene called the dog into the front seat. “Sweety, come talk to me. I need the wisdom of the deep animal spirits.” He came up from the rear deck of the station wagon and, with a damp sigh, draped himself across the front seat, his hindquarters down on the floor and his immense, hideous head resting on Marlene’s thigh, or rather upon the old towel that she had placed across her legs. She stroked him behind his velvety ears.

  “Oh, tell me about memory, Sweety. How can we live with each other if we can’t agree about what happened? Now that I know I’m suppressing stuff, I wonder what I suppressed with Butch, or Lucy. I realize sometimes the family walks on eggs around me, and of course Butch is the world champion of papering over, pretty rich for a professional confronter of crime, but not in the sacred hearth, oh, no, the poor bastard, and Lucy, who knows what’s cooking in there? I could’ve done something horrible and never remembered it. It would have to be pretty bad compared to what I can remember. And they talk about what trauma does to kids, and I think Lucy, a year old, some maniac grabs her out of her stroller and Jim Raney blows the guy’s brains all over her, four years old, her dear Mom has a little nervous breakdown over practically getting raped by her boss, drags her out of town barely functional, at seven she procures a murder weapon for a kid wh
o kills a cop, Mom covers that up, of course, and never mention, at ten she watches Mom blow away a guy who’s after one of her clients, right there on the street, and a little later a friend of hers gets murdered and stuffed in a trunk by a bent cop, and the next year she watches Tran shoot a guy dead and even helps a little, and now what? I’m upset she’s a little tense, a little withdrawn? Doesn’t want to make fudge with Mommy anymore? I should be thankful she’s still in the church, but God forgive me, that irks me, too, like she is just doing it to piss me off, the famous religious failure, I can do it, Mom, and you can’t, nonny nonny nonny, oh, Jesus, is that an unworthy thought, or what, Sweety? Christ in heaven, how does this crap get into my brain? No, she’s sincere, otherwise she’d probably be a serial killer already. And why can’t I, Sweety? Why doesn’t the grace come to me anymore? It used to. Come on, Sweets, you must have some religious ideas. Is there a secret Church of Dog? Does Dog exist, as the dyslexic agnostics ask? No, you don’t need it, because you don’t know you’re going to die. Or maybe you do. How the hell would we know? We can’t even talk to each other and we can talk.”

  The car entered the filthy, gleaming tube, and the radio was cut off, leaving Marlene with static, with the swish of traffic outside and the stentorian breathing of the dog inside.

  “Meanwhile, Sweets, let’s use this moment. In a couple minutes, unless there’s a tanker explosion that fries us all to a crisp or a crack in the tube, which is also something to worry about—of course, in that case you would heroically save me by dragging me out in your mighty jaws—but absent that, we will emerge into bright sunlight on Third and go uptown to talk to Harry Bello and get a lecture full of good sense, and it really is an absolutely gorgeous day, gorgeous, far too good for New York, if you ask me, and we will feel good again, through the dark tunnel into God’s light, like Dante. Here we go.”

  And it was so, the sunlight flooded the broad canyons, Haydn came back with the final chords, and the fruity QXR voice informed us all that it had been the Ninety-fourth Symphony, called The Surprise, which made Marlene chuckle and bounce the dog’s head on her knee, thinking, yeah, it always is a surprise, the good stuff amid the shit, and how pathetically grateful I am for it. The dog shuddered in delight and slobbered into God’s lap.

  Chapter 6

  THE OFFICES OF OSBORNE GROUP, INC., were housed in a twenty-four-story building on Third in the Sixties. The building was an undistinguished crate in the usual degraded International Style (glass over steel, and on the columns and in the lobby marble facings colored like pale toast and as thick), the den of small firms in fields representative of the city’s business, including especially the innumerable parasites that cling like lice to the creative spirit—agents, producers, publishers, packagers, ad agencies, tax lawyers—plus a scatter of legal and medical professionals, and on the ground floor behind glass windows a discount brokerage and a health club. It was a respectable if not prestigious building and right for a security agency that liked to think of itself as having some class.

  Marlene had her own marked parking space in the underground garage, which was a nice perk, and meant, among other things, that she could shop at Bloomies and get home without schlepping packages on the bus or trying to hail a cab or taking out a second mortgage to pay for parking. Many women in New York would work for Satan to get a deal like that, and Marlene knew it and was grateful that she only had to work for Lou Osborne, who was a pretty decent guy. In fact, she only had to report to her pal and former partner, Harry Bello.

  Who was in, and looking good, as he usually did these days. During his last years on the cops Harry had run into some bad luck and got into the sauce and done some dreadful things, things he couldn’t live with, and been in the process of committing slow suicide. They’d called him Dead Harry then. Marlene wasn’t sure whether she or God’s infinite mercy had saved Harry, but saved he was, now a prosperous security executive, and good at it, and while remaining a reliable pal, not in the least willing to cut Marlene any slack. She found his paternal concern alternately chafing (she already had, for Christ’s sake, one semi-oppressive Italian father) and comforting (he was also the smartest detective she had ever met, fearless, and loyal). The arrangement was that Marlene ran her own business how she liked and worked for Osborne under Harry’s nominal supervision, straight security for organizations and the well-to-do, celebrities even, as Marlene had a rep of the kind that the golden people delighted in, a sort of violence-chic. Which she herself despised, but it paid the bills.

