Greenmantle (10 page)

“Takes time.”

“You’re not kidding. This is a lovely place you have here, Mr. Garonne.”

“Tony.”

“Tony,” Frankie repeated. “There are so many beautiful things.”

“Well, I can’t do anything like that myself, but I like to support those who can. Sort of like a
patrono
, you know what I’m trying to say?”

Frankie nodded. Actually, the house was almost like a gallery. It was so neat and tidy, and all the art was displayed in a professional manner, complete with the business card for the gnome. She also felt from Valenti’s enthusiasm that he really did appreciate what he had here. It wasn’t just for show. Or if it was for show, the show was for himself. With the money she had now, she could do as much herself. Though she’d have to be careful not to go too wild. The money wasn’t going to last forever.

“So who’s ready for dinner?” Valenti asked.

* * *

The meal was a great success, consisting of antipasti, spaghetti with clam sauce and garlic bread, washed down with a white Italian wine. Frankie began to relax; their host didn’t seem inclined to pry. The conversation had been comfortably pleasant throughout the meal. In fact, Frankie realized later, while Tony hadn’t asked a lot of potentially awkward questions, he hadn’t offered much on his own background either. Maybe they all had skeletons in their closets, she thought. As far as she was concerned, they could just stay there.

By the time they retired to the living room, she was on her third glass of wine and feeling a nice light buzz. Valenti shooed them away from the dishes. “They’ll give me something to do in the morning, you know?” Frankie and Ali commandeered one couch, leaving the other for Valenti, who paused as he walked by the stereo.

“Maybe some music?” he asked.

“Great,” Frankie said.

Ali sat up. “I brought a tape,” she said as she reached for her mother’s purse. She rummaged around in it until she came up with the cassette, which she handed to Valenti.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s a surprise. Something I taped up last night. Go ahead and put it on.”

The sun had set and the room was lit only by one floor lamp over by the stereo. The night beyond the window was the black dark that only a country night can be. Nothing but tape hiss came from the speakers at first. Then slowly the sound of crickets and frogs, the whirr of a June bug could be heard.

After a few moments, Frankie turned to her daughter. “Ali, what—”

“Shhh. Listen.”

And then it came, a low breath of sound that whispered from the speakers. Frankie regarded her daughter curiously, but Ali was watching Valenti. He stiffened with surprise at the first hint of the distant piping. Ali thought he was going to say something, but instead he leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes, hands behind his head.

He knows something, Ali thought. She was eager to ask him about it right away—what was it, who was it, where was it coming from?—but she settled back as well, determined to be patient. They could talk when the cassette was over.

Frankie was puzzled by both Tony’s and her own daughter’s reactions to this odd cassette that Ali had taped. It sounded like one of those “Environments” records that were so popular in the seventies. The sound of rain falling. Dusk on a lakeshore. Morning in the desert. Then she heard the music and that started to remind her of Paul Horn’s
Inside
, only this wasn’t the sound of a flute. Too breathy. It didn’t even sound real in a way….

She leaned back against the couch herself, feeling a little woozy. When she closed her eyes, sparks danced in her vision. She’d never had much tolerance for alcohol, but the high she was feeling now didn’t seem related to what she’d consumed. It was like doing mushrooms, she thought, surprised herself at how clearly she could remember that sensation since her days of psychedelia had been a good sixteen, seventeen years ago. Mescaline. MDA—though its rushes had been stronger than what she was feeling now. This was lighter, a floating sensation, just like—

The cassette machine suddenly clicked off at the end of the tape and she sat up, startled. She reached for her wine glass, then thought better of it. Her head was still buzzing.

“That’s some recording,” Valenti said softly.

“You’ve heard it before, haven’t you?” Ali asked. “Not this tape, but the music.”

“Sure. Lots of times.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

Valenti made a motion with his hand. “Back there, in the bush somewhere. I mostly hear it in the spring or summer, so I figure it’s got to be a cottager who’s got himself some kind of flute. It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

Ali shook her head. “No, it’s not just pretty. It’s magical. There’s something…otherworldly about it. Something really spacey.”

Frankie found herself nodding, then studied her daughter. Had Ali started experimenting with drugs? God, she hoped not.

“Well, yeah,” Valenti said. “It’s different, sure. But I don’t know about magic.” Still, thoughts of the strange girl who’d dropped out of a tree to sit beside him earlier in the week rose to the top of his mind. The eyes in that thin face—they’d just grabbed him and made him sit still in his place until they were ready to let him go. And then the stag…and the way the music made him feel…Maybe he didn’t know about magic, but he knew about weird.

“Don’t you feel something inside you when you hear it?” Ali asked.

Valenti shrugged. “I suppose…”

“Maybe we should be going,” Frankie said. “It’s getting on to ten-thirty.”

Ali looked from her mother to Valenti, then nodded. “Okay,” she said without much enthusiasm.

“We’ll talk about it some more—next time you come up,” Valenti said.

That made Ali feel better. When Valenti took the cassette from the machine and went to give it to her, she shook her head.

“No. You can keep it for a while if you want.”

Valenti smiled, a curious look touching his eyes for a moment. “That’s great,” he said. “Listen, do you want some company going down the road…?”

“Maybe halfway,” Frankie said. “Just so’s the boogieman doesn’t nab us.”

“Okay,” Valenti said. “I’ll just change my coat.”

* * *

“Ali?”

Frankie stood in the doorway to her daughter’s room and looked in. Ali was sitting on her bed wearing the long T-shirt that passed for a nightie in the summer months. She looked up at her mother’s voice.

“Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

“I was just wondering. This business with the tape…?”

“Well, I know you didn’t hear the music the night I saw the deer in the backyard. When I heard it again last night, I taped it. I wanted to see if you and Tony’d feel the same kinds of things I did when I heard it. You see—you’re going to think I’m crazy—but there’s something secret about that music, only I don’t know what it is.” Her shoulders lifted and fell. “It just makes me feel, oh, I don’t know. Alive, I guess. Am I making sense?”

“I suppose,” Frankie said. She was about to go to her own room, when she paused. “You haven’t been trying drugs at all, have you? You know, marijuana or…?”

Ali shook her head. “Come
on
, Mom. I might hear weird things in music, but I’m not that dumb.”

Not like I was, Frankie thought.

“What makes you think I’d do dope anyway?” Ali wanted to know.

“Nothing,” Frankie said. “It’s just one of those things that mothers are supposed to worry about—didn’t you know that?”

“You can’t fool me. I think you just like to worry.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Ali watched her mother go down the hall to her own room, then slowly returned to sit on her bed. She looked out the window into the night. What’s out there? she wondered. What’s really out there? Had she just been reading too many fantasy books?

Although there’d been no answer tonight, she was determined to find one.

* * *

Much the same train of thought was going through Valenti’s mind as he followed the road back home. He’d never thought of taping the music like Ali had. But then, he’d seen the wild girl in the trees behind Ali’s house—seen her right up close. Maybe if we put what we know together, we’ll come up with something, he thought.

He wondered if the wild girl was watching him from the trees alongside the road right now. There was no warning tickle in the nape of his neck, but he had the feeling that this girl could be standing right smack in front of him and he wouldn’t see her until she wanted to be seen.

“But I’m going to find you,” he said softly before he went into the house and closed the door on what was left of the night. “Just you wait and see.”

* * *

Invisible in the shadows of the side of his house, a small figure stirred. A smile touched her fox-thin features. She was drawn to the girl who lived in the dark man’s house, but she was drawn to this man as well. There was a fire in them both. When they heard the music, it reflected back from them twice as strong. And tonight—hearing Tommy’s music coming from both Wold Hill and inside this man’s house at the same time!

She remembered seeing the girl with her little machine in hand before. Her curly hair tumbled against itself under her hat as she nodded. She had to get a machine like that and learn how to work it. She hugged herself in anticipation of how surprised Lewis would be when she made the machine work its enchanted mimickry for him. Wouldn’t his eyes go big!

Giving Valenti’s windows a last considering look, she scampered off into the forest, heading for the dark man’s house.

10

It was two months after he ran across the piece in the
Star
before Earl Shaw finally had a chance to go looking for his ex. He’d been seeing to the financing of a deal he was setting up for another Colombia-Miami run, and while he knew where he could get backers, he’d rather put the bread up himself.

He didn’t mind using other people’s money—preferred it, really—except the people who were making the right kind of noises this time around were connected. Earl didn’t much care for the kind of interest they’d be expecting when he paid them back. They were an old outfit working out of New York City, but new to the drug trade. Earl wasn’t all that keen on getting caught up between them and the established outfits, but what could you do? The deal was sure as hell right.

Hearing about Frankie’s big win was the shot in the arm Earl had needed. He knew there’d be no problem getting the bread out of her, so he’d been renegotiating his deal with the New York boys first, as well as putting the final touches on the Colombian end.

Things had started off dicey in New York. He’d had a lot of meetings with the Magaddino
consigliere
, Broadway Joe Fucceri, but in the end things had worked Earl’s way. Hell, nobody was going to give them as sweet a deal as what he’d laid out for them, especially now that they didn’t have to put out any upfront money. With the deal set for the middle of June, he flew up to Ottawa, only to hit the first snag in his plans. Frankie’d covered her tracks too well and she wasn’t to be found.

Earl still had trouble figuring her out. Something about her had changed in the few months before she split, and to this day it didn’t make sense. Hell, when they had first met she’d liked partying as much as he had. What did having a kid change?

But it had gotten so she didn’t want any of the crowd hanging around the apartment anymore, and then she’d picked up on the fact that the job he was going to every night had nothing to do with cleaning office buildings. He’d gotten into dealing in a heavy way. What the fuck—a guy had to live, right? Pushing a broom around some asshole’s office wasn’t living, not so far as Earl Shaw was concerned. And was it his fault he had to start carrying a piece? The action was getting rough and a man had to protect his shit or the big boy’d walk all over him. Christ, he was bringing home the bacon, wasn’t he?

But that didn’t cut shit with Frankie. She went all prissy on him. There was no more talk, no more arguments. One morning he came home and she was gone, headed out west where she started divorce proceedings against him.

He would have followed her—just to show her who was boss—but about that time he got involved in some action that took him down to Colombia for a little business trip. After that he’d drifted—Miami, L.A., New York, Van, T.O. He’d put on some meat and didn’t look a whole lot like the skinny hippie he’d been when he’d first gotten into the drug scene way back when. By the time he ran across Frankie’s picture in the
Star
, he’d been up and he’d been down, but he hadn’t thought about her or the kid in years. Had to be an omen, he figured. Things’d been down for so long this time, they just had to start looking up again.

Which was all well and good, except come Saturday night—two weeks from when he was scheduled to fly back to Bogota—he and Howie had run out of options and were up against a dead end. It was around ten o’clock that night, when they were killing a couple of beers in a William Street bar, that things finally took a turn for the better.