West 47th

by Gerald A. Browne

“The same, perfect.”

  “Give her my best. No, give her your best.”

  “I try.”

  While Mitch was on line one with Hurley line two had started blinking, and Shirley had picked it up. She’d brought in a message slip. Mitch read it now. Originally her precise handwriting had said: Riccio wants to talk with you. She’d crossed out the talk with and replaced it with see and an exclamation point.

  Twenty minutes later Mitch was climbing Riccio’s gritty, vinyl-covered stairs. The same fat have-around was on duty on the landing halfway up. He wanted no part of Mitch this time. He backed aside awkwardly and sat on the edge of the daybed. “You got an appointment?” he asked.

  Mitch ignored him, went on up to Riccio’s rooms. He had to go through Bechetti to get in to Riccio but there was no problem: he was expected. Riccio was at a Formica-topped table against the wall, going over some swag that had come in from the preceding weekend. In a small adjacent room off to the right a couple of have-arounds were watching a television talk show.

  Riccio didn’t usually get up to greet someone but now he did. He came at Mitch with a big smile, a two-handed shake and flattery. “Nice to see you, Mitch. What is this with you? How come you’re looking so good. You just get a haircut or something? Come on, sit. I was just going to have some coffee.”

  “None for me, thanks,” Mitch said, mindful of the billions of bacteria there would be on the rim of one of Riccio’s dirty cups.

  “How come no coffee?”

  “Doctor’s orders.”

  “What is it, the belly?”

  “Nerves.”

  “Nerves can lead to an early death,” Riccio recited as though it was sky-writing.

  They were seated at the Formica-topped table, diagonally across from one another. Folding metal chairs that didn’t match. Eight skinny black twists of cigars bound by a rubber band. The swag. Three separate lots. Mitch assumed one lot was that which would be broken up. Another was what would be kept, the third awaited Riccio’s decision. Mitch tried to disregard it.

  “What do you think of this?” Riccio asked, tossing Mitch a piece from the unsorted lot.

  Mitch thought, for one thing, that it didn’t deserve such rough handling, especially when he held it up and realized how fine it was. A sautoir consisting of natural seed pearls and tiny diamond rondelles suspending a frosted rock crystal hoop that was delicately bordered with bagettes of calibré onyx and tasseled with ruby heads. Mitch’s appreciation was obvious.

  “Like it?” Riccio asked.

  “It’s nice,” Mitch understated. Not to waste his expertise, he held back telling Riccio it was Mauboussin circa 1910.

  “It’s yours,” Riccio said.

  Mitch placed the sautoir on the table. It didn’t belong here, he thought, not in this ugly, smelly place being mishandled by coarse hands. It deserved to be around the neck of a lovely, high-fashioned lady, to give her fingers something to fuss with, during the public phase of a rendezvous at the bar of the Ritz in Paris.

  “What’s the matter?” Riccio asked.

  “It’s not my taste,” Mitch told him.

  “That’s not right. You don’t like it you should still accept. If it was anybody but you I’d consider it an insult.” Riccio gathered up the sautoir and relegated it to the break-up lot.

  To Mitch that was a kind of murder.

  “Let’s be more comfortable,” Riccio said.

  They moved to a nearby couch. It was new but cheap, the sort that would soon go lumpy. “I take a nap now and then,” Riccio explained. A regular foam rubber bed pillow had a pink and yellow floral case. A crucifix over the bed. “I hear you had some good luck,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “The stuff you brought me the pictures of a couple of weeks back. You found it.”

  “Who told you?”

  “That insurance guy. What’s his name?”

  “Ruder.”

  “That’s it, Ruder. He said you found the whole package and made a nice score. I’m happy for you. You deserve.”

  “When did you talk to Ruder?”

  “Last week sometime. I think it was Wednesday. Yeah, Wednesday.” Riccio called out to Bechetti who immediately showed himself in the doorway of the television room. “Wasn’t it Wednesday we talked with that insurance guy?”

  “Yeah, Wednesday,” Bechetti corroborated.

