Angel Face

by Stephen Solomita

  ‘I hear ya.’ Bobby does hear Paulie, especially the part about our guy. Now he’ll have to beg when what he’d like to do is yank this fuckin’ gimp out of his wheelchair and put a knife to his eyeball. ‘What I need, Paulie, is a heads-up. I can’t give this guy the first move. I mean, he killed Ricky in Ricky’s own house, so now I gotta worry every time I come home about what’s on the other side of the door.’

  ‘Or what’s comin’ through the door while you’re asleep.’ Paulie raises a hand, palm out. ‘But the thing is, my job, as a middleman, is to protect you and him both.’

  ‘And that means you didn’t tell him, right? About me?’

  Paulie’s answer is prompt, since he’s already anticipated the question. Plus, Freddy’s waiting in the kitchen with a shotgun. ‘Most likely this is comin’ from the whore. Or maybe our guy did his homework. What’s certain is that he’s involved with the whore some kinda way. He was probably comin’ by for a quick hump when he ran into the Blade and Ruby.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ Bobby Ditto rubs his fingers over his chin. He’s a heavily bearded man, his five o’clock shadow commonly visible at ten in the morning. ‘Look, our guy, he’s good, right? Or else you wouldn’t use him.’

  ‘He’s the best.’

  ‘OK, he’s the best. But from what you said, he’s not connected to our thing.’

  ‘Also true.’

  Bobby takes a thick envelope from the pocket of his sport jacket and drops it in Paulie Margarine’s lap. ‘I need some help here, Paulie. Otherwise, I’m not gonna see him comin’.’ He gestures toward the envelope. ‘There’s five grand in there.’

  ‘You want me to sell out? That’s what you’re askin’?’

  ‘It’s our thing, our cosa nostra, not his.’

  There’s an unspoken threat here, one that Paulie’s quick to recognize. Paulie was present at Bobby Ditto’s christening. Back in the day, he and Bobby’s father worked together on deals. So it’s not a hard choice for Paulie, since refusing a favor of this kind might easily result in a war.

  ‘You know what’s gonna happen if our guy puts two and two together?’ Paulie answers his own question. ‘He’s gonna come after me and Freddy. That’s a lotta risk. Plus, I don’t really know all that much about him. In fact, I hardly know anything about him. So, be warned in advance. You might be puttin’ out your dough for nothin’.’

  ‘Hey, you gotta have a way to get in touch with him.’

  ‘Yeah, by email, which I send off to a website in Belarus.’

  ‘Bela who?’

  ‘It’s a little country near Russia.’

  ‘And that’s where he lives?’

  ‘No, Bobby, it’s not where he lives, which is the whole point I’m tryin’ to make.’ Paulie holds the envelope between bony fingers. ‘You want, I’ll put this in my pocket. You wanna take it back, no hard feelings.’

  ‘Just tell me, Paulie. I got no choice here.’

  ‘He’s an American who goes by the name of Carter, which could be his first or his last name. He was a mercenary at some point and he was involved with a British officer named Montgomery Thorpe. That’s it … no wait. You remember a couple years back when I lost a few soldiers?’

  ‘Yeah, you had a problem with some kinda raghead gang, right?’

  ‘Uh-uh. It had nothing to do with them. What happened to me was Carter, all by himself. So if I was in your shoes, Bobby, what I’d do is take a vacation.’

  TEN

  Carter’s feeling pretty good about the surveillance he and Angel conduct. The rain-speckled windshield conceals their presence in the back seat of the van, while the spatter of rain on the van’s roof provides enough white noise to cover their conversation. They could stay here all day without being noticed. Around and behind them, the block is entirely residential, the foot traffic light. Before them, on the far side of the street, a six-story apartment building squats on a corner lot, its double-glass lobby doors in full view. The building is just ornate enough, with its scroll-and-bracket lintels, to have a name – Wilson Arms – set in stone above the doors. According to Angel Tamanaka, there’s a buried treasure somewhere inside.

