Starr Sign
Page 6
I get into the car, put the stick shift in second, and shout to Majd through the rolled-down window of the driver’s seat. “Okay, now!”
He shoves all his weight into the back bumper of the car, and it slowly begins to move. Once we’ve gained some momentum, I pop the clutch. The car starts on the first try. A good day.
I turn onto the street, driving with the window kept down. As promised, it’s warmer than any day in December should be. It feels more like early summer, and that’s a good thing, since the heater in Charlotte’s car doesn’t work. I don’t close the window until I hit the interstate, where I drive the speed limit only because Charlotte’s hatchback can’t go any faster without something falling off of it. The trip odometer sits at twenty-three miles. I set it at zero each time I gas up, since the fuel gauge is busted. I know I can get about twenty-five miles to the gallon, and I do the math to figure out how far I can travel before I’ll be running on fumes.
The city falls away behind me. I find some of Charlotte’s CDs in the glove compartment and pop one in. By the time I pull up in front of the Tudor-inspired low-rise an hour later, I’ve sung along to the entire soundtrack of 9 to 5, enjoying the open road and the weather. After parking the car, I enter through the arched front doors of the rest home. I try to be polite to the nurse at the front desk who sits next to a plastic Christmas tree sprayed with fake snow.
“I’m here to see my grandfather,” I tell her.
She asks me to wait, which I don’t do very well, but before long an orderly shows up and leads me to a common room that smells like Lysol and grilled cheese. A large picture window runs along the far wall. Through it, I can see a deep valley dotted with real-life versions of the fake tree by the front desk, minus the snow.
“Candace,” the old man sitting at a checkerboard says. “Bellissima!”
“Roberto,” I say. “It’s good to see you.”
Roberto Scuderi is not my grandfather. He’s an old-timer from The Goon who I’ve gotten to know over the years, one of the few patrons at that local watering hole who can talk about my mother and the Scarpellos from firsthand experience. Unlike the other barflies of that fine establishment, he’s got class. Even here in the nursing home, with a blanket over his knees, he wears a button-up cashmere sweater and black dress shoes polished to a gleam. His signature white fedora sits perched slightly askew on his head, but I don’t say anything about it. Getting old sucks.
“Leave now please, Reginald,” he says to the man sitting opposite him at the checkerboard. “Can you not see I have company?” Reginald looks up at me through rheumy eyes. Before this, he’d picked up one of the checkers and covertly tried to slip it in his mouth. Roberto signals for the orderly, and he comes and escorts Reginald to a puzzle table in the corner, with no regard for the possible choking hazard.
“Sit down, Candace. Sit down,” the old man says. “Did you bring the small favour I asked for?”
I make sure the orderly is busy, then reach into the inner pocket of my jacket and hand Roberto the water bottle that I’ve filled with one-hundred-and-twenty-proof grappa. He pours some into the dregs of his orange juice and takes an appreciative sip.
“Ah,” Roberto says. “This will kill me, but I will enjoy the dying.”
“How are you settling in?” I ask him.
“The food is too bland and the nurses too skinny,” he tells me. “But it is a necessary evil. And there are worse places for an old man to be.” He’s right on that one. Roberto must have had a good-sized stash put away to afford this place. The state-run nursing homes are like Night of the Living Dead, but with more bedpans. There’s a graphic horror novel Janet should write.
“But I do not think you come all this way to inquire after my settling,” Roberto says, pouring himself some more grappa.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t.”
I tell him about my sister showing up, but not the why of it. He doesn’t need to know about the frozen body in the morgue, or the fact that it had Angela’s blood on it. Where Roberto comes from, everything is on a need-to-know basis. You don’t ever want to have more knowledge than can be successfully beaten out of you. But I am here for information, and I hope the grappa and his age may loosen his tongue.
“Angela went to see the Scarpellos,” I say. “Just before the old Don died. She hasn’t been heard from since. I’m trying to locate her. You know, for my sister.”
Roberto nods, politely picks up a napkin and dabs the edges of his lips.