  If Riccio and Ruder knew each other it was news to Mitch. One thing for certain: if they had talked and Ruder had mentioned the recovery it couldn’t have been Wednesday. Ruder didn’t know about it until Thursday. “I heard that Ruder is missing,” Mitch said offhand.

  “No shit. You mean he ain’t been around anywhere?”

  “Since Thursday afternoon.”

  “So, who gives a fuck? Guy like that gets missed for a while, month or two it’s like he fucking never was.” Riccio inserted a finger behind the top button of his shirt. He stretched his neck. The shirt was overstarched, the collar like a blade at his throat. “Tell the truth, I didn’t like the guy. He was a piece of shit.”

  Mitch noticed the past tense.

  “Know what happens to a guy like that?” Riccio went on. “He fucks with the wrong people. They take exception. He keeps on fucking with them and they have to hurt him. They could pop a cap into him but that ain’t satisfying enough, they don’t want to just do that. Know what they do? They hold his mouth open and pour diamonds into him. Then they give him four or five shots in the belly, hard right hands right in there. He’s an asshole. He’s coughing blood but he’s still fucking with these wrong people. What can they do? Throw him in the river? Not yet. First, to make sure he sinks, you know, that he doesn’t gas up and bloat and come to the top someplace, they slit him up the front and rip his guts and everything out like he was a fish. That way they also get back the diamonds. Happens to a guy like that who fucks with the wrong people.”

  Mitch had never disliked Ruder to the extent that he’d wish him such a fate. He knew, however, as sure as he’d just heard Riccio’s horror story, it had probably happened. A shiver climbed the ladder of his spine. His facial expression remained unchanged.

  “Anyway,” Riccio said, “Ruder told us when you handed over that swag to him you held out.”

  “I turned in all there was.”

  “Except a pair of emeralds.”

  “I never had them.”

  “Look, I don’t blame you for putting those emeralds aside, not when there’s this sand nigger moving around saying he’ll give twenty-five extra large for them.”

  Riccio’s phone rang. He went over to his desk and answered it. A grunt instead of a hello. It wasn’t a conversation, at least not from Riccio’s end. Just a series of flat yeahs and nos. Mitch looked past him and saw Fratino in the television room, the doorway framing him. Like a tableau, Mitch thought. Have-around in a short-sleeve wrinkle-proof shirt with pistol rig on. Hyper reality. He should be exactly done in acrylic and exhibited at the Whitney.

  Riccio returned to the couch. “I’ll make you a deal for the two emeralds,” he said.

  “I told you, I don’t have them.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “What can I say?”

  “You can say what kind of a deal like the sensible, straight guy I think you are and I’ll tell you I’m willing to give you one extra large for them and you can think about it for five or ten seconds in order to look smart before you say okay, Riccio, that’s what you can say.”

  While those were Riccio’s words, Mitch was asking himself why was he there? Breathing the same air as this man and the others. He wasn’t one of them. He would never be one of them. No matter how the street shaped him. They happened to be inhabitants, an ingredient of the mix. They tolerated him. He tolerated them. The bubbling coo of pigeons in the eaves. Transmitted television voices. Precious stones lost in the high-pile weave of the wall-to-wall rug. Riccio farted without apology. What am I? Mitch asked himself, a social chameleon?

  “I don’t
get it,” he told Riccio.

  “What don’t you get?”

  “If I had the emeralds why should I give them to you for a million when I could get twenty-five million for them?”

  “Because you’re not greedy. Because the million I’d pay you wouldn’t come with any bad feelings along with it, no hurt, nothing like that. Because you don’t need the money. You got a rich wife, who, by the way, you should worry about when she goes out shopping and places. Even in the daytime, on any street, you should worry about the wrong people fucking with her.”

  Riccio’s brain was rotten, Mitch thought. There were calluses on his eyes. He was eaten with pathology, putrefied by habit, perhaps by birth. The air that had the misfortune of being sucked into him came out contaminated. He had a wife and children he kissed, a priest he confessed to, holy water went to his head, the chamber of his rottenness, each week.

  “How about it?” Riccio pressed.

