Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel)

by Christopher Finch

  “You see,” he said, “if Crystal had survived the explosion I’d have had to deal with her the same way. These kids had outlived their usefulness. They were out to save themselves.”

  “An act of treason…”

  “They were creatures of limited intelligence,” said Pedrosian, “unlike the lovely Lydia.”

  “And how come she wasn’t in the house when it blew?” I asked.

  “I asked myself the same thing,” said Pedrosian. “Seems she had said something about going out for a little air. She often does things like that. Sometimes she’s gone for hours.”

  Lydia’s response was a slight smile.

  “Yeah, sometimes she just stands around outside my window,” I said.

  “Oh, that part was just teasing,” said Pedrosian. “Do you remember we once got into a bit of a face-off at the Cedar Tavern, you and I?”

  I recalled that there had been something of a confrontation at the Cedar, back in the days when you could still find the abstract expressionists and the beats getting smashed out of their skulls there. I don’t remember what it was about, but I was with a girl that night and wasn’t about to take Pedrosian’s bait.

  “As I remember it,” he said, “you backed off, and ever since, I’ve had you figured as someone who could be easily unsettled, if you know what I mean? I thought that since we’d gotten you involved in this little game of ours—this very serious little game—that we might have some fun with you. All work and no play makes Jerry a dull boy. I hope you found it fun, too.”

  “But are you sure Lydia was always playing by your rules?” I said.

  That caused a flicker of concern, but the grin came back in an instant.

  “We’re the kind of people who make up the rules as we go along,” said Pedrosian. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

  Lydia just smiled.

  “Lydia and I have a very special, very tight relationship,” said Pedrosian.

  “Rooted in the fact that you fucked her mother,” I said, making it sound as brutish as I could. “Which one was better?”

  Lydia did not flinch.

  “You are so unbelievably fucking bourgeois,” said Pedrosian, the grin morphing for a moment into a sneer.

  “How come,” I asked, “a guy like you didn’t just tell Lydia about that little episode? I hear that she had to find out from a girl at school.”

  Now there was a flash of anger in Lydia’s eyes.

  “I like to play games,” said Pedrosian. “It was sweet to be able to think, ‘I did this to your mother, too, babe, and you don’t even know about it.’ But you’re right, Novalis. I let it play out too long. Lydia got on my case over that, but we’ve had all that out. She’s cool with it now, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  Her response was the look of someone who has just bitten into a sour grape.

  “It was a long time ago,” said Pedrosian. “The Kravitzes had just moved to the city, and Marion had found out that hubby had some very kinky habits. She had thought they were just the games he liked to play with her—creepy dressing-up games—but then she found out there was much more to it than that. She was looking for something to lift her spirits. She started to hang out on the art scene. I was the new young star in the firmament. Voila!”

  “Knock it off,” said Lydia, but Pedrosian paid no attention.

  “Imagine my surprise,” he continued, “when I paid my annual visit to that noble institution of higher learning, Teddington College, and discovered this delicious creature seated in lotus position on the floor of the auditorium. She seemed so innocent, as you must have noticed, but when I talked to some of my informants there, I found that, to the contrary, she was anything but. Boys, they told me, girls, too—at least one member of the faculty of each sex—and she’d only been there a couple of months. I was enchanted by her intuitive understanding of my agenda, though her tolerance for dialectic was low, and I would have to describe her as more of an instinctive anarchist. The Dadaists would have loved her. I could imagine her at the Café Voltaire in 1916, performing some obscene cabaret song for the amusement of Tristan Tzara, and the rest of that crowd.”

  “For God’s sake, shut up,” said Lydia. “You’re not teaching a course now.”

  “But that’s exactly what I am doing,” said Pedrosian. “I’m providing our friend here with an education. I admit we may have failed in our ultimate goals, this time, but our example will live on. We are part of history now, babe. We will be remembered for pointing the way to a stateless society. They’ll talk about us the way they talk now about John Reed and Emma Goldman. Mr. Novalis should be given the opportunity to understand what the future holds. Alive or dead, he can spread the word—let our complacent fellow Americans know they are not immune to the winds of change—and those winds will not be gentle. Let them understand that change will be brought about ruthlessly and violently, with terror striking from the skies and reaching into the cities and towns and every last Appalachian hamlet.”

