CHAPTER 7

Freddy pedaled his bicycle like mad through the woods at dawn. He liked to pick out certain produce for the restaurant himself and you had to get there good and early. He bumped through the pine forest and whizzed onto Park Lane South. There was no not braking down White Hill. White Hill was steep, and every year or so another kid got killed sledding through the stop sign on the bottom. And the tow truckers. There was great competition among them to be the first at any wreck. The first one there got the job. Like modern-day cowboys they galloped through the rural neighborhoods at heart-thumping speeds. Plenty of them had crashed at the foot of White Hill. Plenty. The street had a veritable glitter from all the ground glass of accidents throughout the years. You always wanted to be careful around there. There was a tree down at the bottom, just a bit off the crux. It was the oldest tree in Richmond Hill, a good thirteen feet around the trunk, and that tree, as noticeable as it was, was made invisible by the devastating white of the hill. Nobody knew who’d originally painted the San Francisco–like slope, but whoever it was had done a good job of it. It was still white and it had been for as long as even old Mr. Lours could remember. Freddy pulled over at the tree and put his feet on the ground. He blew his nose and wiped his face. Geez, this was one hell of a tree. Funny he’d never noticed it. You could see the front porch of the Breslinsky house from here. He got back up on the bike and pedaled down. Oh, for God’s sake! Claire had Michaelaen outside with her again. This was really the limit. Freddy didn’t like Claire. She would get up and leave the room in the middle of one of his stories. And, worse, if she stayed, she rarely bothered to laugh. She wasn’t a nice Queens girl. She was hard. Yes, that was it, she was hard. She had this childlike bashfulness that fooled you, when in reality she was nothing more than a tart. A world-class tart. Taking pictures round the world. If that was what she’d been doing, where was her money?

Freddy wheeled his bike over and looked at them. The Mayor opened one eye then closed it right back up again. Ugly old dog. Ought to be put to sleep. He looked at Michaelaen’s face collapsed in sleep, so beautiful, so infernally a replica of Zinnie’s that if he didn’t know Zinnie’s character so well he’d wonder if Michaelaen were his. The sound of someone skittering about up on the second floor put him back on his bicycle. Probably Mary getting up. He didn’t feel like shooting the breeze with her. Mary did go on and on. Off he went.

It is Föhn, was Claire’s first thought as she opened her eyes. Sirocco. The high-pressure, delicious wind. Weather that bowled you over with its perfection. The only thing was that people didn’t exactly know what they were doing in it and neither did they much care. Michaelaen and the Mayor still slept soundly. Claire remembered Johnny in a rush, before her defenses were up. Maybe he’ll call, she thought. Maybe I’ll get up and go inside and the phone will ring.

A garbage truck lumbered up the street. The compacter roared and overalled men flung the cans through the air. Claire watched them with interest. Years ago, when Michael had died, they’d found a nest of mice in the cellar. They were Michael’s mice, or at least he’d protected them by never telling their parents about them. He’d made Claire swear she’d never tell, either. He didn’t want Pop to go knocking them off, he said. Poor little fellas. The mice, as though in silent contract with Michael and his live-and-let-live policy, had gone about their teeny lives unnoticed. Claire remembered very well. But after the accident, the whole time Michael was laid out in Mullaney’s Funeral Parlor, the mice had raced crazily through the walls at home. With uncanny terror they’d clattered noisily over the rafters. Stan had set his traps with grief-stricken, dedicated preoccupation. They were only little mice. All mixed up. Of course somebody had had to do something, but Claire remembered how she’d hated her father for his industrious and careful murders. One morning, the morning of the funeral, she had watched from the upstairs window as the garbage men had picked out a wrapped up newspaper from one of the cans that had tipped, and a baby mouse had slid out onto the curb. The garbage man had picked up the thing by its tail and flung it into the chopping blades. She had felt such shame at that moment that she’d wanted to hide. She hadn’t wanted anyone to see Michael’s mice. Not ever. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know any more of his soft and tender weaknesses.

“Why Claire,” her mother came up suddenly behind her, “Why sweetheart, don’t cry!”

