And then she thought about Danny. After all these years. Danny.
Every plan she devised ran smack into a wall, every backtrack, too. There was no right way to go, no best way out or even any way out—which was why, in the end, she’d just come back here. The place where all wrong turns converge. Home.
She tossed her purse onto the breakfast nook table before spotting what else lay there: a cigar box filled with nine shot shells and a checkerboard.
“You play chess?” Frank asked from behind.
She turned to face him. He was juggling a chessman one-handed. The other hand held a shotgun. His eyes were bleary from drink and yet there was something else about them, too.
“My God,” she said. “You’re here.”
“True enough,” Frank replied. He gathered up the chessman in a knuckleball hold and hurled it across the kitchen at her. She ducked the missile and called out from behind her arm, “What’s wrong with you?”
“A wee bit surprised to see me?”
He crossed the distance in two long steps and gripped her throat with his free hand. With the shotgun he forced her head down onto the table.
“Thought I’d be gone for good, right? Dead maybe? Not enough to tell Felix: Do it, kill him. Had to make sure. Just in case the Akers boys fucked up. Play both ends. ’Cuz you had a whole new set of plans tonight.”
She squirmed in his hold but could not break free. Her arms flailed without connecting.
“They found you, right? The twins’ family, they made you an offer and you grabbed it. Was that before or after you fixed it with Felix?”
With his tongue protruding through his teeth he drove the gun butt hard into her kidneys. Her knees gave way and she slid to the floor. Her bladder broke. The gun butt came down hard again, this time on her neck.
“Frank,” she shouted, “you gotta listen, this woman—”
“I know all about the woman,” he said.
He kneed her in the back, a vertebrae cracked. Grabbing a shank of hair, he dragged her kicking across the floor.
“What I ever do to you?” he said.
He pulled something from under his shirt. It had been hidden there, tucked in his belt. She saw what it was when he raised it over his head. A hammer. Shel screamed his name.
CHAPTER
13
Abatangelo stood pinning up prints in the back room of his North Beach flat, drinking a beer and listening to a cassette of Maria Callas performing excerpts from Tosca.
He turned around to recue the tape each time his favorite aria ended: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore.” Now in my hour of sorrow, Maria Callas sang, I stand alone. Callas’s was not normally a voice he preferred, but in this particular rendition, this aria, she gave him the chills. He’d read somewhere that the aria was often called “Tosca’s Prayer.” A misnomer, he thought. She isn’t praying. She’s braving her fate. Which brought Shel to mind and returned him to the matter at hand.
Despite the repartee, a hint of the old spark, even a kiss, Shel had left him standing there. A perfectly good reason existed for that, of course. Frank could be the biggest skank on earth, it wouldn’t change a thing. There was a child in the picture. And the boy got waxed. God only knew what the whole story was. Regardless, he knew Shel well enough to know she’d never in a thousand lifetimes turn her back on a thing like that.
And what about you, he thought. All you ever want to do is help, right? Like some heartsick freelance Boy Scout. All you want to do is say, Tell me how far to go. I’ll lie, cheat and steal for you, baby. Better yet, just like Tosca—I’ll kill for you, if you suffer for me.
He dropped into a chair near the wall and wiped his hands on a dish towel. The damp prints dripped on the floor, dangling from a plastic clothesline hung wall-to-wall by eyehooks. This was the darkroom. With sheets of black plastic he’d sealed off the kitchen in his flat. Upon a card table he’d stationed rubber bins filled with developer, stop bath, fixer. He worked by infrared lamp and an egg timer.
The photographs were those he’d shot from the hilltop overlooking Shel’s house. They seemed very much beside the point now. Even if he passed them along to Jill Rosemond the PI, what would it net him? Frank and Shel were most likely already on the run somewhere, far away and for good, leaving behind lonesome Danny and his pointless schemes.
He did not hear the rapping at his door until his next recue of the tape player. He remained still a moment, ear cocked, wondering if he hadn’t imagined the sound. It came again, more like a scratching than a knock. He tread toward the sound in his socks across the tile floor.
