Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘Miss O’Neill,’ Forrester said. ‘It is good to see you again.’

  ‘And you Mr Forrester,’ she replied, and smiled, and felt that the smile she wore was perhaps the most unnatural expression she’d ever managed.

  He walked towards her, set his bundle on the counter, and then asked if there was somewhere they could sit.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and showed Forrester to the small, plain deal table set to the back right-hand corner of the store, the table where she sat late into the night once a month to update inventories and dream her dreams.

  The exit to the kitchen was no more than fifteen feet to her left, and though she could not see Sullivan she knew he was there, knew he would at least hear every word she and Forrester shared at this most awkward and strange rendezvous.

  Forrester set his package down on the table, removed his coat and threw it across the back of the chair, and sat himself down with an exhausted sigh.

  ‘You want something to drink?’ she asked.

  ‘A glass of water perhaps,’ he said, and took a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He wiped his face, his forehead, his mouth, and then twisting the handkerchief between his fingers he closed his eyes for a moment and lowered his head.

  ‘Are you okay Mr Forrester?’

  He smiled without opening his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice quiet. ‘Sometimes I get a little breathless when I walk. I took a later train, had to hurry a little to meet our appointment.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have hurried,’ Annie said. ‘I wasn’t going anywhere.’

  He opened his eyes. ‘We were never late,’ he said. ‘That was one of the primary rules of membership … never late. If you were going to be late you didn’t come at all. Better never than late, if you like. Your father was a stickler for punctuality and professionalism.’

  Annie sat down. ‘I wanted to ask you something –’ she started.

  Forrester nodded. ‘Could I have some water first my dear?’

  ‘Yes, of course … I’m sorry,’ she said. She stepped back into the kitchen, filled a glass from a bottle of Evian in the refrigerator, winked and smiled at Sullivan, and returned to the front.

  Forrester took the glass and nigh on emptied it with one swallow. He breathed deeply several times, and then set the glass down.

  ‘A question?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Annie said, sitting down once more. ‘My father … what did he do?’

  Forrester frowned and smiled simultaneously. ‘What did he do? You don’t know?’

  Annie felt awkward for a moment. ‘I feel like I should know,’ she said. ‘And I can’t believe I didn’t know when he was alive, or that my mother didn’t tell me after he died, but for the life of me I can’t remember the damnedest thing.’

  ‘Your father was first and foremost an engineer, a planner. His career encompassed some quite significant jobs that were carried out in New York throughout the ’50s and ’60s. He was a meticulous man, a perfectionist, and he was employed by some of the most influential organizations in the state. Had he not passed away I think he would have been responsible for some very memorable things.’

  ‘An engineer,’ Annie said.

  ‘Of sorts,’ Forrester replied, and lifted his glass to drain it.

  ‘More water?’ she asked.

  Forrester waved his hand. ‘No, I’m fine,’ he replied. He reached for the bundle of papers on the table, and from it withdrew another single sheet of paper.

  ‘Another letter for you,’ he said. ‘I have two or three more somewhere, but it takes time to find them among everything.’

  He handed the page to her and she took it, once again feeling that sense of tension in her chest. Was this all that there ever would be of her father? A few words from a stranger, a handful of seemingly confusing letters?

  Once again, scrawled across the top of the page was the legend From the Cicero Hotel.

  ‘You said this hotel was pulled down,’ Annie said. ‘Was this something he was working on?’

  Forrester half smiled – a strange expression. ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘In a way I suppose you could say that.’

  Annie waited for him to explain but nothing was forthcoming. Forrester once again performed that small introductory motion with his hand and indicated the letter.

  Annie looked down at it.

  Dear Heart,

  You will hear things. I know you will. Some of them will be true. Some of them will not. Do not believe everything, and if you are ever in doubt I would ask you to cast your mind back to the most special moments you remember of me, and then make your judgement. What is said by others can never take the place of what you feel in your heart. I believe it is that simple. Take care of our daughter. Remember to remind her how much she meant to me, how much I loved her. And remember this yourself, because you were – and always will be – everything.

