by Ted Lewis
But the peaceful reflection doesn’t stay intact for long. It’s shattered by Wally doing a Buster Keaton round the corner of the villa. When he sees me he proceeds crabwise along the white plasterwork, looking back over his shoulder to the corner from time to time. When he’s finally opposite where I’m sitting he quick-marches across the flagstones like a private trying to avoid a one-stripe.
“Jack,” he says, “Jack, the bastard’s—”
Then he catches sight of Tina on the surface of the pool and the image drives the information he was about to impart straight out of his mind. Apparently it’s driven out everything else as well because all that happens is that his mouth falls open to no effect because no words accompany the action.
“Yes, Wal?” I say to him.
But Wal isn’t listening. He walks as far to the edge of the pool as he can without getting his feet wet and then he launches himself another way: “You fucking tart,” he screeches at her. “You bleeding little brass; get out of there and get your fucking gear on.”
There’s not a ripple on the pool.
“Do you hear me?”
“No.”
“Listen—”
Tina starts singing.
“You don’t come out there right now—”
“You’ll what? Come in after me? You’ve spent all your life not getting your feet wet.”
“Listen—”
“Get your mate to fetch me. From what I’ve heard he should be able to walk on water.”
“Listen—”
“Oh, piss off.”
Any additional dialogue to this exchange is precluded by the appearance of D’Antoni at the same corner round which Wally had made his entrance. Not that it cuts off anything from Tina because she is not facing in D’Antoni’s direction, her eyes are still closed, and in any case I get the impression she has nothing further to add to what has gone before. It is Wally, with his shit-house rat’s instinct, who terminates the conversation by facing D’Antoni and then shuffling backwards along the edge of the pool, like a man on a tightrope, until he feels relatively secure on the western side of my chair. Why he should worry, except for the fact that he’s Wally, I’ll never know, because D’Antoni is in no shape to do anybody any harm except himself. At the moment it’s all he can do to support himself, one arm at full stretch, against the corner of the villa. He’s looking in our direction, but whether he’s seeing us or not is another matter. There is a long silence. Tina is motionless in the pool, Wally is motionless by the side of it, and D’Antoni is fairly motionless trying to keep upright at the corner of the villa. The only positive action is myself pouring more from the jug.
Finally D’Antoni detaches himself from the villa and makes it to the edge of the pool and sits down in a chair which is a twin to the one I’m sitting in. Nothing happens for a moment or two. I’m just about to take a sip of my drink when the silence of the mountains is disturbed, and not the only thing that is disturbed, because D’Antoni jackknifes forward in his chair and is violently but briefly sick right into the fucking swimming pool. Several things happen at once; I don’t drink my drink, Wally almost imitates D’Antoni, and Tina, for the first time, is upright in the rubber ring, looking at D’Antoni and then at what is gradually floating out from the edge of the pool.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she says, and splashes her way to the floating lilo and paddles her way to the far side of the pool, where the towel isn’t. When she gets there she scrambles out and stands on the edge and gives D’Antoni the kind of verballing he’s never heard since maybe he shot the wrong geezer on his first contract, if he was listening. When she’s finished she walks all the way round three sides of the pool until she reaches the towel which is about six inches away from my right foot. She picks up the towel and gives D’Antoni some more mouth. D’Antoni just stays as he is, head in hands. Then after she’s given him everything she can think of she walks off round the corner, dragging the towel behind her. This time, Wally doesn’t say anything to her.
I put my glass down on the flagstones.
“It’ll soon go through the filter,” Wally says at length.
I don’t say anything. D’Antoni says:
“Jesus Christ.”
I look at him again. He is no longer bent double. Now he is leaning back in the chair, his head hanging backwards, his face parallel with the sky, his arms hanging perpendicular.
“God,” he says. “Jesus.”
Then, abruptly, he stands up. He sways so much I think he’s going to bellyflop into the pool. But gradually the swaying slows down until he’s more or less vertical. Then he turns around to look at me and Wally. Wally and me look back.
“Is this the end of Rico?” I say to him.
D’Antoni focuses all of his uncomprehending attention on me. He probably never even saw the movie, I think to myself. Then D’Antoni disengages his gaze and visibly seems to snap himself back together. He strides forward and round my chair and grabs Wally by the shirt and says:
“I want scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee, toast, and a lot of fruit juice. And I want it now, O.K.?”
Wally nods his head.
“You got all that?” D’Antoni says.
The same from Wally. D’Antoni lets go of him. Wally begins to walk away. “Wally,” I say to him, “I’ll have the same. Except I’ll have the eggs fried and the coffee tea.”
“Yes, Jack,” Wally says, not breaking step. D’Antoni looks down at me, then at his watch.
“I thought you were going to be out of here by now?” he says.
I don’t answer him.
“You staying?”
I still don’t answer him. D’Antoni laughs. Then he goes back down the edge of the pool and drags the twin seat to where I am and sits down in it. Then he laughs the same laugh again.
“Bullshit,” he says, looking at me with the expression that accompanied the laugh. “A crap artist, I knew it. I knew you’d never have the balls to go against the Fletchers. A bullshit vendor. I saw it, right away. You guys always think you can hide it, but it always shows. I had you figured from the start.”