It was not quite dawn. The Bible peddlers wouldn’t be making their rounds as yet. Drunks might sleep in the stairwell, but they wouldn’t come up knocking. Jimmy Shu, his landlord, avoided most encounters requiring English, and his probation officer called first now, they were pals.
At the door he called out, “Who is it?” pressing his head to the doorjamb to listen. A snuffling, fleshy murmur answered back. He couldn’t tell if it said, “It’s me,” or, “Come see.” He cracked the door.
Swelling pushed her eyes back hard into their sockets, making them small and unreal. One eye flared red, beyond bloodshot. Swelling puffed her jaw. A long scab flecked her lower lip.
“I had that long, hard talk with Frank,” she murmured.
Taking her hand he led her inside and locked the door. Shel deferred to his touch without remark. He studied her briefly, surmising what had happened and what, to his mind, should be done about it.
He told her to wait and disappeared to the back of the flat. When he returned he was carrying his camera and arming the flash. He positioned her against the white wall and told her to lift her hair. She obeyed, revealing bloody scratches and a bruised knot on her neck.
It’s time, she thought, time to listen to him. It may well have been time all along.
Abatangelo shot five frames, told her to turn front, shot a close-up of her scabbed mouth, her ballooning cheek, her crimped eye. He used Plus-X in addition to a filter, to give the reds a disturbing saturation. She displayed her arms, bruised black where Frank had held her or come down with the gun butt. At Abatangelo’s urging she turned to face the wall again, naked from the waist up, exhibiting the purple-yellow welts across her back. She explained in time that, right before he’d tried to crush her skull with a hammer, she’d managed to groin him, coldcock him with his own gun and scramble to her truck.
“I don’t want to get even,” she said as he disarmed the flash. “There’s no point.”
“This isn’t getting even,” he told her, removing the roll of film and pocketing it. “This is insurance.” He took a blanket from the couch, shook it free of cracker crumbs and wrapped it around her. Setting her down in his only armchair, he tucked the blanket about her knees and told her to stay put.
In the bathroom, he turned the space heater on high and threw open the hot water spigot, filling the tub, tossing in every towel he found except a few he’d need for drying. Moving to the kitchen, he opened the freezer and dug from behind bagged peas and carrots a fifth of Stolichnaya embedded in hoarfrost.
Carrying two glasses and the icy vodka bottle, he returned to Shel. Guiding her up from her chair, he led her down the hall and set her on the edge of the tub. Steam purled about the room, coating the mirror. Moisture frothed Abatangelo’s skin, he opened his shirt and wiped his face with his wrist. He drew Shel’s blanket away, undid her coat, and as he continued to undress her she stared at him with weary bafflement.
“Now that there’s a record on film of what he did to you,” he explained, “we can concentrate on getting the bruises down.”
He poured her a full glass of vodka and told her to drink it. She did. He poured her another. Her body sagged dreamily and she regarded him with sweet, tired eyes. He took her in his arms and knelt beside the steaming water, saying, “This is going to hurt.”
Submerged, her body convulsed. She struggled, whimpering. He refused to let her out, even as
the water scalded them both. He gathered the steaming towels from around her, wrapped them tight across her back, her throat, her face. He wrung or pressed them against her skin until she screamed from pain, the sound echoing against the tile. He reassured her with jokes, constantly moving. He sang the few funny songs he knew, gleaned from opera buffs and cartoons. “You’re looking better,” he said, over and over.
In time he slowed his rhythm, letting the towels sit on her body longer. Where it wasn’t puffed or discolored, her skin had the same smoothness he remembered from years before. The hair of her muff rose up softly in the water. Her nipples flared red in the heat.
“I realize,” he began, “that this is a sensitive issue, and you don’t have to answer, but I was wondering if he—”
“No,” she said, anticipating the question. She sat hunched in the bathwater, shrouded in dripping towels. “I nailed him before it got that far. Besides which, he was cranked out of his skull. What he wanted, was me dead.”
