by Norman Green
Lord, those dark eyes . . . Thank you, God, she thought.
“I shouldn’t generalize,” he said. “Sloppy thinking. Here’s what I was trying not to say: I got so focused on, on, ah, keeping my soul safe where Clytemnestra couldn’t get at it, on survival, and then finally on breaking loose, Izzy and I lost each other. In my heart I always felt guilty about that, you know, like I ran out on him or something.”
“Did you leave before he did?”
“No, he got away first.”
“So how could you feel like you deserted him?”
He reached over, underneath the sheet, put a hand on her thigh. She shivered under the touch of his rough skin. “What you feel about somebody,” he said, his eyes boring into her, “it’s not about the facts, it’s not about the sequence of events. It doesn’t have anything to do with words. The feeling comes up out of where you live, it is its own truth. We only grope for the words afterward, when we’re trying to explain it to someone. Or to ourselves.”
“I see.” She slid her hand over his.
He smiled. “If Izzy were here, well, all right, if he were here he’d be really embarrassed, but if he heard that statement he’d call it fuzzy sentimental hogwash. He’d say that humans can’t conceptualize without words, that we’d only have vague generalized urges with no tools to properly understand them.”
“The artist and the mathematician.”
“Funny, though,” he said. “Izzy called me just before he died. ‘There’s more to life than work,’ he told me. ‘Let’s get together and go fishing or something.’ We probably hadn’t talked in over a year.”
“That is funny,” Sarah said. “What do you suppose came over him?”
“His birthday,” Jake said. “He was turning thirty, and he said all he’d ever done in his life was work. So we made a date, okay, second week in August or whatever it was. And a week after I talked to him he lost control of his bike and he was gone.”
“I thought he was killed in a sailboat race.”
He looked at her. “Please. The only way to die on a sailboat these days is to get drunk, fall off the boat onto the pier, and break your neck. But actually, he was on his way up to Newport, Rhode Island, he had signed up to crew on a boat. He never got there, and when they went looking for him they found him in the trees alongside the highway. They said the front tire on his bike blew out and it must have thrown him off. He loved going too fast. I guess he got that from the old man, too.”
“Wow. I don’t even know what to say.”
“You see?” he told her. “The feeling has primacy, it comes first. You only figure out the words for it later. But I just wish I could have been different, that I could have been a bit less focused on just getting by, you know, more, I don’t know . . .”
“Be different now,” she told him.
He stared at her, the question in his eyes, unasked.
“Can’t you feel something that you want right now? Something alive?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can.”
“Me, too,” she said, and she kicked the black sheet down out of the way, reached for him just as he reached for her, and she knew he was right, she would never have the words to nail down exactly what she felt, right then.
And she was sure he hadn’t killed anyone.
God, he’d been so different from Frank. Jake was quieter, for one thing, he didn’t rush, for another, and he seemed interested in all of her, physically, and not just the usual targets. Not Frank, in other words. It was an unfair comparison, she knew, but she’d had no interest in fairness at the time, and little since. Frank would always be Frank, and somehow she no longer felt it her responsibility to nudge him along the path into adulthood. Could one night with Jake West really be so liberating? Still, Frank had done it to her again, he’d insinuated himself back into her life because now she couldn’t stop worrying about what the hell had happened to him.
You idiot, she told herself, you think Frank went through all this crap just to get back under your skin? But that hardly seemed to matter. Just when she’d nearly gotten him crammed into the mental closet labeled EX-HUSBAND, he had broken free and once again occupied way too much space in her head. She was almost sorry she’d gotten Martillo involved, almost wished that she’d been able to walk away clean. Should have given him the room to sink or swim on his own, she thought. Whoever those guys outside of Costello’s had been, if they had just gotten to him before he’d reached the restaurant she could have stood outside in the freezing cold for maybe another fifteen minutes and then felt justified for forgetting all about him and going on home, and about her life.
Oh, Sarah, she told herself. That’s cold . . .
The phone rang, jarring her back to the present. It was Al. “Hello, Miss Martillo,” she said.
A pause, then: “Mrs. Waters. How the hell are you?”
“Al, I sent a check to an insurance company for the liability policy.”
“Did you? Great. Good job.”
You see, Sarah told herself. Handle your business and let Al do what she does. Al does not care about liability insurance . . .
“Listen, Sarah, can you do me a favor? See if you can find out who owns that warehouse Palermo Imports was using. And see if they own anything else. Look under Palermo Imports, but try Paolo Torrente, too. Can you do that?”
“Of course,” Sarah said. “Listen, what would you think about me setting up a meeting between Jake and Agatha West? He said he’d be willing to talk to her under the right conditions. Basically, what that means is that you and I would have to be there to make sure nothing too weird goes down.”
“Sounds all right to me. Refresh my memory, here. She thinks he’s a nut job and he thinks she’s a psycho. Was that about right?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said, “more or less. He thinks she killed his father. She says he blames her for everything that went wrong with his life, mostly because she’s the last one standing.”