  Chance.

  Annie felt tears welling in her eyes. There was something so powerful in the words, and though she would never have been able to explain it there was something that touched her more closely than she could have believed possible.

  ‘What does he mean … do not believe everything?’ she asked. ‘What does he not want her to believe?’

  Forrester smiled. ‘I am not sure I can answer that question as precisely as you might wish Miss O’Neill.’

  Annie shook her head. ‘Is there something he did? Something that people said he did?’

  ‘He was a good man,’ Forrester said. ‘A very good man, and though there were people that spoke badly of him there were many more who in some way owed their lives to him.’

  ‘Their lives?’ Annie asked, fighting back the urge to cry. ‘Whose lives? And who were these people who spoke badly of him?’

  Forrester nodded. ‘He fought for people. He made life difficult for those who challenged him. Once you earned his friendship there was nothing that could take it away … and I am proud to say that I earned his friendship, his trust, and he also earned mine, and from the day we met I never found another human being so deserving of respect.’

  Annie looked down at the letter once more. The handwriting was fluid, elegant almost, and she thought to consult a specialist, to have it analysed, to see what she could learn about her ancestry from this small fragment of reality. She set it aside on the table.

  ‘So you read what I left with you?’ Forrester asked.

  Annie nodded. ‘I read it … I have it back there on the counter.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what?’ she asked.

  ‘What you thought … what you felt.’

  ‘Fear … fear that such a thing could happen to a human being,’ she said without thinking, without any sense of self-consciousness. ‘And that people don’t understand love –’

  ‘Elena and Jozef,’ Forrester said. ‘A union made in Heaven and burned in Hell.’

  ‘Elena and Jozef,’ Annie repeated, and was quiet for a time, her mind almost empty of thought.

  ‘And what else did you think?’

  ‘I wondered if it was true … a true story,’ she said.

  Forrester shook his head. ‘I’m not sure … and I don’t know that anyone will ever know all of it.’

  ‘You have more,’ she said.

  ‘I have more. I have brought you a further two sections here,’ he replied, and indicated the bundle of papers on the table, ‘but I don’t believe it was ever finished.’

  ‘How much more is there?’ she asked.

  ‘Three or four more chapters perhaps.’

  ‘And you have all of it?’

  He nodded in the affirmative. ‘All that was actually written I think. I wanted to have you read it little by little,’ he said, ‘and then there would be a reason for us to continue our discussions.’

  Loneliness? Annie asked herself. Is he doing this because he’s lonely?

  ‘Is there anything more you can tell me about the man who wrote it? Did he know my father?’

  For
rester shook his head. ‘Not well I don’t think. Like I said, he was just one of the people who was with us at the time. I knew very little about him, very little at all.’

  ‘He writes of someone else’s life as if it was his own,’ Annie said.

  Forrester nodded. ‘He does, but you must read on … read all of it and perhaps you will understand more about the man who wrote it than I could ever tell you.’

  ‘And you will leave these two chapters with me now?’ she asked, hope in her voice, because somehow – suddenly – it had become important to know what had happened to Haim Rosen when he left the Lower East Side and crossed the river into Queen’s in 1952. What was it he had become that Rebecca McCready would never have recognized? Perhaps – and this as an afterthought – there was something in these pages that would show her the kind of person her father had associated with.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave these with you now, and then we will meet again next Monday at the same time.’

  Forrester spoke directly and without hesitation. There was nothing uncertain in his tone. He would be here next Monday at seven and there was no doubt in Annie’s mind that she would be here also.

  He started to rise from his chair.

  ‘You’re not staying?’ she asked, questions about her father clamoring for attention at the forefront of her mind. For some reason she could not bring herself to ask them. Forrester seemed carefully to pace everything he did, everything he said, and she did not wish to risk any possibility of offending him. To offend him would be to lose his confidence, and to lose that would be to watch her only connection with her father disappear.

  Forrester shook his head. ‘They were never long meetings,’ he said, and started to put on his coat.

