The Gods of Greenwich

by Norb Vonnegut

  “I have some business in the Bronx. I’ll be back in an hour, and we can talk.”

  “Since when do you have clients in the Bronx?” asked Bianca.

  Cusack’s eyes widened. He mouthed the words, “Where in the Bronx?”

  “Just give me an hour,” Leeser pleaded, trying to buy time. “We can sort this out. And I’ll move back into our house.”

  “You mean my house.”

  “Your house?” The words angered Leeser. They confused him, too.

  “Unless you forget,” Bianca replied, “Roundhill Road is under my control. It’d be a shame if you were arrested for trespassing.”

  “I pay the mortgage. My lawyer will kick you out by the end of the week.”

  “Don’t bet on it. Remember our estate planning?”

  “Yes.” Leeser stepped on the gas pedal, now doubling as a release valve for his fury.

  “A trust holds the estate for our girls,” explained Bianca. “You wanted it. You were the one who said, ‘Everybody else in Greenwich has a trust.’”

  “So?”

  “I’m the trustee.”

  “Just hold on until I get back from the zoo. We can work this out.” Cy frowned and added, all oil and nose pores, “For our twins, babe.”

  “Don’t you dare attack me with our girls,” she replied dismissively. “Finish your business and get back here. What are you doing at the zoo anyway?”

  This time Cusack mouthed, “Bronx Zoo?”

  “Forget about it,” snapped Leeser.

  “The Bronx Zoo,” said Bianca while nodding yes to Jimmy, “strikes me as the perfect place to showcase your hedge fund.”

  “Hey, the bitching hour came early,” barked Leeser, no longer able to control his temper. “You used to wait until I got home.”

  “Say hi to Emi Cusack,” said Bianca, winking at Jimmy.

  “What makes you—”

  Bianca cut Leeser off. She had grown tired of their game. “Cy, there’s only one takeaway from this conversation. Dorothy Parker said, ‘The two most beautiful words in the English language are “cheque enclosed.” Think about it.” She clicked off her cell phone.

  * * *

  “What’s wrong?” Bianca asked Jimmy.

  “What did Cy say about Emi?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Just that he’s driving to the Bronx Zoo.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No, Jimmy. Why are you so upset?”

  Thirty minutes ago Cusack had wondered how to get the Mac laptop from Bianca. Now he no longer cared. “I need to ask you something. My question may sound odd. But I want you to think long and hard before you answer.”

  “Okay?” Her eyebrows arched high with concern.

  The stress was beading off Cusack like sweat. “Have you ever seen Cy hanging out with a woman with a bad scar on her hand?”

  “Sounds like one of my novels.”

  “It’s not fiction.”

  Cusack stared at her, waiting, his thoughts shifting to last Friday’s lunch with Emi. That afternoon the couple had agreed Cusack would resign. They changed tactics over the weekend, however, after confiding their suspicions to Caleb.

  “Let me reconnoiter with my friends in the insurance industry,” he had said.

  Bianca finally replied, “No, Jimmy. I can’t think of anybody.”

  In that moment Cusack remembered the red-haired woman from Somba Village. He never noticed a scar. But she could hear their conversation, no question. Cusack blinked once, and his alarm bells exploded.

  Emi’s in trouble.

  Without warning, Cusack pushed through Bianca and the tall, gangly marshall. Nikki glanced up from her bank of files. Cusack burst past her, lunging, lurching, his feet scrambling for traction, desperate for pace, for acceleration.

  “What got into him?” Nikki gasped, as Cusack’s slipstream sucked her tower of paperwork and sprayed it through the air.

  “My husband,” Bianca answered, not missing a beat.

  Jimmy blasted into the reception area. Headed for the etched doors of LeeWell Capital. At that exact moment, Shannon towered in the office doorway. He loomed in front of Jimmy Cusack, a large, hulking, menacing presence.

  Cusack lowered his shoulder, shades of glory days from Columbia football, and plowed through Shannon. Caught him by surprise. Bowled him ass over elbows.

  “Out of my way.”

  Shannon’s head snapped against the jamb. He collapsed on the floor. He wheezed, “Ugh,” as the Berber carpet greeted the back of his neck, “Hello.”

