A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  “Where’d you get that notion?”

  “Phone records. He called you at the Speakeasy beauty parlor nine times in eight months. You called him at his East of Eden condominium once. He got angry at you for calling him there, remember?”

  “Silvio and me, we may have talked now and then,” Annabel allowed. “Was that a crime?” She chewed on the inside of a cheek. “Sharon said you said he’d been busted for doing dope.”

  “Buying, not doing,” I said. “Cocaine, to be exact. Was he doing drugs when you hung out with him?”

  “A little recreational hit now and then, nothing to write home about.”

  “Is that what made him violent?” Ornella asked.

  Annabel was suddenly wide alert. “What makes you think he was violent?”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Ornella said softly. “It’s not your fault if—”

  “Who the hell you people think you are, turning up here uninvited, telling me I got nothing to be ashamed of ’cause of how Silvio got his kicks. Holy shit, I’m not ashamed a nothing!” She turned to go, then spun back so abruptly her chandelier earrings rattled. “Is that what Sharon told you? That Silvio beat up on me?”

  I tried to change the subject. “When Silvio phoned you at the beauty parlor—”

  “It’s a beauty emporium,” Annabel said irritably. “A emporium’s different from a parlor.”

  “Emporium, right. When he called you, did you know where he was calling from?”

  “He coulda been calling from the moon for all I know.” She sat down heavily on her top step. “He never told me where he was and I never asked him, which is how come I never knew.”

  “You called his home at least once—you must have recognized New Mexico’s 505 area code when you dialed the number.”

  “There was something Mario said needed passing on right away. Silvio left me a number for emergencies. I dialed it once. All I knew was that 505 was out of state but I didn’t know which state it was out of state in. Silvio wasn’t thrilled with me calling him where he lived—he told me I reached him at a bad time. Sounded as if he had a house full of people.”

  “What was the message that was so important you used Silvio’s emergency number?”

  “I wouldn’t have called it a message. It was more like a single word.”

  “What word?”

  “Whistlestop.”

  “Mario wanted you to pass the word ‘whistlestop’ on to Silvio?”

  “Whistlestop, yeah. I don’t even know if that’s a thing or a place or a password or the code name for a local hooker or what.”

  “What did Silvio say when you passed on ‘whistlestop’?”

  “He said to tell Mario he got the message.”

  I gestured for Ornella to back off a bit and sat down next to Annabel, hoping she would relate more to men who were old enough to be her father. “Were you and Silvio still seeing each other? Were you still his girlfriend? Is that why he kept in touch with you?”

  “How could I be seeing someone who was hiding out in an out-of-state area code?”

  “You knew he was hiding?”

  “Lookit, I’m not as innocent as I look. I guessed he was hiding out. He’d need to be pretty dumb not to be hiding out after Salvatore Baldini caught a bullet in the eye.”

  “So if you weren’t seeing each other—weren’t still dating, that’s what I’m getting at—why all those phone calls?”

  Annabel couldn’t believe how slow I was. “He called me ’cause he didn’t want to call the casino,” she said in exasperation. “I was, like, the middleman. He called me, I called Mario over at the casino and passed on Silvio’s questions. Then I’d pass on Mario’s answer next time Silvio called.”

  “What kind of messages was Mario sending to Silvio, Annabel?”

  “Am I gonna be in hot water for passing on messages?”

  “You’re better off coming clean with me. If you wind up talking to the police, you’ll probably need a lawyer.”

  I let this sink in. Annabel did, too. Finally she came clean. “They was numbers mostly. Mario made me write them down and read them back so I wouldn’t get them screwed up.”

  I jumped to a conclusion. “Bank account numbers.”

  She tossed the hair out of her eyes. “Bank account numbers, Swift code numbers insteada bank names. Silvio had me pegged for a dumb broad. It never entered his thick head I could figure out what he was doing.”

  “But you did?”

  “Fucking-A I did. Everyone who knew Silvio, everyone in the casino crowd up in Clinch Corners, figured he was being paid off by Mario and the Ruggeris for setting up Salvatore Baldini.”