  Carter’s not entirely convinced. They’d wandered through the neighborhood for twenty minutes before they came upon the building, passing a dozen similar apartment houses, though none situated on a corner. The hill, on the other hand, the one Angel first mentioned, is where it should be, just two blocks away. Covered with trees and brush, and at least a hundred feet high, it’s steep enough to pass for a cliff.

  The hill is only a small piece of the bedrock that first emerges, like the spine of a half-buried fossil, at 72nd Street on the West Side of Manhattan. This far north, it separates the Latino-dominated neighborhood they’re in, Kingsbridge, from the more affluent neighborhood of Scarsdale, site of Ricky Ditto’s home. Angel and Ricky might easily have passed this corner on the way to his assassination.

  ‘Do you have a goal?’ Angel asks without warning. ‘I mean, like a life plan?’

  Carter doesn’t reply immediately. The question feels like an ambush and he can’t remember the last time he spoke about his personal life. Carter’s the man nobody knows, the invisible man, a shadow in a city of shadows. Still, it’s already a time of firsts because now there’s someone on the planet, besides Paulie Margarine, who knows what he does for a living. Or used to do.

  ‘I have a today plan,’ he finally says, ‘and a tomorrow plan.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Not me. And this could be the end of part one.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Capital accumulation. Remember, unless you have some kind of special talent, which I don’t, it takes money to make money.’

  ‘What about your looks?’

  ‘OK, then my appearance is my only gift and I intend to make the best of it. You play the hand you’re dealt, right? If you’re smart?’

  Carter lays his hands on the seat-back in front of him. It’s all he can do to keep them off Angel’s legs. He’s convinced her to forego make-up and dress down, but even in a shapeless K-Mart skirt and blouse, she’s still conspicuous.

  ‘What about part two? What are you going to do with all that capital?’

  ‘It’s a long story, but if you want to hear it …’

  ‘We have plenty of time.’

  Carter settles back, remembering night watches in the Afghan deserts and Congo rain forests, nights when his fellow soldiers whispered their tales into the darkness. Over time, he’d come to relish the stories and the intimate setting, nobody going anywhere soon. On moonless nights in Afghanistan, the stars seemed inches above his head. In Africa, the dark was filled with the furtive sounds of nocturnal animals that scurried through the trees or prowled the jungle floor. Did the snapping of a twig signal the passing of a leopard? Or the approach of an enemy?

  ‘How long do you plan to be here?’ Angel asks.

  ‘A couple of hours, maybe more.’ He smiles when Angel lays her hand on his shoulder, the gesture as casual as it is calculating. ‘Unless you think we should go knocking on doors. “Excuse me, but do you happen to have hundreds of thousands of dollars buried under the floorboards?”’

  Angel props her knees against the top of the seat-back and her skirt slips to mid-thigh. ‘OK, so I began to put my life plan together when I first came to New York. I was barely eighteen and I was staying with my cousin while I looked for a job. Of course—’ Angel stops abruptly when the doors open across the street and a man holding a black umbrella steps on to the sidewalk, turns left and heads toward Broadway.

  ‘So, you’re staying with your cousin,’ Carter prompts.

  ‘Yes, right, and it worked out OK because Rita was a private duty nurse and she did sixteen hour shifts. I hardly saw her. Anyway, New York is a pretty strange place to get used to when the only place you really know about is a Seattle suburb. The dirt, the noise, especially the subway … I was like totally unprepared. But New York
is awesome, too. There’s so much energy, half the time I felt like the city was dragging me around by the collar. I wanted to go everywhere, see everything and I visited all the tourist places, Central Park, the museums, Soho, the Statue of Liberty. I even took a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. Guys tried to pick me up, of course, practically every minute, but Rita gave me this warning when I first arrived, about serial killers and sadistic rapists and how New York men couldn’t be trusted, so I stayed by myself a lot of the time. I still do, really. I mostly stay by myself.’

  The statement seems worthy of comment, but Carter only shifts on the bench seat. The rain is falling harder now.

