Fifty-to-One

by Charles Ardai

  Tricia felt the leg pressed against hers in the back seat tense. Apparently Mitch didn’t much mind them knowing Bruno’s name but hadn’t meant for them to know his.

  “In the back,” Mitch barked. “And keep your mouth shut from now on.”

  “What?” Bruno said. “Why?”

  “You know what,” Mitch said. “And you know why.”

  “I don’t, Mitch—”

  Tricia felt the man next to her lean forward, heard a slap of metal against flesh. The car swerved a little. Bruno kept his mouth shut from then on.

  When the car drew to a stop, she was led out by the elbow, across a stretch of what felt like gravel underfoot, and through a door that could’ve used a bit of oil on its hinges. On the way up the stairs inside, Tricia counted 37, 38, 39 steps and she was suddenly reminded of a movie she’d seen when she was a kid, at the local picture palace in Aberdeen. It was an old one, made before she was born, but she’d enjoyed it, people chasing each other around with guns, all sorts of peril and adventure. It had all seemed like so much fun then, when all she had to do was sit in the dark and watch it happen to people up on the screen. She’d never thought someday she’d be marched up a flight of stairs at gunpoint herself.

  “Stop.” Mitch walked around in front of her and she heard a door opening. “Okay.” A hand at her shoulder pushed her forward. After she’d taken a few steps—onto a thick carpet, it felt like—he said, “You can take the bag off.”

  Tricia didn’t wait to be told twice. She dropped the sack on the ground and took in big gulps of air as she looked around the room they were in. It was a sort of a library, with bookshelves running from the floor to the ceiling all the way around. The spines of the books were mostly dark leather with gold lettering, though a few looked newer, with paper dust jackets, and on one table she saw a disorderly stack of familiar-looking paperbacks. The one on top was I Robbed the Mob! and she winced when she saw its condition. The cover was bent back, several pages folded down or torn. Next to it she saw Stella staring up at her from the front of The Crimson Cravat by Bill Grewer. Someone had circled Stella’s face in red ink.

  “Young lady,” a man’s voice said, and Tricia hunted about for its source. She found it finally in a doorway off to one side, where a fat man stood wiping his hands on a towel. He was wearing a scarlet vest, a watch chain stretched across it like the equator on a globe. His shirt looked like silk, his hair like the sleek black coat of a wet seal. He tossed the hand towel onto a chair and came forward.

  “Young lady,” he said again, “I hope you don’t think me rude, but let me tell you I am very disappointed in you. Very disappointed.”

  Tricia recognized him from the newspaper photos she’d seen, but only barely. The scar was there, the heavy brows—but his body had ballooned from years of luxurious shipboard living and his already swarthy skin was baked a deep, nut brown. He had on a medallion on a gold chain, glittering under his open shirt, and he had rings on three of his fingers. He looked like a portly pirate captain, she thought, lacking only the beard and eyepatch to complete the picture.

  “Mr. Nicolazzo,” Tricia said, “I’m sorry you—”

  “Nick,” he said. “Uncle Nick.”

  “Nick,” she said.

  “Uncle Nick,” he said. “It’s what everyone calls me.”

  “Okay, Uncle Nick. I’m sorry you—”

  “Don’t apologize. It makes you sound weak, like a little girl. Stand up for yourself. You’re going to steal from powerful men like me, you’ve got to face the music like a grown-up.”

  “I didn’t steal from you,” Tricia said.

  “Ah, that’s even worse than apologizing. Lying, and so poorly too. Come, now, child, do you think your Uncle Nick is a fool? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No, sir. Not at all.”

  “Stand up straight.”

  She straightened, a sense of annoyance and embarrassment mingling with fear. She could see, as he waved his hands about, the backwards letter N protruding from the ring on his right index finger.

  “I’m told I owe you something—Trixie, is it? I’m told audiences come to the Sun each night just to see you. Not to listen to Roberto’s wretched music, not to see the other dancer—to see you. You’ve made me a good deal of money, with your dancing. I have been encouraged by my manager at the Sun not to harm you physically. I’d be stabbing myself in the pocketbook, if you take my meaning.

