Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  Harry recognized in Alice Raguzzi something of himself. She was a live one, a real human being, and when she talked Harry listened, and when she listened Harry opened his mouth and his heart and his mind. There was something between them, something other than the sweat they broke on the sheets of his crowded little bed. There was an understanding that if there was something you wanted – well, if there was something people like Harry and Alice wanted, it was up to them, and them alone, to go out and get it. That was the way their world worked, and as far as they were concerned that was the only kind of world there was.

  And Alice? She had found this teenage Harry Rose irrepressibly charming, a little slanted when it came to his view of the world, but nevertheless endearing and generous and respectful. No trick had ever called her Ma’am before, and she kinda liked it. Made her feel she was providing a necessary public service, instead of just taking it in the ass for a few bucks.

  Her mother would have told her to take care of a young man like that. Young man like that had stamina for sure, and there were years of business ahead of him. Young man like that would make it good, and he wouldn’t forget those who had taken him seriously despite his age. When he went up in the world, well, she would go up with him, and it wasn’t very far from Alice’s mind that she would make sure she saw him again. One thing about her industry, it was all repeat business. Whatever it was that made a man’s balls fill up, darned, if they didn’t keep on filling up despite the number of times you emptied them. Such a thought made her smile, and when she smiled she looked like a million dollars. With some work on her hair, with a little expensive make-up, Alice Raguzzi could have held a candle to all of those Hollywood sweethearts. But Alice was smarter than that. Alice knew the streets and she knew people, and people – real people like Harry Rose – was where you found real life.

  Two hours after Alice Raguzzi left that apartment on St Luke she was robbed of her three hundred dollars. Whoever took her money took most of her beauty as well, pounding into her face with a piece of wood until she was barely recognizable. She would never work again, she knew that, and a week later – still confined to a bed in the St Mary Mercy Hospital on the corner of Van Horne and Wiltsey – she broke a small compact mirror in her purse and cut her own wrists. She was found dead two hours later by a hospital orderly called Freddie Trebor. Freddie was a gambler, he knew of Harry Rose, and though he had sworn to Alice Raguzzi that he would never divulge the name she’d given him when she was admitted, he felt such a sense of horror about what had happened that he went to see Harry, told him what Alice had said regarding her attacker. He gave Harry a name – Weber Olson. Harry knew Olson, had dealt with him many times on the racing pitches, and when he told Freddie Trebor to forget anything and everything he had seen and heard, when he pressed a hundred bucks into Freddie’s hand and asked if Freddie truly understood what he was asking, Freddie saw something in Harry Rose’s eyes that was not – and never could have been – the expression of a sixteen-year-old. Freddie, as nervous as Capone’s bookkeeper, gave his word, swore on the deathbed of his mother, gave a promise to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost that he had never heard of Alice Raguzzi, Weber Olson or Harry Rose, and left that apartment on St Luke with his heart in his mouth. He never did say a word, even when the police asked questions about Weber Olson’s disappearance a little more than a week later, even when they found Olson in a disused basement beneath a tenement on Young Street with his severed penis in his mouth and his eyes in his coat pockets. Freddie Trebor didn’t know a thing, and two months later left Queens for Brooklyn in case Harry Rose ever got concerned that Freddie might say something out of turn.

  Harry told me about that night later, after we had spoken of many such things and earned one another’s trust. Told me like he needed to, like I was his priest and he was a sinner. I took his confession, took it willingly, and there was something important about sharing such things that made us all the closer.

  ‘Found him in a bar,’ Harry had said. ‘Found him in a bar uptown, one of those fancyass places where they put bowls of peanuts and pretzels down with your drink. He was sitting there like he was the king of freakin’ Persia, and the moment I saw his fat ass on that bar stool I knew that I had to kill him. Wouldn’ta mattered if he’d been the president of the United fucking States, I saw his fat face, the way he laughed while his mouth was all full of chewed-up shit, and I just knew I had to kill that motherfucker stone dead before the night was out.

  ‘I went up there, took the stool alongside his, sat there for a while minding my own business. “Hell of a wristwatch you have there,” I told him. “Sure as shit looks like an expensive piece of work.” The fat bastard smiled like he had a fifty-dollar piece of ass sucking his dick, and he turned his wrist so I could see the huge gold face, a diamond set right there at the top where there should have been a number twelve. “Swiss,” he said, his mouth still stuffed with God knows what. “Twenty-four carat gold through and through.” I wanted to take that tasteless ugly piece of crap wristwatch and make the asshole swallow it. Chase it down with a bowl of pretzels and watch the fucker suffocate. I minded my manners, I complimented him on his jewelry, and then I offered to buy him a drink. The fat fuck took my drink, took another two or three, and he must’ve been busy in there for a couple of hours before I even arrived because by that time he was talking like a man underwater and I knew I could get him out of that place without even raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I told him I knew a good place down on Young Street. “Pretty girls there,” I said. “Real pretty girls … you ever hear of it?” The cocksucker didn’t know shit from shinola, he just followed me like a lost puppy dog, and I walked him out of that bar and across two blocks to Young Street. It was late, some of the streetlights were down already and no-one saw us … and hell, if they had, they wouldn’t have thought twice about it. We were just two drunk fucks staggering our way home, sharing a joke, having a good time. Halfway down the street I stopped near the top of a flight of stone steps that ran down the side of a building and through into the rear yard. Olson didn’t know where the fuck he was, and so I just told him to head on down those steps. I followed him, stayed behind him all the way so there was no chance of him escaping. At the bottom and to the left was a broken-down doorway. I got behind the fat asshole and gave him a damned good shove. The door just collapsed in beneath his weight, and Olson went sprawling across the floor in all this rat shit and fuck knows what kinda garbage. He was so drunk he was still laughing, and I let him laugh, laughed with him, and the fat murdering bastard kept right on laughing until I let fly with one almighty kick to the side of his head. I felt the toe of my shoe impact against his cheek, felt his teeth cave in, and then he was on his hands and knees, screaming blue murder, hollering like a fire siren, blood and teeth foaming out of his mouth like a running faucet.