“I had heard this,” he says. “That she had come to see her grandfather.” Roberto may be in a home, but he still has connections. A made man never really retires. I bet they even have a special LinkedIn for them on the dark web. “The old Don was pleased to see her.”
“Really?” I say.
“Reaching the end of life changes the perspective,” Roberto says. “A man looks to make amends to others and to God.” Roberto makes the sign of the cross, surprising me. He had renounced his Catholicism years ago, after his daughter was found dead in the stairwell of a crack house, her corpse violated more than once post-mortem. But looking around the room, I can see how a person’s beliefs could change in a place where the prospect of death hangs heavy. There are no atheists in foxholes or nursing homes, I suppose.
“Yes, her grandfather was happy to see her,” Roberto says. “Not so much the new Don, I understand.”
“Alex Scarpello,” I say.
“Yes,” Roberto takes another gentlemanly sip of the grappa. “He took over the family affairs last year when the grandfather first became ill. Some say for the better, others say not.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He is not of the old school,” Roberto says. “More like his mother’s people. In the eighties, there was much uncertainty, many arrests, the Cosa Nostra was crippled by law enforcement and informers. A marriage was arranged between the old Don’s son and a young Russian girl. An alliance, to ensure the future. Many were not pleased. But it turned out to be a good match, one that maintained the family during the difficult years.”
Roberto is not giving up anything new here. I had heard most of this at the Murder Ink presentation — how a power marriage was set up between the Scarpellos and the Russian Mob. My mother’s uncle would’ve been pushing forty then, while his new wife would’ve been barely old enough to vote. She couldn’t have had much say in the matter. But it had been a good investment for the future, just as Roberto had said.
“Alex was the only kid they had, right?”
“Yes. It took some time to produce a child. It was fortunate it was a son, of course. Anya, his Russian wife, went back to Moscow to have the baby. Her husband was killed while she was away. By the time it was safe for Alex and his mother to return to America, he was a young boy. A sickly child, many visits to the doctor. But I think he outgrows this.”
“Why do you think he was upset about my mother visiting with the old Don?”
“As I said, there are those who are not pleased with Alex Scarpello. If he did not have the backing of the Russians, he may not have held on to his power after the grandfather died. His methods are … unorthodox. Some had hoped Angela might have gone on to produce a son, an heir to contend for leadership in his place.”
“But she didn’t,” I say. “Have a son.”
“Perhaps,” Roberto says. “But your mother is one to be full of surprises. I do not think Alex Scarpello is a man who enjoys much to be surprised.”
I think about all those years my mother wandered around the country. The large pockets of time that even Malone and her contacts couldn’t account for. She could have had another kid — another child squirreled away somewhere. And it could have been a son. My sister and I are no threat to the Scarpello dynasty, on account of our sex. But a son would have been different. The Mob is still a fiercely guarded patriarchy. Most of the world is, if you think hard enough on it.
“Do you really think if Angela had a son he could have unseated the new Don?”
“Maybe Angela was just trying to get back in with the family?” I say, moving my own checker. I picture Angela, the prodigal Mob daughter returned, burrowing in like a tick to suck the blood money out of her connected relatives. That would have pissed Alex Scarpello off.
“I think there is more to it than this,” Roberto says. He clears his throat after another shot of grappa. “There have been rumours.”
“What kind of rumours?”
He hesitates, but the grappa seems to be working its tongue-loosening magic. Roberto lowers his voice. “They say your mother had some claim on the Scarpello fortunes, or, at the very least, was making the hints that she did. Asking questions. This did not make the new Don happy.”
“But what claim could she have?”
He doesn’t answer me, just moves a checker ahead another square.
“You think she did have a son, don’t you?”
Roberto waits for my move, but I don’t make one. He casts his gaze out the picture window to the pine-dotted valley below, like it’s a TV show he’d forgotten was on. Then he turns back to me.
“I think that Alex Scarpello is a vicious man, Candace. Unpredictable. Il maniaco.” He whispers the Italian words like a curse. “He has not the honour of the old Don. Some say this is the new way.” In between those lines is a warning, but I’m not going to heed it. I lean across the checkerboard.
