Navigation was easy, with the surf beating at Rockaway on his right and the lights of the great city behind it. He ate a box of Oreos and drank some warm beer he found in a cooler. He entertained the idea of sailing back to China, and it made him laugh. By dawn he was rounding Breezy Point, and then it was just a few more hours to cross Rockaway Inlet and reach Sheepshead Bay. He tied the boat up at a vacant slip where the charter boats docked, and walked east on Shore Boulevard. When he found an open store, he bought a pair of zoris, a pair of khaki pants, a white shirt, sunglasses, and a white terry-cloth hat. Shore Boulevard merged into Neptune Avenue. He was in Coney Island. He had heard a great deal about Coney Island; the American had painted it as a boy’s paradise. It did not look like much in the light of day and without the scrim of happy memory. But there was a subway here, Leung recalled, and he found it without difficulty. He took the F train to Grand Street. By noon he was in Chinatown.
The Karps spent another day at the beach, but by Sunday they (or at least the adults) had had enough, and they decided to drive back to the city and deal with the unfinished pieces occasioned by the recent drama. Karp wanted badly to be in on the kill when they finally got Leung, and to ensure that the legalities were strictly observed. He also wanted to be the one to inform Tommy Colombo of what had been discovered. Karp was not much of a gloater, but he felt that a situation so flamboyantly gloatable should not be allowed to pass unobserved.
In the afternoon Posie returned, a walking advertisement for why you should not, if you have lard white Appalachian-person skin, spend eight hours in the sun of a New York scorcher wearing only a string bikini. They’d given her a lot of codeine at the hospital, and Marlene thought that Posie considered this access to legal downers a fair exchange for having most of her skin fried off. For her own part, things were starting to work again in her brain, slowly, like the first groaning movements of a locomotive setting out from the station, but in a direction she could now see clearly. She knew pretty much why everything that had happened since early June had happened. Two people had the remainder of the answer, of whom only one was available, but Marlene was determined to see her, brace her, and extract the truth.
The ride home was uneventful, punctuated only by an occasional scream from Posie as the dog licked her lobster-colored neck with his rough tongue. The twins slept, the girls talked earnestly in whispers, the radio stayed silent, as did Karp and Marlene. Traffic rather than ethnic gangs barred their way on the Belt Parkway. They dropped Mary off and pulled up in front of the loft just after six. Ed Morris got out of the follow car.
“You want me to stick around, Butch?”
“I don’t think so. Just go up with Lucy and check out the loft. I think we can survive the night.”
Morris, Lucy, and Posie rode up on the elevator, with the dog and the first load of bags. Karp leaned deeply into the Volvo’s backseat to unbuckle the sleeping boys from their car seats. Zik, he saw, had taken his beach rock out of its bag.
Marlene had the rear hatch of the Volvo up. She was gathering all the bits of travel debris into a sailcloth beach bag when she heard the sound of a car stopping suddenly and looked up. A black Trans-Am had parked in the middle of the street. The driver’s-side door was flung open, and out stepped Brenda Nero, dressed in pink bermudas, a sleeveless top, and Mattie Duran’s Colt Peacemaker.44. She walked around the front of her car, staggering slightly. Marlene saw that she was drunk, or high.
“I’m gonna kill you, bitch!” she shouted, and raised the pistol.
Marlene put down her beach bag. “Brenda, give me that damn gun before you hurt yourself!” she said.
Karp had been leaning into the car, fumbling with Zik’s car seat strap, but when he heard the woman yell, he came out and stood up and stared at the scene on the street. The woman was pointing a huge shiny gun at his wife’s head. At the same time he saw an old red pickup truck with a green fender draw up and stop behind the black Trans Am. Its driver, a burly man wearing a baseball hat, reached behind him and took a shotgun down from the gun rack and came out of the car. He jacked a shell into it and started walking toward Marlene.
Brenda Nero pointed the Colt at Marlene’s head and pulled the trigger. A confused look came over her pretty, stupid face. She squeezed harder.
