by Peter Israel
A last supper, you could say, for Robert Thorne.
I carried it downstairs for her and put it in the car. Also a large tote. It was mid March, gray and newly cold, freezing cold. We got into the car together in full view of the doorman and drove off eastward where, a few blocks later, Kitty dropped me off. Then she, the woman I loved, went off to seduce another man, and I went into the movie theater off Third Avenue. I’ve no idea what was playing. I walked out again after a while, went into a bookstore on Third Avenue, bought nothing. From that time until I picked up my own rented car at an all-night garage in the Village, I have no recollection.
Oh, yes: what I was wearing. The old alpaca-lined greatcoat, one of my few remaining relics of the past, and a heavy seaman’s sweater she’d given me with buttons across one shoulder. I remember stopping on the Long Island Expressway to take the coat off and driving the rest of the way with the window down. Alone. The radio loud against the wind noise.
I, in my way, had no more of a chance than Thorne. Not after that night in my apartment.
The way Kitty explained it, someone else in the network had sold Thorne Safari. She claimed not even to have suspected it until the night of Wanda’s party. Thorne had apparently been made to pay through the nose, and with no controls over what he did with the information, he’d gone haywire. Many of the accounts I hadn’t recognized in the Angeletti meeting were, according to Kitty, traceable to Thorne. The limited partnerships, the dummy corporations—all Thorne’s.
Worse, she’d learned that Thorne was already under investigation, for other matters as well as Safari. Worst of all, she was convinced that, under pressure and given the chance to make a deal, Thorne would crack. Would name names, sources, transactions. Kitty Goldmark included.
He had to be stopped; it had to be done fast.
But Jesus Christ, she was talking about murder! And not only meant it but had it already planned!
What I actually said was: “For God’s sake, Kitty, that’s murder!”
I must also have said something like: “People like us don’t do things like that,” because I remember her glaring down at me, lips tight.
“People like us?” she said. “What does that mean? Who do you think we are, anyway? We’ve already crossed that line, dear heart. We could go to jail for what we’ve done.”
“Yes, in theory. But you’ve always assured me that it can’t be traced back.”
“Well, maybe I was wrong. I’m sorry, but maybe I was wrong. Don’t you understand? If Thorne gives them the network, the parts he knows about, anyway, and then they investigate all the other transactions in Safari? That’s how they’ll find you, too, Tommy. Angeletti in reverse. They’ll back into it, whether they link you directly to me or not.”
“I can see that,” I answered. “But does that justify murder?”
“Would you rather go to jail, Tommy darling? Would you rather wreck your life? Our life? Or is it that, deep down, you think that somebody will get you off in the end?”
I’d never known her tone to be so cutting. I fell silent, but my silence only fueled her sarcasm.
“What makes you so moral all of a sudden? This isn’t prep school, you know. You haven’t just been caught cheating on some test.”
My reflex, when faced with that kind of bigotry-in-reverse, is invariably to fold up my tent. But this was Kitty, this was the woman I loved …
“There has to be another way,” I said as calmly as I could.
“There isn’t, believe me.”
“No? Why can’t we buy him off?”
She shook her head.
“It’s too late for that. Besides, I know the man.”
I tried to visualize Thorne. Devastatingly handsome, Martine Brady had called him at Wanda’s party. The shock of white hair. I’d also gotten the impression, from something Martine had said, that he liked beating up on women. Beyond that, nothing.
But what unholy difference did it make what I knew of him?
None whatsoever. All irrelevant, totally irrelevant. Kitty herself made that abundantly clear.
“There’s no choice,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve looked. We’ve got to deal with it, and we’ve got to do the dirty work ourselves.”
“Even when the dirty work is murder?”
“Even when the dirty work is murder.”
I was having trouble taking it in. At the same time, I felt myself slipping, sliding, and no place to grab on to. No place except Kitty, who stood before me, staring me down.
“You’re going to do this with me, Tommy. There’s no other way.”
