Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  But his masterpiece, the crowning achievement of his sacred inviolate outrage, was his wife’s face. Her flesh was the clay he pounded with his fists. What he left was a sculpture of collapsed cheekbones, black eyes, and splintered teeth. A grim Russian girl, she’d been raised to believe a man would always take care of her. Sometimes she’d run into Jake’s room and try to hide in his bed. But her husband would always come and drag her out, leaving Jake shivering like a coward under the covers, filled with shame for not being able to protect her.

  One Friday morning the old man backhanded her across the kitchen for burning his eggs and she crashed into the stove, breaking her left wrist.

  Instead of hiding in his room again, Jake, who was all of fifteen, stormed out of the house. He took the B train all the way into Manhattan and wound up wandering aimlessly through the Central Park Zoo. He found himself in front of the lion’s cage, trying to summon up the courage to go home.

  The lion was magnificent up on its perch. All coiled strength and dark glimmering eyes. Watching her, Jake felt the animal was trying to tell him something about how to survive in this life.

  He took the train home just before nine and fished a broken bottle of Piel’s Real Draft out of the garbage can on the corner. With a head that felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, he climbed the six floors to their apartment. His father was asleep on the couch, snoring with his mouth open and a Clark Gable submarine movie on the TV. Jake touched the soft spot at the base of his father’s throat with the jagged glass and waited for the old man to open his eyes.

  “Someday,” he told his father, “I will kill you.”

  What did Philip say before? A man cannot go too far to protect his own family. Up until tonight, Jake believed that too. After all, his father beat only inanimate objects after the night of the Piel’s bottle. But now Jake wonders. How has he gone so wrong?

  Without waking Dana, he slips out from between the sheets and listens for that sound. Tap-tap-tap. He follows it out into the hallway and up the stairs. A dim light is on in Alex’s room and Jake looks in on him. The boy is sprawled across his bed, asleep in plaid boxer shorts and a Pearl Jam T-shirt. Sixteen. He’s all long gangly arms and hairy legs now. But when he’s sleeping, he’s still the little boy Jake pushed down the sidewalk on the tricycle. He leans over and kisses his son gently on the cheek.

  What else can a man do except protect his family?

  Tap-tap-tap. That sound in the hall again. Jake goes and stands out on the landing. Straining to hear what’s wrong.

  All his life, he’s believed that if he had a house of his own he’d be able to keep his family safe and have peace of mind.

  But now he has the house. The little piece of the city he insisted on owning when Dana wanted to stay in the apartment and save for a country house. But something feels wrong here. That tapping is beginning to sound more like creaking. Actually a low shuddering moan. Like plaster, steel, and wood grinding against one another. It could just be old pipes knocking. But the sound is too deep and resonant. Harsh even. Like the voice of God. He listens harder and thinks he hears little timbers snapping and bolts loosening. Maybe the foundations are shifting.

  And he wonders if this house, his only true home, is subtly and slowly falling apart.

  27

  Uncle Carmine has slicked-back white hair and glasses so thick they make his eyes looked tilted. He always smells like a barber.

  “I hear you had a situation get out of hand,” he tells Philip.

  “Says who?”

  “Says Ronnie. He says you had to tune up some bums with a baseball bat.”

  “Ronnie’s got two good ears. He oughta learn to use them and keep his fuckin’ mouth shut.”

  “That’s my boy you’re talking about.” Carmine rubs his hands together and Philip smells hair tonic.

  They’re sitting in the living room of Philip’s mother’s apartment, above the surgical supply store on Twentieth Avenue. A statue of Saint Anthony stares out from a glass-enclosed bookcase. There’s a full 1957 Encyclopaedia Britannica but no other books. The carpet is plush red and there’s gold leaf around the light switches. Philip’s mother watches The Song of Bernadette on the TV down the hall.

  “So what was this about, anyway?” says Carmine, who wears a pair of tan chinos and a blue short-sleeved shirt with a lacy pattern on the front.