  “What was in it for you, being Silvio’s middleman?”

  “I’d get a envelope stuffed with brand-new twenties in my post box at the post office each time Silvio calls me and I call Mario or vice versa.”

  “Did you ever meet this Mario?”

  “Silvio brought him around once or twice when the Speakeasy was still a saloon and I was waitressing there, that’s before it became a emporium and Sharon turned me into a hair stylist. He was hot to trot, Silvio—he wanted to rope me into a”—Annabel glanced quickly at Ornella Neppi—“he tried to rope me into a threesome. He wanted to watch me do it with Mario while he was doing it with me. I said thanks but no thanks, twosomes is my personal private limit, ’specially with Silvio needing to work out his not a hundred percent kosher fantasies. Don’t get me wrong. Silvio may a roughed me up some but he was a pussy cat before and after. He’s the one that gave me these earrings.” She shook her head to make them tinkle.

  Ornella, subdued, said, “They’re very pretty.”

  “So are yours,” Annabel said.

  Ornella smiled at her. “Thanks.”

  “What does this Mario look like?” I asked.

  “He’s on the short side, short and thickset.”

  I took a shot in the dark. “He wears a fedora and round eyeglasses that are thick as windowpanes.”

  “You know Mario!” Annabel exclaimed in surprise.

  “How do you know Mario?” Ornella asked.

  “Our lifelines intersected. I got a bone to pick with him. Son of a gun scratched my car.”

  Twenty

  I’ll never get the hang of these mobile thingamabobs—they’re so darn small I’m worried I’ll wind up with one lodged like a bone in my throat if I talk into it. I’d need a Heimlich to expel it so I could breathe again. Explain to me, for Pete’s sake, how a device that fits into your fist can have someone’s entire address book inside. I rate mobile telephones right up there with plastic credit cards as toxic waste. Public phone booths, even ones that’d been used as toilets, have always been good enough for me. Trouble is there aren’t that many of them around these days. We were five miles out of Searchlight on our way down to Clinch Corners and we hadn’t passed a one. Well, I’m exaggerating. We passed one near the Searchlight airport but the phone box had been pried off the back wall of the booth and cannibalized. We passed another at the edge of town but all that was left of that booth was the cement foundation and some dangling phone cables. I was driving at the time and seeing the booths reminded me I’d forgotten to check in with my lady accountant from the telephone in the Nipton general store. I’d been hung over from the previous night, I suppose, though it wasn’t alcohol that had stupefied me. Passing a third booth that looked as if it had been in a head-on collision with a truck I gave up and asked Ornella if I could use her contraption. She dialed France-Marie’s number in Las Cruces and held the phone over to my ear. I could hear France-Marie saying, “Leave a message if you must,” so I understood I’d reached that infernal machine that answers for her when she’s not home. “France-Marie,” I shouted.

  “You don’t need to yell like that,” Ornella said. “Talk in your everyday voice, okay?”

  “France-Marie,” I said, “if you hear this, here’s a phone number you can pass on to Kubra if she needs to get hold of me in a hurry.” I
read off the number of the Nipton Hotel on the calling card I’d pocketed at breakfast that morning. “I guess that’s it. I’m going to hang up now. Uh, I almost forgot, it’s me, Gunn. Okay? Okay, bye.”

  The Sierra Nevadas in the distance reminded me of mountain ranges in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border—could be all mountain ranges resembled each other when the day wanes and the murkiness rises off the ground like smog. Ornella dozed in the front seat until I rounded a curve a bit too fast and startled her awake. Shaking her head to clear it, she retrieved her mobile again and called her uncle over in Doña Ana to fill him in on where we were at with the bail jumper.

  Where we were at had a strong resemblance to a dead end.