She didn’t even know she’d been crying, but there it was, hiccupping and sobbing out of her like a child, finishing the job that had started up last night at Johnny’s kindness, taking fuel from her mother’s concerned tone. She cried on and on, amazed all the while that these great gulps of water were coming out of her. She was two people then, one watching, one doing, and the watching side marveled at the wholehearted self-pity involved, marveled that Michaelaen didn’t wake up from her noise, and recalled the smell of the pine needles from the last time … when she’d buried the cat. There had to be some meaning there, but she wasn’t sure what. Strangely enough, that had been the start of some hope in her life, being out on her own without that bastard Wolfgang. Now maybe she was feeling hope, too. You didn’t cry from despair. You breathed shallow breaths and you tried to feel nothing, but you didn’t cry.

“There, there,” her mother was saying. “They’ll find your cameras, Claire. And if they don’t, we’ll get you another. Don’t worry, Claire. Bonnie Claire.”

Bonnie Claire? She looked up and laughed. Her mother hadn’t called her that since she was a child. Ah, poor Mom. What had she gone through back then, losing a son? And telling her now with her face all screwed up in compassion that they’d buy her a new camera. As if they had any money for things like that. As if they had any idea how much even half of her equipment would cost.

“I’m all right, Mom. I’ll be fine. I guess it’s all sort of a strain.”

“Sure a strain is what it is. Why don’t you come along with me to mass?”

“Now, Mom. I’ll be just fine. You know I will.”

“I know. But all the same—”

“No ‘all the same.’ Come on. You’ve dropped your rosary. You don’t want to be late. Look, here comes Mrs. Dixon.” And indeed she was, walking across the lawn in right-angle zigzags to avoid the webs. She rolled her sparkling shopping cart behind her. They’d stop off at Key Food straight from church.

“All right, I’m off. I’ll say a prayer for you, special. Claire?”

“What?” She wished her mother would go already. She didn’t want old Dixon to see her with her eyes all red.

“That John Benedetto drove you home last night, didn’t he?”

“Mmm.”

Her mother still stood there. “All right. I won’t ask questions. Just try not to do that anymore. Go off without a word. I was worried.” She hesitated. “See you later then.”

Claire waved to Mrs. Dixon and the two women sped away, not even giving so much as a nod to Iris von Lillienfeld who stood in distressed admiration of her blooming, eight-foot-tall hollyhock.

Claire wiped her cheeks and walked across the street.

“Guten tag,” she said.

“Good day,” Iris snapped. Her lipstick was awry and an exhausted royal blue Spanish shawl clung limply to her sparrow’s shoulders.

“I … uh … I’ve noticed you out here several times and I wanted to say hello.”

“I guess dat means you gonna say hello now.”

“Oh. Yes. Yes, it does.”

“Vell?”

“Pardon?”

“Something else? You vant something else?”

“No,” Claire decided she could play her game. “I don’t want anything else.” She headed back across the street. Old codger, she grinned to herself. She knew a thing or two about reeling in a trout.

“Pisces,” Mary eyed her husband over the paper. “Try not to worry so much about financial problems.”

Stan looked up from his bowl of Sealtest vanilla-fudge. “Tales of the Vienna Woods” bombinated through the kitchen.

“All your worries will soon be over with the moon moving into Virgo.”

“It doesn’t really say that.” Stan returned to his dessert. He gave it one more squirt of Reddi-Wip.

Mary looked hurt. “Sure it does. Pisces. Right here.”

“Notice how she doesn’t show you the paper, Pop,” Zinnie said. She had her mother’s number. How many times had Mary tried to get her to stay home from work by pleading any old bad omen under Gemini.

Mary threw the paper furiously into the air, losing the page and all threat of investigation.

“Ma,” Carmela said. “You’re so naive.”

“Influenceable I might be, dear. Naive I never was. Naivety is a gift. Something, I might add, that none of my children were born with. The lot of ya come into the world with crisp frowns of revelation tattooed to your foreheads.” She started to sing one of her old Irish songs, old “Molly Malone”: “She wheeled a wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow …” Claire looked up, amused. How she had hated her mother singing those songs when she’d been a girl! It used to embarrass her to no end.

The Mayor watched them fondly from the floor. It had been a grand meal. The finest whittle of garlic roast pork and Mary’s special spinach baked in white sauce and laced with Gruyère. Ah, you couldn’t beat that Mary once she got started in the kitchen. There was no match. No wonder Stan had married her.