  ‘OK, so one night around seven o’clock, I was up by Lincoln Center, hanging around the plaza near the fountain. Lincoln Center just glows at twilight – it’s still one of my favorite places – but that night was definitely special for me. All of a sudden, these stretch limos began to arrive, one after another, Lincolns and Cadillacs and Mercedes Benzes, and even a stretch Hummer. I moved over to watch for celebrities, me and almost everyone else in the plaza, but I didn’t recognize anybody, which was maybe for the best. The people who got out of those limos and walked into Avery Fisher Hall were kind of ordinary, short and tall, skinny and fat, young and old, except for the way they were dressed. All the men wore tuxedos and the women wore evening gowns made of every color and fabric known to man. It was like a moving rainbow. And the jewelry, especially the necklaces … One woman, I swear, had an emerald the size of my fist that bounced on her cleavage. Another woman – she had to be like eighty – wore so many diamonds you couldn’t see her chest. Those diamonds were spitting fire, Carter. I swear it hurt my eyes to look at them. They were like alien death rays.’

  Angel’s little laugh stops abruptly when a BMW pulls to the curb across the street and the door opens. A man carrying a small gym bag steps out into the rain, dashes the few feet to the Wilson Arms’ entrance way and disappears through the glass doors. The man is hatless and the white bandage above his left ear jumps across the street, as penetrating, in its own way, as the glitter of diamonds on a dowager’s chest.

  Angel looks at Carter. He’s staring through the streaked windshield with the cold, blank eyes of a predatory fish. Oh look, dinner.

  ‘Carter?’

  ‘Hang on a minute.’

  The minute becomes ten, during which Angel considers her options. She likes Carter well enough, and he definitely turns her on. Better yet, the attraction is mutual. But she has to look to the future. Does Carter fit into her plan? Yes, if they’re successful and they split the pot. But how does she know he’ll pay off? And what is she prepared to do if he doesn’t? Is she supposed to trust him? A man with the eyes of a shark? Compared to Carter, Ricky Ditto’s black eyes were touchy-feely.

  Carter takes a deep breath. ‘All right,’ he says.

  ‘What were you looking for?’

  ‘A light to come on in one of the apartments. That would probably have told us which apartment he went to. No luck, though.’

  ‘You think, wherever he went, there had to be someone already there?’

  ‘Not necessarily. He might have gone to an apartment with windows in the back. And it’s not that dark, even with the overcast. He could be making do.’ He turns to look at Angel, his eyes now amused. ‘You were right, Angel. The dearly departed Ricky Ditto was definitely connected to the building.’

  Angel’s pleased when Carter’s gaze, as it shifts from her eyes to the van’s windshield, briefly settles on her breasts. She’s unbuttoned the top three buttons of her dowdy blouse, the better to tease him with. Carter likes to be teased, as Angel likes to tease.

  ‘So, what now?’

  ‘We need intelligence, and I think I know just the cop to get it from. Meanwhile, we sit.’ Carter drops his hands to his lap. ‘So, you’re on the plaza at Lincoln Center and there are all these rich people …’

  Angel takes a moment. Her story is essentially true, but she wants it to be entertaining as well. ‘I think I was dazzled at first,’ she finally says. ‘But after a while I began to see a pattern that caught my attention. More than half the women were much, much younger than the men, at least twenty years. I saw a lot of men in their fifties with wives in their thirties, and a few in their forties with wives in their twenties, but all of the women had diamond rings – and I’m talkin’ big, Carter – on their left hands.’

  Angel holds up her own left hand with its unadorned ring finger. ‘So, like, they troop inside and go up this flight of stairs to the second floor and then down this long promenade. Avery Fisher Hall has two-story floor-to-ceiling windows and I watched the parade for a while. That’s when I realized that some of the women were in their fifties, while the men were really old. I saw two women actually pushing wheelchairs. Amazing, right? But you know what? These women were seeing their husbands into the grave. They were keeping their end of the deal.’

  ‘The trophy wife deal?’ Carter smiles. ‘That’s what you want, Angel? To be a trophy wife?’

  ‘Hey, remember those Marilyn Monroe movies, How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?’ Angel shakes her head. ‘Do me a favor, give me the name of a young girl out there who dreams of marrying a poor man. And while you’re at it, show me the twelve-year-old who doesn’t dream of a platinum wedding in the Plaza Hotel. Instead of a K-Mart wedding at the American Legion Hall.’

