Ghostheart (17 page)

What’s there to tell … he’s passionate about things, intelligent, sensitive I think, but there is something about his eyes that tells me you wouldn’t want to cross him.

I knew people like that
.

Tell me Daddy … tell me about your life, about what you did, who you were, why you went away so suddenly.

I can’t sweetheart … I would if I could, but I can’t
.

Why not?

There are rules honey, there are rules
.

Rules? What rules?

The dead never tell on the dead … that’s the simplest rule there is
.

Annie O’Neill saw her smile fade. She turned and stopped the faucets on the bath. She slipped off her robe and sank into the water. She leaned back and closed her eyes, but try as she might she couldn’t blank out the image of David Quinn’s face. He looked back at her from behind her eyelids. His smile. The way he massaged his neck. And then she could smell him as he came nearer – the musk, the coffee, the tobacco, together in some warm cloud of masculinity. And something else: a quiet ghost of anxiety perhaps; a question about his motives, his intentions towards her. What did he want?

Annie sighed. The water was deep. She wanted to stay where she was. She shrugged her thoughts away, thoughts without substance. She was not going to talk herself backwards this time. This time she was going to walk forward, and if David Quinn chose to walk with her then so be it. She felt safe, secure. She was
wanted
.

She lay there until hunger called her from the bath to the kitchen. She dried her body and wrapped a towel around her hair. She slipped on a pair of panties and, naked but for these, went through to the kitchen and set about preparing some salad, lit the oven to warm a baguette, took cheese and smoked ham from the refrigerator.

Standing there beside the counter, the window to her right, she caught something in the corner of her eye. Looking through the glass she noticed lights on the floor facing hers in the building opposite. There had been no lights there for weeks. The apartments had been emptied out for renovations by some city property developer who had bought the entire block and was set to upgrade the floors one by one. Perhaps they had started. But this late?

Curious, she looked more closely, and noticed someone, barely visible across the distance – a man. He did not look her
way, his attention was focused on what he was doing, and for a moment Annie stood there, her naked upper body fully visible in the window. Her attention momentarily distracted – a thought perhaps – she glanced away, and then looked back at the upper windows of the block facing her.

The man had stopped.

He was there at the window.

Looking at her.

Looking right
at
her.

He moved a little to the left, and with the back of his hand he wiped his brow. Annie could sense him squinting towards her, perhaps disbelieving what he saw. There was a naked woman at the window no more than thirty yards from where he stood, and she wasn’t moving.

Annie – suddenly aware of her nakedness, the rush of color that flooded her cheeks, her acute sense of embarrassment – stepped to the left, took three steps backwards and switched off the light. Hurrying to the bedroom, barely able to contain her humiliation, she pulled on a sweatshirt and some pants, tugged the towel from her hair and sort of hugged it to her chest as she stood there. She was breathing heavily, the hot flush of embarrassment only now beginning to subside. What had she been thinking of? What had she done? Fearfully she made her way back into the kitchen and stood to the right of the window. Looking carefully, sure the man would not be able to see her, she peered through the window. He was still there. Did he shake his head just then? Was he incredulous about his luck, or was he even now thinking that he must have hallucinated?

Annie stepped back, inwardly cringing once more, and then she stopped. Did she really feel so humiliated? Was she really a closet exhibitionist? She smiled to herself, and thought of telling Sullivan everything, of her rendezvous with David, that she had stood naked before the kitchen window and given some guy a cheap thrill. And what would Sullivan have said?

Go for it sweetheart … always told you you should loosen up a little
.

And then he would have laughed coarsely and suggested he apply for a job with whoever was working across the street.

Annie opened the refrigerator door, left it ajar, made the rest of her meal in the pale glow from the refrigerator’s light, and carried her food through to the front room.

She sat at the table, a table she only ever remembered sharing with Jack Sullivan, and wondered if she should invite David Quinn here to her apartment. Did she want this man in her life? Was he
the one
?

Could he really be
the one
?

And what would he have thought if she’d told him about flashing her breasts at the guy across the street?

She laughed to herself, ate her salad and, to be honest, found she didn’t care.

An hour later, perhaps a little more, she heard the faintest knock on her door. She rose and walked to open it, but before she reached it the handle was turning. Sullivan appeared, his face ruddy, and he stood silent for a moment.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘Sure I am,’ Annie said, and thought for a moment to tell him about how she’d stood naked in the window for some guy across the street.