“Where is Angela, Roberto?”
The old man pours himself a little more grappa, smooths the plaid blanket he has in his lap.
“I do not know, Candace,” he says. “But I wonder whether it is wise for you to ask such questions.” He jumps over my checker and pockets it under his blanket, possibly to keep it away from the guy who likes to eat them. “Where we come from, the answers, they can be very dangerous things.”
I get the orderly to give me a push-start out of the parking lot, after I siphon some gas from the nursing home short bus. I had spent another hour playing checkers with Roberto before I told him I had to go. When I left, he kissed me on both cheeks. The sour plum perfume of grappa still clings to my hair.
I take side roads driving back to the city. One of the headlights is burned out on the car, and it’s dark now. I can’t afford to be pulled over by the cops. The busted light wouldn’t be a big deal, but not having a driver’s licence or insurance would.
When Charlotte’s hatchback coughs to a stop on the side of the road, I haven’t seen another car for miles. I check the odometer. I should have had more than enough gas to make it home. It must be something else besides lack of fuel. I pull out my phone to call Deep for a lift in his more reliable Celica, but the charge on my phone is as dead as the car’s engine.
I wait in the driver’s seat for a while before I decide no one’s going to come by that I can flag down for a ride. I’ll have to wait until the morning, when the commuter crowd avoiding the traffic of the highway starts up. There is no way I’m sleeping in the car, though. I have trouble fitting my lanky frame into Charlotte’s compact at the best of times. Every time I unfold myself out of the driver’s door, Majd says it reminds him of a clown car. I didn’t know they had the circus in Syria, but I suppose dancing bears and trapeze artists have their own cross-cultural appeal.
I pull an old car blanket out of the back. Charlotte keeps it stored where the spare tire should be. I lock up and look around. There’s a moon out tonight, so I can see well enough to make out a murky depression in the trees next to the road. When I get closer, I find the remnants of a farmhouse foundation, the fieldstone walls of the basement lining a large rectangular hole in the ground. There are still intact stairs, made of cast iron, that lead down into the pit of it. Down there, I find the usual leftovers from teenage bush parties — discarded beer bottles, cigarette butts. A used rubber gets stuck on my boot, and I have to kick it away.
There’s a small opening in one of the walls, to a cold cellar that would have been built under the earth rather than the house itself. This is what they used in the days before refrigeration. I manage to crawl inside and make a nest in the corner with the blanket. I’m careful to check for condoms and broken glass, but it looks like the kids stay out of this room. Not surprising, since it’s got a Blair Witch Project–feel to it. But there’s an earth roof above it, and it’s better than waking up bent over like fucking Quasimodo after a night sleeping in the car. It’s a good thing the weather has changed, or I would end up tomorrow morning covered in frost worse than that chick in the freezer.
I’m almost asleep, with the help of the bourbon in my flask, when I hear a twig snap. I open my eyes, keeping them trained on the doorway. It allows me a partial view of the forest above. I wait, not moving, except for a slow reach toward the gun tucked into my jeans. That’s when I see a pinpoint of light moving through the trees. One of those flashlight apps you can use on your phone. It bounces through the branches and shines itself into the basement foundation when it gets close enough. The moon must have gone behind a cloud, because I can’t see who or what’s behind the tiny beam. I watch it move like Tinkerbell along the edge of the foundation. Its disembodied brightness starts a careful descent along the stairs, the old cast iron creaking with every step. I slowly pull the gun out from under the blanket that I still have wrapped around me.
It could be kids, similar to the ones who left the beer bottles behind. But maybe I hadn’t been paying attention in my rear-view enough after I left the old folks’ home, too preoccupied with the information Roberto had given me about Angela and the wisdom of questions. I could have been followed. When the light is halfway down the stairs, I have to make a decision. I don’t want to shoot some pimply teenager carrying a six pack and looking to get laid. But I am also vulnerable here in the cold cellar, with no exit point other than the doorway I crawled through. If this is the person who sat outside my place last night in the Chrysler, I need to create a distraction, then find a way to get out in the open.