  “But Trixie, you have been a bad girl. A very bad girl. You’ve cost me a good deal of money, and more than just money. There’s also the respect of my peers, you’ve cost me that as well—and that’s not the end of it either. As I believe you know, there was more than money in my safe the day of the break-in; and there is less than money in it now. This is not acceptable. What was taken I must have returned. If you refuse, I promise you, pocketbook or no pocketbook, you will suffer.”

  “Mr. Nic—” she started, but he raised a warning finger. “Uncle Nick. I don’t know who robbed you. Honest, I don’t know. I didn’t even know till today that you had been robbed.”

  “Your friend Stella told me otherwise. Are you calling her a liar?”

  “Absolutely,” Tricia said. “But it’s hardly her fault. I mean, with what you were doing to her.”

  “What I was doing? What I was doing?” He looked around incredulously, seeking a bit of justice in an unjust world. “My nightclub gets broken into and robbed, and I’m the one that’s doing wrong? Madonn’.”

  “You branded her on the cheek!”

  “I let her off easy,” he said. “Do not expect me to do the same for you.”

  “What do you want me to say? I can’t tell you something I don’t know.”

  “Very simple,” Nicolazzo said. “Who was it? Which of my men seduced you into helping him rob me, and then had the palle to write a book about it? You’ll notice I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt—I am assuming you didn’t seduce him into doing it.”

  “Nobody seduced anyone,” Tricia said. “I had nothing to do with the robbery. Nothing.”

  He picked up the paperback, waved it at her. “But somebody told you this story.”

  “No,” Tricia said. “I just made it up—all of it, out of my imagination. None of it really happened. None of it was supposed to, anyway.”

  “But it did happen,” Nicolazzo said. “Just the way it’s described in here: the broken window, the chiseled doorknob, the sawn-open door, the missing cart. And the empty safe. For heaven’s sake, child, if you made it all up, how could you possibly know the combination to my safe?”

  “You mean it was right?” Tricia said, and he glared at her. “I just guessed! I’d read the Daily News article about your sister and her daughters and the flowers every week for the one who died, and I needed a combination for the safe, and I just thought, well, what would I choose if I were him?”

  “That’s preposterous,” Nicolazzo said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, concocting such an absurd story.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  He waved a hand in Mitch’s direction. “Bring one of them up here,” he said. Then to Tricia: “We will see how long you continue to lie when the life of someone you care about is at stake.”

  Mitch left the room. She heard him stomp down the stairs, then the creak of the door, then a few minutes later two sets of footsteps returning. When they reached the top she expected to see Erin or Charley come marching out, hands raised, but instead it was Roberto Monge, his wrists tied behind his back, stumbling as Mitch prodded him with his gun.

  “Ah, Roberto,” Nicolazzo said, patting the bandleader on the side of his face. “Pretty soon they’ll be waiting for you at the club. For both of you. What will they do when you don’t show up? Elect another bandleader? Maybe Joey with the clarinet? Or Hugo with the drums?”

  Monge didn’t reply. His skin was pale and Tricia saw sweat beading at his hairline. His eyes kept darting over to her, then back at Nicolazzo.

  “Robbie. R
obbie. Did you do this thing to me? You and your little dancer?”

  “No—no, Uncle Nick,” Monge said. His voice was shaking. “She is nothing to me, this one. You know I love my wife.”

  “Your wife,” Nicolazzo said. “She was my niece before she was your wife, Robbie. And maybe you love her, maybe not, but your little minchia, she likes to wander, no? Maybe I should get a knife, cut her off, so she can wander far away?”

  Monge was shaking his head. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t have to,” Nicolazzo said, “but maybe I should.”

  “I haven’t touched another woman in three years, I swear it!”

  But Nicolazzo had already turned his attention back to Tricia. “Is this the one? Did you devise this robbery with him?”

  “I barely even know him,” Tricia said. “I do a dance number twice a night for his band, that’s it.”