‘You want some company?’

Annie nodded. ‘Sure Jack … come on in.’

‘I was gonna go in and watch some TV, but then I thought maybe we could read that thing that the old guy brought; you know, the second bit.’

Annie hesitated. The time she had spent with David had taken her mind off the book and now, as soon as she thought of it she felt as though a dark cloud was nudging up against the edge of her consciousness. She wanted to tell Sullivan
No
, that she’d had a good day, one of the best days she’d had for a very
long time and she did not wish to ruin it by walking back into something that now seemed so dark and horrifying.

But there was some fascination there also, something almost mesmerizing about reading of such terrible things, and though she thought
No
she found herself saying ‘Yes, okay … come sit down with me and we’ll read it.’

Another thought struck her then: that this was her way of making sure that Sullivan did not feel excluded. Was this how it would feel if her father had come, if he’d wanted to talk to her of something serious when she was in no mood for such things? Was this what you did for people you really cared for? You made time for them, you made allowances for them?

Yes, she thought. This is something my mother would have done. Give just as much as you take, she would have said, and she would have been right. Right enough to love my dad. Right enough to make time for those she cared for even if it meant disrupting her own life
.

Sullivan came in. He offered to make tea and Annie let him. He carried it through, and together they sat side by side on the sofa, Annie leaning against his broad shoulder as if it were an anchor back to reality.

She had carried the pages from the edge of the table and set them next to where she sat, and once Sullivan was settled she reached for them, turned them over one by one, glancing through them as if to remind herself of how it had all been.

‘You ready for this?’ she asked Sullivan.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ he said quietly, and as one they turned their eyes towards the page and started to read.

It was in early 1955 that I met Harry Rose. At that time I went by the name of Johnnie Redbird, and though I was from Staten Island, a foreigner by all accounts, there was something about me that stopped Harry Rose in his tracks. I was down at the stoop ahead of a backstreet gambling joint, minding my own business; seem to remember I was counting a handful of dollars I had taken on a race. This kid comes by, and though he was a good head shorter than me there was something about him that made him big. Can’t say I know of any other way to describe it. He had on a tailored suit, hand-stitched collar an’ all that, hair cut short in the back and kind of hanging forward at the front down to his eyebrows. He looked at me, kind of nodded his unspoken acknowledgement as he passed and went up the steps to the house, and there was something in his eyes, something silent and brooding and almost melancholy that made me think he carried some weight of pain beyond his years.

When he came back down again, couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes, he nodded once more. He paused at the bottom of the well, stood right there beside me, and then he said: ‘Easy come, easy go, eh?’

I had my cigarettes in my hand, was just gonna light one up, and so I offered this kid a smoke and he took it. Remember the way he didn’t look away when I lit it for him. Eye contact, all the while there was eye contact, and there was something in the way he looked that made me – Johnnie Redbird – a little unsettled. I came with a reputation, I had set a few to sleep in their cold-meat boxes, didn’t turn a hair when I took the fingers off a
gambler who owed me thirty-five bucks. Took them off with a box-cutter: seven fingers, five dollars a piece. But standing there in my dark suit, white shirt, silk tie, packing a .38 in the waist of my pants, face like someone had chiselled me out of Arizona sandstone … me, Johnnie Redbird, whose picture you’d keep to scare up your kids and make them eat their greens and get to bed on time, well, hell if I didn’t feel that there was someone here who would give me a run for my money.

Watch the little ones, an old friend of mine used to say. Watch the little guys who look like a streak of piss wrapped in a suit. They’re fast. They got stamina. They’re all wired up inside like you could flick a switch and they’d go off like a roman candle. Watch those guys, ’cause the little ones have had to fight all the harder for folks to take them serious.

‘Lost some bucks?’ I asked the kid.

The kid laughed. ‘Lost some, won some, all the same shit to me.’

‘You placin’ or runnin’?’

‘Little of both,’ he said, and then he smoked some of his cigarette and looked up and down the street.

‘You keep to your own turf or you cross the lines?’

‘Flexibility,’ the kid said, and then he turned and smiled at me, a weird kind of smile that moved his mouth but didn’t reflect in his eyes. ‘Secret of success is flexibility.’