  Cusack reverberated from the impact. Saw stars and did a 360. Pain surged through his shoulder from contact with the human wrecking ball.

  Elevator.

  Ground floor.

  Cusack pushed through a cluster of dour-faced gods, the lobby usually empty at this hour, and burst into the gray October day. Twenty seconds later he was pumping the accelerator of his blue Beemer, screaming, “Shit, shit, shit.”

  The motor turned over and over. Grinding. Not catching. The “adventure in precision physics” had run its course. Cusack tried the ignition once. He tried it a dozen times. No angle of the key worked as the engine ground round and round, deader than a med-school cadaver.

  He smashed the dashboard in frustration. He turned the key one last time. Besmirching BMW. Beseeching St. Jude. Swearing and hoping for a miracle. The old engine hacked to life. It resurrected not in glory but with the throaty knock of a smoker’s cough.

  Three minutes, and Cusack was flying down I-95. His speedometer hit eighty, ninety, one hundred miles per hour. Over and over, he checked the rearview mirror. He expected to see troopers any minute, their flashing blue lights. He waited for sirens to erupt. He wondered if his Beemer would lose a muffler. Faster and faster, he drove—his foot crushing the gas pedal.

  Why did I give Cy my cell phone?

  Cusack cursed himself. Once. Twice. A thousand times. Checking the rearview mirror, he spied a car closing fast. There were no sirens. There were no flashing lights. It was a white Audi. Jimmy stared hard and recognized the driver. He knew that perma-scowl anywhere.

  Shannon was on his tail, sneering, gaining.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  BRONX ZOO …

  The pregnant scientist walked west toward the Dancing Crane Café. The Goth-garbed cleaner walked east toward the World of Reptiles. In twenty seconds the two women would collide, and Rachel would make her move. Emi paused, however, to speak with a colleague.

  Rachel stopped at the Bug Carousel. Through black sunglasses, she pretended to study the long-legged praying mantis. She hardly noticed the ride’s figurines. She had zero interest in the bombardier beetle or firefly. And forget about the ladybug.

  Rachel rooted through her black bag, which now reeked from twelve hot dogs. She bypassed the 100-unit syringe, fingering this way and that for the pink trophy from Henrietta Hedgecock. Her cell phone vibrated and interrupted the search, though. It was Cy again.

  She ignored the call, just as she had ignored his last five attempts. Leeser was becoming a thorn in her side. He was obsessive, compulsive, and flat-out wrong. There was no mistake. Emily Cusack could ID Rachel. She was going down today, baby and all.

  Rachel decided to visit Cy later, talk things over and hold what her daddy called a “sit-down.” She hated surprises. She hated debates midway through the game. Last-minute deliberation was unprofessional. The more she thought about Leeser’s interference, the more he annoyed her.

  Instead of reaching for the cell phone, Rachel pulled the pink C2 from her bag. Tasers, she decided, were more persuasive than syringes. Small, trim, and light, the C2 was shaped like a bent twig, no more than six inches long. The pink trophy looked like nothing special, like a load of empty postholes, but people were terrified of getting zapped.

  Rachel had fondled the weapon a million times. She studied instructional manuals until she knew every feature cold. The pink personal protector was easy to use: Slip back the protective slide
on top, aim using the laser pointer, and mash down the trigger button with your thumb.

  The Taser fired two small probes, each attached to fine fifteen-foot wire lines. The probes could pierce clothes two inches thick and microwave the target a new hairdo. They delivered 50,000 volts, half the power of most stun guns. But Rachel’s personal protector zapped for thirty full seconds. That kind of power would drop anybody, especially a woman seven months pregnant.

  One problem. Rachel hated to take chances, and the C2 was a big one. With each firing, the gun rained confetti traceable to the owner. The debris, according to Taser, prevented the wrong guys from using the gun for the wrong reasons. What if police connected the confetti to Henrietta Hedgecock, a woman who had drowned back in March? Would they ask questions? Would they investigate the insurance policy that LeeWell Capital owned?

  “I hate loose ends,” Rachel told herself.