  He was wearing an expensive-looking gray suit and a blue striped tie, and he’d gained some weight in the last year or so, which he had needed to do. Not much hair left on Harry, and he still had those dark, sunken cop eyes, but his face was now healthy, rather than damp-clay swarthy, and he no longer looked like a fresh corpse.

  Marlene greeted him with a kiss, went to the little refrigerator, opened a Coke, and flopped in one of Harry’s leather sling chairs.

  He said, “You know, you’re supposed to call in, we send you on an appointment. How did it go?”

  He meant the abortion clinic. “I was my usual charming self and a credit to the firm,” said Marlene. “I don’t think I made a sale. In fact, I think Ms. Hyphen-Name expected something very different. More of a sister, which I was not.”

  “Well, you must’ve done something right, because she called this morning and signed up. Site hardening, security service, the works. They caught two of the guys there, did you hear?”

  “Wait a minute, she hired us? I thought she was going to throw me out of there.”

  Harry indicated amusement by crinkling his eyes and twitching the left side of his mouth up a quarter of an inch.

  “What’s so funny?” Marlene was a skilled reader of Harry’s minimalist emotional field.

  “You never can tell the effect you’re having on people. Back on the Job, I used to bang away at some witness, trying to get cooperation, and it was no, no, I didn’t see nothing, I wasn’t there, and a couple days later you get a call, they want to sing. Meanwhile, who’s Vivian?”

  Marlene had to laugh. “That was cute. Where did you find out about old Vivian?”

  “Woman’s been calling here every couple hours,” said Harry. “Won’t give her full name, asks for you, no, nobody else can help her. The girl up front figured it might be something we should know about, so she told me. So?”

  “She’s from the shelter. No, don’t roll your eyes at me, Harry! Showed up in a blanket and a pair of panties, been abused. Vivian Fein, she calls herself, maiden name, and she didn’t strike me as someone who normally goes by the maiden name. She tried to hire me to investigate the suicide of her father. Gerald Fein.” Marlene waited for Harry to make the connection.

  “Not Jumping Jerry? You got Jumping Jerry’s daughter in that shelter?”

  “Yep. She was serious about it, too. Had a diamond the size of a golf ball she was going to give me as a retainer.”

  Harry didn’t appear to hear this. “Jesus, that takes me back. Jumping Jerry. It was what? Nineteen sixty, right? Right, yeah, because it was my last year in the city before I transferred out to Brooklyn.”

  “You were in on the investigation?”

  “Nah, I was in Auto at the time. But there was an investigation. Fein was mobbed up—you knew that?”

  “I recall something of that nature.”

  “Yeah, what they call a Mafia lawyer. So the thought was that he might’ve had some help going off. But nothing turned up, and we had to let it go down as a legit suicide. Arnie Mulhausen had the investigation.”

  “You remember this? I’m impressed, Harry.”

  Bello smiled deprecatingly. “It’s a habit. But I tell you, it’s not that impressive because stuff is starting to slip. I’m trying to think of Mulhausen’s partner and I can’t. Stocky guy, Irish, thin red hair. Donovan? Donohue? Something like that, and he had a nickname, B something . . . Billy-club? No. Anyway, Mulhausen passed while I was still working out of Bed-S
tuy, so what’s-his-name would be the guy to see. Dolan? I’ll think of it.”

  “Guy to see? What, you want me to do this?”

  “Why not?” replied Bello easily. “She’s got means. We’re running a business here, Marlene. It’s got to be a long project, lots of billable hours at the top rate, and we got participation on a sliding scale based on our billables. She wants you, we know that, so go for it.”

  Marlene hugged herself, wriggled in her chair, and in a breathy voice cooed, “Oooh, Harry, when you talk that business talk, it just makes me feel shivery all over.”

  “Don’t get wise, Marlene, like you couldn’t use the money,” Harry grumbled. “Besides, her money, it’s a public service. Donnelley? I should sing that damn song with all the Irish names in it.”

  “What?” said Marlene. Harry occasionally reverted to a gnomic form of communication that assumed that the person he was talking to was making the same mental leaps he was. Marlene could often follow him, but not now. “What’s this about her money?”

  “Just that prick of a husband. It’d be nice to put it to him. On the other hand, he’s not going to be happy she split on him. I hope your pal’s ready for action there, got her six-gun oiled.”

  “Harry, what the hell are you talking about? You know who Vivian Fein’s husband is?”

  Harry snapped his fingers. “Doherty! John Doherty. They called him Black Jack. I knew there was a B in there somewhere.”

  “That’s Vivian’s husband?”

  Harry looked at her as if she were speaking Welsh and replied in an elaborately patient tone. “No, Marlene, that’s the guy on the investigation, with Mulhausen. Who you should see. The husband is Bollano. Jerry’s daughter married Little Sal Bollano about two years after Fein hit the sidewalk. It was the wedding of the year for the wise guys.”

  Marlene could hear it through the elevator as it approached the fifth floor, the incredible volume produced by a pair of four-year-olds in full wail, and her heart shriveled inside her. As she had so many times before, she resisted the desire to head directly for the bedroom and bury herself beneath the covers, and went like a good momma bear toward the source of the noise. In the playroom she found Posie mopping vomit and her husband, still in his suit, a red-faced twin on each knee, his lapel decorated with little yellow flecks.