“And what if I refuse?”
“You won’t refuse.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t need me to answer that.”
“Maybe I do,” I said.
“Very well,” she answered implacably. “We’re either in it together or we’re not. If we’re not, then it’s all over between us. You and I are finished.”
A long time later I might wonder where she got the strength. But all I could think of on the spot, all I could blurt out, was:
“What the hell is it that always makes you so goddamn sure of me?”
No answer.
Maybe she wasn’t always so sure. That night, at least, I think she had simply steeled herself to run any and all risks.
But I felt a bitter reflex, the need to strike back at her even in defeat.
“Let me ask you this, Kitty. Suppose I do refuse after all, and suppose we do break up. What makes you so sure I wouldn’t turn witness against you, too? Just like Thorne?”
For a split second I saw the hurt surprise in her eyes. Then she ducked away, shaking her head.
“You wouldn’t do that,” I heard her say.
“Oh, no?” I persisted. “And why the hell not? Wouldn’t I logically do it to save my own skin? And hadn’t you better kill me too, just to make sure?”
“You wouldn’t do that, Tommy,” she repeated.
“Why not? Tell me why not?”
“Because you love me too much,” she said hoarsely.
At this she turned fully away, neck and shoulders bowed, and I could see her body shaking despite her efforts to control it. And then, so help me, I took her in my arms.
Kitty had given me precise instructions, including a map and an elevation sketch of the house. I was to be there by midnight and park on the side of the road outside the property, where I’d have a full view of the house. Possibly I’d hear shots. Either way, I was to wait for a light to go on in a particular second-floor window, signal that the deed was done. If the light hadn’t gone on by one in the morning, it would mean that, for whatever reason, she had failed. In that case I was to go home.
I arrived a little after eleven. The light was already on in the upstairs window. What I hadn’t expected was that there were lights on throughout the ground floor, too. The house, a rambling turn-of-the-century affair with a wraparound veranda, resembled some sort of cruise ship in the night, perched on a bare bluff overlooking the Sound, and at a glance you’d have thought a party was going on, unlikely though that would have been at that time of the year. In any case, I was clearly too early. I debated whether to drive on and return later, but I was afraid of losing my way on the winding road. Instead I parked as planned, turned off the motor and the headlights, and hunkered down in my seat, my eyes on the house.
At some point, without my noticing it at first, the lights started to go off downstairs, one after the other, as though someone were walking through the rooms. Then darkness below, but the single light remaining above.
A car passed in the opposite direction, its headlights swerving over my head. Then nothing, quiet. The wind sound, that was all.
Could she already have done it?
At eleven forty-five I got out of the car into the freezing air, put my coat on, and walked up the curving driveway, shifting from gravel to the lawn when I heard my own footsteps. I was now in almost total darkness, but my vision had adjusted sufficien
tly to make out the shape of two cars parked beyond the porte cochère. One was Kitty’s, I assumed, one his. Slowly I went up the front steps to the veranda, listening, hearing nothing except the wind and some distant tinkling sound. I saw a pinpoint of green light next to the front door, an alarm system, the alarm off. Then, suddenly: abrupt movement. The door open. Kitty’s voice, impatient, from the darkness.
“For God’s sake, where have you been?”
Her voice sounded like a shout in the silence. I started to say something, but she cut me off.
“It’s done. I’ve been waiting for you for almost an hour. Come in.”
She touched a light switch, illuminating the staircase directly in front of me, a dark wood affair that doubled back on itself.
“Where is he?” I said.
“Upstairs. Come on. We’re wasting time.”
In the upstairs light, I saw that her face had taken on a waxy pallor. Later she admitted that she’d thrown up. Her victim lay naked on his bed, face down, head wrapped in a towel with the ends tucked in, and the murder weapon lay on an empty pillowcase on the floor.
She’d gone there, I knew, intending to shoot him. Instead, she’d quite literally clubbed him to death.
For God’s sake, though, he was almost twice her size! How had she done it?