  “If that’s so,” Nicolazzo said, reaching into his pants pocket and drawing out a bit of polished black wood with metal caps at either end, “you won’t mind seeing him bleed a little bit.” He pressed one of the studs along its length and a spring-loaded stiletto blade shot out.

  “Of course I mind,” Tricia said. “You can’t do that.”

  “I can’t? Ah, but you know I can, I see it in your eyes. Good girl. I make you a deal: You tell me who robbed me and if it’s not him, I let him go.”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  Mitch gripped Monge by the elbows and Nicolazzo drew the blade lightly against his chin. A thin line of blood formed.

  “Stop it!” Tricia said.

  “Tell me who did it,” Nicolazzo said, “and I’ll stop.”

  “All right,” Tricia said desperately. She pointed at Mitch. “He did it. Mitch did. With Bruno. They did it together. It was them. I didn’t want to tell you with him in the room, but it was the two of them.”

  “Boss, it’s not true—” Mitch said.

  “Of course not,” Nicolazzo told him. To Tricia he said, “Enough. I lose patience. You’ll tell me what I want to know or say goodbye to your boyfriend here.” He nicked Robbie again, beneath the ear this time.

  “He’s not my boyfriend!”

  “Who robbed me?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “You don’t believe I will do it,” Nicolazzo said. “It’s too bad. Next time you will.” He looked in the doomed man’s eyes. “Stronzo. I’ve wanted to do this since the wedding.” And switching to an overhand grip, he buried the blade in Monge’s chest.

  “No,” Tricia shouted, and ran to him, but Nicolazzo grabbed her, his arms like steel bands around her chest, his bulk an impassable obstacle. Mitch let Monge’s body down slowly to the floor, where his blood spilled onto a circular throw rug that almost looked as if it had been put there for the purpose of catching it. He pulled the knife out of Monge’s shuddering chest, wiped it off with a handkerchief, and made it disappear inside his jacket.

  “Now we send you down to the cellar, to think,” Nicolazzo said, his breath hot against her face. “You think carefully for your old Uncle, eh? You come back with answers, my dear, or more of your friends will die. You don’t want that, do you?”

  Tricia felt her stomach heave. How had everything gone so terribly wrong?

  Nicolazzo pushed her into Mitch’s arms. “Take her downstairs,” he said. “Put her in with the boxer, not with Borden or the other girl. I don’t want them hatching any schemes together.” He wiped his palms against the seat of his pants. “Then come back and—” he waved a hand at his employee’s body, at the bloody rug “—clean this up.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mitch said.

  Nicolazzo raised a finger and wagged it in stern correction. “What’s this ‘sir’?” he said. “Yes, Uncle.”

  13.

  The Colorado Kid

  The boxer, Tricia thought as Mitch led her downstairs, the burlap sack over her head once more. That’s what he’d said: Put her in with the boxer. It wouldn’t be Stella—it had to be the other one, this Colleen King. The Colorado Kid. Another innocent, dragged into this for no reason. Unless, of course—

  Unless she was the one who had robbed the place. Unless she’d pumped Stella for information about the book and decided to carry out the heist she’d heard described. But how could that be? Anyone who thought the book was a true story would have thought the robbery had already taken place—and anyone who thought it was fiction would have no reason to think the plan would actually work. Especially the combination to the safe. Who would risk everything on the remote possibility that a made-up combination might just possibly be correct? Of course, it apparently had been. But no one could have counted on that. And you don’t risk your life on a guess.

  Tricia heard a key going into a lock and the cylinder turning, then the hammer of a gun being drawn back. “Miss King,” Mitch called out, “I’m coming in. I’m bringing you a roommate. I’ve also got a gun. If you’re not at least five feet away when I open this door, I’ll shoot you dead, do we understand each other?”

  A woman’s voice came through the door: “Yes.”

  “All right. Just step back, keep your distance, and no one’ll get hurt.” Tricia heard the door swing open. “That’s good, like that. With your hands up, please.”

  From the other end of the room, the woman said something that was a little hard for Tricia to make out, the sound muffled by the sack. It sounded like, “Who is she?”

  “Girl named Trixie,” Mitch said. “No one you know. She’s a friend of your sparring partner.” He touched Tricia on the shoulder. “You can take the bag off when you hear the door close.”

