16

ON AVENUE A, I made my way through the sea of garish masks and painted faces—two people in big Babar heads, a couple of skeletons, some ghosts, vampires, aliens—as well as people not in costumes. I saw Munch’s The Scream walking behind me, and that gave me a start. Maybe it was a different The Scream. Maybe it was an amazing coincidence.

I looked down 10th Street, my street. Beams of artificial light glanced off the dark street, sharp as knives, from the bright lights along the basketball-court fence. I was just a block and a half from my bed, from safety, and it was with a heavy heart I kept on walking towards Gramercy.

There were too many voices in my head. I felt like the guy with the tinfoil earmuffs, trying to tune in a clear signal. I couldn’t hear the voice in my own head. I heard Julie’s voice, Claire’s, Old Hobnail’s, Sally’s, Tamayo’s, Yma Sumac’s, Mary MacCosham’s.…

I was within sight of the Vincent now. Julie and I had stopped outside the Hotel Vincent for, maybe, five minutes that night in 1979. Because of an unexpected detour, caused by a minor car accident, we’d turned west in the Gramercy Park area and gone past it. Julie, struck by it, asked the driver to stop. It is a very impressive-looking building, a Victorian Gothic red brick building with wrought-iron balconies and a lot of interesting turrets and gargoyles. We spent all of five minutes looking at it and then, as I recall, I got cranky because I was tired and drunk and needed some sleep. After that, I know we went back to the Abbey Victoria. The next day, we’d looked up the Vincent in a guidebook and learned it was a historic artists’ hotel, home to a lot of famous painters over the years.

“Let’s stay there next time we come to New York,” Julie said. She’d said the same thing about the ritzy Hotel Delmonico up on Park Avenue, and the Plaza on Fifth, so the Vincent didn’t stick with me particularly.

We didn’t come back to New York together, but Julie stayed here when she came back to New York the summer of 1979 with Mary MacCosham. The Vincent must have been a walk on the wild side for her then best friend, Mary. It’s a bohemian residential hotel, a refuge for tortured, semi-insane artists and the like, known variously to its residents as The Mothership, The Asylum, and, during those creatively dry times when the rent is overdue, The Dorm at Hell U.

My phone rang.

“Robin? Claire.”

I could hardly hear her.

“You have to shout, Claire, I’m getting a low-battery light in my phone now. Shit. I have lousy phone karma.”

“I’ve been trying to call you for ten minutes. I finally jumped in a cab. I’m heading down to the Hotel Vincent, Robin. Do you recognize the name Johnny ‘Nostrils’ Chiesa?”

“It sounds familiar. But why?”

Her voice faded in and out. “… don of the Perrugia family … the guy in the tub …”

“George the rich guy?”

“George is Johnny,” she shouted, and began reading. “Like the Genovese family, the Perrugias resisted narcotics and pornography, reputedly concentrating on loan-sharking and protection rackets in New York’s Garment District and Times Square. They claim they are in the Italian soda-import business and … have a successful soda business.

“Johnny … husband of the eldest of Gaspar and Sophia Perrugia’s four daughters … no sons.

“… family prospered in the 1980s, adding the Wall Street district to its loan-sharking operations.…”

Her voice zoned out completely at this point. I shook the phone until it came in a little clearer.

“… crackdown on the Big Five families took a big bite out of their income, they recovered in the early 1990s by expanding their money-laundering operations. Even … IRS admits they can’t trace … family’s byzantine transactions.…”

“What? I can’t hear you, Claire.”

“… only the since-recanted testimony of a rival Genovese capo to go on.”

“George or Johnny, whoever he is, why was he news this week?”

“… to be sentenced yesterday on a weapons violation, and he disappeared … a fugitive …”

“Does it say anything about Frankie the Fish?” A Perrugia-family thug, murdered long ago, somehow figured into all this. Damn. My life had been so murder-free for so long. It made me think of these lifeguards in Florida who threw a party to celebrate their first year without a tragedy, during which party a guest fell into the pool and drowned.