  “This Jew lawyer I was telling you about before. One with all the connections.”

  “What about him?” Carmine lifts a cup of espresso with a pinky extended.

  “It’s the same thing we always talk about. You want somebody to do something for you, you have to give him a reason to do it. You do him a favor and if that doesn’t work out, you put him behind the eight ball. So that’s what I did with this Jew. I put him behind the eight ball.”

  “So you went and killed a guy?”

  “I didn’t plan it that way, C. Life is full of conflict. Shit happens.”

  “Yeah, but now you got my son on the spot for murder.” Lamplight flashes off Carmine’s lenses.

  Philip draws back into himself, trying to figure out how to deal with this subtle breach of mob etiquette. The problem isn’t that Ronnie’s now involved in a murder; it’s that Ronnie’s involved in a murder that doesn’t directly benefit his father.

  “Look, the lawyer’s not gonna say anything, C. He’s in it as much as we are.”

  “And now you think he’s going to come through with these contracts?”

  “Well he better come through with something, or I’ll drop a fuckin’ atom bomb on him, I will.” Philip throws his right arm out.

  “No, you better come through or I’ll drop a bomb on you.” Carmine reaches over and squeezes Philip’s knee.

  “Why you getting a hard-on with me?”

  “Because I’m getting tired of bailing you out, Phil. That’s why. I paid for your house in Massapequa. I got you the job over at the Javits Center. I bailed you out when you had a problem with that girl in the warehouse. I talked to Angelo when half his crew wanted to whack you. When am I gonna see some return on my investment?”

  Philip looks down at Carmine’s hand on his leg. His manicured fingernails look as hard and shiny as little ice cubes. The gorge in Philip’s throat starts to rise.

  It’s that hair tonic smell again.

  Philip remembers that smell from when he was a boy. When Carmine would stand over his bed. Carmine was always touching things. Money in bank vaults, stolen credit cards, dresses off the backs of trucks. After Philip’s father died from a heroin OD in sixty-one, Carmine started touching Philip’s mother too. And on nights when he was drinking, he’d sometimes slip into the bedroom and give Philip a little touch under the covers. Always leaving behind a trace of that hair tonic smell. Carmine understood that in order to possess something you had to be able to put your hand around it. To dominate it. That’s how he’d gotten to be head of his own crew on Staten Island. Life was not about half measures or reasoning with people. It was about grinding them under your will. Humiliating them. Crushing their spirit. So you could touch them whenever you felt like it.

  When Philip did that thing to the girl in the warehouse all those years ago, he made her feel the way Carmine had made him feel. And when he gave his wife a little smack once in a while, she felt that way too. In fact, sometimes it seemed like his whole life was dedicated to making other people feel the way Carmine made him feel.

  “So I’ll get the contracts, don’t worry about it,” he says, noticing that all the furniture in the room suddenly seems bigger, as if he’s become a small boy again.

  “Well it better be worth it. I don’t want you getting my Ronnie involved in this nonsense without a good reason.”

  “It’ll be worth it. We’re talking the whole public school system.”

  Carmine looks up at Philip’s face. There’s still twenty-five years between them, but something in that face no longer interests him. He takes his hand off Philip’s knee.

  “Mea
ntime, I got a piece of work for you,” he tells Philip, his jowls corrugating below the jawline. “This fuckin’ Polack Walt. Still owes me two G’s and he’s out at the Doll House the other night, stuffing twenties into the girls’ G-strings. I think he needs a little thrift lesson. Bring Ronnie along and show him the ropes.”

  “Oh come on, C!” Philip stands up and his brow wrinkles. “Don’t make me do that. I’m not a goddamn leg breaker anymore. I’m an intelligent person. Let me have some dignity.”

  “I’ve given you dignity. If you weren’t my flesh and blood, I woulda had you cut up and left in a fuckin’ bird sanctuary.”

  “But I’m about to set things up so you’re making a thousand dollars a day off every school in the city.”