  Tricia waited till she heard the latch click into place, then turned and ran to the door, tearing off the bag as she went. She tried the knob. Already locked. She rattled it, tugged at it, rammed the door with her shoulder. Nothing.

  “Don’t bother,” the other woman said, from behind her. “I’ve tried, and I’m bigger than you are.” The voice was improbably familiar, and when, after a second, she realized why, Tricia’s blood ran cold. It couldn’t be.

  Tricia turned to face her.

  They stared at each other, dumbstruck. The other woman (the Colorado Kid? why not Nebraska, at least?) stood up from the bunk where she’d been sitting, came forward into the light. “Patty?” she said.

  “Cory?” Tricia said.

  14.

  The Girl With the Long Green Heart

  Coral Heverstadt, Tricia’s older sister, had been born the year before Alfred Hitchcock made his movie The 39 Steps and been gone by the time Tricia found herself sitting in the dark in the Aberdeen Cinerama watching it. She’d lasted at home two years longer than Tricia, moving out the day of her twentieth birthday rather than her eighteenth. She’d been better made for rural life, with her wide, powerful legs and muscular frame. She could push a loaded barrow through mud half a foot deep or lift a hundred-pound bag of feed, if not barehanded then with the assistance only of a pair of heavy work gloves, and so had found work reliably on the farms on the outskirts of town. Tricia, at fourteen, still child-small and fencerailthin, had looked up to her with an admiration bordering on awe.

  Her odd jobs had meant Coral always had some cash in her pocket—not much, perhaps, but enough to treat her kid sister to lunch or a movie or a treat from the drugstore, with its spinning wire racks of brightly colored novels. She’d enjoyed the feel of folding money under her fingers, the freedom it imparted—to do what she wanted, to go where she wanted. But the amount you could make for pushing barrows and lifting feed bags was limited. A few dollars here, a few there. She wanted more. And so she began a quest for more remunerative employment, finding work as a waitress, a bar hostess, a day-shift worker at the 3M plant running the machine that wound the Scotch tape onto those little spools. In each of these roles, she confided to Tricia as they lay in their beds at night in the room they shared, she found herself the center of a certain amount of attention—male attention, to put a finer point on it.
Coral took after their mother and was big all over, not just her muscles but her feminine parts, and the local farmboys and mill workers and 3M middle managers gazed at her appreciatively as she approached and longingly as she passed.

  These were men with wives at home and families, but they also had money in the bank—not the farmboys so much, but the middle managers for sure—and not just the drugstore-treat variety either. They had dough, in the vernacular of the paperback novels Tricia devoured so eagerly—cabbage, lettuce, mazuma, the long green. And they spent it on her happily. They took her out for meals, bought her gifts, once even paid for an overnight business trip to Sioux Falls. And in return they expected, well...to hear Coral tell it, never anything worse than a kiss or a hug, maybe gave her a pinch now and then, but she sternly told them off if they made any advances less proper than that. Anyway, that’s what she told her sister at the time, and it was the picture she continued to paint of her experiences in her letters back home after she left the Great Prairie for the Big Apple. She was a good girl, if occasionally put upon by a certain predatory type of male, and well equipped to handle herself, thank you very much.

  So when, precisely, had she become a lady boxer?

  Coral sank back onto the thinly padded bunk beside her sister and told the rest of the story.

  Some of the pinches had actually been pokes, and not all of them with a finger, either; at age twenty-one, on her own in New York City, she’d found herself in the family way, and she could only conceal her growing belly beneath the cigarette tray she wore at her job for so long. They fired her when they found out—what else could she expect?—and she found herself struggling at once both with morning sickness and a fast-declining balance in her bank account.

  So she went to the man who’d knocked her up—no use for nicer language than that, it’s what he’d done—and told him she’d pay a visit to his fiancée, the daughter of a powerful and unforgiving man, if he didn’t restock her account on the double and keep it filled for the duration. It wasn’t blackmail, she felt; it was just collecting what she was due. A man should pay for his own child.