  Annie rose from her chair.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Thank you for the letter … I really appreciate it Mr Forrester.’

  ‘And I appreciate your humoring an old and lonely man,’ he replied, and he smiled, and once again nodded his head in that polite European manner. ‘Until next week then?’

  Annie held out her hand. ‘Until next week.’

  Forrester took her hand, held it gently, looked at her directly as he did so, and though he did not smile with his mouth there was such warmth in his eyes that Annie felt she should reach out and hug him. She did not, for such things were not done. Not by Annie O’Neill.

  Forrester walked towards the door, paused momentarily as Annie opened it for him and then, turning once more, he surveyed the store. He was remembering something. She could see that in his eyes.

  ‘It was a different world back then,’ he said. ‘People had more time. There was less importance in being somewhere. People would dress for dinner, we would drink whisky sours and sloe gin, smoke cigars afterwards, and always we would find time to talk …’

  Forrester took one more look around the shelves and then turned towards the street.

  ‘Take care Miss O’Neill,’ he said, and stepped out through the door.

  Annie closed the door behind him as Sullivan came from the kitchen to join her. Together they stood in silence and watched the old man make his way towards the junction of Duke Ellington and West 107th. It could be my father. It could be him walking away, Annie thought, and again she was invaded by the slow, cool, quiet sensation of nostalgia and loss that always accompanied such thoughts. The wind caught Forrester’s hair, the tails of his coat, and for a moment it looked as if he would be caught by a gust and carried up into the sky. He disappeared around the corner and Annie turned to Sullivan.

  ‘Let’s read it at home,’ she said.

  Sullivan nodded, and fetched his coat.

  EIGHT

  America, 1952: a different world. The war was over, had been for seven years. Truman was president, but would retain his mantle only until November when Eisenhower would win the largest ever popular vote other than Roosevelt’s landslide in 1936. The election also served to bring two young politicians into the public arena. A senator called Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-nine years old, would become the youngest-ever vice-president. Best known for his dedicated and ‘patriotic’ support for McCarthy’s anti-Communist tirades, Nixon would not feature a great deal in the public’s collective mind until some years later. And then it would be for something quite different. Perverse prophecy perhaps, but in September of 1952, four months before Eisenhower and Nixon took office, Eisenhower would already have to defend his vice-president’s conscience and reputation. Nixon – accused of misusing eighteen thousand dollars of a political fund – was publicly exonerated, and Eisenhower found him ‘not only completely vindicated as a man of honor, but, as far as I am concerned, he stands higher than ever before.’ Eisenhower, dead in March 1969, did not live to see Nixon’s spectacular fall from grace, and thus never had to eat crow regarding his beliefs. On the Democratic front, a young man of thirty-five called John Fitzgerald Kennedy upset everyone by winning the Senate seat in Massachusetts against the Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State; he was a man who encouraged the mass production of nuclear weapons, but perhaps his most infamous attribute was his relationship with his brother, Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1953 to 1961. These were men who thought nothing of destroying the entire island of Eniwetok in the Pacific in a hydrogen bomb test in November of that year: these were the men in charge of America.

  This was the America, Haim Rosen told me, that he found vacant and wanting when he arrived in Queens in July. Fifteen years old, wide-eyed and hungry, he began by making his mark in a small community seemingly populated by brash working men with money to lose and over-painted, beehive-haired wives with bad skin and loud mouths. Into this melee of sounds and smells and colors he blended quickly and quietly. Changing his name to Harry Rose, he became a courier for an illegal gambling joint, running tickets and small bundles of cash between the idle wise-ass losers and their bookies. He worked them at their level, he learned the language and the signs, and those that he could not sway with the force of his personality, he swayed with humor and charm. He watched the business flow, the tens and hundreds of dollars exchanging hands with no more than a wink or a nod or a knowing smile. He kept track of how much money passed between the gamblers and the makers in a day, a week, a month, and he saw what that money could buy. He watched the cars and the dames and the kickbacks and the bribes. He watched it all like a hawk, soaking up everything around him like a sponge. He ran a sideline on the small-circuit boxing tables, gathering a few dollars here and there, renting a two-room broken-down apartment on Charles Street, never once crossing the lines, always on time, always exact to the cent and the dime.

