“Does nothing for me,” she complained.
“Put on something else, some jeans or something.”
She pretended not to hear. She was wearing the Beretta in its shoulder rig. Extra clips in her most reachable upper pockets. Mitch had on the Glock. The shotgun was propped close at hand. Mitch had discovered a sling for it in the back of a drawer of Straw’s gun cabinet.
So, there they sat. Low light coming from the third-floor hallway. The dormer window entirely open. Mitch close to the sill of it, Maddie across from him.
To vary and temper and help pass the wait, she played the guitar. Started out with some Wes Montgomery and without missing a pick or strum, went to the third movement, Recitativo, of Mompou’s Compostelana Suite, and, from that, some vigorous Van Halen. Then on to Mitch’s favorite favorite, Spanish Romances. She gave him a lengthy dose of the latter, repeated its melodic theme numerous times.
Normally the piece evoked within Mitch a sort of sensuous sway, but this time it hollowed his upper chest and lumped his throat and Maddie, with her finely honed sentience, stopped playing abruptly, laid the guitar aside and told him: “Look at it this way, precious, not everyone gets a chance to accumulate such exciting recollections for their recliner chair years.”
She went down to the kitchen and returned with a silver tablespoon and a pint carton of ice cream. Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. She resumed her place opposite Mitch on the comforter and dug into it. She extended the first generous spoonful. Mitch brought his mouth to it. The rich, frivolous treat hitched him up a couple of minor notches.
“Two for you, one for me,” she said, as though it should apply to all things, then thought to add: “Except, of course, when it comes to comes.” She held out another helping. Within ten minutes she was noisily scraping the sides and bottom of the cardboard carton, licking the spoon.
She saw to Mitch’s pillows. Plumped and re-situated them behind his back and shoulders. That done, she stretched out face up, perpendicular to him with her head resting on his thigh. The house a silent container of possessions. Squirrel claws scuttling the rain gutter. The night laying siege beyond the sill.
“Tell me one,” Maddie said.
“You’ve heard them all.”
“Surely not all.”
“I’d have to make one up.”
“Have you ever?”
“No.”
“Probably have, a fibber like you.”
“I could rehash an old one, if you’d settle for that,” he told her. “A real old one that you may have forgotten by now.”
“Save me.”
“Okay then, you’ll just have to accept that as of now I’m all out.”
“Don’t give me that, you with your extravagant repertoire. Are you going to deprive me of your riches?”
My riches, Mitch thought. Well, yes, perhaps that was what they were, all those mainly nefarious West 47 incidents and special little melodramas accumulated firsthand over the years, along with the headful of others of the same ilk he’d acquired second- or third-hand or more. She was demanding a fresh one and he doubted he could come up with it, his frame of mind being what it was. Her motive was obviously well-intentioned. She was trying to normalize things. He should cooperate. However, he felt in need of some good quiet, to just be, be there with her, to observe her and, again, as he had so often, marvel that she existed. And that she loved him. And he loved her. And they were attached. Not attached in the ordinary sense, not merely together for convenience or distraction or to bodyfill the chasm of human separateness, but somehow, miraculously, spiritually overlapped, Mitch felt.
The trouble was if he reflected upon such romantic assets they would soon remind him that they were what he stood to lose, and, as immediate as a shift of thought he would be overcome by gloomy prospect, his and Maddie’s slim to no chance against the onslaught of Riccio’s heartless have-arounds.
Maddie wasn’t going to have any such negative wallowing if she could help it. She did a decisive little grunt. “If you put your mind to it you could,” she said.
“Could what?”
“Find them. As resourceful as you are. It’s one of the zillion things I adore about you, your resourcefulness. Granted it’s not foremost. There are any number of more pleasurable aspects ahead of it, but it’s right up there.”
Mitch did some silence.
Maddie answered it. “Those emeralds.”
