Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  I wasn’t sure when I’d caught her arm, but she was right; my fingers were fastened like tentacles to her wrist. The rage that had growled behind my eyes ever since I’d left the crummy apartment on Orchard Court Road pounded at my temples. There was movement behind me, to my right, quick footsteps from soft-soled shoes.

  “No cat fights, ladies.” The bartender’s hand was heavy on my shoulder; maybe he doubled as the bouncer.

  When I smiled up at him, it felt more like baring my teeth. I forced my hand to let go of Marta. “It’s just business,” I said. “I’m working for her, looking for her daughter.”

  I waited to see whether Marta would deny it. Her lips parted, closed, then parted again, her tongue pale against her dark lipstick. “Is okay, Greg.”

  “Gregor Maltic?”

  “Yeah.”

  A broad gold wedding band circled the third finger of his left hand. A rich unmarried customer. Right.

  “You two go out together?” I asked him.

  “So?” Cool blue eyes in a broad Slavic face. Narrow shoulders and hips. He wore a thin white shirt and khaki pants, but I didn’t know whether that was a job requirement or a fashion choice.

  “None of my business,” I said, “unless you happen to know where her daughter is.”

  “Then it’s none of your business. Why don’t you get the hell out of here, stop pestering the lady?”

  I found myself contemplating assault for the second time in a single day. I could stomp his toe with a booted foot, land a hard one in his gut. Spend the night in jail. Accomplish nothing. With effort, I turned away, leveling my gaze at my little sister’s mother. Gregor Maltic locked eyes with Marta, then measured eight long steps toward the bar.

  “Okay,” I said, “a woman phoned you. What was her name?”

  “She didn’t say. She was calling for Roldan, like a secretary or something. She didn’t say much, just could I leave a photo of Paolina in the mailbox, and she’ll come by and pick it up.” Her right arm rested on the table. There were angry marks where I’d grabbed her wrist.

  “What did she look like?”

  “How am I supposed to know? You think I got a phone with pictures?”

  “You never saw her?”

  “The photo was gone, so she came okay. I’m a busy woman. I work. I don’t stay home all the time.”

  No need to ask whether the unseen woman had paid for Paolina’s photo. Three hundred-dollar bills in the sugar bowl.

  “And when Paolina disappeared, you never mentioned this?” I said flatly.

  “Why would I? A woman calls for a picture, that’s all. What’s the harm in a woman?”

  What’s the harm in a stranger demanding a photograph of a teenage girl? I opened my mouth to ask which planet she lived on; I wanted to call her a stupid bitch, smack her across her lipsticked mouth.

  “Paolina ran away,” she said, like it was written in neon letters ten feet high, obvious and undeniable. “She ran away with some boy she’s screwing, some no-account nothing. She’s never home when she should be, she don’ care about her brothers, she don’ even do the dishes right. She’s—”

  How I made it outside without doing grievous bodily harm to the woman, I don’t know, but I didn’t linger to hear the end of her tirade. I pushed my way out of the booth, leaving the beer, escaping the cigarette smog, and I was in the frigid parking lot fumbling for my keys before I remembered to put on my coat.

  CHAPTER 7

  “So the way you figure, the woman who got the photo from Marta grabbed Paolina?” Sam’s sleepy murmur was soft in my ear.

  “Acting for Roldan. That’s what I think.” Beside him, wrapped in a cocoon of wrinkled sheets, I was warm at last, but wide awake and way too uneasy to sleep. I’d assumed Paolina was with Diego. Wrong. I’d assumed Roldan was dead. Wrong.

  “Just because this woman used Roldan’s name on the phone.” The way he said it, he might as well have said: Don’t you think you’re snatching at straws? Maybe I was, I thought. Maybe I am.

  “Why would Roldan want her?” Now Sam sounded like he was thinking out loud.

  “She’s his daughter,” I said.

  “But why now?”

  “Why write Marta? Why send her presents? After all these years?” The long and the short of it was I didn’t know. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why now. I only knew this: If she’d been taken by someone other than Roldan, I had nothing; I was nowhere. I’d run out of leads. I’d have to wait for the phone to ring. For a knock at the door.