  He earned trust, and he deserved that trust. And when one of the older bookmakers was hit by a stroke in the spring of 1953, Harry Rose, bold as brass, stepped into the old man’s shoes and no-one had a mind to complain. He was always ready with their winnings, consolatory in their losses, and at the end of each month he would send a quart of cheap rye to each of his clients with a little card. Always another race. Best of luck. Harry Rose. They appreciated the rye, they appreciated Harry’s honesty, and though he was only fifteen he was treated as an equal, a contemporary, a confidant. He knew who was losing what, how often, and why. He knew which gambler’s wife was screwing which bookmaker’s flunkey. He had his eye on the ball, his ear to the sidewalk, and his heart set on millions.

  A month before his sixteenth birthday, taking his balls in his hand and his heart in his mouth, he gambled everything he possessed on Rocky Marciano keeping his world heavyweight title against Roland LaStarza. He took the winnings he made on the fight and threw them at Carl Olsen winning the world middleweight against Randy Turpin. Harry Rose cleaned up good. Came away with more than seven thousand dollars in cash, and with that money he set himself up in a five-room apartment on St Luke. He was king of the country, a teenage prodigy, and his reputation for honest dealing and odds-on favorites was soon known throughout Queens a
nd the surrounding boroughs. Honest Harry Rose he was called, and no-one seemed concerned that he was all of sixteen, fresh-faced and youthful, for they’d look in his eyes and see a man of forty who’d carried the business end of things for two decades.

  As Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio in January of 1954, Harry Rose – a little known Jewish kid from the Lower East Side, a kid who’d successfully hidden his past from anyone who’d cared to know – took a hooker called Alice Raguzzi to his apartment on St Luke and she taught him how to be a man. Alice was a girl out of the backwoods of nowhere, twenty-two years old, brunette and brassy and bold as sunlight. Her mother had been a hooker, her father a pimp, and had she been a boy she would more than likely have followed right into her father’s line of work. She was not, and so she followed her mother, and her mother taught her all she knew. And she knew a great deal, Alice did, and she could hold her hand across her hardened heart and swear to God and country that never had a man walked away from her arms unsatisfied. Girl like that could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, Harry would tell me, give a ninety-year-old guy a blue-steel boner, and when she was breaking a sweat she never forgot to say the guy’s name a few times. Made it personal, made it mean something for him, because her abiding philosophy was that no matter what you did you did it as a professional. That was Alice Raguzzi, and she stayed with Harry Rose for two days, and when she left him she took three hundred dollars with her and a small window of soul through that hardened heart of hers. Harry would speak of her later, and he would smile with that wry, sardonic twist to his mouth that said everything without saying a word.

  ‘Girl like that,’ he’d say, ‘girl like that should run this country. She knows more about the way folks work than any politician or businessman I ever met.’

  That told me a great deal about Harry Rose: that he was, above all else, a real human being. Where I came from men were one of three things: they were as stupid as the day was long; park them in an Easyboy, stick a can of beer in their hand, feed them mystery meat three times a day and send them out with a broom to sweep the yard and they never wanted for anything else. Second kind of guy was the one that never grew up. Had been, and would always be, nothing more than a child. Wide-eyed innocence, a belief that all the world was on their side, and then when the shit hit the fan they would look at you with an expression of such dismay, and then they would convince themselves it was all a figment of their imagination and grant the world its perfection once more. And then there were people like me and Harry Rose. We worked the edges and crossed the lines. We lived for the sake of living itself. Where other men wanted one or two of something, people like us wanted half a dozen. Half a dozen girls, half a dozen cars, half a dozen paychecks, even if they happened to be earned by someone else. Life was not cheap, don’t get me wrong, but life – like everything else in the world – could be traded.