Rampage

by Justin Scott

  She said, “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know where you are. And I don’t know where you and your scam come together.”

  “Do you remember the first time we met?”

  She glanced around but no one was near. “Me tied to a chair and you strutting around in a mask?”

  “No. In the restaurant.”

  “What restaurant?”

  “Abatelli’s on Woodhaven Boulevard. I saw you on a summer night with your family about ten years ago.”

  “My ‘betrothal,’” she acknowledged with an ironic smile. She hesitated—for she had good reason not to discuss that night further—but by now she cared enough about him to be as straight as possible and wanted to speak the truth in her heart. “I was wondering when you would mention it.”

  “You remember?”

  “Of course. You stared at me all night. You gave me a really nice smile. I wondered who you were.”

  “You blew me away. I couldn’t get you out of my head.”

  Helen smiled. Honesty’s “reward” had paid off quickly; Chris’s happy expression proved he really meant he liked her, and that he was courting her for more than his scam. She felt like she had for a brief second last spring at Uncle Frank’s ball game, wondering if a special door could be opened that she thought forever closed. But the pitcher, whatever his name was, was a guy in that other world, whereas Chris and she had much in common.

  “What was going on with you?” she asked. “What were you doing there?”

  “Eating, until I got in an argument with Don Richard Cirillo. Remember?”

  “I remember you went out with him. He came back alone.” Taggart’s expression grayed; he looked away a moment, touched the scar on his mouth. Then looked back at her, the gray look erased by one of his easy grins. “You got stoned in the ladies’ room.”

  Helen smiled. “No. I got stoned before I came. I got stoned again in the bathroom.”

  “I guessed they were giving you away.”

  “You guessed right.”

  “I didn’t think that happened anymore.”

  “My parents had their reasons.”

  “Later I heard that Cirillo was brokering peace between your family and the Confortis.”

  “It was much more complicated than that. My parents would not have ‘sold’ me for peace, I can assure you. They’re real Italian-Italian in some ways, but they’re not low class.”

  “Then why’d they do it?”

  Helen shrugged, looked around the sidewalk, stared at a little girl holding her father’s hand. “Marrying me off killed a lot of birds with one stone. I was kind of wild. They knew I’d be nothing but trouble if they kept me home. I was nowhere in school. I was ready, you know? Sixteen, and everything looked better outside the house.”

  “You seemed younger.”

  “I was hell on wheels. I had thirty-year-old guys calling me up.” She laughed easily and Taggart decided there was no question he loved her. “My brothers were spending half their time threatening my boyfriends.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, Christ! What didn’t happen! First of all, the whole thing was a Cirillo trick, which I found out later. Second, the poor kid I married was really messed up.”

  She moved to the next window and Taggart followed. Here the sleek couple were bidding their host and hostess good night, maids were ladling eggnog for the diehards, and outside it was snowing and the Duesenberg had miraculously been transformed into a horse-drawn sleigh.

  “My husband was beautiful. A really good person. But he couldn’t hack his father, his whole family, all the pressuring. He didn’t want the rackets. So he was a doper. Just like with real kids when the parents try to make them be a doctor, so they drop out? I didn’t know it at first. I smoked and did a little of this and that, so I didn’t think it was any different for him. But it was.” She pushed her hair from her face and shook her head violently. “The trouble with being married to a druggie is it’s so lonely. He was always telling me he loved me, and he did, but three-quarters of the time he was flying.”

  “You didn’t fly with him?”

  “I tried. But I’m not a druggie. I get bored if I get stoned more than a weekend. Two days and I want my head back. So I’d get straight and he was still flying. I was alone till I made a friend.”

  She moved again and Taggart followed. The sleek couple were tearing across Central Park in the sleigh. Helen looked at Taggart and her eyes glistened. “You know so much about me— you know who the friend was, don’t you?”

  Taggart shook his head.

  “Come on, you must know.”

  “I guess somebody in the casino.”

  “Sure. Where else would I meet somebody in Vegas. Guess who?”

  “Somebody you fell in love with?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’ll guess his father, the owner.”

  “Jackpot. You knew it was my father-in-law—I wish you wouldn’t lie to me. I’ve been straight, more so than with anybody I ever talked to. I want you to be straight with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and Helen thrilled to his chagrined smile. “I’m out of practice. We’ll work on it.”

  “Thanks. That’s nice. That’s real nice.... Did you know I

  got pregnant by him?”

  “No.”

  She looked up at him sharply, nodded to herself. “No, no one did. I didn’t know what to do. Then I figured, okay, I’ll pretend it’s my husband’s. All I’d have to do was get him off the dope long enough to get it up.”

  “Logical,” Taggart replied lightly, finding it hard to handle how harsh she sounded.

  “The baby’s grandfather would have really been his father. And the baby’s father would really have been his brother. Family, right?”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “It could have been. Only my father-in-law lover got shot by the goddamned Cirillos.”

  She went to the last window, and when a ten-year-old girl smiled up at her, she lightly touched her hair. The girl moved on. Taggart joined Helen again. The couple were on their knees on their drawing-room carpet, hastily wrapping toys. Champagne was in a bucket and the man was holding the knot while the woman tied the bow. They looked about to kiss.