“What?” She shouted.

I was thinking out loud. “And who is Granny?” I shouted.

“… matriarch, mother of Gaspar … Chiesa’s grandmother-in-law.”

“Why do I have a feeling Granny is our ace in the hole?”

“How so, Rob?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Or, as the Afghans say, you’re not even at the Bara River and already you’re removing your trousers.”

There was silence. When Claire’s voice came back in, I heard, “… haven’t heard from Tamayo. Tried calling her …”

“I’m losing you, Claire.”

“Robin, they may have tuned in to your phone frequency …” she said, and then my phone went dead. I shook it a few times, but nothing happened.

If George was Johnny Nostrils, then maybe that fed was a fed. But who were the four wig-wearing women? The four daughters of Gaspar and Sophia, I thought. And they had Kathy. They knew I’d talked to that fed, so they must have been following me. I looked back, and saw a few people, no one wearing anything I recognized, no nose glasses or The Screams lurking about, though they may have been ducking in and out of the shadows. From now on, I had to watch what I said, what I did.

If I tried calling in the authorities now, Kathy, and maybe Tamayo, could be in danger. What to do, what to do. Claire would know what to do. I hoped.

Johnny Chiesa, fugitive—and what better night to make your escape than Halloween. He’d been at the Help for Kids office, Kathy had called there. Had he lured her up to find out why she was on his trail? Was Julie setting him up? How exactly did she figure into this? Did his wife find him there? That must have been where they grabbed Kathy.… Was Johnny dead in the tub, or faking his death so he could get away? Why was he running out on a bullshit weapons rap anyway, when he could do the year, be out, be back in business?

It was still sinking in. Unless I’d misunderstood Claire, George the rich guy was Johnny Nostrils, wanted mobster. We hadn’t been out with a generous, sophisticated businessman during our first trip to New York. We’d been out with a gangster. No bloody wonder people fell all over themselves to kiss our asses and give us free stuff when we walked into those designer showrooms with Johnny Nostrils. Jesus, we were so naive.

That’s why George looked familiar in that old photograph, I thought. I must have seen his picture somewhere in a mob story, and filed it away in the useless-information part of my brain. I’m not a big mob maven. My ex, Burke, was really into mob stories, but I was always more interested in stories about people who killed people they were supposed to love.

Living in New York, you can’t help picking up a little of the mob news just by osmosis. I mean, I knew the big stuff, about John Gotti, and about Chin Gigante, who eluded jail for a long time by feigning madness, walking up and down Mulberry in his bathrobe and slippers muttering to himself. And, thanks to an organized-crime exhibit at the New York Historical Society, which Burke had taken me to, I knew a few historical stories about the mob—how Albert Anastasia was gunned down in a barbershop chair at the Park Sheraton, how a Murder Inc. stool pigeon, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was put into protective custody and despite a twenty-four-hour armed guard was pushed to his death from his room at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. I knew that a century ago gangs calling themselves the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits roamed Five Points (the intersection of Orange, Cross, Anthony, Little Water, and Mulberry streets in what is now Little Italy/Chinatown), and that in the nineteenth century a ruffian-for-hire routinely charged $2 for a punch, $15 to bite off an ear, and $100 to kill someone.

But about contemporary mobsters I knew very little. Just enough to know that these are not people to fuck with. Duh.

Well, there’s a big difference between me and Julie, I thought. To me, “don’t fool around with mobsters” is a matter of common sense. Admittedly, common sense isn’t my strong point, but I’d had more of it than Julie. Julie had had a different kind of genius.

It was too bad we got so drunk the night we met the gangsters. Although, in retrospect, I don’t think we had more than a half-dozen wine spritzers each in the course of the night, and we’d eaten a couple of times. Hmmm. Being older and wiser, etc., I had to wonder if George/ Johnny or Billy hadn’t slipped something into our drinks. When we got home, we slept eleven hours, through two wakeup calls.