He throws back his head and laughs again.
I light a cigarette and decide against making him eat the jug that contains the Bloody Mary. Instead I say: “You’ve recovered pretty well, considering you just tried to turn the pool into the Sargasso Sea.”
D’Antoni continues to grin at me.
“I throw up,” he says, “whenever I tie one on; first thing I do I get out of bed and I throw up. Then I’m fine. Then I eat and after that I’m even better.”
“Tonight I’ll put you to bed in the bathtub,” I say to him.
The smile almost goes.
“Yeah,” he says. “I seem to remember that, last night. In the bathroom.”
I look at him.
“Yeah, I remember that,” he says. “I still kind of feel it.” He leans forward, almost confidential. “The last guy did that, he ended his days by way of standing up in a pillar that happened to support a clover-leaf on the outskirts of New Jersey.”
“Oh, really?”
“That’s right,” D’Antoni says.
“Well, I don’t think it’d be too good an idea over here. From what I’ve seen the labour isn’t quite so skilled.”
“What I’m trying to tell you is—” D’Antoni says, looking like he might get sick again. “What I’m telling you—you’re a very privileged human being. But the reason is, why I don’t take you apart for that, is I need you, in case of certain eventualities. You’re all I got and that is better than nothing at all. I just want you to understand my meaning, is all.”
I smile to myself. It really doesn’t matter, I think. Let him think it. It’s too warm to be any other way.
“See,” he says. “Where I come from, the crowd of mechanics I’m used to, a guy like you wouldn’t even get to hand out song sheets at the glee club. None of you limeys would. Compared to us, you guys are like as scary as the Addams Family. Amateurs. You know
?”
“I expect we are,” I say to him. “A pity you have to put your life in our hands.”
“Right,” D’Antoni says. “That’s right. But what choice did I have? I had no choice whatsoever. A bastard in the bureau fixed that.”
D’Antoni looks at the Bloody Mary jug.
“Here, give me that,” he says.
I hand him the jug.
“You got a glass?”
I take a sip of my drink and so D’Antoni takes a pull from the side of the jug, leaving just about enough for the melting ice cubes not to be able to imitate icebergs.
“Why not try that on the pool,” I tell him. “It’ll clean it quicker than the filter.”
D’Antoni takes no notice and finishes off the rest of the jug, cubes and all. Then he sits back and contemplates the mountains.
“Yeah,” he says. “A bastard in the bureau. The guy I talked to most. The guy was a genius. You got to give him that.”
D’Antoni continues to stare at the mountains.
“Shouldn’t have talked to him, then, should you?” I say to him.
D’Antoni looks at me.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “You wouldn’t, I take it. You’re one of the straight guys, yeah?”
“The only times I talk to old Bill—” D’Antoni’s expression causes me to qualify “—is when I’m paying their wages or when they’re telling me the kind of thing they get their wages to tell me.”
“Sure,” he says. “And supposing the Fletchers did a deal with the authorities that served up your head on a platter?”
I look at him without answering.
“Pure public relations,” D’Antoni says. “They all figured that because of certain happenings in the State of New York it was time that the Mafia got a sacrificial goat, that goat being me.”
He picks up the empty jug, looks at it, puts it down again.
“Yeah, me,” he says. “Christ, I never personally had anybody taken out in fifteen years. I’d moved on from that level. Investments, loans, take-overs, stocks and bonds was what I’d moved into. They never even asked me what I was doing, only twice a year. They just gave me the money and I put it to work. I had forty guys working for me. Graduates, most of them; accountants, lawyers, guys with degrees in Business Management. I had ’em all. Then this messy stuff flew up and they needed somebody to be in the papers and on T.V. all the time. But this time they figure some guy off the street ain’t good enough, it’s got to be somebody heavy. I get wind of all this from a broad who is no longer in the land of the living owing to the nature of the information she imparts. But that’s by the by. What I do is I decide to beat the lousy bastards to it by going through various highly sensitive channels that by-passed all sorts of people and led to me doing some kind of deal where I named some really big ones in return for protection like you never seen, a passage so cast-iron Martin Bormann could have used it. I mean the guys I’m with, well, I don’t have to tell you the guarantees’d have to be good before I talked about them to anybody. But it’s very funny, it really is. The guy I’ve got to who, believe me, has taken a lot of getting to, the guy I’m going to do all the talking to, he’s on the payroll too. I find out because I have a piece of luck. This guy has been playing me along to reassure me before the guys take me out, so I’m under no kind of surveillance. And it’s no hassle to get my ass set down over here.”
I take another sip of my drink.
“Yeah, me,” he says. “Me they wanted to fix.”
He shakes his head.
“Well, that’s what you get with your crowd of mechanics,” I tell him. “You’re not safe unless you’re handing out songs for the glee club.”
D’Antoni just continues taking in the view.
“Still, at least I get my money stashed,” he says. “At least I can get to that. Plus what I took out. I got no worries.”
I smile.
“Only every morning when you wake up, wondering whether you’re still alive.”