  He was beginning to sound like Gary Cooper in some twisted inversion of a Frank Capra movie.

  “For God’s sake,” said Lydia, “let’s just show him and be done with it.”

  She turned and began to walk away from me, having indicated that I should follow. Pedrosian fell in behind me, the muzzle of the gun in the small of my back once again. I began to wonder who was in charge around here. We walked maybe fifty feet farther out onto the pier, to a spot where an old pine door lay flat on the deck. Lydia stopped there and gestured, with the pistol she was holding, that I should move the door. It wasn’t heavy and I was able to push it aside with my foot. Underneath was a large hole in the decking. Floating faceup in the putrid water below, one ankle tied to a piling, was the body of a man. Lydia’s father, my client, Gabriel Kravitz.

  “Shocked?” asked Lydia. “He stole my childhood. The bastard made me pregnant when I was still a kid. He was my father, so I thought I was supposed to forgive him, but I warned him never to lay a finger on Andrea. If he had listened to me, he might still be alive.”

  The words were chilling, but not half as chilling as the composure—serenity even—with which they were spoken. I remembered now how I had been struck by Kravitz’s reference to Andrea’s “nice little place in the Village.”

  “When was he killed?” I asked.

  It didn’t look as if he’d been in the water long, and I saw now that there was a jagged wound to his neck. I wondered who had killed him. For all her composure, I couldn’t picture Lydia slitting her own father’s throat.

  “Perhaps you’re getting the wrong picture,” said Lydia. “He was in the house this morning when it blew. His throat was ripped open by flying glass.”

  “It wouldn’t have been cool,” said Pedrosian, “if his body was found and identified—that would have given too much away. So, with help from Rick and Lanny, and taking advantage of the confusion—there was smoke and dust everywhere—I managed to get him into the truck we had parked outside. The explosions had cracked its windshield, but it was still drivable so Rick and Lanny brought the body here. This had been designated as a rendezvous if anything went wrong.”

  “But what was he doing in the house?” I asked.

  “He was delivering some Czechoslovakian plastic explosives I’d ordered him to get a hold of for me.”

  “You mean he was in on the whole thing?”

  “One of the flaws of capitalism,” said Pedrosian, “is that plutocrats who attain the level of oppression achieved by Gabe Kravitz are very vulnerable to blackmail. When I found out about his taste for jailbait, I knew I had the son of a bitch. It was wonderful to see the arrogance drain out of him when I confronted him. And it’s not just been Lydia and her beloved Andrea. There’s a fourteen-year-old on Staten Island whose mother has been receiving handsome payoffs. I could go on, but the point is that I needed explosives, he had access to them, and I was in a position to send him to the joint for a couple of lifetimes. As a dialectical materialist, I don’t believe in luck
or an afterlife. But, shit, somebody’s been looking after me—Trotsky, or Bakunin, or one of those beautiful muthafuckas.”

  “And why did you have Kravitz hire me to find Lydia?”

  “Because, whatever happened, it would provide him with a cover story when the shit hit the fan. Why would the guy pay someone to look for her if he fucking knew where she was? It was a beautiful idea. Not that I cared a shit about him, but if he’s okay, I’m okay.”

  “So, I’m hired,” I said. “Why bother to have someone try to push me under a train? Kind of counterproductive.”

  “I just wanted to scare the shit out of you.”

  “All part of the game?”

  “All part of the game. You’ll remember there was also someone on the spot to grab you before you fell. I think of everything.”

  “And when someone shot at me in the Bronx, outside your aunt Ida’s apartment?”

  Pedrosian laughed. A crazy man’s laugh.

  “Someone shot at you in the Bronx? So what’s new about that? It wasn’t anyone from my combat cell. And how is Aunt Ida, by the way?”

  “She hates your guts. And what about the call to the police about the man with a gun in my office?”

  “That was one time that Lydia’s little friend Andrea was useful. She was calling the message service to let Lydia know where she was. In one call, she told Lydia that she’d found something in her bag and had passed it on to you—she hoped that was okay. She didn’t say what it was, but it wasn’t hard to guess.”