“Which emeralds?” Mitch joked, going along with her but thinking those fucking emeralds. They were entirely to blame. Had it not been for those fucking emeralds he’d now have little more to cope with than his usual problems, like making ends meet and deciding each night how to get out of having dinner at home. As for recovering those emeralds and being the recipient of twenty-five extra large, forget it. Nothing mattered but survival.
“How much do you buy that story the Iranian what’s-his-name Djam told us?” Maddie asked.
“What part?”
“The pious poet who gazed through the emeralds and got back his eyesight.”
“Things like that are usually bullshit.”
“Usually?”
“Maybe not always,” Mitch conceded.
“Anyway, if you did recover those emeralds I probably wouldn’t give them a try.”
Which Mitch knowingly interpreted to mean she might. He imagined her bringing the emeralds up to her eyes. Holding them there. The verdancy of paradise. When she took them away, instantaneous vision! And he would be the very first thing she would see. That old notion.
“Of course,” she went on, “I might if you insisted on it. Would you insist?”
Test question, Mitch thought. How not to fail it? It really asked had her handicap become a burden on him? Had he wearied of her dependence?
At times, not frequently, just every now and then, she had brought up the possibility of regaining her sight. What it would mean to them. It always started out as something she desired and ended up as something she’d just as soon would never happen. She was, she declared, quite comfortable with her condition, in fact, she probably preferred it. While it made her vulnerable it also provided protection of a sort, kept her from having to directly witness sleaze and suffering, the apathy and deliberate madnesses of these times.
Would he insist that, given the opportunity, she have a go with those wonder-working emeralds? He decided against a yes or no, told her: “I wouldn’t push it.”
She yawned genuinely. The yawn turned into an exaggerated grimace. She sat up and drooped her head. “I’ve a crook in my neck,” she said with only slight complaint. She rotated her head twice counterclockwise and twice the other way and that seemed to do the trick. She raised her left shoulder and, as though she had perfect articulate vision, vamped at Mitch over it. “Jimmy Comforti,” she said.
“What about him?”
“Tell me one of those.”
“You’re weird, know that?”
“Not any more so than you.”
“You’ve got a crook in your head.”
“Always,” she admitted. “You don’t I suppose. Come on precious, stop being stingy, give a girl a fix.”
“What if I refuse?”
“You won’t.”
Mitch was hooked and being pulled up to her lighter level. He did a skeptical grunt.
“Refusal,” she warned, “would call for retribution. I’d have to get back at you some suitable punitive way.”
“Such as?”
She hardly gave it a thought. “Like never again giving you a massage and so forth while wearing a pair of my antelope skin gloves.”
“I don’t believe never.”
“You’d go begging,” she vowed, “believe me.”
“You really are weird.”
“Everything you say is true,” she arched.
How fortunate he’d been, he thought. He had other riches. All the sensational, shame-free-loving times he’d shared with her. Maybe, in a way, it was beyond reasonableness to expect a whole, l
ong life span of it. They’d already had far more than most.
Maddie lay back, returned her head to his thigh and waited while Mitch sorted through his mental Comforti file for one he possibly hadn’t told her. From the numerous Comforti exploits both Mitch and Hurley had fed her over the years she more or less enjoyed the illusion that, though she’d never met Comforti, he was a personal acquaintance.
Actually, not even those few upscale West 47 dealers who were the favored buyers of Comforti’s pricey swag knew the man well. He was seldom seen on the street, never walked it just to walk it, never socialized along it. When, for some unavoidable reason, he showed up on West 47 it was like the sighting of some colorful rare bird and like such a bird he was quickly gone. As a rule, to do business with him a dealer had to venture out of the district to wherever Comforti stipulated, which might be anywhere from the rear seat of a hired limo to a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.
