Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  November came. Ike was re-elected. Christmas was around the corner, the New Year of 1957, and in the year that would see Humphrey Bogart dead; all the shit that went down in Arkansas when Faubus mustered State troops to stop nine little black kids going to school; a year that would see Eisenhower floored by a stroke and Elvis enlisting in the army, Harry Rose started watering the seeds of an empire. Muscle counted for shit in Manhattan. Muscle was okay for Queens and Brooklyn, may have worked the trick in Harlem, but here it was smarts and quick-thinking, the better plan, the faster sleight of hand that gathered the greens and kept you one step ahead of the competition.

  He started once again with what he knew best – the gamblers and bookies – and by the time Sugar Ray took the middleweight championship for the fifth time in March of 1958 Harry was in his stride. He kept the small apartment, never told a soul where he lived, and from there he started working the lines, changing lanes when he had to, gathering a few compadres in the NYPD who would roll over a leech or a late payer for no more than twenty or thirty bucks a time. Manhattan was as dirty as any place Harry had been, but there was a certain class to the Manhattan style of corruption, a layer of airs and graces that veneered over the surface of what was nothing more than a crew of cheap hustlers and lousy drunks. Harry was six months or so from his twentieth birthday, he grew a mustache and looked twenty-five, and when he started to cut into some of the heavier deals and transactions that were run by the Jewish families and some of the Italians that were brave enough to edge their way out of the Lower East Side, he was taken seriously. Harry Rose was earning back the kind of credentials and reputation that he’d possessed back in Queens. Harry was a good guy, Harry paid on time, Harry was a man you could work with but you wouldn’t want to cross. Rumor had it he’d killed a man, and though the rumor was never substantiated it was safe to say that anyone with that kind of reputation earned a degree of respect from his associates.

  The hundred grand came back hard: he broke sweat and talked his mouth dry. He ran hookers and drugs, he hit the protection circuit and oversaw a crew of six thugs who looked after the nightclubs and bars in the rougher neighborhoods. He took what he earned and he rigged fights and races, card games and football games. He played hundreds of dollars on the college circuit, and once he got the machine going the money started crawling back through blood and sweat and tears. The second hundred grand came easier, and for a young man who lived in a scarred tenement on East 46th, no more than a hop, skip and a jump away from Broadway and Times Square, things were coming back to battery. Harry had fought to get his life back, and retrieve it he had, and from one Christmas to the next he didn’t think of me.

  I, however, thought a great deal about Harry Rose. I didn’t bear a grudge, didn’t harbor resentment or bitterness towards Harry himself. I had expected him to vanish from the face of the earth, would have done the same myself, and I knew my old sidekick would be out there taking on the world, harvesting those greens in fat, ripe handfuls, and that all I had to do – all I had to do – was find some way out of Rikers and I would own the world again.

  And that’s where my mind went as the decade drew to a close. I heard about Ingemar Johansson slaying Floyd Patterson in Yankee Stadium in June 1959. That fight gave the world heavyweight title to a non-American for the first time since Primo Carnera in 1934. I also knew – if Harry Rose was still the same Harry I’d known and loved all those years before – that such a fight would have given him God only knew how many thousands of dollars, a significant percentage of which were rightfully mine … for hadn’t I risen at the stand, given my name, and taken the fall for us both? Sure I had. I knew that, and Harry would know that too. Time would come when dues had to be paid, and Harry would pay them. Sure he would.

  That thought – and possibly that thought alone – kept me out of trouble on Rikers Island through the next seven years.

  TWENTY

  As Annie turned over the last page a thought seemed to hover at the edges of her mind. She tracked it, felt it skirt around Forrester and settle somewhere between David Quinn and Jack Sullivan. She was uncertain; perhaps it was nothing.

  Annie glanced at her watch: it was a little after seven-thirty. David would be over anywhere between eight and nine that evening, as far as she recalled. She looked at her watch again, touched the face with the fingers of her right hand and imagined her father wearing it. Dead twenty-three years. Times were he would look at this self-same watch, perhaps late for an appointment. An appointment where? Engineering things perhaps. What things? Annie sighed and shook her head. She had no idea. Her disappointment at Forrester’s failure to appear that evening surely had less to do with Forrester and more to do with the fact that there were no further letters. There had been no more questions asked or answers given regarding who her father was, what he did, what became of him.

  Annie frowned.

  Christ, she thought. I know so little about him. My own father, and I know almost nothing …

  A momentary sadness overcame her, slow and quiet and almost intangible. Seven years old, and he was gone. She couldn’t even remember being seven, let alone the moments, the hours, the days that she must have shared with him. Or the feeling she must have had when she knew he was coming home. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Her sixth birthday. These were things she should remember, and yet try as she might to send her mind backwards she found nothing. Had there been something so painful that she would not allow herself to remember?

  I don’t know, she thought. I just don’t know.

  And then she thought: Sullivan.

  She felt a surge of anxiety, electricity skittering through her nerves. The hairs on the nape of her neck stood to attention.

  Sullivan could find out something. Why didn’t I think of this before?