Marlene took two steps forward, grabbed the barrel of the pistol, yanked it out of Brenda’s grasp, and socked her in the jaw. Brenda staggered back, tripped on the curb, and fell down. She started to cry.
“It wasn’t loaded!” she wailed.
“It is loaded, Brenda,” Marlene said. “It’s a single-action gun. You have to cock it first.” She demonstrated the cocking action.
“Marlene!” shouted Karp. Marlene looked up and into the muzzle of a twelve-gauge shotgun. She had no idea who the man pointing it was.
Karp’s arm whipped around almost without volition, and Zik’s smooth round stone, with its tiny passengers aboard, flew through the intervening space and struck the man on his right forearm. The shotgun roared, sending nine 00 pellets winging over Marlene’s head and into the side of the building.
Marlene pointed the big pistol and shot the man from the red pickup, the bullet entering about three inches above the left nipple. The man dropped the shotgun and sat down in the street. In a Western movie, guys shot with a Colt.44 often ride long distances on horseback, punch out the bad guy, and save the girl from the burning ranch house, but in real life they usually want to lie very still in a quiet place, and this man was no exception. Marlene walked over to him and kicked the shotgun away.
“Sir,” she said, “would you mind telling me who the fuck you are?”
“Reginald P. Burford,” the man said.
“Reginald P. Burford, the right-to-life vigilante?”
“Yes, ma’am. Could you please call me an ambulance?”
“I’d be happy to,” said Marlene. “Why were you trying to kill me?”
“It’s the Lord, ma’am. Because of the baby killing. I saw you on the TV protecting those baby killers, and I opened the Bible to see what I should do and it opened up to Jeremiah 16:4. ‘They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried’. . And, you know, I fought it back, but the Lord, He kept after me, like unto Jonah, and made me stretch out my hand against. It ain’t nothing personal, ma’am.”
“Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure,” she said. “It never is.” Then she stood in the middle of the street and howled to the sky, “Anybody else? Let’s go, people! Step right up! Take your shot! Here I am, Marlene the walking fucking death wish! Come on, you fucking crazy bastards! Come on!”
Karp ran to her and wrapped his arms around her. She collapsed against him, sobbing. “It’s over, Marlene,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not over,” she sobbed. “It’s not all right.”
Later, after Morris had organized the police necessities and Karp the domestic ones, Marlene paced her kitchen floor, smoking as she had not for many years, one after another. Karp sat on a kitchen chair and watched her with growing apprehension, glad that there was for once no gun in the house. There was on her face a look he had not seen for some time, her Medea look, made even more horrible by the absence of a softening coiffure. This was not the same woman who had lately built sand castles with her little boys and sung them gently to sleep.
At last he said, “Marlene, for crying out loud, sit down! Relax!”
She stopped short and stared at him, her eye glittering. “Relax. Good idea, but not quite yet, no. What just happened, Butch, out on the street? A woman I tried to help just tried to kill me. No good deed goes unpunished. And a guy gets a message from God, and what does it say? The envelope, please. Shoot Marlene Ciampi. I don’t get messages from God. God only talks to assholes from Buttzville, New Jersey. Tell me, is this my fate?”
“What can I say, Marlene? You know how I feel about what you do.”
“Yes. Yes, I do know. And you know what? I feel the same way.
&nbs
p; I know that I shall meet my fate,
Somewhere among the clouds above.
Those I fight I do not hate,
Those I guard I do not love.
“Yeats. I have to go out.”
“Marlene, don’t be crazy.”
She came up to him and touched his cheek and kissed him. “You poor man. I’ll be fine. I’ll walk between the bullets.”
Before he could say another word, she ran into the bedroom and came out carrying her purse. She stalked up to him, grabbed his head, and kissed him again, this time solidly on the mouth.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
Then she was out the door. He heard her running down the stairs, and began to worry.
