Pardon the Ravens

by Alan Hruska

  Carrie and Phil could laugh together at this smoothing of Katherine and Conner, at her parents’ readiness to take over the wedding preparations, at the FBI’s shooting pictures of the wedding guests, at the comical appearance of wiseguys in cutaways, at the over-exuberance of the catering, and the enormity of the cake. Phil was clever about people; he could size up immediately what anyone wanted. He could also laugh at himself, even his power, and he plainly loved his young Carrie.

  They had a child in nine months, a girl they named Sarah after Phil’s mother who had died giving birth to him. Several months after the christening of their daughter, Phil began exhibiting passions that wouldn’t have shocked those subject to his actual managerial principles but were stunning to his twenty-year-old bride. He liked tying his young wife to the bed naked and stropping her with a leather belt. The belt, he told her, was how his father once taught him life lessons. So he himself took pains explaining to Carrie why punishment was being administered. The beating was always for her own benefit, according to Phil, and rarely done with the buckle end.

  Often the beating was said to be for something she did, or more commonly failed to do, while under the influence of the drugs to which Phil himself had introduced her. He wasn’t unaware of the irony, Carrie thought, or the hypocrisy. He was simply indifferent to both.

  Providing drugs, mainly heroin, is the way Phil controls her. She’s often left him, but invariably comes back. Drugs are the core of Phil’s business. His supply is inexhaustible. And Phil always apologizes a day or two after each beating, promising never to hit her again.

  Carrie’s skin is translucent. Blue veins run visibly beneath it like a roadmap to her heart. Phil never breaks her skin. He seems to know the precise shade of discoloration that precedes bloody sheets and a permanent scar. But there can be little question that he takes great pleasure in thrashing her. She’ll catch him reacting intently to the way she twists and turns her wisp of a body on the mattress to avoid the blows, the way she screams when they land. Eventually, as his blows become rhythmic, he’ll close his eyes as if transported to a place of indescribable serenity.

  A nurse at Payne Whitney arrives with a needle. Her name is Terry, and she’s from the Deep South. “You got a choice,” Terry says. “Your father’s here—a man who claims he’s your father, Conner Madigan by name, and I believe him, ’cause he’s good-looking like you. So you can have this needle or the man, but if you choose the man, he can’t stay long ’cause you need this needle. You following this?” Hovering over the bed, Terry—black, squat, upbeat, and professional—waits for an answer.

  “Show him in.”

  “Will do, honey chile,” Terry says, deliberately mimicking the stereotype.

  Carrie looks around her. A double room, but she is its only occupant. The room has faded lime-colored walls, vinyl floor coverings fatigued to a mud-like hue, and a window. She’s been out of bed only once to check the view. It’s of an alley of dirty brick, black fire escapes, and unwashed panes. Moving is still very difficult for her. Of course she’s on the verge of feeling wonderful. Addicts call it the “pink cloud.”

  “Hi, baby,” says her father, with Nurse Terry hanging for just a moment to make sure he’s who he says he is. A stooped, well-dressed man of middle height and curly, somewhat oily, gray hair, Conner appears to be cheerful, which means he’s had a few “liveners,” as he calls them, at a local pub.

  Sitting on the chair next to the bed, he takes a closer look at her disfigured face and frowns, his own once-fine features now bumpy with large pores and flushed with broken blood vessels.

  “Phil,” she says, by way of explanation. “He beats the shit out of me whenever he likes, which is often.”

  “Jeeze, baby.” Her father is terrified of Phil, though he was happy enough with the connection when she married him. “I thought he’d stopped that.”

  Carrie laughs to cover her bitterness and yanks the hospital bathrobe around herself more tightly.

  “I could talk to him again.”

  “Oh, great,” she says. “That’ll fix it.”

  They both stare into the futility of such a suggestion.

  “How’s Mom?”

  Conner winces. “The same.” He fumbles in his pocket for a Chesterfield, lights it shakily, finds an ashtray on the window sill, comes back to the chair.