  Sam’s breath ruffled my hair. “You told the cops about all this, the woman, the photo, the statue?”

  “Yes.” I’d gotten Mooney involved first, then the Cambridge PD, goading them till they’d changed the label on Paolina’s disappearance from runaway to possible kidnapping. “Possible” was as far as they’d go.

  “The feds?” He sounded casual enough, but the muscles in his arm tightened and I remembered Mooney’s warning.

  “The locals don’t like to bring them in unless there’s a ransom demand, but Mooney’s going to get them to sign on tomorrow, no matter what.”

  Unless something else turns up, the older of the Cambridge cops had said, nodding his head so his double chin wobbled.

  What the hell else could turn up? I’d thought. The chill had penetrated clear to the bone when I’d realized he meant her body. Paolina. Dead.

  “The FBI will want to talk to you,” Sam said. “Tomorrow.”

  Hell with them, I thought; I’ve worked with the feebies before. I had a pretty good idea how skeptical they’d be, how slowly they’d proceed. Two weeks of paperwork and the trail would be as cold as the slush on Orchard Park Court.

  “You never know with family,” Sam said. “Maybe Roldan’s been keeping an eye on her.”

  It was possible. Roldan once hired a PI to check up on me. Maybe he didn’t like the way Marta was raising her. Maybe he didn’t like the way I’d been ignoring her.

  “It’s not your fault,” Sam said. “Stop doing this to yourself.”

  “What?”

  “You’re yanking your hair out.”

  It’s true; I pull my hair. There’s a fancy name for it: trichotillomania; rolls right off the tongue. I do it when I feel rotten about something I’ve done or haven’t done. It’s an addictive behavior, a named illness. Now I was indulging the demon because I felt guilty. There was a voice in my head saying: You should have known Marta was up to something, you should have taken better care of your little sister. An old familiar tune, guilt, one I knew as well as I knew the plaintive Billie Holiday song on the CD.

  Too tense to lie still, I eluded Sam’s arm and got out of bed. Walked as far as the window, lifted the corner of the shade. I always think I’ll splurge and buy curtains, but I never get around to it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to see whether the snow’s stopped.”

  Sam’s penthouse at Charles River Park has heavy gold blackout drapes over triple-glazed windows, a king-sized bed, and carpet your toes can get lost in. My drafty old Victorian has chilly hardwood floors and plain white walls. The house has good bones, good space. Potential, a realtor would rave. It belonged to my Aunt Bea, and she left it to me, free and clear, except for property taxes that rise like Iowa corn in July.

  “Sounds more like rain,” Sam said.

  “Sleet.” I shivered in the chill, and the CD ended. Instead of sticking another disc in the player, I picked up the Plexiglas music box off the top of the dresser, the one I’d found in Paolina’s room, and turned the silver key. Inside the clear plastic, gears meshed and rotated, and the first halting notes of “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” emerged.

  When Paolina was barely seven years old, when we first met, she was behind in a lot of ways, shy and fearful. Because I was not her mother, not exactly a friend, not a teacher, we had the freedom to regress, to go back and do some of the things she’d never done with her mom, play the baby games, read the baby books. I remembered endle
ss rounds of hide-and-seek to the refrain of “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” By the time the music box ran down, one of us had to be safely hidden. Not till the music wavered and died could the other yell, “Ready or not, here I come.”

  “Sam?”

  He grunted sleepily.

  “Any chance she could have been snatched because of you? Because of your—what you do?”

  He didn’t reply for such a long time I thought he might not have heard me. Then he said, “You spent time with your cop pal today. Mooney. The one who wants to get into your pants.”

  “Hey,” I said. “He might have mentioned it first, but I’d have gotten there on my own, sooner or later. And you know he’s my friend, and that’s all he is.”

  “Don’t tell me he wouldn’t like to be more.”

  “Sam, stop it. Just answer the damn question.”

  “The answer’s no. Plain and simple. No. Nobody’s going to go after Paolina because of me. Nobody in their right mind.”

  “I’m not worried about people in their right mind. I’m worried about contract killers from Miami.”