In his sleep, she said.
I could think of only one way she’d have gotten him to sleep. I pictured them, or half pictured them (as though through the fingers of my hand, spread across my eyes), and Kitty then sliding from the bed noiselessly and lifting the weapon above her head with both hands …
“I couldn’t move him without you,” she said. “We have to get his clothes on first, anyway.”
I hesitated before touching him. I’d never seen a dead man close up who hadn’t been prepared for viewing, and never a victim of violence. Bloody violence, too, for when we inadvertently pulled the towel free from his scalp, there was a fresh ooze of blood. His body felt heavy, deadweight. Together we propped him into a sitting position, where I held him, maneuvering his arms, while Kitty dressed him. White button-down shirt, V-neck cashmere, blue blazer. No tie. Then flat on his back while we did the underpants and trousers. Gray flannels. Ragg socks. Cordovan loafers.
Kitty debated about an overcoat, then decided that he’d have gone out without one.
I struggled under his weight, carrying him downstairs and outside while Kitty led the way. She opened the passenger door to his four-door convertible, and I deposited him inside. Then we returned to the house to clean up.
Blood had soaked through the sheets on his bed, and a little had even worked its way under the rubberized sheet that covered the mattress itself. I bundled the sheets and the pad and stuffed them into Kitty’s tote, an enormous carryall, while she scrubbed at the mattress. The weapon went into the tote, too, in its pillowcase shroud, all for me to dispose of the next day. Kitty decided to turn the mattress, and I remade the bed while she wiped the room clean of fingerprints. Downstairs in the kitchen she repacked the picnic hamper, putting Thorne’s dishes and glassware into the dishwasher. She filled the soap receptacle, then closed the door and turned the machine on.
I loaded the tote and the hamper into the trunk of Kitty’s car. Then we met by the front door, and she worried as to whether to lock the house, putting the keys in Thorne’s pocket, or to leave the keys in the inside alarm lock and the system off.
“What would you do?” she asked me.
“It would depend on where I was going,” I answered.
“To an assignation,” Kitty said.
“How long will I be gone?”
“At least till morning.”
“But I’m coming back? And my usual habit is to leave the house open?”
“That’s right.”
“Then let’s leave it open.”
And so we did.
There was, however, one small problem. When I got behind the wheel of Thorne’s Cadillac, I called out to Kitty for his car keys. She didn’t have them. As carefully as she’d planned every step, she’d forgotten about Thorne’s car keys, and the fact that she’d overlooked them threw her into a temporary panic.
“For God’s sake!” she shouted at me. “Look in his goddamn pockets!”
I managed to, awkwardly, but found no keys.
Then Kitty, cursing, ran back into the house.
I sat in the dark for a moment. Then, perhaps because I’d done the same thing myself, I started running my hands into various possible hiding places until, sure enough, I found them. They were tucked into the overhead visor on the passenger’s side.
I retrieved Kitty. We drove off, she leading the way in her car. The spot she had chosen was one where the cliff line jutted out into the Sound. There was no guardrail around the curve in the road, just a wide place beyond the macadam shoulder where cars could park, and steps cut into the face of the cliff where you could make your way down to the rocky inlet.
Following her signal, I parked beside her. A strong and icy wet wind blew into our faces, and distantly, it seemed, you could hear the sound of water crashing onto rocks. Kitty had the rest of it precisely planned, down to the positioning of Thorne’s car. From a spouted metal can he carried in his trunk, we doused his upholstery with gasoline, front and back, including the convertible roof, and opened his gas tank cover. Then, cumbersomely, we propped his body behind the steering wheel and fastened the seat belt. Kitty called to me to get the towel off his head. It was stuck to his skin, and I had to tear it free. Then, reaching in, depressing the brake pedal with my left hand, I turned on the headlights, then the ignition, and with my right hand shifted the transmission into drive. I released the brake pedal, jerked my body free, slammed shut the passenger door, and General Motors engineering did the rest.