  “Well, when you start getting those contracts, I’ll start sending Ronnie and his friends out to do these jobs insteada you. Meanwhile you still work for me, and when I say ‘frog,’ you jump. Understand?”

  Even after all these years, just the sound of Carmine’s voice can make Philip’s insides move around.

  “But C. . . .”

  “But nothing. Do like I say. If you’re so smart, you’d be rich already. I tell you.” Carmine starts muttering to himself. “You put a dwarf on top of a mountain, he’s still a dwarf.”

  Philip blinks. He’s noticed Carmine saying some strange things lately.

  “Look,” he tells his uncle, “let me talk to the Jew one more time before I see Walt.”

  “Well, don’t take too goddamn long about it.”

  Carmine steps around Philip’s mother’s wheelchair and starts moving down the hall toward The Song of Bernadette in the back bedroom.

  “It’s a good thing I feel the way I do about family,” he grumbles.

  FALL

  28

  The day after the incident in the tunnels, the weather starts to turn. Brown leaves litter the gutters and a chill bites the air. On Fifth Avenue, women drop their hemlines an inch or two and horse carriage drivers throw extra blankets in the back.

  Up in his office, Jake is trying to act as if nothing has changed. He returns phone calls, works on briefs, reads transcripts, but as he gets up from behind his heavy oak desk and starts pacing, he feels like an imposter. The guy in the framed New York Times article on the wall isn’t him anymore. He’s involved in murder.

  For the third time this morning, he picks up the phone and calls his old friend Andy Botwin, the defense lawyer.

  “He’s still not back in,” says Andy’s secretary, Beth. “Can I leave a more detailed message?”

  “Just tell him I need to see him in person right away. You think he has any time tomorrow morning?”

  “I’m sure he’ll make time for you, Mr. Schiff.”

  The other line buzzes. It’s Deborah, Jake’s secretary.

  “Everything okay in there?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I hear you moving around a lot in there. You playing handball or something?” The voice like an old engine turning over.

  Jake likes to say that if he’s ever sick, he’d want Dana to take care of him. But if he’s ever in another street fight, he wants Deborah on his side.

  “No, I’m fine,” he says. “Everything’s fine.”

  “I just wanna remind you about your schedule for the morning. You got a ten-thirty with Todd and the other partners about the merger. And then you got lunch at the Four Seasons with Margaret Dunleavy.”

  Right, Margaret Dunleavy. The forty-four-year-old widow of a famous Truman-era diplomat and bank chairman, who’s being sued by her seventyish stepchildren over the estate. He looks over at the teetering pile of bank documents on the left side of his desk and sees a yellow sticky note he wrote himself: “Check codicil.”

  “I also wanted to let you know there’s someone waiting out in reception for you.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Rico Carty,” she says.

  “Guy who used to play outfield for the Braves?”

  Deborah sighs and riffles through some papers. Jake can picture her sitting there, legs crossed, plastic cigarette substitute between her painted fingernails, files precariously balanced on her nyloned knees. My guardian angel.

  “Philip,” she says. “That’s the guy’s name. Philip Cardi. He says he’s done some contracting work for you. I told him no one gets in without an appointment. So he’s still sitting there. You want me to call security?”

  Jake feels as if a firm hand has just been placed over his throat. The rest of Deborah’s words are lost in the riot in his mind.

  “... or do you want I should send him in?” he hears her asking.

  All right, stay cool, he tells himself. What are the options? Call security and risk having a scene trying to get rid of Philip? Todd Bracken and the other partners would love that. Especially with the Greer, Allan people arriving any minute. Maybe it would be better to talk to him quickly and quietly, find out what’s on his mind.

  “All right, tell him I got a minute,” he says to Deborah.

  “You sure?” Knowing his schedule better than he does, she’s aware he can’t afford the time.

  “Yeah, but buzz me if I go too long with him. I may need to be rescued.”

  Some twenty seconds later, Philip is standing in his doorway. Wearing a light blue sports jacket, a pink button-down shirt, dark slacks, and that same easygoing smile that made Jake let his guard down in the first place.