  Carter’s about to concede the point when Ruby Amaroso, still toting the gym bag, exits the Wilson Arms and dashes to his car. When he pulls away from the curb, Carter works his way into the front seat and starts the van.

  ‘So, what do you think, Angel? Is he bringing money in or taking it out?’

  ‘Why? Are you going to steal the bag?’

  Carter shakes his head. ‘We’re not giving up the element of surprise for an unknown reward. Did Ricky say anything about what he did for a living?’

  ‘He hinted that he was some kind of gangster.’

  ‘Gangster covers a lot of ground, but if he was dealing drugs, especially on a wholesale level, he’d have money stashed somewhere, a lot of money. And that stash would most likely be in a place nobody would suspect. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We need more information.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re going to do it? You’re going to rip them off?’

  ‘It means I’m real interested.’

  Carter turns on to Broadway, giving the BMW plenty of room. He drops his hand to Angel’s knee and runs a finger along the inside of her thigh. She responds by kissing the side of his neck.

  ‘Tell me more about your gold digger scheme,’ he says. ‘Tell me why you need capital.’

  ‘OK, my plan is to go to the Caribbean once I have my stake in place – to St Barts or Tobago where you get an international crowd – and open a small art gallery. But suppose I went there broke. How long would I last before I became somebody’s mistress? These men, the ones I’m talking about, they know how to play rough, especially if a girl doesn’t have options. That’s what having your own money really does. It gives you options.’

  ‘I won’t argue the point, but I have one question. Have you ever considered a plan B?’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Hard work, education?’

  Angel doesn’t respond and they follow the BMW over the Broadway Bridge and into Manhattan. By the time they pass Columbia University, Carter knows exactly where the gangster’s headed. He’s on his way to Angel’s apartment where he finally pulls to the curb beside a fire hydrant and settles in to watch the entrance to her building. Carter drives on past, makes a right on to West End Avenue, then double-parks.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Angel asks.

  ‘Send a message.’

  ‘A message.’

  ‘I want to concentrate Bobby Ditto’s attention. I want him to be more worried about his own skin than his money in the Bronx.’

  ‘Are you going to take the bag?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

 
A car slides away from the curb and Carter pulls the van into the open slot. Angel can almost see the neurons firing away in his brain. Without warning, a single thought grabs her own attention: Get away from this man. Even if you have to sleep in the goddamned subway, even if you have to go home with the first jerk you meet in a corner bar. Carter’s traveling a road that has nothing to do with Angel Tamanaka and her plans for the future.

  ‘OK, Angel, here’s the way I want it to go down. We circle around the block so that we come up behind him. I want you to walk ahead of me, understand? You walk right past him, turn the corner, jump into the back of the van and stay down. I’ll take care of the rest.’

  ‘Which is exactly what?’

  ‘That depends. If there are witnesses, I’ll have to settle for a beating. If we’re alone on the block, I’m going to kill him. You understand, Angel. When he picked up the gun, he lost his right to live. He became a warrior and all wars have casualties.’

  Angel doesn’t mistake the warning. If she helps him now, she’ll be picking up a gun of her own. And she understands what he means about the right to live. You can’t take human life and claim your own life to be somehow sacred. And there’s one other thing. If she goes along, she becomes an accomplice, an outlaw, in her own eyes and in the eyes of the police.

  ‘Why do you want me to walk past him?’

  ‘First, to distract him. Beyond that? Look, he fucked up last time out. Now he has a shot at redemption. I think he’ll try to force you into the car. With a little luck, he won’t notice me until I’m on top of him.’

  The conflicts ricochet through her mind, the pros and cons, the costs and benefits, the risks and the rewards. Much too fast to be weighed. Angel feels only the ascension of some wild piece of herself, a chained demon suddenly freed and all the more powerful for its long imprisonment.

  ‘Just walk past him, right? Walk past and keep on going?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Carter leans forward to detach the knife strapped to his left calf. He slides it behind the waistband of his khaki pants. ‘Just walk past him and keep on going no matter what. Even if he somehow takes me out, you’ll be safe.’