  The lights were coming on as we rolled into Clinch Corners, a man-made township a couple of hundred yards inside Nevada on the Nevada-California state line. Location, as they say in the gag trade, is everything. This was surely true for Clinch Corners. Witness the endless stream of headlights coming from the direction of Los Angeles. I think there may have been a Pony Express relay stable here once, I think it was a Mr. Clinch, Christian name lost to posterity, who gave his name to it. By the time the two Italian families decided to put down roots here, one on either side of the four-lane highway that stretched from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Clinch was nothing more than a historical note on a brittle page of an old Farmers’ Almanac.

  The roots, of course, sprouted into two gaudy casinos. By the time we pulled into town, both were lit up like passenger liners at sea, not that I’ve ever seen passenger liners at sea. Comparison number two: The casinos were lit up like the perimeter of the Green Zone in Kabul after lockdown. That I have seen. Besides the casinos, the township consisted of a gas station and fifty or so mobile homes parked among Joshua trees in the field behind the gas station. Ornella and I found a Pullman car that had been transformed into a diner at the side of the road beyond the first casino. It was set out on a length of tracks only slightly longer than the Pullman itself, so God only knows how it wound up here. The cook, who also waited on customers seated on stools at the counter, introduced himself as Timothy. He was glad to make conversation while he fried up what the menu, set out in chalk on a blackboard, described as charcoal broiled hamburgers. (I couldn’t spot any charcoal, just a gas-lit flame under a metal plaque, but as Ornella was paying for the solids, I didn’t make a fuss.) “Ruggeris are the ones across the highway,” Timothy explained, slipping a spatula under the burgers and flipping them over with a flick of his wrist. “Baldinis are on this side.”

  “Do they ever cross over and talk to each other?” I asked half in jest.

  “Hell, no. I been here four years and I ain’t even seen them meet in the middle. I’m answering your joke with a joke, right? Although my joke’s no laughing matter—these guys pretty much keep to their own side of the tracks even though there ain’t no tracks in Clinch.”

  “How did this Pullman wind up in the middle of nowhere if a railroad didn’t run through here?” I asked.

  “Search me,” Timothy said. “It was parked here when I arrived. The guy who sells vegetables from the roadside stand a ways up the road was using it to store empty crates when I bought it. I did everything you see myself—the lampshades, the window curtains, the red leather banquettes over there, the brass rail under the windows. Everything’s original except the red leather. I had to use vinyl because genuine leather was too pricey.”

  “You are a man for all seasons,” Ornella remarked.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “It’s an expression,” Ornella said.

  “It’s a compliment,” I assured him. “She thinks you’re the cat’s meow.”

  Ornella poked me with an elbow. “You may be older than I thought,” she quipped.

  When it was good and dark outside we settled up with Timothy—I got the liquids, Friday the solids—then climbed back into the Toyota. “Where to now?” Ornella asked.

  “Ever notice how parking areas outside of supermarkets or drive-ins or casinos look like used car lots? We’re going vintage-car hunting.”

  When I could get across the road, which wasn’t all that easy with all the traffic, I steered the Toyota into the Ruggeri lot and, moving at a crawl, started up one lane and down another and then up a third.

  “You looking for any particular make of vintage car?” Ornella asked.

  “Cadillac,” I said.

  I spotted the off-white Cadillac in the section marked RESERVED FOR CASINO PERSONNEL. I pointed it out to Ornella. “That’s a 1938 LaSalle coupe,” I said. “The teardrop fenders went out of style after the war. There may be only two hundred of these babies rolling today.”

  “How do you know so much about vintage cars?”

  “I own one—my Studebaker is a 1950 Starlight. This Cadillac caught my eye. Wait here. Keep the motor running.”

  With Ornella watching from the Toyota, I made my way between parked cars to the Cadillac, took out my key to the Once in a Blue Moon and carefully scratched the left front teardrop fender from end to end. The sound was music to my ears.

  When I got back to the Toyota, I found Ornella watching me through her night-vision goggles. “You were right about the goggles,” she said. “Everything looks as if it’s underwater. You looked as if you were swimming when you came back to the car.” She gestured toward the Cadillac. “Why were you messing up a perfectly nice green Cadillac?”

