Act of Revenge (9 page)

Marlene sat in her car for a while, feeling the sun through the windshield, warm but not unpleasantly so, listening to the rumble of the dog's breathing from the back and the sounds of metal bashing from inside Lopata's, and letting the old neighborhood soak in. Contra the famous saying, Marlene, unlike New Yorkers from Iowa, say,
could
go home again and did so fairly often. Her family and their neighbors thought she was crazy but not a danger to anyone but herself, and the mild celebrity she enjoyed did not hurt. Lately, her mother had started asking why Marlene did not appear on the talk shows, since she “knew more than all of those idiots they got on there put together.” Also, although she would have denied it, the stability of this neighborhood was a comfort. Ozone Park had been inhabited by Italians and other Catholics of the old immigration when Marlene was born, and it was inhabited by them and their children still. Ordinarily, Marlene rather enjoyed dwelling in one of the districts of the city most boiling with ethnic weirdness, but sometimes not, as now; in the wake of the Chen unpleasantness she had
paisan
hunger, and had semiconsciously contrived a business excuse for a journey here to assuage it.

Through the dusty window of the garage she could see a burly man in a filthy pinstriped mechanic's coverall speaking on the phone. His gestures as he spoke were eloquently violent, and she could imagine the tenor of his language. Remembered, more than imagined, and that went for the gestures, too. Rocky Lopata as a high school junior had been a lean, cocky, mildly criminal kid with a duck-tail haircut and a black motorcycle jacket, the heartthrob of the whole girls' eighth grade at St. Joseph's parochial school. He hung with the kind of bad girls who wore their collars up in back and hung Chesterfields from their scarlet mouths, and it was a known thing that Terry Riccio had gone all the way with him. It was therefore a wonder to the school when little Marlene, of the straight A's and perfect behavior record, laid a heavy flirt on him at the Holy Martyrs basketball game (to which he, of course, responded, she being at the time as beautiful as the dawn) and even more of a wonder when Terry came after her with claws out after the game and Marlene knocked her sprawling with three punches. This, naturally, won the heart of Rocky, and there followed three months of educational evenings in the back of Rocky's chopped Plymouth out by the airport, the planes roaring overhead, while Marlene learned what she wanted to know about the physical aspects of love. Rocky never got her to go all the way, but he wasn't complaining, considering what he
was
getting, and thinking himself in love until the day when she skillfully dumped him. It was his first heartbreak, and Marlene's first as a breaker, though far, far from her last.

Rocky finished his call, slammed down the phone, felt eyes on him, cocked his hand to shade a peering look through the window, and then walked out to her car. He grinned as he came closer.

“I thought to myself, that can't be Marlene Ciampi in a orange
Volvo
,” he said, “but I was wrong. All right, she had the VW, she's a old hippie, I can live with that, but a
Volvo
?”

Marlene grinned back and got out of the car. “They're very reliable,” she said primly.

“Oh, yeah, and
safe
. Hey, I got a cherry '78 Trans I could put you in. Silver flake lacquer?”

“Rocky, give me a break. I'm an old lady with a big dog.”

“So get a poodle. You belong in serious wheels, Marlene.” He looked her boldly up and down. “Meanwhile, you're still the hottest thing in the borough.”

“Thank you. You probably clean up pretty good yourself. How's Terry?”

After that they spent a pleasant fifteen minutes catching up on the old gang, many of whom had stayed close to home.

“So, what're you, visiting the folks?” Rocky asked when that had run its course.

“Yeah, I'll fall by after, but really, I needed to talk with Chester.”

Rocky's face took on a pained expression. “Ah, shit, Marlene . . .”

“No trouble this time, honest to God, Rocky, I just want to talk to him.”

“He quit on me, Marlene. I ain't seen him in a week.”

“Horseshit, Rocky.” She gave him that look, the one they had both learned from the nuns. He sagged, sighed, said, “Not with the dog, Marlene.”

“No dog, and there wouldn't have been one last time, if he hadn't tried to bash my head in with a body hammer.”

