“The law is a genius, really. I refer, as you know, to all its elegant ad hoc acrobatic flexibility.
“Well. In the event, I should like to see you, too, Dorothy—may I call you that?—and have made arrangements, unless you advise otherwise, for a driver to pick you up at the Towers @ 9:30 A.M. Tuesday next.
“I hope you enjoy the roses, Señora.”
When she went back to the lobby she was so furious it was astonishing to her. It was so long since she’d been angry that she was not entirely certain she had it right. Was it always such a drain on the body? Did it usually dry up your mouth so bad that it was difficult to pronounce your words? Had it always made her nauseous? Indeed, she felt so ill that she was quite amazed, she was able to speak at all. For her years Mrs. Bliss was a relatively healthy, vigorous woman, but she would have sworn she felt blood pressure rising in her veins and heart and blood. She felt it seep into organs she could not even name.
She demanded. “What did you do with my roses?”
“What roses is that?”
“That he brought with the note in the limo!”
“The messenger?”
“Yes, the messenger. Who else would I be talking about?”
“Please, Mrs. Bliss, there were no roses. He didn’t bring no roses.”
She’d terrified her. The girl with the gun and the flashlight, the handcuffs and nightstick and two-way radio. She’d reduced her to tears.
“No roses,” Louise Munez said. “I swear you, no roses. You gonna tell my mother there was roses?”
All anger left her. She felt incredibly empty, almost hungry.
“No, no, of course not, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake about the roses.”
It was a mistake, but not Louise’s. It was something she didn’t understand, but somehow she understood there hadn’t been roses. Oh, the world was so difficult. Alcibiades Chitral’s note had come the day after she’d broached the question of a visit to Hector Camerando. It had to have been Camerando who got word to Chitral that she’d asked for a meeting. And then all that stuff about the law and felons and material witnesses and appeals and difficulties, the difference between out-of-the-question and the inadvisable.
What did she know of the world and its kingpins?
Who ruled here? Did the dog track and jai alai interests hold sway over the drug ones?
A word to Camerando, a note from Chitral. Yes, and the mystery of the missing roses. Louise was a little crazy and a blabbermouth but she was honest as the day is long, responsible, an ethics stickler, too conscientious to quit her post for so much as five minutes to stash stolen roses. No, that was out of the question. Speaking of which, she remembered having brought up the whole visit business with Manny after she heard about Alcibiades Chitral’s hundred-year sentence, and recalled that the lawyer’s response had been those words exactly! How could Chitral know? Was Manny from the building working both sides of the street? Impossible, she thought, what could the real estate lawyer get out of it? Or Chitral either? I mean, she thought, they gave the guy a hundred years. What was that supposed to be, a reduced sentence? Or maybe Manny was even a lousier lawyer than Maxine thought he was. Impossible again, thought Mrs. Bliss. The South American was a hotshot drug lord. Those fellows could afford nothing but the best. It was a mystery. It was all a mystery. Like all those cop and detective shows she liked to watch. It was as if—Tommy Overeasy flashed into her head—her 5,512 chickens had come home to roost. Though the mystery of the missing roses was maybe the biggest mystery of them all. Her part in the affair, too. Lashing out at the girl like that—with all she, Louise, had to worry about. It wasn’t like Dorothy. Even though Dorothy didn’t always know what Dorothy was like these days. The sudden, terrible reappearance of temper like a renewal of feelings she almost couldn’t remember ever really having. And suppose when he said that about the roses all he meant were those original roses, the ones he brought the night she sold him Ted’s car. She reread the letter. No, he said, “I hope you enjoy the roses.” That could only mean today’s roses, not roses he’d given her years ago. Unless he thought, and here Dorothy felt herself blush, remembering all the times in the game room when the men had spoken openly of her beauty, and been asked to guess her age as if she were some girl at the fair, she kept them pressed in a book somewhere. Oh, God, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, don’t let him think that, anything but not that.