“It’s all coming back to me,” Al said. “Didn’t the cops think Jake and his brother had something to do with his father’s death?”
“Yeah, that was one of the theories.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think that because I found him I’m done with the case, Al, and I think we won’t get paid if we don’t deliver, and I think we’re too close to broke to let that happen. I think we should get the two of them in the same area code, let them do what they need to do, and get our money.”
“Can you do it?” Al asked her. “Can you set it up so everybody feels safe? And walks away with a whole skin?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “I think so.”
“West residence.” It was a deep male voice.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I thought I was calling Dr. West’s cell phone.”
“They’re linked,” the man said in his cultured baritone. “How can I help you?”
“I’m Sarah Waters. Would it be possible for me to speak to Dr. West?”
“Please hold.”
No music while they have you waiting, Sarah thought. One minor point in their favor . . . She’d heard the voice before, though, the one that answered the phone, and she tried to remember where. The guy came back on the line. “Mrs. West is feeling particularly unwell at the moment. Is there a message? Or perhaps I could help you with something . . .”
“I don’t think I want to leave a message,” Sarah said. “Maybe she’ll feel better tomorrow, I’ll try back then.”
“We’ve met, Mrs. Waters. My name is Mitchell Haig. I am Mrs. West’s personal assistant and driver. I’m quite sure you would not be violating any confidences by leaving a message with me. I am aware that she hired your firm to locate her stepson.”
“Oh, I remember now.” He was the former Bentley mechanic. “You were with the car that day. You’re, ah, folically challenged.”
“Bald. That would be me.”
“I see. Well, you can tell Dr. West that I have good news for her.”
“You found him?” Haig’s tone of voice changed completely. “Wow. That’s great news.” He sounded, suddenly, less educated, more human. His careful demeanor must be like the coat he wears to work, Sarah thought, and it just slipped. She wondered who the real Mitchell Haig was, and what he was like. “And she could use some good news, let me tell you.”
Made his day, Sarah thought. You’d have thought it was his son I found. Nice, when the people who work for you like you that much. “Well, don’t overpromise, Mr. Haig. Jacob is willing to meet with her, but he does have certain conditions. My partner and I would have to guarantee his safety.”
“I am certain whatever guarantees he requires will not be an obstacle. Mrs. West is most anxious to see him again.” He recovered, got some of that dispassionate distance back. “If I could trouble you to hold for me one more time . . .”
He came back. “I am truly sorry, Mrs. Waters, but she really is feeling rather ill this afternoon. I must tell you, though, you did manage to put a smile on her face. Mrs. West spends her weekends at her estate in Manhasset, and she swears that this weekend will be no different, regardless of how she’s feeling. It’s rather a large property, I’m sure we could satisfy Jacob’s requirements. If he’s uncomfortable in the house, we could arrange for the two of them to see one another in the driveway, or the gazebo, or on the beach behind the house, or in the middle of the village, if that’s what he’d prefer. Just let me know.”
“I’ll try to arrange it, Mr. Haig.”
“Thank you very much,” he said. “Very much. We’ll be waiting for your call.”
Well, you made a sick old lady smile, she thought. But now you have to go back to work . . .
Some time spent searching told Sarah that there were a lot of Paolo Torrentes and that some of them did indeed live and own property in the city of New York. None of them, however, had any vested interest in a warehouse on Staten Island. She organized her results and printed them out, even though nothing there seemed promising or even relevant.
She didn’t do much better looking under the name Palermo Imports. Again, she found pages of results that had nothing to do with prospective wine merchants on Staten Island or anywhere else, but she did find an item in the archive section of the Staten Island Advance. When she read the story, though, it didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, except, perhaps, what a positive development Palermo Imports had been for a hurting neighborhood.
How many Torrentes in Palermo, Italy, she wondered, and when she looked she found a whole tribe of them. Another hour of searching compounded by a balky on-line Italian-English translating program told her more about the Torrente clan than she wanted to know. Their number included two dentists, a college professor, a whole family of stonemasons, a proctologist, and a twenty-one-year-old who had strangled his father with a wire coat hanger, but no wine brokers or merchants. Poor Frank, she thought, feeling a pang, they were scamming you from day one . . . If she and Frank had still been together, maybe she would have done this search back when he’d first started working for Torrente. Yeah, she thought, but back before you knew Martillo, would you have been suspicious enough? Or would you have taken it all at face value and simply felt good for Frank, who might finally have caught a break?
Sarah, she told herself, try to focus. You’re not supposed to be surfing, here, you’re at work. She looked at PropertyShark.com, found the records of the warehouse sale, and discovered her first piece of relevant information: the warehouse had been purchased by one Frank Waters, of Brooklyn, New York.
What the hell? she thought. Frank didn’t have enough money to buy a warehouse. She’d have been surprised if he’d had enough dough to buy a bicycle . . . How could he have even scraped together enough for an acceptable down payment? And even if he had, what kind of fool would have given Frank a mortgage on a run-down warehouse in a questionable neighborhood in Staten Island? He had no business, no collateral, no credentials. He had a good line of shit, that was true enough, but not the kind that would generally work on a banker.