  Carrie thinks about sending regards, then decides not to waste her breath.

  “I’m leaving him,” she says.

  “Jesus, Carrie.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe—” Conner starts.

  “What? He’s not going to do it again? It’s my fault? It never happened?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I’m not stupid,” she says. “He’s not gonna change. I’ve had enough.”

  “Where will you go?” He already looks frightened.

  “I have a place. That’s what the last beating was about. Supposedly.”

  “Oh, jeeze, baby. What about Sarah?”

  “I’ll take her with me.”

  “You will?”

  “Phil has no rights.”

  “Oh… rights,” he says, with a deep drag on the Chesterfield.

  “You remember what Sarah was like as an infant?”

  “Of course.”

  “The happiest kid, almost never cried, loved to be held.”

  “She cries a lot now?”

  “No,” Carrie says. “But she doesn’t laugh much either.”

  “You’re saying Phil—”

  “He adores her.”

  “So?”

  “He’s making me miserable, what do you think! And beat up! You think a child can watch that?”

  “He hits you in front of the child?” Conner says, squirming.

  “Jesus, no. He doesn’t have to. You’re not getting any of this. Or don’t want to. I can’t have Sarah living in a house where her mom’s getting beaten up every other day.”

  “I dunno, Carrie, I dunno.”

  “What are you worried about, Da, Phil cutting you off?”

  He shows a pout. “Needn’t be unkind.”

  “No worries about yourself, is it?”

  “That’s the least of it. I’m thinking of you.”

  “That right? Be a first.”

  “I can protect you.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Yeah, you and Sarah. Come live with us. Maybe…” he begins.

  “Maybe what?”

  Conner sits up in the straight-backed chair. “I could get an order of protection?”

  Her laugh belittles him.

  “You think I can’t?”

  “He’d probably kill you,” she says.

  “Let him try!”

  “Oh come on, Dad.”

  “What about you?” says Conner, his hand trembling ashes over her bed. “He’d probably beat you to death.”

  “No way,” she says. “Guy like Phil doesn’t actually kill his wife. Much less the mother of his kid. It’s a sign of weakness. He goes up to that line. That’s a sign of expertise.”

  A low groan comes from deep in the man’s throat.

  “Stuff it, Dad, will you! You’re a fucking broken record.”

  “Isn’t there anything that can be done?”

  “Oh sure, you got a cannon?”

  “Maybe….”

  “Will you stop with the maybes!”

  “Maybe he’s not totally hopeless.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

  “Yeah, but maybe”—Conner looks away—“if you were… nicer to him?”

  Her eyes get squinty and dark. “Boy.”

  “I’m only saying….”

  “You’re out of your depth.”

  “What then?”

  “What do you think?” she says. “What do you think stops a guy like Phil? An abuser like Phil? You think he likes just sex? He likes the beatings. That’s his sex. That, he gets off on. And he’s what? One of the twenty most powerful guys in the whole f
ucking world. So how do you stop him from doing what he most likes to do?”

  Conner’s brow bunches. “Maybe….”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Maybe when he’s in one of those moods—you know, when he’s apologizing—you could suggest… I don’t know… therapy?”

  Carrie, dazed for a moment, lets out a guffaw. “One thing about you, Dad! Always good for a laugh.”

  FOUR

  Alec and Darcy met senior year on spring break in Bermuda. Outside the army barracks, where the rugby teams stayed, Alec was perched on a low stone wall, face up to a light tropical rain, trying to distill the rum punches out of his brain cells. Darcy came screeching up the driveway on a motorbike, yellow slicker billowing, pale hair wet and wild. “Where’s the goddamn party?” she demanded to know in a voice made at prep schools and New York cotillions.

  They still get on reasonably well. The world, according to Darcy, is peopled largely by dimwits with whom she communicates on terms of sweet insincerity. With persons she likes, she banters. Fun, but never relaxing. And Alec never knows what the girl wants.