A swift he was, however no one’s swift but his own. Early on, some twenty years ago, he had belonged to a crew, but before he was nineteen he’d outclassed it and defected. He didn’t need any such protection or direction. He didn’t have anyone who’d need caring for while he did time. He also didn’t get enough kick out of doing houses. They were too hit or miss. The city, on the other hand, was a surer thing, a veritable treasure trove. All one had to do was learn how to get to it.
Comforti hung around the entrances and lobbies of the better hotels. Watching the high-grade goods come and go on the necks, ears, wrists and fingers of the visiting well-offs. He took particular notice of how many failed to deposit their valuables into the hotel’s vault when they came in late at night all high and happy or tired or anxious to get up to their rooms for some improved, away-from-home sex.
Hotels became Comforti’s specialty. Within a year he possessed the master passkey of every major hotel in Manhattan. It was so easy. Before long he progressed from hotel rooms to hotel vaults. The first vault he did encouraged such focus. A hotel on upper Park at three in the morning. Comforti and another guy went in, frightened the resistance out of the night clerks and other staff. Got to the strongboxes with a prybar. It was so easy. The first box they forced open contained two hundred thousand in hundreds. The second and third yielded five hundred thousand in jewels. It went like that, so easy. They gathered up ten minutes’ worth, the contents of fourteen strongboxes. Went out the front in no hurry.
Got away with it.
He didn’t always, of course. He served some three to fives but the way he accounted life and its pleasures his scores had him way ahead. Glamorous scores, headline scores, seemingly impossible, audacious scores. So many that eventually the police had him come in and, as a favor to them, clear away the unsolved jewelry theft cases from their books. In return one hundred percent immunity. While he was at it, as a gesture of professional largesse, he admitted responsibility for a few sizeable scores he’d had nothing to do with, thus absolving some other swifts he probably didn’t even know.
The Jimmy Comforti episode Mitch chose to tell Maddie now was one that had taken place about four years back. It began when Comforti was released from Attica state prison. A Thursday. He arrived in the city and went directly to the Hotel Carlyle.
He had paid a porter of that hotel two hundred a month, half in advance, to hold three pieces of very presentable luggage down in the guest’s storage room. The luggage was sent up to the suite Comforti had reserved from Attica using his platinum American Express. One of the Carlyle’s high-priced, high-up suites with an ascendant southerly view. Bouquet of Casablanca lilies. Huge black grapes swagged from a silver salver of fresh fruit. Fax machine, five telephones including one on the wall next to the commode.
The liberated Comforti immediately set about to liberate his belongings. He summoned the valet on duty to have some pressing done and within a half hour was approving of his appearance in a full-length mirror. He hadn’t gained or lost a pound or inch while in the joint all those months, so his suits and shirts were still perfect fits. Nothing about him gave him away as an ex-convict, nor would anyone guess that his tasteful guise and easy countenance concealed a first-class criminal mind. For all the world he looked like a respectable civilian, in town for a few days to take care of some little legitimate matter, and perhaps to visit his tailor.
He sat slouched in one of the sofa chairs and brought the nearest telephone to rest on his crotch. His first call was to a certain West 47th dealer named Wattenberg who middled upscale swag behind a straight reputation. Wattenberg was more than pleased to hear from Comforti again. He agreed to the meeting Comforti arbitrarily set much later that night.
Comforti’s second call was to a certain young woman he’d never been with. He’d met her just before he’d gone inside and had held her in mind all the while, so she’d become somewhat essential. The given name she’d given herself was Laura. The two family names she’d chosen to go with it were hyphenated.
The thing about this young woman Laura that appealed to Comforti was her well-bred looks and mien, and the fact that she had enough imagination to carry off that impression most of the time.
When it came to women Comforti’s preference was unusually limited. No bimbos or go-go’s for him. To qualify for his ardent attention a woman had to at least convincingly seem as though she might have had some years at Smith, Wellesley or the like, possess a desperate sort of wildness to compensate for being quickly bored with everything, and whose family could possibly have an engraved brass nameplate on a reserved pew at St. James’s Episcopal.
