41

Charley rode back on the plane sitting beside a man who hummed “These Foolish Things” for three hundred miles. It was torture, not because it reminded him of Maerose or Mardell, he didn’t need any help with that, but because it was one endless drone.

Charley changed his seat. He looked out the starboard window and began to hum “The Washington Post March” and tried to think. A week after Election Day it was all set up that Laverne Toby and her mother would fade out of the picture, unavailable to testify against Marvin Mallon, the ballistics report would turn out to be a mistake and, on laboratory examination, the contents of the two tinfoil parcels would turn out to be talcum powder. After Marvin signed a release absolving the hotel of any responsibility for his misadventure, he would be all fixed up. But he, Charley Partanna, would be in exactly the same bind with the same two women in his life.

He was all clear on George F. Mallon, but he was going to have to live like a thief on the lam. If Mae had been shook up enough to hire private detectives to check him and Mardell out at the Miami airport and to pin down that he had stayed over at Mardell’s apartment in New York a couple of dozen nights, then she was going to keep the same people on him until after the engagement party, when there wouldn’t be anything he could do about it anymore.

But Mardell had had pneumonia. Nobody just turns his back on somebody who has just had pneumonia. If she needed him before, she needed him triple now. Pop would have handled the hospital bill, but who knew how much cash she had on hand? How much food could she have in the house, and how could a woman who had just come out of the hospital be expected to carry heavy groceries home from a supermarket? She wasn’t working, and also she was nuts enough to send any extra money she had to her mother in England, so it could be that she didn’t even have enough money to buy groceries. He had to see her. He had to talk to her and make sure she was all right. If she was all right, he would be able to cool it because, after almost a three-week break, she might even have gotten used to it.

He could bring her a list of club dates from Pomerantz and make sure that Pomerantz had the loot to take care of her if she wasn’t strong enough to work yet. The time had come to lop her off, Charley admitted that, but even Maerose would understand that the only thing he could do was to go and see Mardell so he could tell her all this. But it was risky, so the best thing would be to not even go home to the beach but to lose any possible tail Mae might plant on him at the airport, and to go straight to Mardell’s. Not so straight, either. Down the alley behind her house and into the building by the back door.

The cabin attendant brought lunch. “How come airlines never have Italian food?” he asked her.

“You ever eat reheated pasta?” she asked him. “You know what it’s like?”

“I can guess, I guess.”

“You ever eat canned spaghetti?”

“Canned spaghetti?”

“Reheated pasta is worse. I know—my husband is an Italian and he can handle canned spaghetti. But when it comes to reheated pasta he like wants to slash his wrists.”

“I’ll eat the salad. I hope I can keep it down.”

“The bread isn’t great, but it isn’t bad.”

The flight came in at La Guardia. Charley got on the non-public phone on the tarmac outside the airport building and called Arrigo Sviato, who headed up the high tech freight and luggage robbery unit at La Guardia for Religio Vulpigi, Charley’s old boss. He told Arrigo he had to get out of the airport without anybody seeing him go. Arrigo asked him for the number on his baggage check, then where he was, and when Charley told him he said to stay right there until they could send a van over for him that would take him right into Brooklyn. “I gotta go into New York, actually,” Charley said.

“Why not? The van will bring your bag.”