  “Hey, buddy,” Philip says, like they’re two best friends meeting up Monday morning after a weekend of hard drinking. “How ya doin’?”

  “What do you want?” Jake says.

  “You mind if I sit down? Forgive me for interrupting.”

  Jake just stares at him. Philip pulls over one of the brown leather-backed chairs with copper studs around the sides.

  He sits and turns his head for a moment to admire Jake’s view of downtown. Ten million passengers and predators, moving past traffic lights and stop signs.

  “You know, I’ve been reconsidering about your chimney,” says Philip.

  Jake doesn’t respond. He imagines he can hear the distant rumble of the subway some fifty-seven stories below.

  “I’m thinking maybe we don’t have to reline the whole thing,” says Philip, resting his right hand on the arm of the chair. “You know, it would be terrible to have to open up the walls on every floor. You’d have an unprecedented amount of soot pouring into your house. You’d never get it cleaned up.”

  Jake continues to glare at him. But nothing in Philip’s voice or relaxed face begins to suggest the violence the man is capable of.

  “So maybe we just open up one spot on the wall and take out the obstruction and keep the mess to a minimum. A little carpentry work, we set up an enclosure, and then we put the bricks back in and plaster it up. What do you think?”

  “I think I don’t know what you came here for,” Jake says evenly.

  Philip ignores him. “But then you might still have the problem of asbestos in your basement.”

  The word “asbestos” is somehow a signal that things have changed. It’s not just that it has nothing to do with the chimney problem Philip’s been blathering on about. It’s the particular emphasis that he puts on the word. Like he’s suddenly decided to raise the stakes.

  ‘T bet you haven’t thought much about asbestos,” he says.

  “It’s all been removed,” Jake tells him, wondering how long they can keep talking about one thing when they’re both thinking about something else.

  “Yeah, but maybe you only think it’s all been removed. It’s just like the carbon monoxide. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, but once it’s in the air, it can slowly poison you. You’re dying and you don’t even know it.”

  Jake feels his jaw lock in his face like a loaded cartridge sliding into a gun. Why is Philip playing with him? Is he going to bring up the murder? Jake has a slight spasm of panic, remembering a story he’d heard about old man Bracken bugging the partners’ offices back in the
days of the Nixon White House. But then who was supposed to be sitting around all day, listening to these excruciatingly boring tapes? Forget it. It’s not true.

  Just the same, he has to be careful about what’s being said here. The Greer, Allan people are arriving any minute. He looks at his telephone, willing it to ring.

  “Philip,” he says slowly, “I’m really kind of busy here. Is this something we can talk about later?”

  Philip studies the back of his right hand, seemingly oblivious to the rising tension in Jake’s voice. “Did you know I do asbestos work too?” he asks.

  “No, and I’m really not sure I have time to hear about it right now.”

  “That’s too bad.” Philip sinks deeper into the chair, making himself comfortable. “Because the school year is beginning and you know that out of the—whatever it is—six or seven hundred public schools in the city, at least thirty percent of them have some asbestos still in the physical plant.”

  “So?”

  “So I was thinking your friend Bob Berger probably has the final say over who gets the contract to remove all that material,” says Philip, broadening his smile. “He’s going to be with the School Construction Board, right? I was thinking you could put in a good word for your paisan from the old neighborhood. Tell ‘im I’m his guy for the job.”

  All right, so there it is. Out in the open. An old-fashioned kick-’im-in-the-nuts shakedown. At least now he knows what Philip wants.

  “What happens if I say no to you?”

  Philip’s smile disappears. “Well, that wouldn’t be right.”

  “Why not?” Jake takes a blank sheet of yellow legal paper off one of the piles and begins to fold it into smaller and smaller sections.

  “Because that would show a basic lack of gratitude, if you forgive me for saying so. That would be a situation in which I’d done a favor for you and you failed to reciprocate.”

  “Maybe I don’t see it that way,” says Jake, remembering the splatter of blood on his cheek.