  “Where the hell did that come from? Late-night TV? Listen, I work with businessmen. Get it? I don’t operate some low-rent street gang. I don’t do Jamaican drug rings and—”

  “How about Colombian?” I said sharply. “What exactly do you know about Roldan? What do you hear?”

  The room was dark. I could tell by his outline that he’d turned to face me, but I couldn’t see his eyes. “I thought we had an agreement, remember? I’m not your window into the Mob. You don’t want to know about the business.”

  “Sam, come on. Am I some little Mafia wifey? Hear no evil? See no evil? I know the Italian thing isn’t a gents’ club anymore, running policy numbers and strip shows and shit. It’s drugs now, Sam. That’s where the money is, right? Drugs. And I’m asking because I need to know. This isn’t some case; this is Paolina.”

  “The money’s in legitimate businesses,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. Right. I clamped my lips together but I couldn’t stop. “Sam, don’t you see? Every day, you’re getting in deeper. Can’t you get away from it?”

  “My dad,” he said softly. That was all. My dad.

  Anthony “Big Tony” Gianelli, Mob patriarch, Sam’s father, was in a nursing home. The first stroke had been mild, but there’d been others, each minor, but with a cumulative effect that required constant care. Or maybe not. Maybe his much-married father was taking advantage of his last surviving son, using his illness to bind Sam closer to the family business. There wasn’t much I’d put past Tony or his latest conniving wife.

  “What I have to do,” Sam said, “it’s gonna take a while. I can’t back out.”

  Can’t, I thought, or won’t? I stared out the window through the skeletal tree to the yellow glow of the street lamp. “You’re going after her, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Tomorrow.” I had a reservation on a flight to Florida first thing in the morning. If the planes could take off in the crappy weather. “To Colombia?”

  “If that’s where she is.” I waited for him to speak. He didn’t, so I said, “If you know anyone in Colombia, anyone who might run in the same circles as Roldan, I could use some help.”

  Silence.

  “I’ll see what I can find out.” His voice had changed, become edgy and cool where it had been warm.

  “Thanks.”

  More silence.

  “Hey, you’ll freeze in that thing,” he said.

  “What thing?” The only item I was wearing was a thin gold chain around my neck.

  “Come back to bed. I promise you, I’ll try to find out about Roldan. But I haven’t heard his name for years. The stuff’s coming out of Cali lately, and that’s not his territory.”

  I craned my neck, peering again at the spot where the streetlamp shines through the big elm on the pocket-sized lawn. It seemed to me the sleet was falling more lightly than the earlier snow, but that could have been wishful thinking. I padded back to bed, burrowing under the worn sheets and heavy quilt.

  “When I find her, Sam,” I said, shivering and sliding close to take advantage of his heat, “she’s going to live here full time.” It would alter our current arrangement, so I thought I owned him an early warning. Times have changed; I’m not a prude, but I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where I’d have to constantly explain why it was okay if I slept with my boyfriend and not okay if Paolina slept with hers. Her hypocrisy-meter is fine-tuned.

  His chest rose and fell. I could feel his heartbeat, count the pulsing thump. Music box blues, sleet tapping the roof, and Sam’s reassuring heartbeat; sweet music.

  “She’s the family you want?” he said quietly.

  “Mmmm.”

  “All of it? Don’t you want to hold little babies in your arms?” Even in the dark, I could tell he was smiling, teasing.

  I don’t take queries about children lightly. When I was fourteen, younger than Paolina is now, younger than Marta was when she had Paolina, I gave birth to a child. I gave the baby up for adoption. I don’t know whether it was a boy or a girl. Sam doesn’t know about it. No one does.

  I said, “I don’t know.…To be responsible for someone’s whole life—”

  “You did it when you were a cop.”

  I thought, Yeah, and I sure screwed that up.

  He replied as though he’d heard the unspoken words. “You’re older and wiser.”

  “Yep,” I said, “that’s why I ought to be packing right now.” “Don’t go. The cops will—”

  “Sam, I have to.” If there’d been a seat on a Miami-bound flight tonight I’d have been in it, but the planes were snowed in on the runways, the terminals packed with travelers lined up to escape to sunnier climes.

