The Girl From Nowhere (20 page)

“My calling does not permit me to name names, but did you not steal this woman from another? And is not theft of a woman’s honor a mortal sin?’

“Honor in what sense of the word?”

“This woman had pledged herself to another.”

“Pledged herself? How so?”

“She had engaged in a contract with him.”

“I know nothing of this bullshit.”

“I fear that you are now committing the sins of aggravated arrogance and vanity—believing that your appetites override all else. Do you not believe in the validity of contracts?”

“What is this fucking contract?”

“The contract that this woman pledged herself to respect.”

I had a pretty good idea I knew what he was talking about, but I wasn’t about to advertise the fact.

“I’ve only ever entered into two contracts with a woman,” I said. “Both times the same woman. The first time was when I asked her to marry me. The second time was when we got a divorce.”

“Because the woman was unfaithful to you?”

“None of your fucking business.”

“And how did you feel when that happened? How did you feel when you found out for the first time?”

The guy knew how to hit a nerve. It had nothing to do with anything that was happening, but I remembered Janice standing on the stairs at Lampwick Street, looking down at me and telling me, “It doesn’t matter. It’s cool. Nothing has changed.”

And of course everything had.

“I don’t remember,” I said. “You get over that stuff.”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

I let it go. Was I beginning to understand where the guy was coming from? Was I crazy?

“Have you ever committed the capital sin of taking the life of another human being?” he asked.

“Not knowingly,” I said. “But I’ve seen men die.”

“And women?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

The picture in my head was of a girl of eighteen spread all over the sidewalk alongside the twisted remains of a truck that had been loaded with plastic explosives.

The man in the booth began to roar with laughter—unexpectedly high-pitched, manic laughter.

“Was she beautiful?” he wheezed.

With my cuffed hands, I took hold of the grille and shook the confessional, which only brought on more laughter. Meanwhile, I was grabbed by Anthony and one of the younger hoods and dragged away.

The laughter stopped abruptly and the man in the booth called after me, “We’ll have to think long and hard about what mortifications can purchase your forgiveness. There is perhaps only one form of penance sufficient to atone for sins of this magnitude.”

I opened my mouth to yell something back, but Anthony punched me in the kidneys, killing the words stone dead in my throat.

“As for your partner in fornication,” came the voice from the confessional, “even that ultimate punishment may not be enough.”

There was little doubt in my mind that this crazy “father confessor” was the angry patron behind Sandy’s gender transformation. That didn’t get me any nearer to discovering who he was, though. One thing I felt sure of—he might be pissed as hell at me and at Sandy, but he was in no hurry to take his revenge. He was a game player. He wanted to draw this out so he could find as many ways as possible to jerk off.

So the question was, what would the next game be? I didn’t have to wait long for the answer. Back in the nave of the former church, where the guests had been gathering, I saw that the strippers, some sipping champagne, were clustered around a large black-and-white television monitor. Anthony did nothing to stop me from joining them, so I took a place at the rear of the group and peered up at the screen. Something resembling a familiar tableau was being reenacted. What was conjured up was the scene from
Vamp
—a book-lined interior with Sandy sprawled in a leather chair. In the background, as in Yari’s photo, were two young women watching her. There were differences, however. The young women were dressed as bridesmaids, and seemed confused. Sandy’s eyes, instead of glaring defiantly at the camera, were glazed over as if she had been pumped full of sedatives or plied with martinis. The image—presumably transmitted over some kind of CCTV circuit—was blurry and kept breaking up. I could not tell for sure if the setting was Stewart Langham’s atelier.

As I watched the screen, horrified, an older woman in a maid’s costume carried in a wedding gown. I turned away from the monitor and found myself facing Shirley Squilacci.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “she’ll be sober when it’s time for the ceremony.”

“Is she drunk?”

“Stoned, more like it.”

“Is she here?”

No reply. I tried a different question.

“Was that Langham’s apartment?”

Again, no reply. I forced myself to turn back to the screen. The two bridesmaids and the older woman were trying to get Sandy into some frilly white underwear. It was like trying to dress a spastic rag doll. Some of the strippers watching found it funny.