She looked at him with an expression that said, And that is that.
“And now you’re here,” he offered.
“A little the worse for wear.”
The water cooled, Shel settled herself back, eyes closed. So this is where the future starts, she thought. With a beating. A scalding dunk in the healing tub. She watched as Abatangelo wiped flecks of blood from the porcelain. Regarding her body, she detected swelling here and there, but he’d rid her scratches of infection; they were neat white seams. Her skin flushed. My Little Miracle Worker, she thought. Unaware that she was watching, he searched inside her purse until he came across a perfume bottle. He added several drops to the tub water.
“I’m assuming you’ll tell me,” she said finally, flicking tepid water at him, “where it was you picked up your medicine.”
He sat down on the floor and peeled off his shirt and trousers. In only his shorts, T-shirt and scapular he answered her finally with, “You grow up Italian, you learn how to take a beating.”
She shook her head and laughed. “That’s an answer?”
Abatangelo shrugged and poured himself three fingers of vodka.
Shel said, “And after your daily lesson—your mother, she did this for you?”
“No,” he said.
Her eyes softened. “Who?”
“Aunt Nina. My father’s sister. She was the designated guilt bearer of the family.”
She watched him turn away, busy himself. Until you took over, she thought, thinking better of saying it out loud. There simply was no limit to the burden he’d shoulder, as long it was for someone he loved. And if there was one thing to be said for Daniel Sebastian Abatangelo, she thought, it was this: The man loved.
“You look good,” she told him.
He shrugged and drank.
“No, don’t be like that. You look good.”
Her words slurred from the swelling. She eased back, closing her eyes again. The ridiculous songs he’d sung for her echoed in her head, making her smile. And yet a suspicion came over her quickly—tomorrow would never redeem today, not even with Danny there. The future did not start here after all, just more of the same. I am, she thought, depressed. Her heart sank in an utterly familiar way and she looked at Abatangelo as though to ask him to stop it, stop this feeling.
“Hey,” she whispered. He did not hear her.
She pictured Frank reeling room to room, clutching his head, rehearsing his sotted apologies, waiting for her to reappear so he could shower them on her. God help me, she thought. Is there a word in the language, she wondered, in any language, for someone as hellbent as I’ve been to do the right thing, someone committed to real charity, not lip service, the Good Samaritan and all that, someone who put her own life aside to care for someone else, some lowly forgotten other, the least of my brethren—is there a word for someone who does all that, does it for years, only to see it crushed in three weeks’ time, carried away by a bitter wind of insanity, cruelty, and death? Yeah, she thought, there’s a word. And it’s nothing grand or tragic. The word is “depressed.”
A thread of bile slithered up into her throat. Abatangelo eyed her curiously as she spat toward the toilet.
“Freshen that up?” he asked, nodding to her glass.
She worked her tongue to rid her mouth of the taste of her sputum. “Keep it cold, keep it coming,” she said, holding out her glass.
Abatangelo obliged, the liquor poured happily. “Thank you,” she said.
She studied his face, his shoulders, his long heavy arms. She wanted to tell him, We have to find a safe place now. We can’t self-destruct anymore. Fate doesn’t have to be all gloom and sorrow. Fate can be happy, too. You and me, Danny, happy again, my God, what a concept. Maybe fate is love, and love requires nothing more than the courage to be seen for who you are. Maybe they could teach each other that. Maybe they could handle that, show each other, it isn’t so terrible or hard, letting someone see you.
Without thinking, she stood up in the tub. As though to be seen. Looking down self-consciously at the soaked wrinkling of her flesh, her bruises, she said, using a Betty Boop voice, “Such a dainty little rose.”
Abatangelo toweled her dry, produced a sweatshirt and boxer shorts for her to wear and wrapped a dry towel around her head, fussing it into a turban. Missing her, wanting her from afar had become so ingrained a habit that her reflection in the mirror seemed strangely more real than she did. To dispel this illusion, he gave her his arm, led her back to his bedroom and set her gently onto the narrow bed.