  I was learning a lot, but it was getting me nowhere. I had to find some way of stirring things up.

  “I suppose you realize,” I said, “that Lydia wanted me to find her?”

  I was hoping that there was at least a scrap of truth in that statement. Pedrosian’s response was not what I expected.

  “Do you think I don’t know that? She’s been a very bad girl. She’s so hung up on that stupid little tart of hers—doesn’t want her to get hurt. I’ve been getting quite concerned about the lovely Lydia. She’s talented, but she lets her mind wander from the task at hand. That’s one reason I sent her to haunt you. I wanted to see how she would react to the temptation—and you, too, of course. I was pretty sure the two of you were together earlier today, and she confessed as much—but it doesn’t matter. She came back to Jerry. That’s what counts.”

  While he spoke, Lydia didn’t so much as blink.

  It was at this point that it struck me how, from Pedrosian’s point of view, this had all been a game—a dangerous one that had spun wildly out of control. He had been on a fantasy power trip for years, going to places like Teddington and seducing credulous girls with fairy tales about artistic uprisings and cultural revolution. It was how he got his rocks off, but there wasn’t much more to it than that. Pedrosian was no dedicated revolutionary. But then he had run up against Lydia, and the ante was upped. Lydia was not just the docile acolyte that I had at first assumed her to be. She was a tough cookie who, despite appearances, had had plenty of opportunity to work up a powerful head of anger, especially against her parents. This anger had played spectacularly into Pedrosian’s fantasies, especially when he found that Gabriel Kravitz was choice blackmail material and had access to the explosives that he so cherished for the harebrained conceit that was beginning to take shape in his head. Blow something up—the ultimate happening. That was what Pedrosian had had in mind, a stupendous performance piece, something that took place in the gap between art and life, as Bob Rauschenberg famously put it. The problem was that, as the plan took shape, real life had edged out art entirely. My guess was that, under the crazy exterior, Pedrosian was petrified. Maybe he had been hoping I’d find him before everything blew up in his face.

  That time had passed, and now mine was fast running out.

  A telephone rang, and I saw that, a few feet away, was the briefcase radiophone that I had seen before on Ladies Lane. Pedrosian walked over and picked it up.

  “Yes, Lanny…You did? Good work. That’s too bad…”

  I’d forgotten about Lanny.

  “Lanny says the pigs got Rick,” said Pedrosian, matter-of-factly, still holding the receiver. “There was a shoot-out in a bank. He died in a temple of capitalism, but he took at least one pig with him.”

  He spoke into the phone again.

  “What was that address? 133 Lampwick Street. Thanks for that, Lanny. No, no, leave her where she is. I’ll take care of this personally. See you in Vladivostok, comrade…”

  How the hell had Lanny found that out? 133 Lampwick Street was Janice’s address.

  “I see,” said Pedrosian, approaching me, his pistol waggling ominously, “that you’re familiar with that address. But then, of course, you used to live there. I’ve been there myself, a few times, but I could never remember the street number. Didn’t matter, though, because it has that bright blue front door. All I had to do was go to the bright blue door and ring the bell. You weren’t at home at the time, of course.”

  He turned to Lydia.

  “Did I ever tell you, sweetheart, I used to fuck Novalis’s old lady? She was a good fuck, too, as Alex here will attest, but he and Janice weren’t seeing eye to eye at the time. You know how these things creep into a marriage—or maybe you don’t—those little yens for pastures nouvelles.”

  He turned back to me.

  “That’s another reason I recommended you for the job, Novalis. After fucking your wife, I felt I owed you a favor. This morning, when things started to go wrong, it occurred to me that there was a good chance that our paths would cross, and I might need an insurance policy. What or who better than Janice, I thought. Great ass, by the way. So I had Lanny check her out, just in case I needed to—how shall I put it?—get a hold of her. Of course, I’d forgotten the house number, but luckily the door is still the same color. By the way, is that color approved by the community board? Well, Lanny just got around to checking. He rang the doorbell and found Janice was in. He said there was someone else there, too. Lydia’s little friend Andrea is hiding out there. Isn’t that convenient? I think it’s almost time to pay her a visit.”