  ‘I had to shut the fucker up, and so I raised my foot and stamped down on the back of his head with every ounce of strength I possessed. Figured for a moment that I might have killed him stone-dead, but I knelt down and pressed my ear against his chest. He was still breathing, his heart thundering like a train, and I thought for a moment that he might get up and walk away from this thing in a few hours and come looking for me.

  ‘Figured he wouldn’t recognize me if he couldn’t see, and that’s when I had the idea to take his eyes out. And once I had him on his back, once I had my knees on his chest and one hand around his throat so he couldn’t move … once I had my knife out and was pushing that blade beneath his eyeball and feeling it give, it was then that I thought he should pay in kind for what he did to Alice.

  ‘Two, three times I had to bang him in the side of the head with the butt of the knife handle. Fat fuck kept wriggling and screaming, but I stood up at one moment and kicked him in the head again, and he lay still, still like a corpse, and I finished what I’d started. Then I cut his pants open, took his shorts off, and after hacking at his groin for a couple of seconds his Johnson came off right in
my freakin’ hand.

  ‘Afterwards I sat on the floor beside his body. I looked at my clothes, the way the blood had spattered all across the legs of my pants, and it was like I’d become someone else. I looked at the fat fuck lying there and it was almost like I’d been watching someone else do this thing. Like I went into some black hole where nothing counted for anything, even someone’s life counted for nothing, and when I came out of it he was already dead. I couldn’t connect with the thing I had done, not for a while … not for a long while. That was the end of Weber Olson, and I had done it to him. Left him there with his eyes in his pockets and his dick in his mouth. Figured he wouldn’t be screwing any more hookers … figured he wouldn’t be screwing anything ever again, the fat useless sack of no good crap.’

  And that was Harry Rose, all of sixteen years old; christened in blood now, and set to make a mark.

  Folks knew Harry Rose, and they knew a kid who could do such a thing for the sake of some cheap no-good two-bit hooker, was either crazy or desperately loyal. Harry Rose didn’t kill Weber Olson for the money, or because it gave him a rev. He killed Olson because of principle. Nothing more nor less than principle.

  Word went from mouth to ear to mouth once more, and those who had a mind for such things contacted Harry through runners and consorts. Harry Rose was where the big money could be made, where the wagers in excess of a grand or two could be carried, held back, run three times over at three different fights, and never a moment’s delay in payback. And then there were poker games – fat sweaty men with five-cent stogies in smoky back rooms behind bars and clubs, bets starting at two hundred, sky’s the limit. All these things, and more besides, and more beyond that if the mood took someone to gamble their life away. And they did, and Harry Rose let them, watched them deal their lives away through the pages of a California prayer book, and though he was always willing to pay his dues he was just as precise in his collections. And collect he did, handfuls of dirty money, used bills and clean, never banking a cent but keeping his earnings in boxes beneath the floorboards of his rooms. Some said there were thousands, others said millions, and no-one but Harry ever knew the truth.

  September of 1954 saw Rocky Marciano slay Ezzard Charles in Rocky’s forty-seventh consecutive victory; October saw Harry turn seventeen years old, and on the eve of his birthday he threw a party the like of which Queens hadn’t seen too often. Rumors said there were more than two hundred people, and when the police broke it up they found more liquor than in Prohibition times and they arrested Harry Rose for under-age alcohol violations. That was Harry’s first run-in with the law, and the law listened, and they understood, and they took some dollars and let him go. They even drove him back to his apartment on St Luke and said he should call if there was ever any trouble. Harry said he would, and he learned a lesson: everyone was a hooker. Everyone was up for fucking someone else for money. As long as the rules were understood there wasn’t anyone beyond a price. While other kids were heading for colleges and straight-As, Harry Rose – still fresh-faced and youthful – carried a hundred and thirty grand in cash and turned more bets than all the bookies in Queens combined.

