Gravesend (15 page)

“It’s probably that Henry Nicola’s house,” her father said. “Bastard’s a menace.”

As they got closer, it didn’t take Alessandra long to realize that it was in fact Conway’s house. She looked at Stephanie. Stephanie’s expression said she’d realized it, too. Her father said, “Frankie. I hope he’s okay.” Alessandra was thinking about Conway—snapped, all the way off the deep end—but now she thought of his poor old father.

Two fire trucks were pulled up on the curb outside Conway’s house. They had a nearby hydrant open, going full blast. Firefighters scrambled around, unspooled hoses, hooked one to the hydrant and another to the truck. Alessandra watched their black boots, their greasy jaws, their spiderwebby jackets. Fifty, sixty people stood on the sidewalks, in robes, pajamas, work clothes, watching, huddled together. A couple of cops, chests puffed out, kept the crowd back. An ambulance buzzed down the street the wrong way, parking close to the trucks.

They stood across the street, as close as possible, and Alessandra felt a pang on her cheek from the burning. The flames were lighting the sky, swishy swabs against the clouds.

“I don’t believe this,” her father said. “Poor Frankie.”

Alessandra said, “I hope Conway didn’t—”

Stephanie said, “He wouldn’t.” She went and talked to a cop, wanting to know if everyone got out. She came back, shaking her head.

“What’d he say?” Alessandra said.

“Said no one’s in there probably, no one’s come out. Pop’s got to be in there.”

“They’ll get him if he is.”

“I hope.”

The firemen had their hoses going now and they were trying to keep the fire from spreading to the houses on either side but it leapt to Chrissy Giordano’s three-family frame house on the right and took a black bite out of the siding before they got it under control.

The air was heavy with smoke.

Alessandra rolled the cigarette around between her fingers, flattening it. She went around to people in the crowd, trying to bum a light. She got one from a blonde Puerto Rican lady in a pink robe with green curlers in her hair and drawn-on eyebrows. Alessandra thanked her and pulled in smoke. The lady said, “Just awful. Weird people, though.”

“Weird how?” Alessandra said.

“You know, just weird. Guy’s almost thirty, lives with his old man. That’s weird, you ask me.”

Alessandra nodded.

“I’d see that boy in the Rite Aid,” the lady continued, “picking up my prescription and I’d say to myself, I’d say, ‘Something’s not right here.’ Just the other day I was saying to myself, ‘Something’s off with this one.’ The way he was lumbering around. I thought maybe,” lowering her voice, “he liked boys like his brother. Who knew? I mean, I could just tell something was off. And now this.”

Alessandra said nothing. She remembered that: whenever something went wrong, whenever someone lost it, everybody else started talking about how they could just tell something was going to happen. It was sickening really, the way they got off on it.

“Who are you, doll?” the lady said, now wanting the straight dope on Alessandra.

“Just passing through,” Alessandra said.

The fire kept burning, spitting embers up into the air. The Puerto Rican lady caught one on the front of her robe and palmed it out, threatening to sue.

Next to her, a wrinkled old Chinese guy with white spots on his chin perked up. He said, “Sue who?”

“The city,” the lady said. “The city goddamnit.”

Alessandra went back over by Stephanie and her father. “Crazy,” she said.

“This is my fault maybe,” Stephanie said.

“You’re not serious.”

“I don’t know.”

The firemen charged into the house with axes and pulsing, waist-high hoses, like a scene from
Backdraft
, except none of these guys looked like Kurt Russell or Billy Baldwin. Alessandra tried to imagine what was going on in the house’s inside parts: the firemen smashing down doors, looking for people to save, getting jumped on by flames.

It was almost an hour before one guy, a pug-nosed Irishman with grit on his face and bloodshot eyes, came out carrying a body wrapped in sheets and towels. It wasn’t Conway, Alessandra could tell somehow. Something about the way the Irishman carried the body made it clear that it was Conway’s father. And then the guy put the body on a gurney and one of the sheets dangled loose and the crowd saw Pop. He was crispy, but it was definitely him.

“Oh, what a shame,” someone behind them said.

“Poor Frankie,” Alessandra’s father said. “Didn’t hurt no one. Had no enemies.”

Stephanie wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. Blubbering again.

Alessandra wasn’t sure what she felt. Pity. Remorse. Nothing. She thought about Amy, thought about taking the train back into the city, and going to Seven Bar. That’d be sure to wipe some of this mess away. Frankie D’Innocenzio dead, Stephanie Dirello and her old man gone to pot, Firestarter Conway on the loose—Yeah, she needed respite, escape. Maybe she’d stay on Kissena Boulevard for a few days.

It wasn’t easy to get away, but she said she had to go, something came up with a role she’d been offered in an indie movie, and her father said, “Now? This time?”