Rocky was still frowning and shaking his head when Marlene leaned into him, grabbed the collar of his coverall at an unsoiled spot, and said, “And I also came by to see a real good old friend,” with which she planted a semi-sisterly kiss full on his mouth.

He gasped. He rolled his eyes to heaven and flapped his hand, as if it were on fire. “Oh,
marone
!” he said, and then, “Marlene, you're gonna burn in Hell, you know that.”

“Yeah, but they'll have to catch me first. Where is he?”

Rocky punched a thumb over his shoulder. “Back in bay three. Be nice, now.”

Marlene stood in the doorway of the cinder-block room and watched Chester Durrell fill a dent. He was a small, narrow, dark man of mixed Latin and Irish ancestry, with long black hair tucked under a reversed ball cap. His sleeves were rolled back, showing muscular forearms, the dun skin elaborately illustrated with blue, red, and green tattooing. His long fingers worked a pad of wet sandpaper back and forth on a gray patch of Bondo on the neatly masked rear fender of a new black Lincoln. Marlene knew that Chester had a city-wide rep as a body guy, and that in a couple of hours you would need an electron microscope to know that the bright black surface had ever been marred.

Marlene loved to watch a competent craftsman mold the physical world. As a girl she had begged her father to be allowed along on weekend plumbing jobs, where if the old man was feeling good, she would get a shot at turning a pipe cutter. Chester rubbed his patch to perfection, tossed his sandpaper into the water bowl, stretched, scratched, and reached behind him for a spray can of primer, at which point he saw Marlene.

He's looking for the dog, thought Marlene as she observed the tension in Chester's body and the jerking of his head. His pleasantly goofy face showed a near ludicrous apprehension, like the kind you see the doomed bit-part actors wearing just before the jaws snap shut in the early scenes of a monster movie.

“He's in the car, Chester,” Marlene called out. “I just want to talk. Why don't you put your first coat down and we'll chat while it dries?”

After an uncertain pause he did that, in a dozen smooth strokes, the solvent smell filling the room despite the roaring fans.

He put the can down and leaned against the draped fender of the big car. “She sent you, right?”

“No, actually, I came on my own. You probably figured out Brenda's at the shelter again. Chester, I thought we talked about your hand problem. I thought that was all over.”

“Hey, it wasn't like that, I swear to Christ, Marlene. You want to hear how it went down? Okay. We get invited to this party, right? Up in Inwood, man, my cousin Clarisse's. I say, Brenda, let's go, we'll have some laughs, but she says, no, she don't like Clarisse. Okay, so I say, I'll drop by myself, fuck it, she invited me and all, and she says, okay, go. Fine. So I go. A couple hours, I'm there, feeling good, I had a couple, few drinks, what happens? Bam! In walks Brenda, dressed up and all, so I go over to talk with her and so forth, why she changed her mind, and I see she's coked to the ears. So, fine, right away I knew there's gonna be trouble, and sure enough, pretty soon she's mixing it up with Clarisse, Brenda made some remark. You know like she does?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“So Clarisse and her start scuffling, and we all break it up, and I pull Brenda into the bedroom, and I try to talk to her, you know, but now she's like yelling shit, all kinds of personal stuff. I mean really yelling so's everybody could hear it. So I like lost it and I popped her a couple, not hard, and she runs out, crying. So I had a few more and I take the subway home.”

“That's it?”

“No, later back at our place, she comes in, maybe three in the morning, stoned. She takes her fuckin'
panties
, which I actually
bought
her, out of her bag in front of me and tosses them on the floor. In
front
of me, you understand? And . . . fuck, man, I don't want to get into what she was saying, but it was real bad, mean stuff, and like I must've blacked out because the next thing I knew, there's blood all over the bed, and I'm standing there in my shorts and she's gone.”

“You busted her face up pretty good, Chester.”

He hung his head and then lifted it abruptly and stared at her. The beginning of panic showed in his eyes. “Are you gonna get me arrested again?”

“No. Look, let me explain something. You know what I do, right?”

“Yeah. You beat up on guys who pound their old ladies.”

“Not exactly. Chester, there's bad guys out there. Sick guys. Guys who get their rocks giving women grief, guys who don't feel like men unless they got a woman who's a slave. There's guys who just pick a woman off the street, or in a store or a bank, they see her and they stalk her, and they make her life hell. I can stop that kind of guy sometimes.”