She looked up at his face with a plastered smile, sniffing the cologne in his chest hair. Fingering his scapular, she said, “I had hoped, sir, you wouldn’t go churchy on me.”
He removed the cloth medallion, hanging from his neck by a satin thong, and let her hold it. She took it as though it were a shrunken head.
“Oh Danny, you worry me with this stuff.”
“Chaplain at Safford handed them out like suckers.”
“That explains how you got it. Not why you wear it.”
On one side, assuming the foreground, was the picture of an arch-backed man, bound to a cross. Christ Crucified predominated the background, wreathed in purplish storm clouds and attended by disciples. On the reverse side, the inscription read: “Jesus, remember me when you enter upon your reign. Luke 23:42.”
“St. Dismas,” Abatangelo explained.
“There’s a saint named Dismal?”
“Dismas,” he corrected. “The Good Thief.”
Shel fingered it a moment longer then handed it back. “The guilty are so sentimental.”
Morning had come. The curtains flared with light. Abatangelo retrieved another bottle of vodka from the kitchen, this one warm, so he brought ice back with him, too. He filled both their glasses. Shel set her cheek on her knee, watching him.
“In all the time you were gone, all those years,” she said, “a day didn’t go by that something didn’t come up. Some little thing, you know? A smell. A voice somewhere. Reminding me of you. I began to think I’d never forget you. And I needed to. Sometimes. You understand?”
A hint of relief, even joy, flickered beyond the heartbreak, like a promise. It showed in her eyes, her smile. Abatangelo waved a fly from his glass. “I came as fast as I could,” he said.
She laughed softly. “Not fast enough. Sorry.”
They stared themselves into self-consciousness. Then, gently, she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth.
“I am so looking forward to it,” she said.
“What?”
She gave him a little shove. “Sex, you asshole.” She ran her hand across his hair, his face, his throat. “Soon as I’m in better shape.”
The same fly scudded angrily across the ceiling join. The sound of morning traffic escalated outside. Shel eased back onto the bed and closed her eyes.
Abatangelo stroked her hair and watched as she drifted off. Her palm closed and opened, as though in a dream she was reaching for something. He studied her eyeb
rows, the chewed nails, the wrinkled flesh middle age had engraved around each eye, around her mouth. With his fingertips he traced the line of her shoulder, her arm.
A sense of well-being settled in. Images segued through his mind, scatterings of film in which she laid her head on his stomach, knees drawn up, as though she intended to nap there. He imagined her rising, straddling his hips and placing him inside her, eyes closed, quivering slightly as he rose to her. She would lift her chin, no sound, rocking with him gently. Something long-lost and forbidden. Strangers on a bridge, someone saving someone else. In his fantasy she came without cries or moans the way she often had, simply lowering her head and shivering as he slowed his rhythm. Bringing her down to him. Kissing her hair.
Every hour through the morning, he shook her awake, told her this was a precaution against concussion and checked her eyes, her pulse, her breathing. At first, Shel accepted this attention compliantly. He was a man who knew his beatings. After the fourth roust she grew irritable. By noon she was fending him off.
In the kitchen Abatangelo fixed himself coffee, his third pot of the day. Cup in hand, he dialed Lenny Mannion and begged off coming in that afternoon, resorting to the same excuse he’d concocted that morning: He said his eye was swollen shut from a spider bite. Mannion, from his tone, found this too weird to disbelieve. Abatangelo hung up, went into the front room and sank into the sofa, thinking things through.
His hourly calls on Shel had not been inspired solely by a desire to monitor the healing process. Every time he nudged her awake, Abatangelo grilled her a little further about what her life had been like the past few years. He kept it simple and innocent, blamed it on lost time, they had a lot of catching up to do. Little by little he gained a much clearer view into who this Frank character was. He learned in particular that though the dead boy had not been Shel’s, she’d felt a special devotion for him. The guilty are so sentimental, he thought. No joke.
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