“That’s the way it works,” she said. “This business.”

Stephanie said, “I understand.” But she clearly didn’t. She honestly believed, Alessandra thought, that she’d somehow driven Conway to this, that she was such a bad lay he’d had to go burn his house down afterward. Alessandra really hoped Stephanie wasn’t knocked up.

She saw them putting Conway’s father into the ambulance and took a few steps back. She passed the bullshitting Puerto Rican lady and nudged her way through the rest of the crowd, their necks arched, eyes wide, some taking pictures of the scene with their iPhones and BlackBerrys.

Back at the house, she got dressed. Tight jeans, loose flannel button-up falling off her shoulder on one side, red flats. She listened to The Cramps on her iPod and thought of Amy, not Steph, not Pop, not Conway. She put on rouge and eyeshadow and mascara and lipstick and dabbed a little ginger oil in the hollows behind her ears and under her pits. Then she brushed her teeth and rinsed with Listerine, cleaned her ears with Q-Tips, plucked her eyebrows, and studied her face in the vanity mirror.

She texted Amy:
You working?

Amy said she was, to come on down or come on over or do whatever she needed to do to get there. Alessandra put on her coat and walked to the El, wispy trails of smoke still sitting over the neighborhood.

Seven Bar was packed again, same crowd, and Amy was dancing around behind the bar, popping PBR tabs, pouring shots, pulling drafts. Alessandra squeezed between two hipsters dressed like hunters and waved at Amy.

Amy nodded in her direction, stopped what she was doing. She brought over a gin-and-tonic and passed it to Alessandra. “Crazy right now,” she said over the noise.

Alessandra said, “It’s okay. Thanks for the drink.” Since there was no room at the bar, she went to a booth in the back and watched some college kids shoot pool. The girls were dressed in leg warmers and vintage ruched mini-dresses, the guys in retro T-shirts and pre-worn jeans and trucker caps. Roxy Music blasted from the jukebox.

It would be a few hours before Amy was free, she realized, and she wasn’t sure how she’d pass the time. She twirled her swizzle stick in her drink and played with the corners of her napkin. She listened to the conversations the college kids were having. Classes. Movies. Music. She checked her phone. Her father had called. Steph, too. Updates probably. She powered off the phone and tucked it in her pocket. She wanted to empty her mind.

Thirteen

Eugene needed a gun, numbers filed off, that kind of thing. Untraceable. Sweat—he’d know how to score one. It was about three, little after maybe, and Sweat should’ve been out of school, driving home. Unless he had detention. Eugene wondered if they’d turned on the hot lights and questioned Sweat.
Where’s your buddy Eugene
? he could picture Aherne saying.
We know you know where he is
. Like they were police. Like it was an interrogation. Pathetic.

Eugene took out his phone and turned it on. He ignored the blippy message saying he had voicemails and fought the urge to scroll through his texts, even if there might’ve been one from Sweat. Instead, he sent Sweat a fresh message:
Hit me up
.

Sweat got back to him immediately, Eugene’s phone buzzing and bumping. He picked up.

Sweat said, “Where you at?”

“I’m over by The Wrong Number, that bar. You know it?”

“Aherne gave me serious shit today. Your moms was over here, too.”

“Fuck them.” Eugene paused. “Come by here.”

“I gotta go pick up some cannoli and shit for my grandma. Then I’ll be over.”

“Whatever. I’ll wait.” Eugene ducked down an alley next to the corner store where he’d bought the O.E. and Swedish Fish, the music even louder now, and he turned over a milk crate and sat on it. He finished the forty and threw the bottle against the brick wall in front of him.

A Dumpster at the far end of the alley reeked of days’ old garbage. A carpet of trash—wrappers, bottles, plastic bags—was all around it.

Eugene paced back and forth in the alley, examining the graffiti on the walls. Used to be an art to it back in Uncle Ray Boy’s day. Now it was all half-assed.

The broken glass from the forty was pebbly, and Eugene kicked at it.

Sweat pulled up fifteen minutes later, powdered sugar on his chin. Eugene got in the car and slapped Sweat five like he was tagging him into a wrestling match.

“You know anybody get us a gun?” Eugene said.

Sweat cinched his face and smiled. “Why you need a gun?”

“I got plans.”

“Plans to go all Columbine in OLN?”

“I look like a sicko?”

“You look fucked up, homes.”

Eugene jabbed Sweat in the arm. “I did a job this morning.”

“Kind of job?”

“Got picked off the street by this Russian in a tracksuit. Says, ‘Deliver this.’ Gives me a thing. Who knows what’s in it? Winds up I deliver it to Mr. Natale.”

“Enzio Natale?”

“You know another Mr. Natale?”

“Face-to-face with him?”