  Still, the C2 made a compelling threat. It was more menacing than a syringe, no matter how long the needle or what the injection. Rachel knew the one threat guaranteed to make any mother comply:

  “How’d you like me to Tase your baby?”

  Rachel doubted Emily would scream. She doubted it would be necessary to fire. A simple, unequivocal threat and “Come with me” would do the trick. Rachel liked the mental image: two probes and 50,000 volts discharging into a swollen belly. The pregnant woman would seize, before tumbling backward into the ravine. And the polar bear, primed with twelve hot dogs, would finish the job.

  Emi was walking west again.

  * * *

  Jimmy had not called. Emi was a knot. She wondered what was happening at LeeWell Capital. Whether James had convinced Cy about working together. How long it would take her father to find answers. She willed herself to go through the steps, to behave like everything was fine. She rubbed her bulging stomach and said, “I haven’t heard from you either, Yaz.”

  On this crisp October morning, students all in school, there were few visitors to observe a pregnant woman cooing to her tummy. The moms with strollers and kids with snotty noses were nowhere to be seen.

  The only other person on the path was an athletic woman power-washed in coal. She wore black gloves, black pants, and black lipstick that looked like a hostile makeover from a Goth. Ever the scientist, Emi Cusack wondered why so harsh. The inky colors clashed with the woman’s delicate features.

  Emi reached into her purse and pulled out a cell phone. The woman in black stopped and looked over her shoulder, deliberating whether to retrace her steps back to the Mouse House.

  “That’s weird,” muttered Emi, getting a busy signal at LeeWell Capital, staring at her phone with a confused look.

  The Goth woman was walking again, drawing near, opting against the Mouse House. She was taking off her black gloves. She was holding something in her hands, something cute and pink. There was something on the back of her hand. White. Puffy. A scar.

  The scar.

  Emi turned and punched the numbers to James’s cell phone, petrified but in control. Just as she was about to punch the little green phone button, the icon that actually dialed the numbers, she heard a familiar voice:

  “Emi Cusack,” the man called. “I thought you might be here.”

  Relieved—she glanced at the smiling man and burst out, “I need your help.” She knew the voice but could not place it. Not yet, anyway. Emi felt the Goth woman crowd behind her.

  “It’s Cy Leeser,” the man said, putting his arm on Emi’s shoulder, cheek-kissing her hello, smarmy as a can of WD-40. “What’s wrong?”

  “What are you doing here?” Emi recoiled from Leeser’s touch. Shivers flossed her vertebrae. And she cursed herself for flinching. She wondered if Cy had noticed.

  He did.

  “You’re awfully jumpy,” observed Leeser.

  Rachel, he realized, had been right. He could smell the pregnant woman’s fear. She was no different from the CEOs of his portfolio companies. An open book. Easy to read. Leeser berated himself for missing Cusack’s ruse earlier that morning.

  “Don’t scream, sugar,” Rachel interrupted from behind, her voice matter-of-fact. “I’ll zap that baby into labor right here on the spot. I’m holding fifty thousand grade-A certified volts.”

  “You wouldn’t.” Emi grabbed her stomach in horror, protecting Yaz by instinct.

  “One peep,” the nurse grinned, “and I’m plugging a fifteen-foot extension into your umbilical cord.” She brandished the Taser to punctuate her words.

  Emi’s eyes widened. Her jaw hung slack. She studied the puffy white scar on the back of Rachel Whittier’s hand. It was the same scar she had seen when Conrad Barnes hailed a cab with a woman forty years his junior.

  “I was wrong,” Leeser acknowledged to Rachel.

  “You’ve got some ’splaining to do,” Rachel told Emi. “Why didn’t your husband resign?”

  “We talked to my dad over the weekend,” explained Emi, mustering whatever bravado she could find. “His people are running a check on eight of your insurance policies right now. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “That’s a problem,” snapped Leeser. He looked stricken.

  “I bet the authorities are on the way now,” Emi threatened, bold and brave and petrified to the core.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Rachel noted, addressing Leeser and gliding with the predatory stealth of a big cat. “First Emily. Then her husband. It’s always the spouse, Cy. We stay on plan.”