  “No deal,” Mitch replied unequivocally. He was surprised how much pleasure he got out of telling Riccio that, how angry and yet calm he was. “And, as for my wife,” he said, “I’ll look out for her. Anyway, no need for me to worry about her for a while.” He paused and did a smug punishing smile, “She’s leaving tonight to spend some time in France … with her mother.”

  Chapter 27

  Shortly before nine that night she came out of the Sherry. Her luggage had preceded her and Billy and the doorman had loaded it into the trunk of the Lexus.

  She was wearing an outfit suitable for traveling: slacks and a pullover and an amply cut, lightweight, long coat. Her hair was contained in a latter-day cloche.

  When she reached the curb she hesitated in order to adjust her dark glasses. The open, rear door of the Lexus awaited her. Her right hand searched and found the upper part of the car’s frame along the roofline before she ducked down and got in.

  Caselli and Fratino, Riccio’s two have-arounds, were parked across the avenue. When the Lexus pulled out they followed along behind. Crosstown to the FDR Drive and up to and over the Triborough and all the way to Kennedy to the TWA terminal.

  “Maybe she really ain’t going,” Fratino said.

  Caselli agreed.

  They watched Billy help get her luggage checked at the curb. A TWA courtesy attendant showed up with a wheelchair. She refused it. The attendant guided her. Through the automatic doors and on into the terminal.

  Caselli stayed with the car.

  Fratino got out and followed her. That she had checked some luggage didn’t prove anything. The luggage could make the trip without her.

  Fratino followed her to the security pass-through and on to the gate. The attendant remained with her. She was traveling first-class, could board then or later. She waited to be last, then she and the attendant entered the boarding ramp and were out of sight.

  Within a short while the attendant emerged and the doors to the boarding ramp were closed.

  Fratino was beginning to believe. He watched from a window as the 747 disconnected and pulled away. As it taxied out to the runway he thought he caught a glimpse of her in a window seat of the first-class section.

  Still, he waited, allowed more than enough time for a takeoff before going to the nearby bank of telephones to call Riccio.

  “The cunt’s gone,” he said.

  “What did you do to her?”

  “I didn’t do nothing to her. I’m at Kennedy. She got on a plane and it took off.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Chapter 28

  At that moment Mitch and Maddie were going seventy-five through the heavy night air, northbound on the Taconic State Parkway. The unrelenting growl of the Harley beneath them seemed strong and reassuring, as though declaring make way, I’m carrying my owners to safety.

  They arrived at Kinderhook and Uncle Straw’s house at half past eleven. The house was summer stuffy from having been shut up for several days, so, first thing, they went about opening windows to allow the slight breezes from the west across the Hudson to flow through.

  Maddie turned down the bedcovers in their usual room, second floor rear. Mitch, meanwhile, made some toasted cheese sandwiches and brought them up on a tray. Oven-warmed potato chips, two sweating bottles of St. Pauli Girl.

  “Want some music?” he asked.

  “Got some,” she replied, meaning the chorus of the pastoral night being performed by the tiny creatures moving about enormously brave deep among the grasses and perched higher upon the platforms of leaves.

  Mitch placed the tray upon the table by the window. He lighted an old glass oil lamp and switched off the electric ones, thinking it would lend to the mood. He was immediately reminded that lighting did not matter to Maddie. It had been a while since he’d made such an oversight.

  “I smell an oil lamp,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s one of the countless things I love about you,” she smiled, “you have a sense for the appropriate.”

  Somehow she knows when I need to be saved, Mitch thought. The oil lamp was smoking, blackening its glass chimney. He reduced the wick.

  They ate in silence. Mitch observed her. Actually, it was more an examination the way he employed his sighted advantage, took lengthy notices of her various features, appreciating them so much and focusing so intensely upon them that at times they seemed magnified. The left corner of her mouth, the perfect crease of it that made a faultless transition to her cheek. It alone momentarily occupied his entire visual field. As did the textures of her various parts. The space between her eyelid and brow. Her instrumental hands.