Chapter 20
They had repaired the door at the East Village Women’s Shelter. It was now a steel-sheathed monster with a small glass porthole in it, suitable for a nuclear submarine. Marlene pressed her face against it, and Vonda buzzed her in.
“Nice door, Vonda,” said Marlene.
“About time you showed,” said the guard, with her usual glower. “She’s in the kitchen.”
Marlene sought the woman out and found her on her back, surrounded by tools, replacing a fitting behind the shelter’s ancient gas stove. She lifted her head an inch when Marlene came and stood at her feet. The work light shining on her grease-smeared face gave it a theatrical Phantom of the Opera look. She frowned when she saw who it was.
“Where the hell have you been, girl? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a week. Have you heard from Brenda?”
“In a manner of speaking. She tried to kill me with your gun.”
“Chingada! What happened?”
Marlene told her. Mattie was not pleased. “You had her arrested? Jesus, who the fuck’s side are you on? What about the goddamn boyfriend? He’s the one should be in jail.”
At that, Marlene felt she had two possible options: smash the woman’s skull with the fourteen-inch pipe wrench that lay conveniently to hand, or laugh. She laughed, ever the correct response to fanatics, and walked away.
“Hey, when am I gonna get my gun back?” Mattie called after her.
Up in room 37, Marlene found that Vivian F. Bollano had settled in for a long stay. The small room now held a color TV, with VCR, both set up on a new chest of drawers, a larger bed with a thicker mattress, a thick rust-colored area rug, and a teak and leather sling chair. A tape of The Sound of Music was playing on the VCR. Vivian switched it off after letting Marlene in, and sat on the bed. Marlene sat opposite in the sling chair and examined her client. Vivian had had her hair done, by whom Marlene could not imagine, and looked rather more doll-like than she had before. But there was a fuzziness about her expression that indicated the presence of dope, probably prescription downers, since Mattie had a ferocious rule about the nonprescription sort. Aside from that, Marlene imagined, Mattie was perfectly happy to indulge this resident in every legal way. There was a sliding scale of payment at the EVWS: most women owned only the clothes they fled in and paid nothing, but Vivian was clearly at the top of the scale. She could probably have had a suite in the Plaza for what she was paying here, for the day or so before the Bollanos found her and dragged her through the gilded lobby by her hair.
“Well, Vivian, since our last interview, I’m happy to report I’ve made some progress.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mild interest only: she was tranqued out.
“Yeah. Your father did not commit suicide, as you suspected. He was murdered.”
“Uh-huh. Do you know who killed him?” No excitement, no shock, Marlene noted, and put that down to the meds.
“Yes, your husband did it, assisted by a man named Carlo Tonnati. I’m reasonably sure of my informant, and there are some other suggestive pieces of evidence. But I don’t know why it was done, and I don’t have enough at present to go to the cops with.”
Vivian nodded, and her face seemed to deflate a fraction.
“You don’t seem all that surprised,” said Marlene.
The woman shook her head and turned her face away. “I guess that’s it,” she said in a ghost’s voice. “Thank you for your help.”
“Well, actually, Vivian, it’s not quite it yet. Because when you enter into a contract like we did, there are mutual obligations. My obligation is to give you honest service and keep your secrets. Your obligation is to tell me everything relevant to the case. You fail to do that and I could poke into a hole that I think’s got no bear in it, and the bear is waiting and I get my head bitten off.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Vivian to the blank television. “I just had some suspicions and-”
“No, Vivian, you had much more than suspicions, and ordinarily I would let it slide because it comes with the territory-clients lie, or they conceal. What else is new? But this time I got blindsided, because when you mess with the Mob, you might put yourself at risk, but not your family, because by and large, the Mob doesn’t go after family. It’s not like Sicily here. But because you didn’t tell me what was really going on, my children were put at risk. Your father-in-law sent a thug after my babies. And I thought to myself, What would make a don send a thug after my babies? It would have to be something outside the normal run of Mob business, wouldn’t it? What was it, Vivian? What’s got Big Sally so scared?”