  “But Bianca’s back at my office with a marshall.”

  “What’s that about?” asked Rachel. She prodded Emi in the stomach with the Taser, and the three began walking toward the bear pens.

  “Bianca’s divorcing me.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Rachel repeated. “There are two people who can ID us. Maybe three if they really talked to Caleb Phelps. We need to check boxes one and two before we deal with anything else.”

  “Cy, what’s wrong with you?” gasped Emi. “There’s no way out.”

  “Let me worry about that,” scoffed Rachel.

  “Why, Cy?” Emi was looking for compassion, somewhere, anywhere.

  “It is what it is,” Leeser replied, treating Cusack’s wife like just another trade.

  “Where are we going?” asked Emi.

  “Leave the questions to me,” ordered Rachel, “and tell us about the polar bears, Emily. You can personalize our tour.”

  “What smells like hot dogs?” asked Leeser.

  Rachel started to answer. But the sounds of Louis Armstrong stirred the poison air. He was singing “La Vie en Rose.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  HUTCHINSON PARKWAY …

  “Come on,” screamed Cusack.

  He pounded the steering wheel of his Beemer. Both fists. Traffic on the Hutch had slowed to a crawl. The construction just ahead, backhoes and orange pylons closing off lanes, snared all drivers heading south. Beefy guys in hard hats everywhere.

  Cusack had no cell phone. He had no proof anything was wrong. But he knew. He knew beyond all doubt. Something had gone bad. And Emi would not recognize danger until it was too late.

  What in the dense hell was I thinking?

  Great clouds of black smoke belched from the Beemer. Back on I-95, when the speedometer needle had edged over 110 miles per hour, the engine went “clack.” Now his ancient Beemer, a relic from the last century, coughed and sputtered with a noise resembling “Woo, woo, clack. Woo, woo, clack.” The engine clanged with a death rattle all its own.

  “Come on.”

  Cusack eyed the heat gauge on the dashboard. The needle wasn’t touching H for hot, not yet anyway. But the pointer headed in that direction.

  He checked the rearview mirror. Black fumes ballooned from his engine’s exhaust. Cusack eyed Shannon through all the smoke. The white Audi trailed two cars back, stuck in traffic just like everyone else.

  Up ahead, a police officer waved traffic past orange-and-white sawhorses with blinking yellow lights. There were only thr
ee cars until the end of construction. Only three cars navigating through orange pylons that turned two lanes into one. The drivers slowed anyway, rubbernecking at the road repair. The cop, skinny as a rail, with black sunglasses, blew his whistle and flapped his arms like a maniac. He commanded drivers to get moving.

  Two cars. Cusack rolled down his window. One car.

  My turn.

  Cusack almost floored the gas pedal. His Beemer would launch from the snarl, shoot forward like water through the nozzle of a hose. He held back, though, eased down on the brake and leaned out the window. The engine pounded with the woo-woo-clack noise.

  “Move, move, move,” the officer screamed, fierce in his black aviator sunglasses.

  “See that white Audi two cars back?”

  “What about it?” the officer hissed.

  “The driver’s got a gun.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alarm registered in the cop’s voice.

  “Big black guy. He was waving a forty-five at me on I-95. Tried to force me off the road.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Call for backup,” instructed Cusack. “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

  “Pull over.” The cop pointed to the breakdown lane.

  “Fuck you,” snorted Jimmy. “The guy’s got a gun.”

  This time Cusack gassed the Beemer, which burst forward like a howitzer’s shell. From his rearview mirror, he watched black exhaust blanket the trooper. Even through the haze, he saw the cop unhook a latch holding his pistol.

  On the open road Cusack’s Beemer rumbled forward. It gained speed. Sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour—the engine rattled like it would explode, growing louder and more fierce as the pistons pumped. The needle on the thermometer hit H, and then some. Steam poured from the hood.

  Woo, woo, clack.

  Cusack did not care. He planted his foot on the throttle, forcing his car to dig deep. Only three miles to parking lot B at the Bronx Zoo. Smoke poured from the exhaust. It billowed from the hood, where the wipers hid. Shannon was nowhere in sight. Cusack was flying.