Claire was thinking, all right, if he’s on nights, he’ll just be waking up. Any minute now the phone will ring. He would certainly want to know if she remembered anything new from the missing photographs. Or if Carmela had lost sight of Stefan at the party. Carmela had said no, but then you never knew with Carmela. She might think of an absence as a desertion to her femininity. She certainly sat there looking cool and polished, although Claire knew she wasn’t. Her perfect nose had the start of a shine and she kept turning, looking nonchalantly out the window.

Michaelaen jangled Mary’s change purse between his knees. There was rock ‘n’ roll between those coins. All at once he jumped up and shrieked. Freddy was at the back door with a cherry cheesecake. They were always glad to see Freddy. Even Stan, despite himself. You couldn’t stay mad at Freddy for very long.

“What news from the front?” Zinnie asked when they’d divided up the cake and settled down to a second dessert. Freddy took his time and licked the fork with a big red tongue. He loved to have the floor. Claire looked away. “It hasn’t been easy,” he said finally. “I guess you all know by now that I’ve been interrogated?”

“What?” they all said.

“Yes, indeedy. And not with kid gloves, let me tell you. After they solve the murder, Carmela, you ought to do a story on the underhanded methods of harassing innocent suspects by the police.”

“You weren’t a suspect?!” Mary’s arm went protectively, instinctively around Michaelaen.

“Well, maybe not a suspect,” Freddy didn’t want to go tipping the wheel of credibility and ruin his story. “Not exactly. But they sure put me through the third degree. They most certainly did. And you’d think they think we’ve never watched a ‘Kojak’ in our lives the way they do that old one buddy, one enemy routine.” He looked to Zinnie who was studying her sneakers. “They roughed me up. I’ve had an awful week. First the opening and now this.”

“What? This?”

“They’ve got some flibbertigibbet insect from the stationhouse posing as a bartender. As if the killer is going to walk into my place and announce himself. It’s just too much. Somebody asked him for a Harvey Wallbanger and he gives the guy a Rob Roy. A Rob Roy!”

“An honest mistake,” Stan defended the cop.

Freddy ignored him. “And I’m almost positive this undercover dick is on drugs. Cocaine. I’m sure he is.”

“Talk about unfounded accusations,” Zinnie sneered.

“Well, he’s wired on something. You should see him.” Freddy gave his cruel and dumb-faced imitation of a space cadet. They couldn’t help but laugh.

“Maybe he’ll improve with experience,” suggested Mary.

“Barely plausible,” Freddy shook his head.

“He’s probably wasted from working too many hours overtime,” Zinnie said. “There’s a lot of pressure on the 102 right now.”

“I wonder what ever happened to those license plate numbers?” Claire asked suddenly, but no one was interested in that now. Freddy still had lots to tell. He rubbed his hands together.

“Shall I make another pot of coffee?” Mary stood.

“And I’ve got this other bartender,” Freddy nodded yes, “who is so good that I’d give him a raise if I wasn’t afraid that he’d realize how good he is and take off on me for the city.”

Nothing if not honest, thought Claire.

“Or the airport. They’re paying big bucks down there in inebriated tips. But this kid’s a redhead,” he rumbled Michaelaen’s hair. “Curious tribe. No tribe at all when you think about it. There’s one in every large family. Stubborn bunch.”

“Yeah, so what about the guy?” Carmela was terse.

“Oh. The redhead. If he left I’d be really in trouble. Unbelievable. He must be ambidextrous. I don’t know how he does it.”

And I bet he does it with a drop of the eyelids and a purse of the lips, Zinnie hummed inside her head. She gritted her teeth. She knew who that redhead was. His lover, that’s who. He couldn’t even resist referring to him in front of his son’s family. Such was his enthusiasm. Sometimes Freddy was a real canker sore.

“See that’s the thing. I don’t need another bartender right now. He’s just taking tips away from the others is all he’s doing. He’s just in the way. Plus he looks so unaesthetic with his big walrus moustache. In this day and age when a Ronald Coleman is the thing—”

“Hoy Jesus,” sputtered Stan.

“Well, it gives the place the wrong look. People walk in, they take one look at him, they want a beer instead of beaujolais nouveau.”

He prattled on and on. Claire tuned him out at the mention of a redhead. She remembered a redhead. Where had it been? Every thought she had was interrupted by the urgent pressure of the thought of Johnny Benedetto. The Mayor looked at her with panic. To notify her of what was coming. It was either Claire or Stan. Stan would give him a trusty little once around the block, when what he yearned for was a journey. Claire pushed her cherry cheesecake over to her father, stood up, and went for the clothesline. If Johnny called, at least he’d realize she wasn’t sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.

