by Rosa Foxxe
This explanation made Tyra all the more uncomfortable. Why was there the need to put up some strange kind of smoke screen? Why in the world did Gizmo get so defensive about a rich family living in Italy? There were a lot of questions. Luckily they weren't quite red flags yet, Tyra told herself, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't turn into red flags. Or had she already missed them? Had the red flags come and gone, or had they just been there all along? Tyra was beginning to think that she needed to start doing her own homework on Vinnie and his family, especially since it appeared that Vinnie had taken a genuine interest in her.
Up until this point she'd never gotten the idea that anything else was going on than what Vinnie told her was going on, because why would he lie to her when he was in the position he was in? Guys like Vinnie, Tyra thought, didn't have to lie because they had it all. Once you have it all you don't have to project your pretenses on other people. Once you have it all, you just go about your life and do what you want.
But did Vinnie have it all? When she had been in Vegas, he'd kept referring to some kind of power struggle. And maybe there was a reason that he couldn't pick a mate from the many super attractive women with money in LasVegas. There had to be. But what was it? Something that Tyra hadn't thought about, hadn't even thought to think about, something that she overlooked or missed or ignored. It could be anything, it could even be nothing, but even if the reasoning was null, it was still null enough to something she wanted to know about.
“Hey, are you listening to me?” Gizmo said.
“I'm sorry my mind was elsewhere,” Tyra answered. “What were you saying?”
“No need to be sorry,” Gizmo said. “I know you just came from work. It takes time to get your mind back, you know? But I really envy you, and I want you to know that. Even though I'll bet your job sucks a little bit of your soul away each day, or at least drains you, you get to walk away from it. I have to live my job every day. That's the kind of business I'm in, the one that goes on in the waking and sleeping hours. It never really stops.”
What was he talking about? As far as Tyra could discern, Gizmo was little more than a weird guy that did strange things for Vinnie.
“What exactly do you do for Vinnie again?” she asked.
Gizmo's eyes averted for a second, but unlike Steve the day prior, there was no storm to entertain them. They were just stuck with each other in a small room, talking. And Tyra was starting to want some real answers.
“Vinnie and the family run a bunch of businesses,” Gizmo said. “Here, let me break it down like this. So there is a kind of family estate, but it isn't just one thing, see. It's many things, and in many ways it's just one thing. So the money and power, they are kind of fluid, and although I'm not saying that there aren't banks that we use, what we really invest in is people. We put our trust and faith in people and we hope that it pans out in the long run, even though time and again, people prove to be spineless pieces of shit.”
Gizmo's beeper went off, and he pulled it off his belt to look at it. Who had a beeper in this day and age, Tyra thought.
“Ah, that's Vinnie right now,” Gizmo said. “Just dropping me a line to see how life is going for me out here, and if I've talked to you yet. I'll answer him later. Vinnie is a really great guy to work for, very laid back. But when he needs to be, he's a fighter, a pit bull. And at the same time he's got brand new ideas that the family is wary about but he's pressing forward with his vision and really starting to make a lot of money out there in Las Vegas.”
Tyra nodded, pretending to understand. The only thing that was really becoming clear, though, was that she had much to learn yet about Vinnie, and not just what his favorite color is.
“Anyway,” Gizmo said. “Here. Take this plane ticket. It’s first class like the last time, we don't cram people into coach unless we are really desperate to get them somewhere in a hurry and there is no other way. Plan on spending some time out there. Nothing set, Vinnie hates locking romantic stuff into deadlines and start dates, but maybe a week or something? Don't worry about your work, I sent them an email right as you walked in and I'm sure they'll be very receptive.”
Tyra nodded and took the ticket. They exchanged goodbyes and she left, but not before she shot Roxanne a text. She needed someone to talk to.
*
“So, what? You think this guy is some kind of criminal? Like money laundering?” Roxanne asked.
They were back at The Lift, but there wasn't a crowd so early in the afternoon. Roxanne had just gotten off of work as well so that made it about four o'clock. Neither of them were really drinking, only sipping a single Martini they would nurse until they both thought they'd talked enough.
“Let's look him up,” Roxanne said. “Do you know his first and last name?”
“Yeah, but it's long and Italian,” Tyra said. “Here, let me type it in your phone for you. His last name has more letters than the alphabet and sounds Italian for ambrosia.”
Tyra handed Roxanne back the phone so she could be the one to hit enter and start the search. When the results came back there seemed to be no focus to any of it, like there were so many different people with the name, and so many instances of the word ambrosia.
“Let's narrow it down,” Roxanne said.
She started tacking words on like criminal, record, crime, and even the words bad guy.
“Bad guy?” Tyra said. “He's not a cartoon!”