Maybe Torrente gave him the money, she thought, but why would the guy do something like that? He’d only known Frank for a month or so. You got to figure, she told herself, if the guy is intelligent enough to run a business he has to be smart enough to know better than to give money to a guy like Frank, who despite whatever fine qualities he might possess, had been demonstrably allergic to prosperity his whole life.
Alessandra is right, she told herself. Whatever these guys are up to, the wine was just a cover.
She searched the name Palermo Imports again and could not find anyone doing business in the State of New York under that name, so she found a Web site for a company that would help you incorporate yourself for twenty-five bucks. After some hesitation she paid the money and requested the name Palermo Imports. The site asked her to wait while its search engine chewed through the databases checking for duplicates. Sarah took advantage of the delay to go out for coffee. She successfully avoided the scones, donuts, turnovers, rolls, cannoli, et al., and when she got back her computer told her that the name she requested was available and that she could register it for an additional fee.
It pissed her off.
Frank had been born one generation prior to the Internet revolution. He wasn’t really a bad guy, maybe not the best husband or father in the world, but still, he was a guy who had tried, as long as she’d known him, to improve himself. It had been his firm belief, justified or not, that all he ever needed was the opportunity. Torrente, or whoever he was, had seen that, had used it to his advantage.
She burned . . .
She tried PropertyShark.com again, looked to see what other real estate Frank Waters owned. There were three other properties, two in Manhattan and one in the Bronx, but when she dug deeper she found that the Frank Waters in the Bronx was black and the ages of the other two did not match. Then, out of curiosity, she tried her own name, then her maiden name.
One hit.
Sure, there were other Sarahs, but the sales involving them had all taken place more than six months ago. Paolo Torrente hadn’t even hired Frank until after that . . .
The property in question was an enormous Victorian wreck on the southwestern shore of Staten Island. The property taxes had been in arrears at the time of the sale, so Sarah called the city. “My husband,” she told the surprisingly helpful clerk who answered the phone, “must be the most disorganized man on the planet. I know the bank was supposed to clear up the property tax situation after the sale, but the bank we dealt with was merged with Citibank and my husband misplaced the paperwork . . .”
“If you hold for just a moment I can look that up for you,” the man said. She waited, and a few minutes later he came back on the line. “Eighty-four hundred and twenty-six bucks,” the guy told her. “Probably a shock, I know, but you still have some time. Shall I send another copy of the bill?”
“Can you do that? Thank you so much. Wait, let me give you my work address . . .”
The sale of the house was fairly recent, so she checked the listing agent’s Web site, and sure enough it was still there. At the time the pictures had been taken the place had apparently been occupied by a very old man. Sarah surmised that the guy’s wife had died because when she looked at the shots of the interior it seemed to her that the dust everywhere and the dogs lying on the couch did not go with the yellowed lace doilies or the badly tarnished silver tea set. A woman had lived there, certainly, but not recently. Another sad story, another lonely guy playing out the hand, waiting for the game to end.
The house was set on a large lot that looked like it had been created by dumping gravel into a swamp, because out behind the place the tall reeds stood in a row just beyond the huge detached garage that sat near the back property line. In the distance the Arthur Kill reeked, Sarah wrinkled her nose at the thought of the wind blowing in off the bay. God, she thought, is there any water left out there at all? When you looked down on it from one of the bridges, the Arthu
r Kill sometimes looked like it ran with automotive anti-freeze. And on the far shore loomed the enormous oil refineries of Jersey, and the concrete wastelands and vast parking lots of Newark Airport beyond that. Paradise on earth . . . Who would want such a place?
She supposed that one might get used to the smell, eventually . . .
She Googled the seller’s name, spent some time looking at the hits, but she couldn’t decide if any of them might be the right person so she went back to the agent’s Web site, looked up his phone number, and called him up. He wasn’t there, of course, but he returned Sarah’s call about a half hour later. Family pictures, she told the man, I’m sure the family would want to have them . . . They might, the man told her, sounding doubtful, you could send them along. It’s the assisted-living facility down in Cherry Hill, New Jersey . . . But he might still be angry about how long it took that check to clear. Six whole weeks! Why on earth couldn’t you transfer the money out of the Bank of Dubai into an American bank? It would have made everything so much easier. God, the phone calls he’d had to endure . . .
Sarah thanked him and hung up.
No mortgage, she thought, not if they all had to wait for a check. If there had been a mortgage company involved, they wouldn’t even schedule a closing until they had the money in their hot little hands. So Sarah Rizzo, whoever she was, either she or her benefactors, had paid for a ramshackle firetrap on the crusty side of Staten Island, using money from a long ways off.
You could go knock on the door, she told herself, pretend to be the Welcome Wagon lady, just to see what the other Sarah looks like . . .