Comforti had never bedded the genuine article. However, there was a type of young woman scattered in the social mélange of Manhattan who looked pretty much the part, who had the requisite features, figure and bones, acquired taste and such, as well as the appropriate range of high-strung attitude. Usually these young women were aware of their assets, relied on them, placed hope in them. Believing that because of them there’d come a day, a just reckoning, when they’d no longer need to receptionist or sales clerk. This was the wellspring from which Comforti drew. What made this young woman Laura so vital to him. There’d be others like her when he got back into circulation; however, at the moment, she was it.
Maddie interrupted with a scoff. “How could you possibly know what went on inside Comforti’s head? You’re embroidering, aren’t you?”
“I’m telling it the way it was told to me,” Mitch said.
“You’re not embroidering it for my sake?”
“Not much.”
“How much is not much?”
“Shall I go on?”
Maddie re-settled. “Please do.”
After the Laura phone call Comforti went out and down Madison a short ways to a branch of a major bank where he kept a safety deposit box. He had four boxes at four different branches in which he stored what he called his “sleeping beauties.” These were swag goods that he’d chosen to not sell. A reserve of some of the finer pieces. He awakened two, so to speak, put them to pocket and returned to the Carlyle.
Wattenberg showed up at the appointed hour. Three in the morning. Normally he was in bed by eleven but the prospect of huge gain had him high. A stocky sort with a weak, nearly indistinguishable chin and a pate that looked as though it had been buffed. He said the routine opening lines. No mention of prison. Nice to see, looking good, all that. It was like Comforti had been away on a long trip. Wattenberg declined a drink and accepted one of the chairs opposite the sofa but didn’t sit back in it.
Comforti took the sofa. He wasn’t merely relaxed. His limbs felt softly, delicately attached to his torso, his edges blunted. He was wearing a suit but nothing else. Bare chest, bare feet.
The door to the bedroom was partially open. A bright light on in there. A section of the used bed was visible, a bare part of woman upon it. Wattenberg couldn’t help but notice. He got momentarily caught on that view, then self-consciously looked anywhere else. He tried to sit back but couldn’t remain back, seemed to not know what to do with
his hands.
Comforti noticed Wattenberg’s abruptly increased unease, a giveaway of erotic envy. That amused him, caused him to put off for a moment his bringing the bracelet out from his jacket pocket. He placed it on the low sofa table.
Wattenberg took up the bracelet and sighted it with his loupe. First, a cursory all-over look, then a longer, thorough examination of its individual stones.
Eight sugarloaf-shaped cabochon sapphires spaced by eight emerald-cut diamonds, mounted in platinum. It was signed Cartier.
Wattenberg asked what was the aggregate weight of the sapphires and Comforti told him without hesitation it was seventy-four carats. Comforti anticipated what Wattenberg’s next question would be, and said the total carat weight of the diamonds was a few points less than twenty-six.
Wattenberg remarked that the bracelet was a pleasant piece. An obvious understatement. He hopefully complimented the sapphires by saying they were nice number-one Burmas.
Comforti knew the game, stated that the sapphires were Kashmir. Which made them much rarer and five or six times more precious.
Wattenberg took another lengthy look and pretended only now to recognize the sapphires’ Kashmir characteristics.
It was at that point the young woman Laura came from the bedroom. In a full-length bias-cut nightgown of gray silk charmeuse. Bare on top. The thinnest possible straps. She was possibly over twenty-five but not thirty, a fine-boned, slender brunette with every good reason to be confident of her body. There was an attractive disorder about her. Without acknowledging Wattenberg or even Comforti she went directly to the room service cart that was off to one side. Helped herself to a leftover toastpoint.
Wattenberg noticed a tiny price tag discreetly attached to the rear hem of her nightgown by a tiny gold safety pin. He had a momentary battle with distraction, particularly the way the silk charmeuse fabric declared her gorgeous buttocks.
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