Who ruled here? What did?
Why, the mysteries. It was like the puzzle of the jai alai and drug and dog track ascendancies. It was like those words her children had spoken before throwing out their hands in that game. What was that game? Lorn Som Po. Paper covers rock! Rock smashes scissors! Scissors cuts paper! It made her head spin. Such a mishmash of claims on her attention. The hidden secrets of the upper hand.
SEVEN
There was no guarantee he’d show up. Probably he wouldn’t. But why take chances? So when Dorothy went to bed that night she set the alarm to go off an hour earlier than it usually did. She set it to go off the same time it would if she had an appointment at the beauty parlor, or the doctor’s, or she wanted to beat the heat on a day she went shopping, or if she were going away on a trip. This way she had time for her bath and to lay out her clothes the way she wanted, and to eat her breakfast without having to rush.
She was down in plenty of time. She had time to spare, even. As a matter of fact, if it hadn’t been such a beautiful day she would have gone back inside and sat down on a bench in the lobby till he came. (If he was coming.) But it was, so she was content to stay put, to get away from the air-conditioning and stand out in the wondrous weather. (If it even was weather, and not some gorgeous potion of perfect idealized memory, the luscious aromatics of a childhood spell say, Mrs. Bliss’s, Dorothy’s, charmed skin fixed in the softened, smoothed-over stock-stillness of all temperate sufficiency. If it even was weather this temperate ate sufficiency as absent of climate as a room in a dream.)
She wasn’t the only resident of Building One content to be there, happy just to stand in place, apparently with neither a desire to go back indoors nor the will to continue on the errands that had brought them outside in the first place. Those who’d come down to walk their dogs remained where they were, and so did their animals.
They marveled at the temperature, they complimented the perfect humidity. They congratulated each other on their decision to have chosen south Florida as a place to retire.
“They bottled this stuff they’d make a fortune,” one of them said.
“Put me down for a dozen cases. Money’s no object.”
“It is, but not under the circumstances.”
“Weather like this, you couldn’t bribe me to go inside.”
“What’s that smell? Oranges?”
“Lemons, limes. Something citric.”
“It’s like you just stepped out of the best shower you ever took.”
“It’s paradise.”
“I wish my kids were here today. They never catch the really good weather.”
“I know. Mine are always complaining, ‘Ma, it’s too hot,’ ‘It’s too cold,’ ‘Don’t it ever stop raining?’ ”
Mrs. Bliss joined in the laughter. It was true. They had a day like this once, maybe two times a year, tops.
“And not every year,” someone said as though continuing her thought, or as if she’d spoken it aloud.
What’s that all about, Mrs. Bliss wondered, startled, returned suddenly to her mission, and nervous because the atmospherics were a distraction and might hold them there until the car came for her. (If it did.) What, did she need this, a bunch of strangers standing around like they were seeing her off? (Because, Mrs. Bliss noted, most of their faces were new to her. She’d laid low the past few years, did not often go to the parties in the game room these days, was less and less comfortable shlepping along with her married friends like a fifth wheel. And with her fellow widows, so unhappy and lonely, it was even worse. She didn’t need no gr
ief support groups.) The presence of so many onlookers made Dorothy self-conscious. And if the driver showed up—he was already ten minutes late—in an actual limousine she wasn’t entirely sure she might not just disappear into the small crowd, turn around, and go right back into the building. Louise could make up some excuse for her. Because the thought, just the thought, of these people seeing her helped into a long white stretch limo—she could picture it: the automobile with its gleaming silver wing-shaped antenna mounted on the trunk and the one-way glass that made the passengers invisible; its spic-and-span leather interior got up like a fancy motel room with its absurd built-ins—the speaker phones and cable TV and wet bar and sun lamp and a desktop you let down like a tray top on an airplane—would diminish her more than she already was, turn her pathetic, as if there were no quicker, more obvious way of pronouncing this some redletter day in the life, summing her up in the measly bottom lines of her dressed-up, shined-shoe, queen-for-a-day happiness. What, did she need it? Did she need it?