Despite everything, I couldn’t believe Julie would put me through all this without a very good reason. There had been bad times, sure, there had been resentments and, apparently, long-held grudges. But you grow up, a little bit, let go of some of the past, decide what you want to carry with you into the future.

There had been good times too. She had to remember those. There had been love there. And co-conspiracy. We learned a lot from each other. The first time I kissed a boy was in her basement, the first time I smoked a cigarette was with her, the first time I tasted a beer. Together, we got even with Mary MacCosham. Julie told me about sex and went with me to buy Tampax to replace the awkward Kotex belt-and-pad contraption. I could still see Julie unflinchingly taking the Tampax to the drugstore counter and paying for it, in full sight of everyone in the store. I thought that was so brave.

True, at times I was a shitty friend to Julie. I ratted her out, indirectly, to Doug Gribetz. Not only that, but I ratted Julie out to our sewing teacher, Old Hobnail, after the wet-ass incident. I never told Julie that either. After Hobbins caught up with her, I let her think Hobbins had figured it out for herself. Of course, now I realize, Hobbins did figure it out. She detained me and accused me in order to put a wedge between me and Julie, punish us both in a sinister way, by making me rat Julie out.

But, damn, the statute of limitations had expired on that too, long ago.

The Vincent loomed ahead. My legs were going towards it, but my heart and brain were hanging back.

Every year you read a wire story about how a whole family was killed, one right after another, by deadly, odorless methane gas which had built up in a closed manure pit. In almost every one of these stories, the first person goes in and doesn’t come out, the second person wonders where he is and goes in to see what’s going on and he doesn’t come out either, so the third guy goes in … and so on. Up to five people have been killed this way. You’d think, after three guys had gone into a manure pit, not responded to calls, not come out, the next guy would think, “Wait a second. Maybe I shouldn’t go in there. Maybe I should get help.”

I felt like the fourth guy, about to go blindly into the manure pit.

After hours, you have to get buzzed into the Vincent, unless a man in a tuxedo ahead of you gets buzzed in first and holds the door for you, as happened to me. The key from the envelope Sally had given me had no tag, so I stopped at the desk and asked the night clerk if someone had left something for Robin Hudson. He handed me a little piece of paper which bore only the words “Doug Gribetz’s birthday”—which was July 21, 7/21—and another from the housekeeping staff, confirming that the guest had requested no housekeeping service until the next afternoon.

I looked back casually to see if Claire had arrived. She wasn’t there.

“When was this room rented, when was check-in?” I said to the clerk, who was reading a skin mag and absent-mindedly swatting flies.

The clerk looked it up. “Yesterday evening.”

“Do you remember a dark-haired woman …”

“I wasn’t working here yesterday evening,” he said, in a please-leave tone of voice.

“If a woman in a dog costume comes in, or one looking like Marilyn Monroe, please tell them I’ll be in 721,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, and went back to swatting flies.

Seven twenty-one was in a little cul-de-sac of rooms. I knocked. When there was no answer, I put the key in the lock and opened the door, shut it quickly behind me, then bolted it and chained it.

A very old woman was fast asleep in the double bed, next to an empty wheelchair.

“You must be Granny,” I said softly.

On top of the dresser was a note on stationery from Metro Home Nurse, “your temporary home nurse specialists.”

Dear Ms. Winston,

I have bathed, fed and given the medication you left for your grandmother. She should sleep through the night. She was very disoriented and confused and at first refused to go to bed. I did get her into bed. As per your instructions, I left at midnight. The morning nurse will be here at 6 A.M.

She gave emergency numbers and signed it “Frances Johnson, R.N.”

I poked the old woman to make sure she was alive, and she snorted and fell back to sleep.

There was a flash outside the window. I looked out. A moon, partially obscured by clouds, shone between the pink neon hotel sign and a black water-tank on spindly legs on a roof across the street. Dry lightning cracked about.