“Walked right into his card game, made the delivery, left with some hard-earned cash.”

“You’re a courier now?”

“I got bigger dreams.”

Sweat drove away from the curb and alternated between looking at Eugene and looking at the road. “Kind of dreams?”

“The kind I’m gonna need help from your fat ass with.”

“My old man told me some shit about Enzio Natale—”

“Hold up.” Eugene sniffed the air. “I smell some snatch in this car? You gonna go snatch on me before I even explain?”

“Explain then.”

“Mr. Natale’s got this card game. I was there during it. Lot of dough on the table. My bet’s they play all the time. They’re in there that early today, they’re probably just sitting in there all the time. What else they got to do? Guy’s got all these other people working for him, he oversees these card games.”

Sweat said, “So what?”

“You remember,” Eugene said, “that episode of
The Sopranos
when Jackie Jr. and those guys hold up Eugene Pontecorvo’s card game?”

“How’d that end?”

“Not if we do it right.”

“They’re gonna know. You can’t just put on a mask. You’re you. They’re gonna take one look and say, ‘Oh, it’s that kid with the . . .’”

Eugene thought about this: it was true. He couldn’t really hide under a ski mask. They’d know it was him. But who cared? Wasn’t like he was going to hang around the neighborhood. He was going to be forever on the run with Uncle Ray Boy. And Sweat had nothing to lose because they didn’t know him. Could be any porker from anywhere. Eugene sniffed the air again. “Stinks like snatch in here,” he said.

“You better quit it with that snatch shit.”

“They don’t know you. No one’s gonna say, ‘That’s Sweat Scagnetti.’ You got nothing to lose.” Sniff, sniff.

Sweat firmed up. Eugene could see he was about to fold. Sweat said, “That dude Cesar probably help us out.”

“Call your cuz, tell him to hook us up with Cesar,” Eugene said, waiting for Sweat to take out his phone and punch numbers. “Now. And we need money. I got some, but we need more. You got money?”

“I got hundreds.” Sweat steered with one hand, dialed his cousin with the other.

Their past dealing with Cesar Cisneros had been quick and easy. Sweat’s cousin had told them to ask Cesar if they were in the market for new girls. So they did, they went to Cesar, a forty-five year old with bushy red hair who wore a sweatband on his head and ripped corduroy pants, and Cesar had directed them to Knee Socks. Cesar operated out of the back room of a thrift shop on Mermaid Avenue. He mostly sold drugs and guns, but he also dealt in exotic birds.

Sweat and Eugene went into the shop now—place was called Sutton’s—and walked past racks of dirty jackets and dusty bins of LPs and ruined alarm clocks and moldy rubber children’s toys. A Chinese lady with an eye patch and a perm nodded them in the direction of Cesar’s office.

Cesar was sitting behind a desk piled high with porn mags and spiral notebooks, writing on a napkin. He had a couple of monster parrots perched on bars over his shoulders. One was the color of the New York Mets, blue and orange, and said “Fire away” when they came into the office. The other was yellow, and he was silent.

“Remember you boys,” Cesar said.

“Yo,” Eugene said.

Cesar smiled. “Let me finish this right here,” nodding down to his napkin, yellow, from Wendy’s, “I’m going good. I write rhymes. Gotta just go where the flow takes you.” He continued to write, bopping his head. “Like to write rhymes about birds. Fuck rhymes with cardinal?”

Eugene said, “Don’t know.”

“How about you?” Cesar looked up at Sweat. “You gifted with words?”

Sweat shook his head.

“You motherfuckers are useless. Let me figure this shit out on my own.” He bopped his head some more, spit words under his breath. “How about I go, ‘I was out looking at a cardinal, who was up in a tree guarding all
. . .
’ And then I just let it bleed into the next line like such.” He cleared his throat. “‘I was out looking at a cardinal, who was up in a tree guarding all,” searching the air for words, “the berries from the crows who was trying to pick—” He tailed off. “Fuck it, I’ll finish later. ‘Berries from the Crows.’ Good title.”

“We’re looking for a gun,” Sweat said.

“Sure you don’t want a parrot?”

“How much are the parrots?”

Eugene nudged Sweat. “We don’t want no parrots.”

Cesar stood up. “‘We don’t want no parrots,’ he says. Something wrong with my parrots?”

“Fire away,” the Mets parrot said.

“Nothing wrong with them,” Eugene said. “Just parrots ain’t what we need.”

“How old are you?” Cesar said.

Eugene, without hesitation, said, “Seventeen.”

“Small for seventeen. Tiny.” He came around to the front of the desk and nodded in the direction of Sweat but looked right at Eugene. “He’s fat, you got that limp, what you gonna do? What could you boys possibly need a gun for? You gonna hold up the lunch counter at your school? I say save your money and buy one of these here luxurious parrots. Teach em shit. Times tables. Poems. Motherfuckers are verbal as hell.”