“Just like your wedding night, babe,” giggled one. “And you didn’t even make it through the honeymoon.”

“I didn’t make it
to
the honeymoon!”

I turned away again and tried to concentrate on a thought that had popped into my head a little earlier. Undoubtedly whoever was behind all this had a nasty denouement in mind for me, but assuming he was planning to give me a one-way ticket to Nowhere—Sandy’s hometown, after all—he wasn’t going to do it here in front of a crowd of witnesses. For sure these bimbos knew how to keep their mouths shut, up to a point anyway, but with this many people you could never be quite sanguine about leaks. I wanted to pass this thought on to Darla, and it was then that I realized I hadn’t seen her in a while. That gave me a little crumb of hope. I turned back to Shirley Squilacci and asked if she knew where Darla was.

“Around somewhere. Why?”

“She said she was going to get me a drink.”

“Anyone can get you a drink. There’s champagne over there on that table.”

She was going to try and find me a Scotch.”

“I don’t know where the bitch is. I haven’t seen her. She’s taking care of business someplace.”

Unintentionally, I may have planted a thought in Shirley’s head. She politely excused herself—as if she was detaching herself from a paying customer at the Alibi—then walked over to Garofolo, who was nearby and nervously consulting his watch. She said something to him under her breath. They both glanced in my direction, then Garofolo strode quickly to the front of the building and into the vestibule where the entrance was, pulling a pistol from some hidden place as he went. That entrance was guarded by at least two hoods that I knew of, and I heard Garofolo scream at one of them.

“Why the fuck did you let her leave?”

“She said she was stepping out for a smoke.”

“When, for chrissakes?”

“I dunno . . . A coupla minutes ago . . . Maybe longer . . .”

“And you let her go? Just like that?”

“I thought she was fuckin’ okay . . . She just wanted a smoke.”

There was the sickening sound of something hard, like a pistol butt, hitting something fragile, like a skull. Then all hell broke loose.

“Plan B . . . PLAN B . . .”

I don’t know who screamed the words, but the organist concluded his recital abruptly, with a blast of dissonance, and everyone went flying in different directions. Except for Anthony, who stayed glued to me with the muzzle of his gun held to my throat.

“Just don’t get any fuckin’ ideas,” he growled.

I asked him what was going on.

“That cunt Darla must’ve blown the whole fuckin’ thing . . .”

“Who?”

“Fuckin’ Darla . . .”

“What do you mean, she blew it?”

“Shut the fuck up—okay?”

It looked like Darla had taken advantage of the one tiny window of opportunity she was presented with. By now, with luck, she was already talking to the cops.

Meanwhile, the action inside had become frantic. One of the first things to go down was that the strippers were hustled toward the exit—shrieking and yelling and complaining that they were being pawed. When they got there, they were intercepted by Garofolo, who managed to calm them down by gesturing at them with his gun.

“Okay, cool it . . . understand? You’re getting out of here, but you’ll still get paid. You’re doing it nice and easy and you’re leaving in twos—got it? The first two—you and you—out! The next two—Ginger and Marielle—count to twenty, then go. Okay? Then the next two—or maybe make it three—and so on. First couple goes uptown, the next downtown—okay? When you get out there, walk slow. No hurrying. Act normal. You’re just a couple of broads on your way to a bar, looking for a good time. You don’t know anybody else on the street. If you see a cop, ignore him. If you see a cop car, look the other way. Is that clear? Now get going. Louie, you’re in charge.”

While this was going on mobsters were crashing around, turning off lights, screaming orders, bumping into one another. A couple of guys scrambled to get the movie camera into its carrying case and then took off in a hurry, leaving the tripod behind. Garofolo, in a rage, tipped over a table covered with champagne glasses, then ran to the vestry and reemerged with a briefcase. As he did, a bellow came from the deconsecrated church’s pulpit, which was almost alongside me. It was a wordless howl so unworldly that everyone froze in their tracks and looked up. Glaring down at them, his eyes wild behind the slits in his Pierrot mask, was a man in a clerical collar and a ridiculous hat—the man who had taken my confession—his hands grasping the rail of the pulpit so tightly his knuckles were white. For a long beat nobody spoke or moved, and then the man in the mask launched into a wild harangue.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you people? What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Who gave you orders? Everyone stays put! This is my fucking show! Who pays the bills around here? I call the shots—understand? This is
my
fucking show!”