They both laughed.
“I found something!” Roxanne said. “Look! Look at this!”
Vinnie's family was involved in some very shady deals happening over in Italy, most of them having to do with large amounts of money and politics. At first, Tyra didn't see anything wrong with it; sometimes large, powerful families really, really liked to have things their way, and sometimes their way involved putting people in positions of power. But the more she and Roxanne read, the more there was to read, until Tyra got tired of looking over Roxanne’s shoulder and pulled her own phone out.
An hour went by, and their Martinis were replaced with new ones. The more Tyra read, the more it became obvious there was a good chance that Vinnie was involved in some things that were much less than legal. Tyra still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, though. Who was she to judge someone else? She hadn't come from a rich and powerful family who had to struggle with the rest of the world. She wondered what it would be like to grow up in that kind of environment, to know that the other people in the same businesses as your family would be doing everything they could to put you and yours in the poor house, post-haste.
“There was some kind of shoot-out at his father's restaurant,” Roxanne said, her face lit by her phone’s glowing screen. “The headline reads 'Gangland Violence Erupts as Ceasefire Ends.'”
Tyra quickly pulled up the article that Roxanne was reading. It was hard to understand because of how poorly the internet translated it to English, but it seemed like some armed thugs had walked into Vinnie's dad's restaurant and lit the place up with machine gun fire. The article went on to describe how Vinnie's family was one of the bigger crime families in Italy, and how they had international aspirations. Which made Vinnie's casino make a lot more sense, and also all of the talking he did about people in Las Vegas wanting to push him out, or not wanting him there at all. And how he wanted to bring new ideas and ways of doing things to Las Vegas. A lot of things started to make sense.
“Are you going to end it?” Roxanne asked.
“Do you think I should?” Tyra retorted.
“It's up to you, sweetheart,” Roxanne said. “I can't make that decision for you.”
Tyra thought about it for a few seconds, but in her heart the decision was already made up. She liked Vinnie, and didn't care if his family and he were in some shadier business than just running a casino.
“I'm going to go back,” Tyra said. “I just got another first class ticket today and I'm going to use it. I can't see why I shouldn't. I get that maybe this isn't the smartest thing to do, but
really, who cares if the guy’s family is in the mob half way around the world.”
Roxanne raised her glass.
“Cheers to that, then!”
They clinked their glasses together and drank.
*
The plane ride was worse than the last one. Tyra got seated behind a family with three little children who wouldn't stop jumping around their seats. For a moment she wondered why the staff wouldn't put the little hellions back in coach, but then she realized that without the little shits in front of her, all she would have to do would be to sit and think that maybe she was making a huge mistake by going back to Las Vegas to see Vinnie. After all, even after talking it over with Steve and Roxanne, she wasn't completely sold on everything that had happened and was happening.
She just wasn't sure how she was going to play it. Would she bring up any of what she'd found out to Vinnie or just pretend like everything was all right? She didn't really have a leg to stand on when it came to telling him how to live his life and run his business, especially since she had no idea how true any of what she had read was. What if she brought it up to him and he turned around and told her she was a fool for believing something that was published on the internet to slander his family’s good name? That would probably sour the trip pretty quickly. And Tyra did want the trip to go well, even though Vinnie wasn't being up front with her about everything.
“What's your name?” One of the little boys in front of her asked, peeking over the back of his seat.
“Baby, leave the nice lady alone,” the boy’s mother said.
Tyra smiled at the mom and peered over the child’s seat to get a better look at the parents. Tyra always wondered what it would have been like to have kids and settle down early. She'd opted out of that for a lot of reasons, the biggest being because she felt like she'd be cheating herself out of a lot of great experiences. She still wanted to backpack across Europe, visit China, and do all sorts of things. But as time went by she came to realize more and more that unless you were super rich, those kind of things weren’t always an option. Even with Vinnie there were limitations to his life. He couldn't just do as he pleased. He had to defend his family's business and good name. He had to do things he was told on a daily basis, whereas, Tyra did not. She wondered what it would be like to be important enough to have every decision you made matter a very great deal.
“Lady,” the boy whispered from in front of her. “What's your name?”
“My name is Tyra,” she whispered back.
The parents started scolding the little boy again and Tyra drifted off into her head to think about what lay ahead of her while she looked at the window. Not everything would be so easy, and she needed to accept that. So far things had been easy though, she'd done little more than show up to Las Vegas to bask in the adoration of a man who didn’t really know her, but wanted to. Even without all of the turmoil about Vinnie's business, they would face some pretty steep uphill struggles, considering how different they were as people and how different their backgrounds were —just the normal couple stuff that tore people apart in the blink of an eye.