D’Antoni looks at me.
“When I’m out of here, no way, no way, where I’m going.”
I shrug.
“In the movies I’ve seen, they always catch up with you, even if it’s twenty years later, and you’re digging your vegetable garden.”
“Listen, I told you. Not me. Not this guy. All right?”
I shrug again.
“You know who you’re dealing with,” I say to him.
To that, there is no answer from D’Antoni. He looks from side to side, then he stands up and shouts at the villa.
“Hey!” he shouts.
There is only the echo from the mountains.
“Wally!”
Wally appears at the corner.
“How long’s that food going to be coming?” D’Antoni shouts.
“Couple of seconds. I was just laying the table in the arbor, round here.”
“Then lay it again, only inside.”
“Yes, Mr. D’Antoni,” Wally says, and flashes off.
D’Antoni turns round and sees that I’m looking at him.
“It’s the flies,” he says. “The way they come around, crapping all over your food.”
I finish my drink and stand up and walk past him, to the villa.
Chapter Nine
D’ANTONI’S RIGHT. After he’s eaten, he’s much better, by his standards. He’s smiling all the time and occasionally cracking jokes that are about as funny as him being sick into the pool.
I pour myself some more tea.
“What time does the paper lad come with the Express, Wally?” I say to him.
Wally shows his appreciation of my funny joke.
“I usually pick up the week’s ration when I go into Palma,” Wally says.
“Just wondered how the Spurs got on,” I say to him.
“Yeah,” Wally says, grinning at me and D’Antoni.
“More coffee,” D’Antoni says to him.
Wally picks up the coffee pot and makes for the kitchen but before he’s a yard away from the table, D’Antoni says: “So where’s the broad? The one with the tits and the black black hair, if you get my meaning.”
Wally turns round but he doesn’t stop moving.
“Tina? Oh, she’s about somewhere. If I know her she’d be in the bath.”
“She’s just been in the pool.”
“Yeah, well, you know women.”
D’Antoni laughs his laugh and Wally disappears into kitchen.
The dining room is slightly smaller than the other rooms in the villa, which makes it not quite as big as the Savoy Grill. It has the same kind of carpets on the walls as all the other rooms and the arrangement is beginning to make me feel like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
“Well,” D’Antoni says, wiping his mouth with a napkin, “at least we now got some ass with which to while away the hours.”
“You think so,” I say to him.
“That’s what I think,” D’Antoni says. “No problem with that one.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe. Listen, I seen broads like that before. At that age? They know how to turn more tricks than a forty-year-old hooker, and enthusiastic with it. We would get broads like that anytime, to entertain associates, and younger. Once, I saw these two ten-year-olds, a boy, a girl, they—”
“Yes,” I tell him. “I seen things like that. They make me throw up.”
“You’re in a minority. Big market in that kind of thing. Lot of people pay big money for it.”
“I know.” I pour some more tea. “I also heard what happens to some of the kids that took part, to protect some of the senior citizens involved.”
“Yeah,” D’Antoni says. “Well, those things have to be taken care of.”
“Not by me they don’t.”
“You think I have? Personally? I never had nothing to do with that side of the operation. I just saw some things, now and then.”
“Well, on my firm, we don’t have that kind of an operation.”
/> “Yeah?” D’Antoni says. “I must know the Fletchers better than you do.”
“There’s nothing I don’t know about the firm.”
D’Antoni laughs.
“You should see some of the movies they ship over.”
“I don’t see every movie the firm makes.”
“That’s what I mean,” D’Antoni says. “Compared to me, you’re first grade. I knew where every cent I handled was buried. You’re supposed to be their number one man and you don’t even know the kind of movies you’re making.”
I don’t say anything.
“A joke,” D’Antoni says. “Berll could use you.”
“Well,” I say to him, “at least I still work for my firm. They haven’t decided to give me a free transfer.”
“Comes the day they need to, they will,” D’Antoni says. “It’s the same the world over.”
There’s no arguing with that, and I’m not going to give D’Antoni the satisfaction of giving him one. Instead I get up and walk away from the table and into the kitchen where Wally has started the washing up. I light a cigarette and watch him for a while. Wally doesn’t turn round. He just gets on with the dishes, like a woman not speaking in the course of a barney.
Eventually Wally says: “She turned out just like her old lady, that’s what she done.” He puts the last plate in the drainer and unties his apron. “The way she goes on you think she’d been mixing with our sort all her bleeding life.” He folds the apron up and lays it on the work surface.
“You’re out of touch, Wally,” I tell him. “Stuck out here in the wilderness.”
“I’ll be in touch with her when I see her.”
“Oh, leave her alone. You’re like an old woman.”
A voice behind me says: “You should be very happy, then; old man, old woman. Just get the banns read.”
I turn round and Tina’s standing in the doorway and the novelty is she’s wearing some clothes. Only a bikini, but for her it’s some kind of breakthrough.
Wally begins marching over to her.
“Leave it out,” she says, “I’ve heard it all before.”
Wally keeps on going but Tina ducks round him and makes for the fridge. “What’s for breakfast?” she says.