  Because you didn’t want to know, a voice answered.

  Hell, of course I wanted to know.

  Maybe now you want to, but not then … not before …

  Before what?

  Before someone came and reminded you that there might be something you were missing.

  And who might that be?

  Forrester of course. Robert Franklin Forrester. He brought you the letters. He told you about the reading club. He reminded you that Frank O’Neill existed somewhere back then, that he possessed a life just as real as anyone else’s, and that you were never really old enough to become part of it. That’s who. He reminded you that you were once somebody’s daughter …

  Somebody’s daughter. I was somebody’s daughter.

  Annie looked at the watch-face again. She closed her eyes, her fingers still touching the smooth glass surface, and holding her breath she could hear the sweep hand ticking, the tiny metronomic movements encased in something that had once encircled her father’s wrist.

  She thought she was going to cry, but she did not. She breathed deeply, and then rose from the chair and went to the sink in the kitchen, a vantage-point on the world beyond the window. She wondered if there was anything in her line of sight that her father might have built. If indeed he had built things at all.

  If …

  She decided to ask Sullivan to look into it. Perhaps there were people he could ask who would look up obituaries, personal records … perhaps he might even locate a photograph and she would find out how much like her father she looked …

  The idea scared her, yet excited her. Like the high turn on the county fair rollercoaster, stomach all tightened up in a ball of frightened muscle, feeling like your breakfast was rushing ahead of you, eyes wide, teeth gritted, fists clenched … Here I go Ma … top of the world!

  Annie smiled to herself, switched off the kettle, and made some tea. She wanted David to come. Wanted him to read the next chapter. Wanted him to feel the way that she felt: that Johnnie Redbird was a real human being, that he was holed up in Rikers Island while Harry Rose lived the high life in Manhattan and pretended that he didn’t owe his life to someone who would never forget. These were dangerous people living dang
erous lives. Murder, intrigue, passion, money, scandal: these were the elements of their everyday existences, and she felt certain these would be the things that found them in the end.

  Leaving the kitchen she returned to the couch, and just as she sat she heard the street door open and slam shut. Footsteps on the stairwell. Not Sullivan’s. David’s, she felt sure, though she was not yet familiar with the sound of him arriving. His was a new sound, a different sound, and when those footsteps reached the third floor and she heard him knock she believed she’d never been so pleased to have anyone come to her home.

  ‘David?’ she called.

  ‘Bearing ribs and rice and things,’ he called back. She unlocked the door and let him in, barely allowing him to set his bags down before throwing her arms around his neck. He’d had a haircut, wore a clean pair of jeans, a white open-necked shirt and a tan-colored cotton jacket. He looked good, he smelled good, and when he returned her greeting with a breath-squeezing hug she felt everything she ever could have hoped to feel about being close to someone.

  ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘I only brought Chinese.’

  Annie let him go. She stepped back and surveyed him. ‘You look good,’ she said. ‘Good haircut … it suits you.’ She reached up and touched the side of his face, pulled him towards her and kissed him. She felt his hands around her waist. Strong hands. Sensitive fingers. She felt like getting laid.

  ‘Eat first,’ he said.

  ‘First?’

  He smiled. ‘Your face is a book, Annie O’Neill.’

  She laughed, took the bags he’d brought and fetched plates.

  They ate. They talked a little while. Annie made coffee and watched him smoke a cigarette.

  When he was done she rose from her chair, pulled her tee-shirt up over her head and took off her bra.

  She started towards the bedroom, tugging the button free on the waistband of her jeans. ‘Come get it,’ she said when she reached the doorway.

  David was up out of his chair and had caught her by the time she reached the bed.

  They made love. Furious almost. Hungry, as if they were out for revenge. And when it was over they lay naked and breathless, sweating on the bed beside one another, not touching, no contact, waiting for nothing but inner silence to return.

  ‘You see Forrester tonight?’ David eventually asked. He rolled over and leaned up, supported his head on his hand.

  ‘He couldn’t come … sent a courier over with the chapter.’

  ‘Can I read it?’

  Annie rolled over to the edge of the bed. ‘Now?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure … if you don’t mind.’

  She smiled. ‘I don’t mind. Why would I mind?’

  David shrugged and shook his head.

  Annie sat up and started towards the door. She glanced back, saw David watching her as she moved.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Stunning,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Stunning? That’s a little strong isn’t it?’

  He smiled. ‘Not from where I’m looking it’s not.’

  ‘Tease,’ she said, and slipped out the door into the front room.

  She brought his cigarettes back with her, sat on the edge of the bed and lit one for him. She took a mouthful of smoke and blew it out without inhaling.

  ‘You don’t want to start that,’ David said.

  ‘Practise what you preach,’ she replied, and handed him the cigarette.

  David took the pages, sat upright, his back against the headboard, and for the time he took to read it Annie just sat and watched him.

  Strange, she thought, how someone looks one way when you meet them, and as you get to know them they look different each time. Maybe as you get to know them what they’re really like comes through … you begin to see what’s under the skin, behind the face they wear for the world. Like the really attractive ones, at least attractive when you see them, and then when you get to know them you find out they’re complete assholes and they become uglier and uglier.