And then, suddenly, their chatter ceased. They made a collective sound of awe and wonder. The limo pulled into Building Number One’s driveway and stopped beneath the canopy.
The driver got out and walked around the immense length of the car. He was in black livery, and wore high black boots and a chauffeur’s inky cap.
He came directly up to Dorothy.
“Mrs. Ted Bliss?”
“Yes?”
“I apologize for the delay, Madam. There was construction on 163rd Street, and the traffic was backed up.”
“That’s all right,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“When ain’t there?” said the man who wanted to be put down for a case of the perfect weather. “There always is, 163rd Street is murder.”
“Dorothy,” Edna Bairn said, one of the few people Mrs. Bliss recognized, “the car is for you?”
“I’m going on a trip. He’s taking me to the airport.”
“You’re going on a trip?” said the one who thought the air smelled like oranges. “So where’s your luggage?”
Dorothy looked past the driver to the extravagant car. “What I need I’ll buy when I get there,” she said, and allowed the chauffeur to hand her into the limousine.
The penitentiary had been built on landfill along the northern, central edge of the Everglades. They had left the Tamiami Trail somewhere between Sweetwater and Monroe Station and plunged north onto a gravel road that cut through vegetation that reminded Mrs. Bliss of a kind of gigantic tropical salad. The trees here, she supposed, bore the sort of fruit whose names she recognized—guava and plantain, currant, avocado, gooseberry and huckleberry and elderberry, damson and papaya—but had never tasted or, vaguely thinking of them as somehow gentile fruits, brought home for her family. It seemed curious to her now that she had never encouraged them away from their old appetites.
She’d never been much of a sightseer when Ted was alive, and now, even on cruises, was content to play cards in her cabin or poke about in the duty-free shops searching out gifts she could bring back for her children and grandchildren. Ashore, in colonial port towns, it was all her companions could do to coax her to ride with them in an open landau drawn through the narrow cobblestone streets by a team of paired horses.
“Oh that,” Dorothy would say, “that’s for the tourists.”
“And what are you, Dorothy, a native?”
“We should hire a guide and let him take us around in a taxi.”
“And deal with two shvartzers?”
“Shh,” Dorothy said.
But she was oddly moved by the journey today, the sight of such ancient, lush significance on either side of the tremendous car that skated over the loose gravel on the slender little road like some sleek, fearless, predatory beast, its flanks mere inches from the edges of what in places seemed more path or trail than road, brushing the rough saw grass that grew along the queer, amorphous, indeterminate earth like clumps, paddies of unfamiliar geography.
Thinking, this is how they took him to prison. These are the last things he saw before they threw him in jail.
Though she knew he hadn’t been “thrown” into jail, that he had too much influence, too much imagination and power, that even now, behind walls and locked up in a cell, they let him take calls (it had been the next day she’d heard from Chitral, the day after she’d made her wish known to Camerando), and let him put calls through, to arrange to send drivers with gracious notes and imaginary roses.
“Oh,” she told the chauffeur, “that reminds me,” she said, inspired, “I never thanked you for bringing me those beautiful roses.”
“What beautiful roses would those be, Mrs. Bliss?”
“Why the roses you brought with you last week when you delivered that letter to the Towers.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but the first time I was to the Towers was when I picked you up this morning.”
Amazed, thinking, oh, two drivers!
Thrilled retroactively who’d never met a man who hadn’t impressed her, swept away by men, not in any sexual or romantic sense but rendered dumbstruck by all the ways they seemed to fill up the world (so overwhelmed by them that she had had trouble with the notion of disciplining her male children, this so apparent to the two boys that even when they were still quite small they behaved in front of their worried, vulnerable mother like visitors in a sick room), stunned by their stature and brisk efficiency (their perfect businesslike forms built for a power and efficacy that spread through their bodies like steam pushed through a radiator, their unadorned flesh not expended in breasts or useless piles of complicated hair, and even their privates out in the open, functional as hand tools), by their willingness to go forth and wrest bread and victory from their lives in the world, clear down to changing a tire or starting a fire from scratch or handling the money or initiating love, by their gruff and bluff and boldness, and all the rest of their dangerous, hung-out, let-loose ways.