“Be careful, Claire,” Stan said.

“I must have told you twenty times, Mary,” Freddy was saying as he picked through the supper dishes, “don’t use the Grayère with the spinach and the béchamel. Use the Emmentaler.”

“What’s the difference? It was scrumptious.”

“It’s my recipe,” he wiggled his head at her.

Claire shut the door. There was old Iris out on her lawn. She was carving a rainbowing mist with the hose. Claire sneaked up behind her and crossed her arms over her chest.

Iris turned around and glared. “Oh. Pollyanna, is it?”

“What a rude thing to say. I’m grumpy and cantankerous myself. I’m no such thing as a Pollyanna.” She heard herself defending her distemper and started to laugh.

“Vot’s so funny?”

“Uh … Me … You … I don’t know. That coronet on the top of your head.”

“Vot?” she patted her coronet. “It takes me a very long time each morning to assemble dis, you know.”

“Yes, it does look like it. It’s pretty elaborate. But then so are you.” That was what she said to her, like that and right from the start, without any ifs, ands, or buts. This was the kind of relationship they were going to have, like two already drunken men in the middle of the night bumping into each other in some old pub … they were both right at home from the start in the impudent banter of recognition, two souls lost and found out the hard way. Claire walked over and fingered the foxglove. “Digitalis purpurea,” she identified its Latin name, showing off.

Iris, not missing a beat, continued: “Fingerhut. Revbielde.… Vitches Gloves.”

“Fairy Thimbles.”

“Dead Men’s Bells.”

Claire stood there, stumped. “Ah!” she said then. “Bloody Fingers.”

Iris laughed, delighted. “Gloves of Our Lady. How do you know about dese tings?”

“I used to read about them. In a place where there was nothing else to read.”

“Vere vos dat?”

“In India.”

“Ja. I heard dat’s vere you ended up.”

“You heard about me? From whom?”

Iris snorted. “I got my sources.”

“Right. I remember you used to tell fortunes.”

“Me? I never did dat. Never. Dey used to tell dat story und I let dem, but I never did.”

Iris did, too, used to tell fortunes. She knew because Michael had seen her. He used to watch her like a hawk.

“Tell you vot. You help me carry dat foxglove to a sunnier spot und I’ll let you maybe take my picture. Und,” she continued her bargain, “I’ll giff you cookies.”

“Cookies, too, huh?”

“Ja. Und don’t act so surprised. I seen you vatching me mit dat camera all hooked up.”

So. Iris didn’t know what had been stolen. Either that or she was more sly than Claire was inclined to believe.

“All right, you old bandit. Do you have any gloves, at least?”

Iris stood there blankly.

“No gloves. Fine. How about a shovel?”

“Ja. Dat I got.” She led Claire into the barnlike garage. Things hung on rusty nails that looked as if they’d crumble if you touched them. It smelled of old, dank everything. “One ting I love,” Iris was saying, “is my plants. I talk to dem.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. Vy not? Old voman like me? Gotta talk to something.”

She was excited, bent over and digging around in some boxes. Claire thought, that’s no future, that’s not what you live looking forward to. Being so at the mercy of strangers. She will die all alone in her house and not a soul will notice till her body rots and smells and the dog starts howling. No one will happen to know where she’ll be laid out but every antique dealer and real estate shark will cluck nervously over the place the day after she’s gone.

“Come on,” Claire took the mighty shovel from the narrow woman, “let’s see how quickly I can scruff up yet another pair of my sister’s shorts.”

Together they approached the magnificent foxglove. Iris von Lillienfeld crooned away, notifying it of its imminent journey. It was no small task. What seemed to be a simple four-foot fixture turned into a person-sized thing with its heavy, gangling roots exposed, and Iris insisted on getting every root up. “Vatch dat one!” she cried. “Yoy! Vorsichtig! Careful, careful!”

And Claire was careful. She’d forgotten how nice it was to get your fingers good and filthy dirty with the fragrant, deep-dug earth. You remembered your own mud pies. You forgot that winter ever froze New York and left you with nothing out of doors but brittle twigs and rigid ground. This lush beauty fooled you, let you think it would go on forever. Iris stooped over her, a ravaged cameo worried for her dear foxglove, her single sprouts of whisker very evident and sturdy in the horizontal light.