I train my Ruger on the rise underneath the stairs, unlatching the safety. When I let the hammer down, the shot echoes off the stone walls of the old foundation and leaves a hole in Charlotte’s blanket before I throw it off. I do a commando roll out the doorway to the basement proper and crouch down tightly beneath the last few steps of the stairs, waiting to see what the light does next. Soon, I hear a car engine start up, the squealing of tires. I take the rickety metal stairs two at a time, but when I get back to the side of the road and Charlotte’s broken-down hatchback, all I can see are the red tail lights as they disappear around the next bend in the road.
CHAPTER 6
THE NEXT MORNING, I CATCH A RIDE with a lady in a pink car on her way to a Mary Kay conference. She tells me they always have a great time there, comparing sales figures and checking out the new product line over cocktails. She’s really looking forward to the unveiling of a new long-lasting lipstick. Apparently, you practically need a sandblaster to get it off before you go to bed at night.
I ask her about under-eye cream, and we pass the next half hour discussing serums and collagen boosters. When she drops me on an exit ramp just on the outside of town, she hands me a business card the same colour as her car.
Now, I’m in the backseat of a Honda. The two guys up front reek of dope. The driver looks like Cartman from South Park, that prime time cartoon that isn’t for kids. His ballooning gut barely fits behind the steering wheel. The one in the passenger seat has dirty-blonde dreadlocks and a grey-and-black Mexican jerga hoodie. They call me “dude,” even though I’m not one, and giggle inappropriately a lot. A girl can’t be too picky about a ride when she’s covered in dirt and smelling of leaf mould. After my run-in with the cellphone flashlight, I’d found a nearby ravine and covered myself with the blanket and a heap of leaves. Cramped space aside, I hadn’
t wanted to risk the exposure of sleeping in my fishbowl hatchback of a car, or the trapped possibilities of the Blair Witch Project cold cellar.
When the stoners pull up in front of the E-Zee Market, they start giggling again. I thank them for the ride, then go to open the car door, but the little fuckers have put the child locks on.
“You want to open the door?” I say, pulling a twig out of my hair.
They giggle some more. “You sure you don’t want to stick around, ragamuffin?” the one with the white-guy dreadlocks says with a sad attempt at a patois accent. Someone should tell this moron that no amount of hairstyling is going to make him Jamaican.
“Yeah,” says the Cartman look-alike. “Ass, gas, or grass, baby. Nobody rides for free.”
I could use my gun, but I don’t. Instead, I pull Charlotte’s car keys out of my jacket pocket, reach forward, and press the pointed end of one of them into his jugular. The red pom-pom on the chain swings back and forth above his huge gut.
The door locks pop open. When I get out of the car, their beat-up Civic speeds off faster than the car with the tail lights did last night.
I open up the E-Zee Market front door, and the bell jingles over my head. Majd looks up, but then sees my face, creased and cranky from a night on the forest floor. He goes back to sorting the lottery tickets he has spread out on the counter.
When I get back inside my apartment, I take off my jacket, kick my jeans off, and throw them in a corner along with my shirt. The gun and holster I hide in an emptied VHS box set of Sex in the City, Seasons 1–6. I’ve watched enough of Carrie Bradshaw’s hijinks to last me a lifetime. After I tuck the box back with the other tapes, I connect my dead phone to the charger on the kitchen table and step into my coffin-sized bathroom.
Majd likes to call this ceramic cubbyhole a three-piece, but there is no separate shower. Instead, the walls and ceiling are covered in white subway tiles, and there’s a spray nozzle hooked up at about the height of my nose. I have to turn it on and crouch under the weak stream of water without falling into the toilet when I shampoo. But at least the water’s hot. After about fifteen minutes, I finally begin to warm up. I wash the smell of the forest out of my hair, watching the stray leaves as they gather at the drain in the floor. My mane, now fully saturated, reaches all the way to my ass. When it dries into my signature spiral of mad curls, it only comes to the middle of my back.