  I was trying to decide how many Tshirts I could squeeze into my duffel bag when Sam said, “Will you marry me?”

  My first thought was that I hadn’t heard him correctly. The words themselves sounded odd, rusty and worn. My mouth went dry.

  “Jesus, Sam, you do that just to get my attention?”

  “Well, it did.” Then he said, “Shove over,” so I rolled onto my back. He turned to face me, weight on his right elbow and arm, his features in shadow. “Look, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I come here. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, you come to my place. We’re getting in a rut.”

  The rut wasn’t deeply carved; we’d started seeing each other again only a few months ago. The rut would change if Paolina lived with me. I didn’t say anything. I wished I could see his eyes more clearly.

  “If you have to go up against Marta in court, wouldn’t it be better to face off as a married woman?”

  “Have you thought this through, Sam?”

  I met him when I was nineteen and foolish, a part-time cabbie way too young to manage a torrid affair with the owner of the company. We argued; he left. I married on the rebound, and he did too, so we both have divorces under our belts. Since then, we’ve dated and fought and slept together. Slept with others.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “Even when I’m with another woman, I think about you.”

  Would that keep him out of bed with another woman? I wanted to ask: Would you mean it, the part in the ceremony about forsaking all others? Would I mean it?

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve thought about it. We could buy another place, someplace safer than this, in a good neighborhood. Or we could get a condo in a high-rise, do the gatekeeper thing.”

  I already live in a good neighborhood. The North End building where Sam’s father held court for years had two guards in the lobby. Discreet, heavily armed men shadowed the old man whenever he went out.

  “Sam, after I get Paolina back, ask me then, okay?”

  “Bad timing.”

  “I can’t deal with this now.”

  “I’d come with you tomorrow. You know that. But I’ve got business that won’t wait.”

  There was always that. Business.

  “I’ve got to
get to Las Vegas,” he said. “Take care of a few things.” Right. And I couldn’t ask which things. I couldn’t ask if he was headed to Las Vegas to avoid a Miami hit squad. “You need money?”

  “I’m okay.” I was planning to use Roldan’s money for a while, the cash he’d sent over the years. I’ve tried to keep it for Paolina’s college fund, but if I couldn’t bring her back there wouldn’t be college.

  “Let me know,” he said, and I knew he meant about getting married, not about money.

  “I will, Sam. I love you.”

  I knew how he’d respond. He’d say what he always says: “Yeah, babe,” or “Me, too, kid.” It wasn’t a litmus test or anything. Oh, it used to be; I admit it. I used to wonder why he’d never say the words, why they seemed to stick in his throat when they slipped so easily from mine.

  “I love you, Carlotta.”

  There wasn’t much light in the bedroom, just the dim glow from the streetlamp in front of the next house, but what light there was glinted off the corner of his eye.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This Las Vegas trip.” I traced the outline of his mouth with my index finger. “Yeah?”

  There were too many things I wanted to say, too many questions blocked by too much history.

  “You’re okay, right?” That’s all that came out.

  He smiled and kissed my fingertip. “How about I drive you to the airport in the morning?”

  PAOLINA

  The door was wooden and so warped she had to try twice to secure the rusty latch. Dark wood showed through the white paint, especially at eye level where most of the graffiti were scratched. DORIS LOVES JOEY. DORIS PUTS OUT. Paolina wondered what moms said when they brought little kids into the bathroom and the four-year-olds asked about the swear words on the door. Even as she had the thought, the toilet in the other tiny stall flushed. Jeez, Ana would start calling her name any minute. She wished they would just leave her alone for one second, just leave her in peace so she could think. Honestly, she’d given her word. She was old enough to be left on her own for a second.

  Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she was just getting weird, thinking too much, watching too hard, letting small irritations build on one another until they blurred into a loop, playing over and over like a late-night movie, on and on. Maybe it was just a coincidence that every time she had to go to the bathroom, Ana needed to go, too. But if she wanted to take a walk, well, Jorge wanted to take a walk, too, really needed to stretch his legs, so grateful she’d mentioned it.