The car seemed to hesitate, just for a second, when it reached the edge. Then it continued forward, in slow motion. Over. Gone.
Kitty had said there was a risk it wouldn’t ignite, in which case we’d have to climb down the cove. It did, though. We heard the sound of one explosion. Then heard, and saw, a second and larger one.
“Done,” Kitty said beside me.
She drove us back to Thorne’s house. Totally dark now, its shape even darker than the background sky. I got out. In the dim interior light of her car, I saw Kitty adjust the rearview mirror so as to examine her face, and she fluffed her hair, pinched color into her cheeks. She reminded me again of the side street in the city where I was supposed to park and wait for her to pick me up.
“I love you, Tommy,” she said, reaching one hand toward me. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
I drove back to New York with the windows wide open despite the cold, and still I couldn’t get the reek of gasoline, Thorne’s gasoline, out of my nostrils. I parked as agreed, and within thirty minutes Kitty pulled in behind me. We drove around to her building, where, in view of the night doorman, we unloaded the remains of our outing, and Kitty carried them upstairs while I returned her car to its rental garage.
It was after four in the morning by the time I got back, closer to five. Kitty had a CD playing—something Mozartean, I’m sure—and a drink ready to hand me. She had already showered and changed her clothes. Her hair was wet.
“I don’t know how it’s possible,” I said, “but I feel wide awake.”
“Me too. Are you hungry?”
“No,” I said, sipping from my drink. “But I want a shower.”
I stood in the stall in her bathroom, jets as hot as I could stand beating down on me. My clothes were piled in a heap outside. I wanted to destroy them, incinerate them, along with their smell of gasoline. I imagined in the hot steam that if I could erase the smell, I could erase the night, too, like a dream that, no matter how vivid, you can no longer summon to memory the next day. But when I got out of the shower, the pile of clothes was still there and the gasoline fumes now seemed to cling to the wet towel I held in my hands.
Kitty was waiting for me in the bedroom
, stretched in her silk robe on the Récamier sofa. She was listening to the music. Her dark hair, still damp, had begun to form little ringlets as it always did when she didn’t blow-dry it.
A faint smile on her face.
“Better?” she said.
“A little.”
“Are you hungry now, poor darling?”
“No.” I couldn’t, though, remember when I’d last eaten.
“Well, I am,” she said, reaching for me.
“Please, Kitty,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m up to it.”
“Oh yes you are. Let Kitten show you that you’re up to it.”
She laughed, a low chuckle, and rose to her knees on the sofa, holding firmly to my stem while she began to lick its underside.
I felt heat, nauseating heat, spreading in my stomach, and the fumes in my nostrils, and her wet hair crushed in my fist.
She fell back, her robe open, her hands pulling me firmly, inexorably, inside her. She was right: I was up to it. But when she came, her nails digging into my back, her voice in its raucous, rhythmic cry, I was, I think for the first time, genuinely afraid of her.
In time, though, that too passed.
PART THREE
16
We were married the following June.
It was an outdoor wedding, held on the lawn of our new house under a chuppa, one of those four-pole canopies which, in Jewish practice, is held over the bride and groom, supposedly to symbolize the happy home-to-be. Kitty had found a rabbi who had agreed to officiate over a mixed union and in fact waxed quite eloquent about these two “strangers” (presumably a Jew and a Christian) who had chosen to join in the joyful and sacred mysteries of marriage.
Over a hundred people attended, but representation on my side was sparse. My mother sent regrets and a gift. For the second time in my life my father, newly returned from Euope, told me I was a fool for marrying. She simply wasn’t our kind, he said. (He sent no gift.) My children were there, over their mother’s and Kitty’s objections. So were Art Fording and Phil Lamont, both lawyers and among my oldest friends. So—finally and to my surprise—was Mac Coombs, now slowed of gait and in the process, I’d heard, of being pushed out of the firm himself, but still able to kiss the bride and squire her around the outdoor dance floor.