  Lydia looked at me.

  “Is that true?”

  “He’s just bluffing,” I said.

  She looked back at Pedrosian, not sure who to believe. Pedrosian laughed and cracked me across the side of the head with the pistol. Lydia winced.

  “What I don’t get,” I said to her, “is why you came back to this creep when you know that yesterday he tried to run Andrea down in the street. You told me you couldn’t forgive him for that. And then his goon tried to drag her out of the movie theater. How could you let him get away with that?”

  Pedrosian hit me again, this time in the stomach, with his fist.

  Lydia pointed her gun at my head.

  “I had to come back to Jerry,” said Lydia, quietly, menacingly.

  Pedrosian laughed.

  “I just had to,” Lydia continued.

  “There. I told you,” sneered Pedrosian. “She can’t stay away from me.”

  “I had to come back,” said Lydia, “…to take care of business…”

  Without any show of emotion, she swung the gun away from me, toward Pedrosian, and pulled the trigger. The first slug caught Pedrosian smack in the groin. His eyes popped wide open, and he folded forward. She fired again, hitting him full in the face. He spat out blood and splinters of teeth, then collapsed onto the floor. Lydia swung the gun back toward me.

  “Get the keys out of his pocket then dump him into the river with my father.”

  “I don’t know if he’s dead,” I said.

  She fired two more shots into Pedrosian’s head. Gulls squawked and scattered.

  “Satisfied?” she asked.

  I fished the keys from Pedrosian’s pocket.

  Lydia stood over the body, staring down at the remains of the bloody face, then turned away and threw up.

  “Just leave him there,” she said. “Let’s go find Andrea.”

  EIGH
TEEN

  Lydia directed me to a black Dodge pickup truck with a cracked windshield, parked under the elevated highway. She didn’t bother to hide the little Ruger that was still trained on me, but no one was around to see it anyway.

  “You drive,” she said.

  We got in, and before I turned the key in the ignition I asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She smiled—the first real smile I had seen from her. It was the kind that can get a girl’s name onto a movie contract.

  “Do I really have to answer that question?” she said.

  “So what’s under the tarp in the back of the truck?” I asked.

  “Oh, that?” she said. “Try to avoid potholes.”

  I started the motor.

  “Do you want to know why I killed him?” she asked. “Well, there’s more than one reason. As soon as I knew that Jerry knew where Andrea was, I had to do it. I couldn’t bear the thought of him touching her, or even looking at her. He was always jealous of Andrea because he knew how tight we were. He thought of her as his rival. He would have taken his revenge on her in some horrible way, so I had to shoot him. But I would have killed him anyway. I’ve already had one man steal my childhood, and now this one stole my future. I guess in some ways it was my fault.”

  “That’s what they wanted you to believe,” I told her.

  I pulled out onto West Street and began to work my way crosstown.

  “Why did you stick with Pedrosian so long?” I asked.

  “For a while, I didn’t think anything was going to happen. We were talking about revolution, but it was fantasy. Jerry was having too much of a good time to risk everything by doing something that could blow up in his face. More fun to talk about it in the interludes between fucking. Then one night I made a big mistake. We’d dropped some acid, and as I was coming down from the trip I got weepy and told him what my father had done to me. At first he thought I was still tripping out, but then he realized what I had told him was for real. He already knew about my father’s demolition company and he’d fantasized about me somehow getting a hold of explosives. No way. But knowing what he now knew—and without telling me—he confronted my father and told him he would go to the papers with the story. My father said he would deny everything, but he was scared enough to agree to a meeting in Jerry’s studio. The studio has a sleeping loft and Jerry hid me up there, telling me that I should stay out of sight and I was going to witness something mind-blowing. I presumed it was one of Jerry’s games. When my father walked through the door, I thought I would die. Jerry laid it on the line for him, and he called his bluff, too. He had guessed that I probably wasn’t the only one. My father broke down. I can’t tell you what it was like for me to see this man—who had been the authority figure in my life, and who had abused me for years—groveling. I guess that’s why I hung in with Jerry as long as I did.”