“We just need a gun.”

Sweat said, “Something big.”

Cesar showed crooked yellow-gray teeth that reminded Eugene of crumbling overpasses on the Belt Parkway. They looked like they’d been cemented together with grime. “‘Something big,’ the fat one says. ‘Something big.’” Cesar closed his mouth and shook his head. “Too much. Ambitious beyond your means. I think you want a BB gun, that’s what I think.”

“We got money,” Eugene said.

“You got money?” Cesar grinned again. “How much you got?”

“Enough. Show us what you got and tell us how much.”

“You the boss now?”

“I’m just—”

“I’m fucking with you. You got money, I’m deaf to the rest of this shit. But, for real, you ever want an exotic bird, I’m your man on that front, too.” Cesar went back behind the desk and opened the bottom drawer. He took out a large Nike shoebox full of guns and put it on the desk. He went through what they were and how much they cost. Eugene didn’t give a shit what they were, the numbers meant nothing to him, as long as they wouldn’t blow up in his face. He figured the more they cost, the better they were, so he settled on one that was almost two hundred bucks and made Sweat empty his pockets. “Good choice,” Cesar said. “People take you serious with that one.”

Back in the neighborhood, they were driving around, looking for Uncle Ray Boy. Eugene was slumped over in the passenger seat, Wu Tang thumping from the speakers. The gun was loaded and in the trunk under the spare tire. Cesar had given them a couple of boxes of bullets, too. They’d thought about going back to see Knee Socks but decided against it. Uncle Ray Boy was the priority. Eugene’s block was a hot zone, but they zipped past his house a few times to try to catch a glimpse of what was going on. They saw his grandparents on the front stoop with a box of pastries, looking worried, out of it, forgetting that no one used the front door.

“I gotta go in,” Eugene said.

Sweat said, “Go inside?”

“Got to. Maybe you park around the corner, I hop the fence in Henry Yu’s yard, go into the basement, just try to hear what’s going on.”

“They catch you, you’re fucked.”

“They won’t.”

Sweat pulled around the corner and blocked Henry Yu’s driveway, turning down the radio. Eugene got out and went into Henry Yu’s front yard, activating a motion detector light, and then he went down the alley next to the house and hurled himself up onto the green-slatted, ivy-covered fence that backed up against his yard. He threw his leg over the top and pulled his whole body over, landing with a thud. He knew chances were good that no one would be looking out the two small windows at the back of the house on either side of the deck, chalky yellow shades always drawn, Virgin Mary statues on the sill facing out. He just had to hope no one entered or exited the back door on the deck. He stayed low and went over to the storm drain by the rusted jungle gym he used to play around on. He remembered sitting up on the high bars with Robbie Mariano one afternoon and talking about what they’d do if they had X-ray glasses. Robbie said he’d go stand outside Kearney and just soak it in, all the girls, being able to see through all their clothes. Eugene said he’d go to the bank and look inside people’s vaults and then he’d plan a heist and know exactly which vaults were worth breaking into, which ones were loaded with cash and bonds and diamonds. He remembered going out there with his mom after the Yankees lost the Series in 2001, he was only six but he remembered it, and he was too young to be hurt or angry about the loss, but he remembered looking at his mother as she pushed him on the swing and seeing her cry. He lifted the drain cover and reached down into the hole. His mother kept a spare key for the basement under a rock at the bottom of the drain, and he took it out now. He stayed low and crawled to the basement door and used the key. He flipped the door open, shut it over himself, and walked down the steps into the dank basement where his weights and boombox were.

He could hear action upstairs right away. His mother’s voice, loud. Grandma Jean and Grandpa Tony. Aunt Elaine. He climbed up the steps, soft-toeing it, and sat down, listening. His mother was saying they needed to get his picture up around the neighborhood.

Grandma Jean said, “That’s the wrong tactic. We need to make him feel like he’s welcome here, that he’s not going to get in trouble.”

“Not get in trouble?” his mother said. “I’m gonna beat his ass over here.”

“See. Exactly what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t come home either.”

“He’s lucky I don’t beat him with a bat.”

“You’re assuming,” Aunt Elaine said, her voice quivery, “you’re assuming he’s run away. What if?”

“What if what?”

“I don’t know. He got kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped. Yeah, right.” His mother paused, paced around the kitchen. “And where’s my piece of shit brother? I ask him to help me with this and now he’s gone.”

“We can’t pretend to understand what your brother’s going through,” Grandma Jean said.

“No, we can’t, can we? He’s in and out, just like that. We mean nothing to him. My son means nothing to him. Middle of this, he leaves a note? A note?
Vaffanculo
!”