Awed by the driver, too, overcome with wonder and admiration by the sureness with which he negotiated the fragile, narrow gravel road, the toxic-looking swamps—logjammed, she was sure, with alligators—on either side of the winding, puny spit which they did not so much travel as traverse. He must be a convict, Mrs. Bliss thought. Probably a trustee or something. Which just goes to show, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Wouldn’t you have to be as smart as you were probably brave to know how to walk the fine line between the guards with the guns on the watchtowers and the vildeh chei-eh killers, kidnappers, and bank robbers in the prison yard? If that wasn’t man’s work she didn’t know what was. And if that wasn’t going forth and wresting bread and victory from his life in the world, then she didn’t know what it was. It’s a man’s world, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and between you, me, and the lamppost, he’s welcome to it.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Mrs. Bliss, “you’re from the federal penitentiary, too?”
The driver may not have known she was addressing him. They were the first words she’d spoken since she’d asked about the roses.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
He spoke very softly. She might not have been able to hear him in an open room, but in the big airtight automobile his voice was startlingly clear, even intimate.
“You work there,” she said.
“I’m a con. I live there.”
“Oh,” she said, “you live there.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s none of my business, you’ll excuse me for prying, but what did you—”
“Forgery. I forged things.”
“Oh,” she said, “you forged things.”
“Passports. Liquor and drivers’ licenses; when the elevator was inspected.”
“Oh, I don’t think I could do that. It must take so much skill. I’d get caught.”
“I got caught,” said the convict.
Mrs. Bliss didn’t answer. Yes, he got caught, but he proved her point. Men were more gifted than women. They could make a fire, rotate the tires, and forge important pape
rs, too.
What men did took nerve and a steady hand. It took brains and courage. Here was this nice, polite, and, as far as Mrs. Bliss could tell, very bright young man who had managed so well in the penitentiary that he had not only worked his way up to trustee but had climbed so high in the system that they trusted him to drive a great powerful limousine all the way out of his prison in the high Everglades, down the gravel road to the Tamiami Trail, across to Miami, and up to the Towers in Miami Beach. He was a man. He was brave; he had nerve. At any time during his journey he could have stepped on the gas and made his escape by outdistancing anybody who might have given him chase. But he was a man, he knew better. He knew it would be other men who would be sent out to find him.
“You know,” said Mrs. Bliss when they had gone a few more miles, “you wouldn’t believe it to look at me but a long time ago in Chicago I used to carry a gun.”
“You did, ma’am?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “My husband owned a building on the North Side. It wasn’t a good area. I took it with me when we collected the rents.”
“I’m damned,” the driver said.
“I never took it out of my purse. Not once. These were very rough people. You know why I did it?”
“Why?”
“I thought I could save my husband’s life,” Dorothy said and, so quietly she didn’t think he’d notice, she started to cry.
“Look there,” the driver said some minutes later. “That’s where all the magic happens. I’m home.”
The guards at the gate didn’t need to see identification. They didn’t even ask her her name. They didn’t bother with the driver either, just waved him on through as though he were pulling up to discharge a guest in front of the entrance to a hotel. When he stopped before what Mrs. Bliss took to be some sort of administration building he got out of the limo and came around to Dorothy’s side to open her door and help her out. Now she was there she wondered why it had seemed so important to come.
“It’s a big roomy car and very comfortable,” Dorothy said, “but three hours in a closed automobile is a long time to sit. I wonder could I stretch my legs a few minutes before I go in?”
Mrs. Ted Bliss Page 18