And so on till Garofolo interrupted, jerking his gun upward toward the man.

“You do what you want. You want to stay here and play footsie with the cops—that’s up to you.”

“We shook. We had a deal,” said the man. “Does nobody believe in fucking contracts around here?”

“The contract,” said Garofolo, “stipulates we go to Plan B if I say so.”

Everyone went back to what they had been doing. The man in the pulpit seemed, for the moment, to have run out of steam. To nobody in particular he said, “That cunt has poisoned everything.”

Then he glared down at me and spat. The gob of spittle missed me and landed on the lapel of Anthony’s tux.

“That’s fuckin’ nice!” said Anthony.

The man in the mask addressed himself to me.

“Don’t worry, Novalis” he said, “I’ll still get you—you and that treacherous bitch too.”

TWENTY-TWO

Anthony hurried me
through a side door that opened onto a paved yard, which in turn led to a back alley that, in the horse-and-buggy days, had provided access to stables. Now they were converted into bijou homes. It was nighttime, and above the rooftops, I caught a glimpse of the tip of the Empire State Building illuminated against the urban glow. I wanted to hug it one last time.

Waiting in the alley was a black stretch limo with tinted windows, decked out with white wedding ribbons that someone was in the process of ripping off. Anthony opened the passenger door and I saw that Garofolo was already inside, grasping his gun fretfully—like a jilted bride clutching her bouquet. He didn’t look happy. I wondered if this was the moment to try something, but I couldn’t think of any smart moves, so I meekly climbed in. As I did, I heard the sirens of at least three police cars approaching from different directions. I prayed that they meant Darla had gotten the word out. The limo took off as Anthony slammed the door behind me. As we emerged onto 10th Avenue, I could see, through the tinted glass, the flashing lights of one of the cop cruisers, but there was traffic between us and the heat, and the limo driver eased the vehicle onto an eastbound crosstown street.

The car phone burped. Garofolo picked it up with his free hand and spoke to someone—Shirley Squilacci I guessed—who evidently was in another vehicle, because he began by establishing his respondent’s location.

“And you know where to find her?’ he said. “And where to take her?”

It wasn’t difficult to figure out who he was referring to. As soon as he ended his call I asked, “Where have you been keeping her?”

“What difference does it make?” he said, paying me no attention but staring out a window of the limo.

“Is she at Langham’s place?”

Now, without actually answering my question, he became more forthcoming, as if thinking out loud.

“It’s too bad. We wouldn’t have this mess if someone hadn’t fucked up.”

He seemed to be trying to explain things to himself, as if rehearsing what he would have to explain to someone else later.

“All it takes is one thing. We needed to keep her quiet for a while, but the bitch who administered the sedative overdid it. I guess Sandy’s tolerance for medication is maybe screwed up by all the hormonal treatment. You do know about that shit, I presume? Bottom line, I should have left Shirley in charge, but I needed her at Yari’s place and I thought I could trust this other broad. She’s supposed to be a nurse. You saw Sandy on the monitor. That was a couple of hours ago. She should have been ready by then, but she was way overdosed. You’d be a married man by now.”

“About to enjoy my honeymoon?”

He didn’t respond, a gloomy expression on his face.

“And who’s the lunatic behind all this crap?”

Garofolo shrugged. I thought he was going to ignore my question, or just tell me to button my lip, but the fact that he had the gun trained on me seemed to focus him. I was a captive audience, so he could use me as the sounding board for whatever was going on in his head.

“You heard the man. A deal’s a deal. We shook hands on it. His anonymity is guaranteed. The contract is still in place. We’ve moved to Plan B, that’s all.”