  He rode her finger up to her teeth. Caught a glimpse of the slick pink pillow of her tongue. His thought came with an ache. I won’t let anyone harm her, he vowed. They’ll have to go through me, over me.

  He loathed being reminded by his practical side they would probably do just that.

  He left the oil lamp burning when they went to bed. Its captive flame projected a shadowy ring upon the ceiling. Maddie snuggled into the cave of his arm and fell asleep quickly. He was left awake with his worry. Shirley was thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic. Riccio’s have-arounds had bought the impersonation. They wouldn’t be coming this night. This night was a stay; he could rest easy.

  Still, when he finally gave in to sleep he remained in the shallows.

  The birds woke him at dawn with their chirping. He got up, dressed quietly and went down to grind some coffee and set it to brewing. He stood there at the kitchen counter as though caught in a spell by the explosive hisses and drips of the automatic coffee maker. His mind felt dull and vulnerable, a heavy head. The glass pot seemed to be purposely slow to fill. He couldn’t wait for it, went out onto the covered rear porch, intending to go back inside shortly and pour himself a cup.

  His legs, however, as though they were independent and, at that moment, in charge, took him down the porch steps and across the wide rear lawn to a gated opening in the neatly masoned brick wall on the south. That gave to a buffer of mowed meadow and a piled rock wall beyond which lay the expansive area where the neighbor’s cows were permitted to pasture.

  The cows.

  The sight of them caused both his mind and body to brighten and snap into alignment for this day. They were mere black and whites in the distance, being let out; however there was no mistaking they might be other than cows.

  He had patience for them, could have stood and waited for all the time it would take for them to make their slow amble to him. A large herd. How many? Fifty at least, more.

  He strode right at them and soon was among them. They with only slight or no acknowledgment of him, the most meager curiosity. Their huge dark eyes. Their barreled girths and bony rumps. Tails switching out of habit.

  Mitch was lost in them, their simple worthiness. They were so removed from diamonds, emeralds and such, and above all, threat-less.

  He circled back to the piled rock wall and walked along beside it for quite a ways. He clim
bed up onto it and sighted across the West Meadow, that large gently undulating open area of crotch-high grass that he’d waded the weekend before last. No trace of his trek through it now. The grasses and the Queen Anne’s lace that his weight and motion had injured had fully recovered.

  He traversed the meadow by the old equipment barn where he’d taught Maddie to shoot, and entered the woods. The sun was not yet high enough to cause dapple. Patches where the branches did not umbrella still had some night wet on them. Offsprings of maples and oaks were submissive whips. The chatter of a squirrel. The metallic cry of a jay. The leaves of last year, superficially dry, damp a layer down, especially slippery on the inclines. And, underneath, the accumulated drop and rich decay of countless autumns, spongy.

  About a quarter of a mile in ledges broke the regularity of the woods. Blocks of nearly black granite, more massive than high. A modular series of those individualized by their varying heights and defining faults. Water, from what seemed their secret source, seeped from them, ran down their faces, preferred the grooves of their fractures. Mitch’s mouth was dry. He stood at the base of a ledge, leaned to it for his tongue to catch some of the trickle. He pressed his forehead against the rough wet. Closed his eyes and imagined his brain being bathed.

  With his face dripping and shirt-front soaked, he followed one of the runoff gullies down to the lower land. The marsh there was at its summer low, having receded and left all the clumps of skunk cabbage standing on their roots like columns. The water of the marsh was no more than a foot or two deep out in its middle. It appeared blacker because of that, its surface closer to the black silt of the bottom.

  Mitch found a fallen branch and used it to poke at the bottom. The branch went down into the silt easily, penetrated nearly a foot before it met resistance, and that was just there at the edge.

  The bass croaks of frogs. Their frantic leaps for underwater. Mitch knew, of course, that he was not out on some empty-stomach, early morning hike. It was reconnaissance, looking at the lay of the land in a way that he had never perceived it. A battleground. If Riccio’s have-arounds came, and chances were they eventually would, they’d outnumber him. He was desperately in need of allies. Possibly, he was finding some.