The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she was going to have to stop worrying about the sordid details concerning Vinnie. There just wouldn't be enough time to discuss it the right way, and right now she didn't have enough political capital in the relationship to make Vinnie sit down and tell her every little detail of what was going on. And it wasn't that she even wanted every little detail, in fact she'd rather be left in the dark about a lot of things. But she would like to know the bare bones of what was going on. She didn't like to not know anything. It really stung her that she hadn't been told any part of Vinnie's real life on her first visit. But it was easy to think that when she was mad and on a plane ride. In reality he had gone on in length about his life and some of the struggles he faces in Las Vegas, which, she had to remind herself, was not the kind of town that had a reputation for being a warm and fuzzy place. Las Vegas had a reputation for chewing people up and spitting them out, but somehow Vinnie had managed to not only survive but thrive. Tyra didn't want to penalize him for that.
Her own family hadn't been model citizens at times while she had been growing up. They hadn't exactly been rich either, in fact they'd been very poor. This had put her parents in positions that were less than savory sometimes. Her mother had always tried to do the right thing no matter what, but her father wasn't above doing something he'd later regret.
Tyra couldn't remember the amount of times that her father had spent sitting in the county jail, not far from their home. It hadn't been years or anything like that, but she could clearly remember a few holidays when he father hadn't been around because he'd been caught stealing something to make their lives better, or moonlighting at some job without the right certification or something like that.
She needed to keep her judgments to herself, she thought. She needed to let Vinnie show her a good time and, like Steve had said, let the fun things be fun. Not everything had to be some kind of internal struggle, some things were just there to be enjoyed. And maybe that's how her relationship with Vinnie needed to be.
By the time the plane landed she had talked herself in and out of worrying several times.
Chapter6
“Vincent Ambrosiano, at your service.”
The hand extended was attached to one of the biggest smiles Tyra had ever seen hovering over it. When she reached for Vinnie's hand he drew her up in a hug that made it hard to breathe.
“How have you been, eh?” Vinnie said. “Has Iowa been treating you, well? I've been reading up on that place a little bit and some of it is actually rather fascinating.”
Vinnie took her luggage from her and they made their way to his car, parked where it had been the first time.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Well, for starters the weather there is completely out of control. There is flooding in the spring time, droughts in the summer, blizzards in the winter, and tornadoes nearly year round. Then, beyond the apocalyptic weather that rocks your state, the government there has some very real corruption issues.”
“Really?” Tyra said. “What do you mean?”
Vinnie jumped in the driver’s seat while she got in the passenger side. This time the car was a convertible of some kind. Tyra didn't know what kind because she didn't know anything about cars but it was the kind of vehicle that she heard people routinely refer to as a muscle car.
“Well,” Vinnie said as he took them out on the freeway in the direction they'd gone last time. “It's kind of complicated. But not really. Nothing about politics is every really that complicated unless the people in charge want it to be that complicated. An easy example of some blatant corruption is that the governor's son killed someone in a drunk driving accident years ago and more or less didn't get in any real trouble.”
“What!?” Tyra said.
“And that's not all,” Vinnie said. “The state board that controls the state universities keeps giving itself a raise while hiking the tuition amount, and this is amidst, of course, very hard times for everyone else. Including the universities themselves.”
“Wow,” Tyra said. “I guess I just didn't know.”
“I got really into reading about it one night,” Vinnie said. “American politics are always fascinating to me. People here don't really realize what is going on, ever, and somehow the people in charge get away with it. And what I mean by that, because I now you're going to ask, is that I kept reading that Des Moines, and even Ames, the college town to its due north, are considered 'little Chicagos' because they are so corrupt. That got me interested in Chicago politics and I read a little bit about that, but then it became apparent that in order for me to read about all of the fucked up things going on there I'd have to spend several days reading, so I just cut it short.”
The day was gorgeous, the sun shining. It wasn't hot out at all because it was winter. The seventy-five degree day felt like heaven after how bris
k Iowa had been. Vinnie was quiet for a second as he wove through traffic, and Tyra thought about how strange it was that he would find the goings-on of her little town to be something that he wanted to invest his time learning about. Maybe he was just curious. It was funny that while his own possible misdeeds and those of his family had been on her mind during the flight, the corruption of her own state was on his mind now. He had just told her several things that she hadn't known about, and she wondered what else he knew about the state.
“So, did you learn anything else about Iowa that you found interesting?” Tyra asked at last.
“The water there is very, very dirty. The farmers fertilize with nitrates that get in the water and cause small plant forms in the water to flourish. Oftentimes this causes all the fish in a given body of water to die. Also the water is dirty because the manure from cow lots and pig lots will often wash into other bodies of water.