  She smiled at the thought, smiled and watched David, who could sometimes look a little like Kevin Costner, and yet again looked like no-one at all but himself. She wanted to reach out and touch him, perhaps lay her head on his stomach and feel the rising and falling of his chest as he breathed, but he was reading – his attention rapt – and there seemed to be something so important in sharing this thing with him that she didn’t want to disturb his concentration. They were sharing people’s lives, and it didn’t matter if they were real lives or not, didn’t matter if it was all a figment of someone’s imagination or The Gospel of Rose and Redbird. What she had read she could feel, and in feeling it she wanted to share it, and at this moment it felt so much more important to share it with David Quinn than anyone else she could think of. Even Sullivan. Even Jack Sullivan – the man she’d once believed would be the closest she would ever get to a real honest-to-God friend. Annie felt she could spend the rest of her life with such a man as this and never want for anything else. For some reason – unknown, intangible, non-specific – it felt that right.

  ‘This is some story,’ David said as he turned the last page. ‘This is really something. This intrigues me, intrigues me greatly.’

  Annie nodded. ‘Me too,’ she replied. ‘I am actually fascinated by the whole thing … who they were, how this all happened, what will happen to Redbird, if he’ll ever get out of Rikers Island.’

  ‘The suggestion is there that he will,’ David said. ‘This line: “That thought – and possibly that thought alone – kept me out of trouble on Rikers Island through the next seven years” – certainly gives me the idea that something happens to change things for him.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Annie said.

  ‘Forrester knows,’ David replied, and then setting the pages down on the bed he turned and looked directly at Annie. ‘Aren’t you interested to find out more about who he might be?’

  ‘Who, Forrester? Or the guy who wrote this?’

  ‘Forrester,’ David said.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘But there’s something else that seems more important to me now.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘My father … how this thing might connect to my father.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Forrester has given me two letters … both of them written by my father to my mother. They’re addressed from somewhere called the Cicero Hotel … you ever heard of it?’

  ‘Can’t say that I have, but there’s gotta be hundreds of hotels in New York.’

  ‘If it was New York at all,’ Annie said.

  ‘Right, if it was New York at all.’

  ‘The whole thing has made me curious. The fact that I barely remember anything about him, that my mother never spoke of him, that I don’t really know what he did for a living. The letters have made me think about what he might have been like, and I was thinking of asking Sullivan to make some inquiries, try and find out how he died, stuff like that. And then there was the thing you said the other day, how Forrester had the letters amongst my dad’s things, and so the letters could never have reached my mother.’

  ‘It would be good to know,’ David said. He rolled over and pulled Annie close. His hands were warm, and he started to trace tiny circles across the top of her thigh.

  Shivers ran through her leg, and pushing the pillows up behind her head she lay back and folded the length of her body against David’s.

  ‘How did you end up with the store?’ David asked.

  ‘How did I end up with it?’

  ‘Yes, how did you get to own a store like that?’

  ‘When my mom died I sold the house we lived in and bought the lease. Why d’you ask?’

  David closed in tighter to her. ‘I just wondered.’

  There was silence between them for a minute, perhaps two.

  ‘You okay?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Sure I am,’ David whispered. She could feel his breath on the back
of her neck and it made her shiver pleasantly.

  ‘What’re you thinking?’

  ‘Closure,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Closure?’ she asked. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Like when you don’t know something it seems to stick to you, and then when you find out the truth you can feel it let go … even if it’s the worst thing you could imagine, it still somehow manages to help you let go.’

  She nodded without speaking.

  She moved her left hand up close to her face, and there was her father’s wristwatch again, its face no more than six inches from her own.

  She could hear it ticking, and it seemed to follow the beating of David’s heart. She could feel the pressure of his chest against her back, the warmth of his skin, the sense of security and stability it gave her. Like an anchor. A safe port in a storm. She pushed herself closer against him, felt him respond and then, closing her eyes, she sighed so deeply she felt she would empty out and vanish.

  ‘You alright?’ he whispered.

  ‘Never better,’ she whispered in return.

  She felt him kiss the back of her neck, her shoulder, the sound of his breathing mere inches from her ear, and within the depth of whatever it was she was feeling – an emotional freedom that was rare and heady and addictive beyond measure – she felt herself slip soundlessly into sleep.

  David slept with her – front-to-back – their bodies pressed together as if one entity, and though the wind pushed against the windows of her third-floor apartment, there was nothing she could hear but silence.

  The silence of loneliness tip-toeing its way out of her life for keeps.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The way the early morning light seeped through the window, the way it outlined David’s form as he slept on the bed, the warmth from the sunlight as it touched her skin – all seemed timeless, eternal, unforgettable.

  Annie closed her eyes, opened them for a second, and then closed them again as if taking a photograph. Her mind was a camera. She would hold this image forever, and at any time she could replay it, see it there behind her eyelids and remember how she’d felt right at the second it was taken.