“With one through the skull is what I hear.”

“If necessary,” Marlene said coldly, “but my point is, you're
not
a bad guy. You're a
good
guy. You're just in a bad relationship. I'm telling you now that if you stay with Brenda Nero, one day you're going to wake up next to her corpse. No, wait, I know what you're going to say. She's great a lot of the time and you love her, and you're right, she
is
great. She's sexy, pretty, she's classy, she's smart—but she's also crazy, Chester. Disaster happens around her. You got to break it up. I mean now. You understand what I'm saying?”

She wanted to shake him as he stood there by his fender, rolling his eyes and shaking his head, like an unusually stupid horse shying from a proffered halter. I'm no good at this, she thought. He's right, one through the head is where my true talent lies. But eventually she got him to promise more or less that he'd ditch the woman, and she left him, thinking that she would have to do the same thing with Brenda, too, with even less chance of success. Marlene had met more than one woman whose life was a disorganized sprint toward an early grave, and most often they got some poor schmuck to help them into it. Tragedy, whereas Marlene did best at melodrama, with a clear villain in the black suit and the tender maiden in white pining for rescue. Depressing, and she had wanted to be cheery for Mom, or so she thought, and naturally, there was no question of coming to the old neighborhood and neglecting a family visit. The NSA would be happy if it could track Chinese missile tests as accurately as Marlene's family recorded the trajectories of their absent children.

The elder Ciampis dwelt in a pre-war two-story bungalow, built of dark brick, the sort of sturdy, simple house that working-stiff vets could buy in the late 1940s when the nation was still poor enough to afford it. In the front, two small patches of immaculate clipped lawn greenly gleamed behind low privet growing through a chain-link fence. To the left the lawn patch was decorated with the usual Virgin w/blue mirror ball and birdbath, and on the right there was the fig tree, stunted and twisted but still alive, still throwing out green shoots. These items demonstrated, as they did in all the old boroughs of the city, that second-generation Italian-Americans lived here.

Marlene hitched herself around in the car seat, removed her pistol and its holster, and locked them in the glove compartment. Marlene had a new gun. The old gun had killed two men and it had started giving her the sick shivers when she touched it, so she had sold it and bought this thing, a SITES AW9 “Resolver,” one of the lightest 9mm semiautomatic pistols available, made in Turin, sleekly Italian in design. She prayed daily and sincerely that it would never have to resolve anything, would forever remain a shooting-range virgin. It was a little less than twice as long as a king-sized cigarette and about twice as thick and weighed about the same as an office stapler. This made it much too heavy to carry into her mother's house.

The front door was, as always, unlocked. Marlene went in and passed directly into the kitchen.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Good, you can help me hang,” said her mother, indicating the wicker basket of wet wash on the kitchen table, as if this visit had been arranged, or as if Marlene had never left home. Mrs. Ciampi, despite the book on Italians, had never been a physically demonstrative parent.

Marlene heaved the basket up on her hip and followed her mother out through the screen door to the tiny backyard. She and Mrs. Ciampi began to hang clothes on plastic lines strung between two T-shaped poles.

“Didn't we get you a dryer, Ma?”

“I like it better when they hang. They don't smell right from the dryer.”

Marlene was out of practice, being totally dryer dependent herself, and her mother placed four clothespins to every one of hers. Marlene cast glances at her mother through the flapping linen. Aside from the hair, which had gone pepper and salt, and a thickening middle, she looked more or less as she had looked during Marlene's youth, or perhaps it was merely imagination. She had the kind of face that holds age well, Marlene thought, handsome rather than beautiful, too bony for that, the features too prominent. The main difference seemed to be the track suit she was wearing instead of the flowered housedresses she had worn every day back then. Mrs. Ciampi had discovered track suits late in life and had adopted them for every occasion that did not involve the Roman Catholic Church. She had a dozen, this one being aqua with a beige stripe. Combined with her mother's energetic movements, the outfits suggested that she was about to strip and run the five-hundred-meter hurdles.