Her mouth was slightly open, like a hungry little bird unsure of whether that large shadow was really its mother. She shook her head again, reached for a beaded purse on the nightstand, took from it an amber plastic vial. Marlene jumped from her chair, snatched it away, and moved back to the chair. She tossed the pills into her own purse.
“Excuse me, I have to take my medication. What do you think-”
“No, Vivian, no pills. We’ll save them for after, okay? Don’t want to talk, huh? Vivian, I will have the truth out of you, if it takes all day and all night.” Dumb silence. The woman now had the glazed and stupid look of a shot antelope. “Okay, Vivian, let’s see if we can prime the pump. We start with the peculiar case of the Chinese gentleman Mr. Leung. Or Mr. Lie. This person has some interesting characteristics. He is a gangster, a triad member, in fact. He is in business with your husband’s organization. He seems to have an uncanny understanding of American law. He went through a lot of trouble to kill one of your father-in-law’s two chief subordinates and hang the murder on the other one. It seems that Mr. Leung doesn’t like the Bollano family at all. No reaction? Well, you might say he’s a gangster trying to take over the Bollano family. True enough, but that’s not all that’s true. This particular Chinese had a relationship with an American in Macao. My daughter found this out, by the way. Mr. Leung can speak English with a New York accent. So, now remember, Vivian, Mr. Leung knows something about New York law, can speak phrases with a New York accent, has it in for the Bollanos, and was in close contact with an American in Macao. Can you make a guess as to whom that American might be? Excuse me, I didn’t hear you.”
“Bernie Kusher,” said Vivian, just above the limits of audibility.
“Yes, it would explain a lot that is otherwise very strange indeed. It would explain one of the two big questions I’ve been wanting to ask you ever since I started on this, and which I would’ve asked you if your husband hadn’t kicked me in the head that night. Why you suddenly, after twenty years, bailed out on Little Sally. Bernie’s dead now, apparently, but he was obviously working on this a long, long time. He didn’t want to contact you until he had his little guided missile in place and ready to fire. Leung saw you, didn’t he?” Nod. “And he brought word from Bernie about who really killed your father, didn’t he?” Nod.
Marlene made an exasperated sound and crossed over to sit on the bed beside Vivian. She put her arm around her, and found that she was trembling like a caught mouse.
“Look, Vivian. This has to come out. It has to all come out, right now, so your life can start up again and the people who murdered your father can get what they deserve. It’s
like vomiting, Vivian: if you try to hold it back it gets worse and worse. Just heave it up, and brush your teeth and it’s over.”
“Please, could I have a. .” Her hand twitched toward Marlene’s purse.
“No. First talk. Leung came to see you, didn’t he?”
The woman uttered a small sigh, and Marlene knew that it was the sound of the cork going on a magnum of poisoned mental champagne; it would all come out now. “He called first. He said, ‘Hiya, princess,’ which is what my dad used to say, and then Bernie picked it up, too. I almost fainted, because the accent was so right on. He said he came from Bernie, that Bernie had died in Macao and had told this guy to come see me. He wanted to know could we meet, and I said, yes. I would’ve crawled over broken glass. So we met the next day in some hole-in-the-wall place in Chinatown. He said Bernie had saved his life after some war they had there, I didn’t follow that part. He said Bernie had landed in Macao, which is kind of a wide-open town. If you have money, they don’t care what you did anyplace else. And Bernie had plenty of money. He bought some real estate, had some businesses. He got into opium, too. And when he was high, he would talk, about what happened to my father, about what Panofsky had done, to my dad and him. He couldn’t go to the cops with what he knew, or guessed, because the cops were all bought by the Bollanos. So he just stayed in Macao, talking to this kid. The kid got into the triads-they practically run Macao anyway, and Bernie was connected with them too. And they figured out this plan. The first step was to come to me and tell me that Sal had killed my father.”
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