He could talk about Plan B as much as he liked, but the fact was that Plan A—whatever it was—had been blown sky-high. Evidently, there would be consequences.

“My client is disappointed,” he said, “because he likes ceremonies and colorful diversions, and now that’s all shot—but we’re still moving forward with the endgame.”

“You’re a chess player?”

“I used to be pretty good. In high school we went to the regionals.”

How about that? Joey Garofolo could’ve been a contender.

“And when you use the word ‘contract’,” I asked, “are you employing it in the legal or the colloquial sense?”

Garofolo smiled a noncommittal half smile. I tried another tack.

“How much did your client pay for her?” I asked. “How much do you have to lay out to buy yourself a freshly minted girlfriend like Sandy? Must be plenty.”

He wasn’t touching this.

“My guess is you weren’t in the picture that early on,” I speculated out loud. “You came on board after the deal with Sandy was set in concrete.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors,” he said.

I asked if he taught college on the side.

He almost smiled again.

“What the fuck is the mob coming to?” I asked. “Did Joey Bonanno worry about mixed metaphors?”

An apologetic half-smile.

“I went to school at Pepperdine,” he said. “My Dad wanted me to see the world.”

Malibu? This was rich. Next he was going to tell me that the mob was an expression of Keynesian economics.

“I thought there were more traditional ways for managing human resources,” I said. “You know—extortion, intimidation. Don’t they call you ‘the Shiv’?”

He didn’t like that, but answered anyway.

“So I’ve been told.”

Having nothing to lose, I decided to push my luck.

“There’s a story out there about how you once sliced a guy’s face open from ear to ear, then hung him in an air shaft to dry. Upside down. A snitch. Is that true?”

Anger flickered behind his eyes now, but he went back to his half-smile.

“You really want to know?” he asked. “That story’s bullshit. The snitch got sliced, but it had nothing to do with me except that I was at the wheel of the getaway car. An Irish kid from the West Side did it. My old man thought it would look good on my résumé so he paid the kid off to keep his mouth shut about it—paid him off handsomely. So everyone believes it was me that sliced the guy up. It bought me respect, and in my business respect is everything.”

I wished he hadn’t told me that. It’s was the kind of confession he was unlikely to entrust to someone he was expecting to make the cocktail party circuit in the foreseeable future.

As the limo reached the intersection of 5th Avenue and 23rd Street, I looked out through the heavily tinted windows and noticed the time on the big pedestal clock that stands on the sidewalk across from the Flatiron Building. Past two a.m. The limo continued smoothly to the East Side, then headed uptown. Traffic was light. When we reached Murray Hill it became apparent that we were headed for the Midtown Tunnel. We were bound for Queens.

I don’t like tunnels that travel under bodies of water. They bring back childhood memories, waking nightmares in which I imagined tugs and lighters and ferries, and the
Queen Mary
with Roy Rogers and Trigger at the captain’s table
,
and Japanese aircraft carriers
loaded with Zeros and kamikaze pilots, and German battle cruisers and U-boats—a motley fleet—displacing millions of gallons of wet stuff right above my head. The only things that kept them off my skull were a couple of inches of bedrock and a layer of sludge. When we went to Jones Beach, or to visit Aunt Louise and Uncle Harry in Elmhurst, I would bribe my mother with wet kisses and hollow promises if she would just take a detour, however inconvenient, that would allow us to cross to Long Island by way of the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Williamsburg Bridge, or the Triborough—anything but the Midtown Tunnel.

So as we plunged down toward the entrance to the tunnel, I felt the familiar tug on my testicles as they attempted to retract into my body. My phobia heightened into real fear at the thought that I might never set foot in Manhattan again. I craned my neck, hoping for a last glimpse of the Chrysler Building. Too late. As the limo entered the concrete mouth of the tunnel, I held my breath and began to enumerate things I was leaving behind that I would miss: Zito’s bread, the bar at Fanelli’s, the cocktail called a troika that they served at the Russian Tea Room, Sunday mornings at the Met, Monday nights at The Village Vanguard, the French guys out of a Maigret novel who played
pétanque
in Central Park, my annual visit to the Oyster Barat Grand Central Station,
Broadway Boogie Woogie
,
the egg-and-bacon sandwiches at La Bonbonnière, the railings outside my apartment, Balducci’s, the kids playing in the schoolyard at PS 41, the beauty mark on Janice’s ass.