  “So I went home and I told my parents, You owe me! You get me an annulment and an abortion. And they did. I don’t know what it cost, but they got the marriage annulled. I had my abortion. I made them let me go to college.... That was funny, Sarah Lawrence College. You should have seen it. This little Italian girl in perfect makeup with hair washed every day, while the real girls are dressing down to look like our kitchen help. ... In college they taught me about music. They gave me a ‘don,’ this woman who played the violin like an angel, and for one whole semester I studied an Italian composer I had never heard of named Corelli. Then your fucking brother sent my father to jail, and I had to come home to help Eddie and Frank run the business.... ”

  Taggart wished he had not chosen her family to be his instrument of revenge. “You keep calling other people real. You’re real.”

  “Not like them. They can make all the mistakes they want. In the rackets, one mistake and you’re caught. But who can live a perfect life?... Why were you fighting with Don Richard?”

  She had caught him off balance. “I thought he killed my father.”

  “Did he?”

  Taggart shook his head. “Somebody got mad and flew off the handle. It took me a while to see it that way.”

  She touched his throat. “Your pulse is pounding like you’re going to explode.”

  Taggart escaped the necessary lie by kissing her mouth.

  She kissed him back, her lips opening and molding softly to his; he felt her fingers on the back of his head, exploring his hair and drawing him harder against her mouth. Their tongues met. She broke away with a satisfied smile.

  “Hey. Merry Christmas.”

  Taggart felt like he would float across Fifth Avenue if she weren’t
holding his hand. “Why don’t we go someplace and exchange presents or something?”

  She was still holding his hand. She probed his face, her violet eyes dark with wonderment. “I really don’t know.”

  “Want to see my new apartment?”

  She shrugged, as if so sure of herself in most things, Taggart thought, that being unsure about him didn’t matter. She almost seemed to revel in the luxury of not deciding. “Why?” she marveled. “Why did I tell you all that?”

  “You figured I knew it anyhow.”

  She gave him a lopsided smile. “God, would my mother love you. A nice, rich Italian boy not in the rackets.”

  “Half.”

  She arose on tiptoe and whispered harshly and bitterly, “Whose brother put my father in the slammer and who’s moving in on the Mafia? Just wonderful!”

  “Leave out the last part.”

  “Chris, you’re crazy.”

  “Want to go play?”

  “I’ll look.”

  “Come on.”

  They got back in the car, which headed toward Park Avenue. Helen leaned against the door on her side as if debating whether to jump out. Then, to his delight, she moved closer and laid her head on his shoulder. Her hair was shiny and lightly perfumed; when he kissed it it felt like dense folds of silk. Taggart sat back, happy to watch the city slide by the bronzed windows. He hadn’t felt like this since—but there was no since. He had never felt like this in his life.

  The Rolls drew up to the Spire. A timid-looking little guy in a ragged army jacket was huddled by the construction fence. As Taggart and Helen got out of the car, he started toward them with his hands in his pockets. “Sir, you got change for coffee, sir?”

  The building guard hurried from the gate, saluting. “Good evening, Mr. Taggart.”

  “Evening, Johnny. They get my elevator working again?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The little guy, backing warily from the guard and Taggart’s chauffeur, was shivering, so Taggart slid a pair of C-notes out of his money clip. “Cold,” he said, his father’s rough voice echoing in his head. “Get yourself a coat.”

  Helen followed him into the chaos of the lobby. The cement floor and steel supports were lit by bare bulbs; cables and scaffolds cast shadow webs on the poured concrete walls and the lofty ceiling. “Your club, madame.”

  “Can Victoria and Chryl really do it?”

  “Given a sufficiently blank check, they could arrange tasteful sunsets in the east.”

  “Don’t worry about the money. You’ll make a fortune.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “When John Gere’s PR man pays a hundred and fifty bucks cash for a bottle in the Champagne Room, a hundred and twenty of that is cash in your pocket.”

  “Right this way, partner.”

  She hesitated again. “You really like them, don’t you?”

  “We’re real friends.”

  “More than friends?”

  “We’ve become family. I met them right after my father died. I gave them away at their weddings. When they got tired of the bozos, I provided shark divorce lawyers. Sometimes they’re like mothers to me and sometimes I’m like a father to them.”

  “They showed me pictures. Victoria’s little girl looks a lot like you.”

  “That’s Annie. Tony says she looks exactly like our mother.”

  “Do you—?”

  “The kids carry the names of rich, old Wasp families. There isn’t a door in America that will be closed to them. And until then, they’ve all got Uncle Chris whenever Mummy needs a man around the house.”

  “Do you still get it on with them?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Chryl and Victoria are a couple. It’s both or neither, which was one of the problems in their marriages.”

  “It’s not something I can get with, but they seem very happy.”

  “They’re hot in their field, they’re getting rich by their own hand, and the jerks they married gave them beautiful children. Damned right they’re happy.”

  “Will you ever have your own children?”

  “Funny you should ask. Shall we go up?”