Together they tugged and they pulled. Still the foxglove wouldn’t budge. Claire began to think that maybe it had a mind of its own. Why move the thing to a sunnier spot when it had grown this indomitable where it was? Perhaps it would very simply refuse. No, it couldn’t do that. Iris was determined. It could very well up and die, though. No. No, on second thought, Iris would keep it alive just by watching it. She’d talk it back to health if she had to. Now Iris stuck the pitchfork into the hole and wobbled the lower roots. Son of a gun, marveled Claire, she’s stronger than I am, the old faker. Iris looked at her quickly, maybe reading her thoughts. “It’s chust a matter of balance,” she explained. “Like jujitsu.” And out came the foxglove.

“I see.”

“Und den you can put dose pansies back in the shadow,” Iris instructed her, the kindly film star to the Mexican gardener. Claire didn’t mind, though. She’d waited for so long to get in touch with the old woman that she kept doggedly on, her nails already split and caked with black. And Iris didn’t bother with conversation. She stood alongside quietly, apprehensively watching for signs of any agonized branch.

The Mayor was performing for Natasha, Iris’s poodle, who watched condescendingly from the ivy. He covered his complete routine of independent jumps and snout grovels and he did them well, then flopped to the ground with a weary change of heart.

Claire’s knees were black now, too. The white shorts she’d borrowed from Zinnie were stained with grass. “Oh, hell,” she said when she saw that.

“Dat’s all right,” Iris prodded her impatiently with the shovel handle, “you’ll get your reward in de other vorld.”

So Claire continued. There was a whole new other hole to dig to put the flower in. She had a great belief in the “other world.” She also knew that foreign diabolical spirits could enter into your body without your even knowing it if you put yourself in a susceptible position. Such as going to Macumba ceremonies and uncrossing your legs when the devil came in. Don’t laugh, she told herself even as she started to laugh into the mud. Remember the zombie girl down in Rio? Yes, it was true that that girl had let herself in for it, selling her soul to Fatiema the hag just to hook up with some no-account hot socks from the Gerada de Ipanema. What had she paid her? Forty dollars? Something like that. A couple of laughs. And it had worked. Yes, indeed. That beautiful man had hung around that girl as though his life had depended on it. It had, sort of. She’d had to give him all the money she’d earned in San Paulo. The girl would sit there in the Gerada de Ipanema with her vodka lime and stare at the carnivali world with vacant oozy eyes and wait for him. And he’d beat her, too. That poor girl. She hadn’t had much of a life but she’d had him. She’d had what she’d really wanted and gone for … easily, simply … on a dare, really. But she’d done it. Yes, not everybody believed in it, but Claire knew that you could have anything you wanted in the world. All from black magic with chickens flying in a grungy candlelit “church.” You could have what you wanted all right. What they didn’t tell you was all that went with it, what a price you had to pay. Claire knew. She’d been the zombie girl.

“I hope,” she leaned back on her haunches and pulled her hair into a knot, “that you mean the life after death and not the ‘life’ of walking death.”

Iris took one step backward. Always pale and powdered as good Queen Elizabeth in her final days, Iris went one notch paler still. “Dat’s enough!” she whooshed her hand back and forth at Claire. “Dat’s goot! You did a fine chob. Dat’s enough.” She yanked the trowel from Claire and gave her a push on the shoulder. Not a love tap, either. The Mayor, lounging imperiously in the portaluca, sprang to life. His four dainty feet churned with rapid ignition before he could right his portly girth. Once up, he gallivanted across the lawn to his Claire’s side. He didn’t go so far as to bare his teeth, but his gaze was steadfast animosity. No matter that Lü the cat prowled just underneath the porch. Or that Natasha watched him, not so haughtily now, from the ivy. When push came to shove one stood fast in the face of all terrorism. “It’s all right, boy,” Claire bent down and unruffled him with soothing strokes. “It’s all right.” She wasn’t the least intimidated, he noted. Let the old biddy do her own gardening, by jingle. Or hire a man, the way everyone else did. When they reached the end of the shrub, Iris did a most surprising thing. She tottered after them in her chorus girl slippers and shouted, out of breath from the strain of the run, “Come back tomorrow around four und I’ll giff you a nice fenugreek tea. Yes?”

“Ja wohl,” Claire grinned without turning. The long crooked shadow of Iris reached out like a club-footed path in the street.