  The Stork Club is their hangout. For them, the velvet rope always comes down. And in that blue-and-gold room glistening with silver and crystal, they congregate with their fellows and an occasional celebrity to the beat of Lester Lanin refrains. If Sherman Billingsley, the owner, is there, their dinner is comped. Darcy, a recent Smith graduate, was a classmate of Sherman Billingsley’s daughter at Miss Porter’s.

  Darcy’s willowy Botticellian form packages the appetites of a mink. “If I like the boy,” Darcy would say, as when she showed Alec her favorite masturbatory technique in a bathtub in the old Taft Hotel in New Haven. “Running water?” asked Alec. “Oh, yes!” she said languidly, the V of her legs poised under the spout. “But the temperature has to be perfect.”

  In the cab taking her home from the Stork Club, Alec says, “I’m afraid I’m about to become even busier.”

  “Great,” she says. “Even busier than totally inaccessible.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Then you’d better come up,” she says. “Mummy and Daddy are away.”

  Alec had never been on good terms with either of Darcy’s parents. As the son of impoverished socialists, he embodies their worst nightmare. And to Alec, the von Hammerts seem like birds of prey, maneuvering beyond their means on the fringes of New York society.

  They keep a tiny apartment in a Park Avenue co-op for which a listing in the Social Register is a minimum requirement. Their bedroom, despite their absence, Darcy declares off-bounds. This leaves a slender cot in Darcy’s room, the sort of six-by-four cell in which Park Avenue families used to torture their servants. Alec and Darcy, having shed all clothes, squeeze together on it as tightly as they can. Until Alec, attempting something overly ambitious, falls out of the cot.

  “Oh, shit!” Darcy declares. “If we could only live our lives at the Stork Club, everything would be fine.”

  Alec starts getting dressed. “I’d better go. I actually have to work tomorrow.”

  “Oh, well, in that case!” she says.

  When he kisses her goodnight, she says nothing, and doesn’t move from the cot when he leaves.

  Outside, in the elevator vestibule, Alec pushes the button and waits. Eventually, the elevator doors open. A uniformed gray-haired retainer appears, his expression implacable. They both hear the scream inside the apartment—a sound of raw anguish. The doorman’s face remains impassive. “I’ll be another few minutes,” Alec says, and goes back inside.

  He finds Darcy sitting on the edge of her cot, with a nightgown bunched at her shoulders. “What happened?” he asks.

  “Whatta you mean?” she says, getting her arms through the sleeves and the nightgown into its normal and more useful position.

  “I heard a scream.”

  She gives him bright eyes and a hard shell, as if to say she couldn’t imagine to what he might be referring.

  “Not you, huh?”

  She bats her eyes and shakes her head twice.

  “Must have been some other apartment,” he says.

  “Must have been.”

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Well,” she says in an upbeat voice. “I’m not having what you’d call a really great day.”

  He doesn’t know what to say.

  “Go,” she says.

  “Darcy, I’m sorry. I’ll call you.”

  “Go already! Get out of here!”

  “We’ll talk about this.”

  “Like hell we will!”

  “See you Sunday?”

  She shrugs.

  FIVE

  In a Narragansett diner, a man eating dinner in a suit and vest is conspicuous, no matter how ordinary he might otherwise appear. Aaron Weinfeld has no leisure clothes, however. He’s a widower, has no hobbies or even much leisure, and devotes himself to the practice of law, which he rarely enjoys. For Aaron, it’s an activity engaged in solely to make money. He is not physically attractive, being a portly man with a protruding brow and an inadept comb-over. He likes sex with women and pays for it. He also feels invigorated on occasion by elements of danger, which his work offers him as well as making him rich. He isn’t consigliere to any one crime family, but rather, in his fields of expertise—market manipulations and commodities law—he acts as outside counsel to several families in New England, New Jersey, and New York. Of course representing potentially conflicting interests places him in a precarious position.