Well, now I guess I wait for Claire and the cavalry. I sat down in the wheelchair and opened the envelope Julie had left for me on the desk, taking out a thick sheaf of papers. On top was a typewritten note that said, inexplicably, “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

Underneath were some photocopied pages from a book called Mob Myths: New York Mafia Legends 1925–1995, written by a longtime New York Post crime reporter, and a computer printout that looked to me like a bunch of financial transactions. The computer printout was pretty meaningless to me, but I suspected it would interest the feds.

The first photocopied section from the book was the story of a mob enforcer, F., who had been assigned by a high-ranking capo in a small but powerful family to knock off another high-ranking capo in the family, J., who was married to the eldest daughter of the don. The family was undergoing a power struggle while the don, G., was on his deathbed. The intended victim, J., was tracked to a midtown bar, where he believed he’d be meeting with a colleague. The “colleague” was supposed to take him out and kill him. Unbeknownst to the “colleague,” J. caught on to the plan and tried to get away through the men’s room, which also opened into the hotel that housed the bar. The hit man/colleague followed him into the john and insisted on escorting J. out.

But on the way out of the john, the intended victim saw two girls, and invited them to have drinks. He used these two nice girls from the Midwest as a shield all evening, refusing to let the hit man go and luring him, finally, to a spot where the hit man could be grabbed by two of the intended victim’s henchmen. The hit man was taken off and killed, but it wasn’t until a decade later that his bones were found in the Dunes in Bedford-Stuyvesant, near the old Brooklyn dump.

Jesus H. Billy was Frankie the Fish. We’d blundered into a hit that night! Fuck. Billy, or Frankie, whatever his name was, had been killed that night. Julie and I had saved Johnny Nostrils’s life, and cost the other guy his. Julie had done it, really. Every time Billy suggested that he and George had to go meet some business colleagues, Julie insisted we keep going, even to the point of grabbing Billy by one arm while I grabbed the other, all of this with George’s encouragement. What was Billy going to do, pull a gun on us in public?

And when we held Billy/Frankie at Cafe Buñuel, we gave Johnny Chiesa a chance to use the pay phone by the john, call his cohorts to come get Frankie the Fish.

God, we were lucky we didn’t get offed along with Johnny Nostrils. The mob was bad, but they did have a code of honor that precluded the murder of innocent bystanders. Partly this was because innocent bystanders brought the swift wrath of the cops and the media, especially when said innocent bystanders are dead tourist girls. Only after most of the Mafia was broken did sloppier, more ruthless gangs move in and kids and other innocents get killed from stray bullets in gang crossfires and drive-bys.

After that excerpt was a story about Godmother G., mother of the dead don G., who was said to be the brains behind the family until a head injury resulting from a fall in 1989 left her daft. Before the head injury, she had been the meanest woman in the Mafia, believed to be responsible for the mysterious disappearance and presumed murder of two women with whom her husband had long affairs. As soon as her ailing husband slipped into a coma, the mistresses vanished.

Godmother G.’s son Don G. had four daughters, the eldest married to the man, J., who took over the family after the Godfather died.

Shit. I looked over at Granny. She looked so sweet and harmless now. You could hardly even tell she was a murderess.

Where was Claire? I wondered if I should call the feds. What if the room phone was tapped or something? What if the feds showed up before I got Kathy and Tamayo back? How would the Perrugia sisters call me now that my cell phone was dead? I looked for the room phone. There was none. Someone had removed it.

Granny was snoring loudly away. In between snores, I heard pounding at the door. Quietly, I crept to the peephole, looked out, and saw someone in one of those cheap, over-the-head skeleton costumes.

“Who are you?” I said. “Show your face.”

Two delicate hands rose, with identical movements, and pulled the front of the costume up over the top of her head.

It was Mary MacCosham, and did she looked pissed. More than pissed. She was wild-eyed, like she was manic, or on something. Evidently, Mary had gone off the deep end.

“Open this damn door,” she said. “Or I’ll shoot it open.”