  He ran cigarettes and silk stockings out of Idlewild until the Italian airliner crash of December ’54. Security tightened like shoelaces and Harry, understanding the rules as well as any man in the business, moved his operations out of there and opened a bar. The bar became three, then six, then eight, and while the dope-freak jazzers smoked their mighty mezz and snorted H and C through tightly rolled ten-dollar bills, while the hookers plied for trade along the boardwalks, while the drunks rolled each other for as much long green as they could find, Harry lived the high life.

  Honest Harry Rose was The Man. He carried a name. He was always there at the business end of things, and business always seemed to find him.

  Folks said there was a light in his eyes like a devil. But then most folks had loose tongues and looser minds. Truth was Harry was a businessman, a born entrepreneur, and where one man would see an obstacle, Harry would see a stepping-stone to something bigger, better, faster, higher. Seemed to me he saw everything as a challenge: and one small story perhaps illustrates how he worked.

  After Idlewild closed down and after the law got real interested in all the shit that had been running smooth in and out of there, Harry found himself as unemployed as a boat-builder in Texas. Another man might have seen it as a setback, but not Harry Rose. ‘One man’s accident is another man’s coincidence,’ he’d say, and he’d smile with that little devil-glint lighting a spark in his eyes. He took what money he had, walked into the city with his pockets stuffed, and he stopped at the first bar he found on East 26th. Walked right in like he already owned the place, asked to see the owner, some wiseass, wide-mouthed inbred Polish-American faggot with a name all made up of Zs and Ws.

  ‘Got a crew,’ Harry Rose told him. ‘Got a crew of Irish and Italians, maybe twenty-five or thirty all told, and then there’s all their cousins and brothers and sisters if you wanna include them too. Well, me and my crew took a liking to your little establishment here and we wanted to make you an offer.’

  ‘Ain’t for sale,’ the wiseass replied.

  Harry smiled, maybe winked as well, and he told the guy: ‘I understand that it might not be for sale right now this minute, but you gotta hear me out. Good businessman always listens to a proposition whether he’s planned for it or not, right?’

  The wiseass smiled and nodded, like he knew the difference between a good businessman and a flatfish.

  ‘So here’s the deal. I got some cash in my pocket, a whole bunch of cash, and I’ve taken those dollars and tied them together in bundles of a grand apiece.’

  Harry reached into his inside pocket and took out a wad of greenbacks. He laid them on the table ahead of the wiseass.

  ‘There’s a thousand dollars there, and it’s good money, and what we’re gonna do is sit here while I put another grand on the table, and then another one, and when you think there’s enough to buy this place outright you stop me.’

  Harry paused for a moment and looked at the wiseass.

  ‘Only thing is this … at some point I’m gonna stop, and I ain’t gonna go no further. You don’t know how many thousands I’m gonna put on the table, and I ain’t gonna tell you. If we get to that point and you ain’t agreed to a sale already then I’m gonna leave. And then tonight, maybe tomorrow night, maybe in a week’s time, you’re gonna find my crew of Irish and Italians outside with a Molotov party, and we’re gonna burn this piece of shit joint to the ground with you inside it.’

  The wiseass started laughing. He got up from his chair and pointed at the fresh-faced teenager, and he carried on laughing and he carried on pointing until Harry took a .38 from his pocket and pointed it right at the guy’s gut.

  ‘This here,’ Harry said, ‘is my friend Maurice. Maurice is an ugly little motherfucker who gets mad and spits lead at folks who joke around. Now sit your fat ass down and play the game you ugly sweat-stinking piece of crap.’

  The Polish guy sat down, heavy like a bag of cement, and he watched as Harry Rose slowly removed the second bundle of cash from his jacket pocket.

  The wiseass wriggled like a stuck pig. He sweated a bucket and a half before Harry even got to five grand.

  The deal was done for six. Six thousand dollars all told. Bar and chairs and bottles and pool tables, the juke box, the refrigerators, the freeze-boxes and outhouse. Six thousand dollars.

  The wiseass hightailed it out of there because he saw the devil-glint in the kid’s eyes, because he couldn’t be sure how much money the kid was going to offer, and he sure as hell didn’t have a clue that there were no Irish and no Italians to come down and burn his place to ashes.

  He got out of there with six grand and his life, and that – as far as he was concerned – was the best deal he was gonna get. Who could he have turned to? The Police? The Mob? Make a call to Poland and ask for his big brother to come over and kick this smart-mouth lit
tle kid six ways to Sunday? Hell no, that wasn’t the way it worked. He knew that he could have died, and while a bar could always be started over again a life couldn’t.

  That was the thing that made Harry Rose special. He could bluff it with the best of them, and when he told you something there was nothing in his eyes that suggested what he was saying was anything but the gospel truth. That was his magic, that’s why everyone thought he was honest, but Honest Harry Rose wasn’t honest at all. Honest Harry Rose could tell a lie that would make the devil blush with shame.

  At the time, still a teenager and with the whole world out there waiting for him, it seemed to be a blessing, but later, when a great deal of bloody water had flowed beneath a lot of burning bridges, it would perhaps be his undoing.

  NINE

  Sullivan turned the last page over and leaned back in his chair. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty.’