  The day before, his young office manager, Carrie Madigan, had come to him with news that made his situation untenable. She’d been away for two weeks, he thought on holiday, so he was surprised to see her normally pleasant face lined with distress. Carrie’s husband, Phil Anwar, was Aaron’s principal client. Aaron assumed Phil’s aim, in placing his wife in Aaron’s office, was to allow her to spy on other families. For that reason, Aaron didn’t want to hire her, and all his other clients were furious he had, but Phil left him no choice. Now Aaron was glad he had taken her on.

  “You’ve got to run, Aaron.”

  “Run?” he said. “I haven’t done a thing.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Carrie told him.

  “What’s happened?”

  “It’s subtle.”

  “Maybe I can fix it.”

  She shook her head. “As I understand it, Little John has turned sour on the Bayonne thing. It’s too close to him.”

  “I know this.”

  “Because of Bayonne and other reasons, Little John’s also turning on Phil. At the same time Phil thinks you’ve gotten way too close to Little John. Which is dangerous to Phil because of what you know.”

  “I haven’t done anything! I’ve been very careful.”

  “Not the way Phil sees it. And he’s had your phone tapped.”

  “My phone!”

  “’Fraid he has.”

  “I haven’t said anything.”

  She gave him a look.

  “One can always be misinterpreted,” he uttered in an agitated voice.

  “I said it was subtle.”

  “Subtle? That’s it? That’s enough for Phil to have me killed? After all I’ve done for him?”

  “Just go, Aaron. Today. And don’t tell me where.”

  He left. Carrie knew what she was talking about and gained nothing by telling him except risk to herself. Aaron was touched. She was trying to save his life.

  He thought she had done so. And he’d been congratulating himself on having chosen Narragansett as a place no one would dream to look for him. I won’t stay here for long, he thinks. I’ll keep moving around.

  Aaron is no fool; years ago, when there could have been no suspicions or reasons for phone taps, he prepared himself with an escape hatch: alternate identities, different bank accounts, places to stay. I’ll be all right, he thinks.

  Then Vito walks into the diner.

  This muscle-bound menacing figure slides into the booth across from Aaron. He simply star
es into Aaron’s startled eyes. The lawyer is too shocked to say anything.

  Finally, Vito speaks. “Narragansett?”

  “I’m here vacationing.”

  “That right?” Vito says.

  “Love it off-season. The sea air.”

  “Know what you mean,” Vito says, nodding sagaciously.

  “How’d you happen to know where I was?”

  “Oh,” says Vito, “usual ways.”

  “You’ve put the tap on me, Vito? When?”

  “Not me, no.”

  “Those are confidential communications you’re intercepting. Lawyer, client.”

  “What can I tell ya?”

  “So what’s up, Vito?” Aaron asks, shifting his weight on the hard wooden seat of the booth. “What the fuck’s happening?”

  “Not here. I’ve got the boat at the boatyard.”

  “You want me to get on a boat with you?” Aaron manages to say, fear tightening his throat.

  Vito shrugs.

  “I’m not getting on a boat with you.”

  Vito’s look is apologetic.

  “That’s crazy! A fucking boat! No fucking way!”

  Vito spreads his hands and smiles, as if to say, you don’t have much of a choice about this.

  “You here alone?” Aaron asks.

  “No, couple of the guys came along. They’re outside.”

  “Front and back?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re here to kill me, Vito?”

  “Absolutely not. Just talk.”

  “Why do we have to get on the boat?”

  “The sea air,” says Vito. “I love it too.”

  Four miles out to sea, Aaron throws himself around Vito’s ankles, crying in panic and grief. “I haven’t done anything, Vito! Please let me see Phil.”

  There’s a young hood on board named Joey Forcaccio. He’s rocking with Vito on this fifteen-foot craft, helping to untangle Aaron from Vito’s legs. Together—sea spray and wind whipping their faces, the older man struggling pitiably—they prop him at the aft railing. Aaron is sobbing, pleading for his life, offering them all his money, promising forever to be loyal and good. This is so sad, Vito thinks, then shoots the top of Aaron’s head off with a Smith & Wesson 1911 semi-automatic .45-caliber pistol.