  The elevator shaft was still an open frame, but the car itself was finished in lacquer and chrome. In the corners were crystal flower vases filled with white freesia which perfumed the air, a silver umbrella stand, and a bottle of Moet chilling in a silver bucket.

  “Won’t they steal this stuff?”

  “Private car, straight to the owner’s suite. Champagne?” Taggart removed the foil, gripped the cork, twisted the bottle, and filled two tulip glasses. “Cheers.”

  “Per cent ’anni.” She smiled at the bubbles boiling from the hollow stem as the elevator started to ascend.... Chris, how rich are you?”

  “Never quite as rich as I look, but doing pretty good the last couple of years. And thanks to a maniacally confused city government, I get enough tax credits to keep most of it.... Swal low if your ears hurt.”

  She said in deep seriousness, “What are you doing it for?”

  “What do you do what you do for?”

  “I’m protecting my family.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  Let this tiger go? Taggart thought. Get out somehow, take Helen and get out. And spend the rest of his life remembering a broken promise? Not while Mike Taglione’s killers ruled New York. But afterwards? He shivered, unable to complete the thought, and was saved from further unsettling introspection by the doors opening. He took Helen’s hand, which she slipped naturally into his, and led her into the foyer. The doors hissed shut behind them. The air smelled of fresh paint, brand-new lacquer, and roses.

  “You live well,” she said, and he felt obliged to explain.

  “It didn’t really cost anything because it’s worth a fortune in free advertising. My publicist will get articles about the apartment published in all the magazines. Everybody will hear about the building being the newest and most incredible. That makes it a hot building. Which means I sell an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar condo for a million two and promise the owner he’ll be able to sell it for a million five next year because the building has my name on it.”

  “I’m in the wrong business.”

  “Well, if you ever want to go straight—” He smiled.

  “This is yours, not mine.”

  She was impressed, he realized, yet not impressed, as if trendy opulence was of the world of stranieri, too far from her own to have a lure. He showed her the downstairs bedrooms, the kitchen, dining room, and library on the lower levels. On the top floor, down a long hall, appeared a room with glass walls. As they neared it, views of the night leaped from the city.

  “Look at the ceiling,” he said, leading her inside.

  And for the second time—the first being six months ago when he removed his mask on the Irish cliffs—he astonished her. She looked up; twenty feet overhead the stars shimmered in the glass ceiling. She circled, staring up at them. Her gaze descended through the glass walls and finally to the floor.

  She screamed, and Taggart caught her in his arm. “Easy. I’ve got you.”

  She brought a hand to her chest, gasping, “Oh, my God!”

  They were standing on a glass floor, a thousand feet above Manhattan. The city sprang at them like a monster rising from the dark with a million gleaming teeth.

  “Feel my heart.” She laughed. “I thought we were falling. Oh, this is fantastic!”

  Taggart leaned against a column—the same column from which he had dangled Jack Warner last spring—and watched Helen prowl the room. It occurred to him that all this stuff was suddenly fun in ways he had never been inclined to notice before. She drifted among the furniture islands, stroking fabrics and polished surfaces, drinking in the views, and looking down repeatedly. At one point she sank into a chair, leaned over the arm, and stared through the floor.

  “It still makes me shiver.”

&nbs
p; “I know. It took me a week to make my legs behave.”

  She prowled again until, near the outer wall, she stopped in a space between two groupings. “What are these lines?” she asked, pointing at evenly spaced wires in the floor, so thin as to be almost invisible.

  Taggart started toward her. “Touch it.”

  She knelt, her gown puddling around her, and felt the glass. “It’s warm.”

  “Heaters.”

  She stared at the building tops between her spread fingers and suddenly glanced at him with a grin. “Oh, wow! I just got this incredible idea.”

  “I was hoping you would.”

  “Have you done it?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Truth?”

  Taggart sat on the floor beside her. “Truth. You’re my first guest. The place was finished today. Only problem is the floor’s hard as a rock. I drove my engineers crazy trying to come up with a soft floor, but everything they tried was cloudy.”

  “Will anyone see us?”

  “That’s up to you.” Taggart handed her a remote-control switch. She toyed with the dimmer, smiling, and lowered the lights until the room went black.

  “It’s like we’re floating in the sky,” she breathed.

  Above, below, and around them were black night, stars, and lights. Taggart’s eyes adjusted and her face took form in the glow from the city. He kissed the soft skin on her shoulder. She moved against him, and he traced the strap of her gown with his lips and tongued her breasts.

  “Chris?... What do you want of me?”

  “How about your body for ten years? Then we’ll talk.”

  “Don’t joke. We’re in business.”

  Instinctively, though there couldn’t possibly be a bug in range, she had whispered the last in his ear. Taggart replied in kind. “The fact that we’re beating the Mafia only makes it better.”

  “Beating? You sound like a cop.”

  “Making it ours,” he amended, alert to the razors in her voice. “Look!” He swept his hand across the floor as if caressing the lights below. “We’re like barbarians, you and me, galloping our horses over a rise—there’s the city, waiting to be taken. It’s ours because we want it.”