  I slid back behind the wheel of the Toyota. “It’s biblical,” I said. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

  The penny dropped. “Oh, I get it. A fender for a fender! Now I know where the scratch on your Studebaker comes from. That’s the famous Mario’s Cadillac.” Ornella studied me through her night-vision goggles. “Actually, you look good green.” She took off the goggles and fitted them back into their case. “So you think vengeance is okay?”

  I was following the arrows marked WAY OUT on the tarmac. “I’m not saying it’s okay, I’m only saying that it’s satisfying.”

  “As satisfying as crushing the metal cap of a beer bottle between your fingers?”

  “As,” I agreed.

  We were waiting for traffic to let up so we could cross back to the Baldini side of the highway. The headlights of passing cars turned the front window of the Toyota opaque but filled the interior of the car with yellowish light. I became aware of how dirty the car was, crumbs, stains, smudges everywhere. I became aware of the fleeting smile performing live on Ornella’s lips—it conveyed trepidation, or was it anticipation? Hard to tell as the two are kissing cousins. We often dread that we’ll get what we think we want. Lemuel Gunn, the philosopher-detective, running off at the mouth again! I caught Ornella having a conversation with herself. She repeated the word “satisfying” a few times, sometimes with a question mark after it, sometimes with an exclamation point.

  Punctuation, as they say in the gag trade, is everything.

  I finally managed to cross back across the highway and pulled into a parking space near the Baldini casino. Water cascaded down man-made falls on either side of the gaudy main entrance. Two doormen wearing livery that went out of fashion in the Middle Ages tugged open the enormous imitation bronze doors with sculpted nymphs cavorting in their birthday suits on them. The effect was about as sensual as flushing out a septic tank with a self-priming pump.

  I know what sucks good people into these giant hangars of iniquity, with their floor-to-ceiling windows draped in thick curtains so customers won’t know it’s morning and time to go home: It’s unadulterated greed, it’s the get-rich-quick, bet-now, pay-never mindset that has polluted the American spirit. Something tells me this is not what our ancestors were looking for when they crossed the Continental Divide. The presence of more losers than winners on the casino premises on any given night doesn’t seem to discourage customers from thinking this is their night to break the bank. Which is to say the great majority of bettors checked their brains at the door. Prosecution exhibit number one: an intense young woman dres
sed in a particularly short minioutfit methodically inspecting the slot machines trying to figure out which one was due to come up triple sevens. Two rows down, people flocked to congratulate a gray-haired woman when her one-armed bandit started spitting quarters into her paper cup. Overhead a siren yowled and the voice of an excited jerk of an MC boomed over the loudspeaker, “Ladies and gents, we have got us a winner in aisle four!”

  I bought Ornella ten dollars’ worth of quarters and parked her at one of the one-armed bandits. “If you win big, you do solids and liquids,” I said.

  “You going to be long?” Ornella asked worriedly.

  It’s been a while since anyone besides Kubra worried about me. “That depends,” I said.

  “Depends on what? Depends on whom?”

  “On whether the local godfather, Giancarlo Baldini, will buy into my sales pitch.”

  “What are you selling, Lemuel?”

  “Vengeance.”

  I looked around to get my bearings. You couldn’t miss the bozos in shiny tuxedos posted around the floor like potted plants that only needed occasional watering. You had to be naive not to realize that the two young women in low-slung dresses giggling about how much they won were casino shills trying to lure bettors over to the roulette wheels. You had to be brain dead not to notice the long, narrow mirror high in the wall above the tables—it was the one-way mirror behind which the casino’s professional gamblers watched for players who might be cheating the house. And you had to be blind not to spot the narrow door at the back of the hangar of iniquity and the lean, mean thug guarding it. A white wire snaked up from his starched collar to the tiny receiver in his ear, from time to time he spoke into a microphone on the inside of his left wrist. Nobody went through the door without him checking first with someone inside.

  That was the portal to seventh heaven. Or maybe seventh hell.