“Are you okay?” asked Garofolo. “Don’t throw up in the fucking limo.”

I gave that a second or two.

“I was thinking about the mac-and-cheese you used to get for two bits at the Automat.”

“Yeah—it was the best,” he agreed, seeming relieved. “I used to get it on 57th Street after my piano lessons.”

There were times when Garofolo seemed almost human. By the time we approached the Long Island City exit, however, he had reverted to type. Tucking the muzzle of his gun under my armpit, he became all business again. He used his free hand to activate a switch that lowered blinds over all the windows in the passenger compartment.

“Okay—don’t get any ideas as we pass through the toll plaza. The doors on this thing have reinforced locks and the windows are armored glass. Don’t try yelling to the squirrel in the booth. He won’t be able to hear you, and he doesn’t give a shit anyway. He just wants to finish his shift and get home in time to screw his old lady before she has to roll out of bed to feed the kids their gruel and split for her day job.”

The guy was a Tolstoy manqué.

Once we were past the toll plaza, he got back on the car phone.

“Okay, so you’re on your way . . . What shape is she in? . . . That’s good, I guess . . . And did you hear from the client? Okay, I’ll bear that in mind . . .”

He hung up the phone and closed his eyes, as if reassured by what he had heard. For half a split second I thought of snatching his gun, but I was still wearing cuffs.

Without opening his eyes, Garofolo murmured matter-of-factly, “Don’t even think about it.”

The limo pushed into Queens, past warehouses and red-brick apartment blocks, and Greek Orthodox churches, and little Puerto Rican meeting houses, and dingbat terraces, and branches of Loehmann’s and Bloomingdale’s, and ethnic restaurants, and vast cemeteries filled with dead strangers—and my Aunt Louise and Uncle Harry. I knew they were all there, even though I couldn’t see anything with the blinds down.

I soon gave up on trying to keep track of the route the driver was following. By day, the sound of planes headed to or from La Guardia might have given me some clue as to our whereabouts, but not at two thirty in the morning when neighbors in Astoria and Jackson Heights—not to mention the clams in Flushing Bay—were provided official respite from the roar of Pratt & Whitney turbines at full throttle.

Garofolo opened the limo’s bar, poured himself a drink, and offered me one.

“It’ll make you feel better,” he insisted.

I didn’t see that I had much to lose, so I asked for a Scotch. He built a large one.

“Too bad for you that you had to go and hook up with Sandy,” he said, touching his glass to mine.

“I was just walking down the street minding my own business,” I told him.

“No such thing. Your business is my business is Sandy’s business is everybody’s business. That’s the way things are now. You’ve got to get yourself in a position where you’re the one running the business.”

I felt strangely calm having this portentous conversation with someone who, for all I knew, was about to become my executioner. Maybe “numb” would be a better word. We rode in silence for a while. I sipped my Scotch. It felt good as it hit my stomach, but I tried to be careful not to down too much, determined to hang onto to any last chance that might turn up of scrapping my way out of this mess. After a while, the limo jolted a couple of times, as if it had passed over railroad tracks or maybe one of those storm channels that drain into the bay. Garofolo peeked under the blinds.

“Almost there,” he said.

“Let me guess,” I said. “We’re at JFK and you’re going to put me on a flight to Hawaii. Maybe in a suitcase. Or perhaps you’ll need a matched set.”

He ignored me and continued to look out under the blind for a few seconds before activating the intercom that allowed him to communicate with the driver.

“This’ll do,” he said.

The limo slowed and stopped. Garofolo looked at the cuffs on my wrists and said, “I’d take those off for you if I could, but I don’t have the key.”