I nodded. ‘Is that so?’

‘Sure is,’ he said, and then he smoked his cigarette again.

‘You a lone operator, or you got a crew?’

The kid turned. He looked at me askance with his sixty-five-year I-seen-it-all-go-to-hell-and-back eyes. ‘You gotta whole suitcase of questions there mister, or you just short of folks to talk to?’

I took a step sideways. I could feel the pressure of the .38 in the waist of my pants. ‘I got a mind to be conversing,’ I said, ‘and there ain’t nothing more to it than that.’ I figured I could pop the kid right where he stood before he even knew which way the wind was blowing.

The kid shrugged. ‘Seems to me people spend an awful great deal o’ time talking these days, time they could be spending doin’ things a great deal more useful.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as making the dollars, you know?’

I nodded. Couldn’t disagree with him.

‘So you makin’ enough dollars?’ he asked.

I laughed. ‘Is there such a thing as enough?’

The kid laughed too. ‘Name’s Harry Rose,’ he said. ‘Maybe you heard of me?’

I shook my head. ‘No more heard of you than I heard of your sister.’

The kid frowned. ‘I ain’t got a sister.’

‘See, that’s how much I heard of you then.’

The kid didn’t take offence at the dig I gave him. ‘So you were asking about a crew?’ he asked.

‘I was,’ I said. ‘Asked whether you were a loner or running a crew.’

‘Sometimes a little of both, but I’m the kind of guy who figures that there’s many a deal where two heads are better than one. Yourself?’

‘Looking for a partnership,’ I said. ‘Looking to kick the ass of this neighborhood, shake it down some, you know?’

Harry Rose nodded, and then he turned and looked directly at me again with those painfully old eyes of his. ‘Figure we could share a fifth of something dangerous and see whether there might be something mutually beneficial for us.’

The kid was okay. Had some balls. I nodded. ‘Figure we could.’

‘We’ll walk a block or two, find some place and have a sit-down, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said, and I started away from the stoop.

Kid’s hand had been in his pocket all the time, and as we moved away he withdrew his hand, and there within it was a long stiletto blade. He folded the blade back into the handle and tucked the knife back in his pocket.

‘You’d have had that through your eye before you ever reached the .38,’ he said quietly, and though I thought he was kidding himself, though I thought that such an idea was both a wish and a prayer, there was something about the kid’s cojones that impressed me.

We walked. Johnnie Redbird, six-foot tall, wide like a wall, dark-haired with two helpings of face, and Harry Rose, a good five or six inches shorter, fair hair greased back against his skull with bangs hanging down in front, handsome kinda kid if you didn’t look directly at him, the pair of us like some mismatched circus act in sharp suits and cordovan wingtips, ugly hearts and ugly minds, and a darkness inside that resonated like a bell. Walked three blocks and sat in a bar, and we talked like there was little time to talk, all full of ideas and scams and twists and turns, all fired up with liquor and ready to kick everyone else six ways to Sunday if that’s what it took to get what we wanted. We fell in like brothers, and just as there had been that unspoken and unidentifiable something between Harry Rose and Alice Raguzzi, so there was also something between me and this teenage kid from out of nowhere.

And me? Well, I had my own story altogether. I was twenty-two years old, hailed out of Staten Island, but that was not my place of birth. My mother was a prostitute, kind of prostitute with a meter ticking under her skirt, from out of Cabarrus County, North Carolina. My father was an unnamed and forever unknown trick my mother often referred to as ‘no better than dog puke’, and the room I grew up in was a sweat-smelling, peeling-wallpaper, damp-floorboard honky-tonk where whore-hoppers and junkies came to alleviate the tensions of the world by knocking a hooker around and then fucking her in the ass. How many times did I hear my mother screaming? I lost count. Perhaps in some way there were similarities between my own childhood years and those of Harry Rose. Granted, my room was not in Dachau, and my mother did what she did for money, not for fear of her own life
or the life of her son, but there were similarities enough for us both to have our view of the world twisted upon its axis and set on its head. People used people. Everyone was a prostitute, up for fucking someone else for money. Perhaps I believed that was the way it was meant to be. I don’t know, and now I don’t honestly care. My mother died when I was twelve, and that was the end of that.