AFTER HOURS

Lily Fakaofo was up late, sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, listening to the 24-hour news station on the radio, smoking a cigarette and working her way through the second box of Nilla Wafers she’d eaten since Doug, Romeo, and Perdita had left two and a half hours before. Estrellita and Duane were asleep in Tutu’s room.

“From Harare, Zimbabwe, comes this story,” said the radio. “The Zimbabwe Football Association banned four players for life yesterday for publicly urinating on the field at a Harare soccer stadium. Association chairman Nelson Chirwa said the organization was appalled by the behavior last Sunday of the four players of the southern Tongogara team. ‘It is a public indecency for a player to openly urinate on the football pitch,’ Chirwa said. ‘We all know that it is all superstition and that the belief in juju that almost all the clubs have taken to believe in is strongly deplored by the association.’ He said the four were advised to urinate on the field by witch doctors, who said it would ensure a victory. It didn’t. Tongogara lost, two to nothing.”

Lily laughed and took a puff on her Bel-Air Menthol Slim. Doug had told her that he thought Romeo Dolorosa was mixed up with some kind of voodoo cult down in Mexico or Texas, but she didn’t want to know about it. There was enough real mysterious shit going down in the world, Lily thought, without getting sucked into that phony black magic crap. Take this strange business in Russia she was reading about.

A forty-two-year-old French-Armenian multimillionaire art dealer, who was also a well-known poet, had disappeared in Moscow five months ago. He’d been having a meeting with three Soviet business associates in his hotel room near Red Square when he received a telephone call. He spoke briefly to the caller, hung up, and told his associates to wait there, that he had to go out but would return within the hour. They saw him get into a black Zhiguli limousine and speed away, and that’s the last anyone had seen or heard of him, including his family in Paris.

Police, KGB agents, and the Soviet government, specifically the Visual Arts Department of the Cultural Affairs Ministry, with whom he’d had dealings for several years, were pursuing the case. Speculation was that with the restructuring of the Soviet society and increasing entrepreneurial climate, the art dealer had engaged in unlawful export of Russian Orthodox icons and other art items in league with the various crime organizations operating throughout the Soviet Union. Authorities in Moscow were paying particularly close attention to the case because of their feeling that it could lead to the exposure of a homegrown Mafia.

According to an official in the Department of Cultural Affairs, this art dealer was a clever man who spoke several languages fluently, had a wide variety of friends in many countries, was very confident and thought there was nothing he couldn’t handle. He had made his millions in a very short period of time, a decade or so, having started out with next to nothing in a small Paris gallery. His family were convinced that he had no dealings with gangsters.

Those involved in the investigation theorized that the art dealer had become enmeshed in a power struggle among the seven major Moscow Mafia families, and found himself in a situation he could not handle; or, that he had simply been double-crossed and disposed of. Another rumor circulating in Armenia and Paris held that he had been selling artworks to the Soviet government itself, that a number of the items were revealed to be forgeries, and he had been killed by the KGB, who dumped his body in a forest outside Moscow. This version maintained that the body had been discovered five days after his disappearance, and the family was fostering the pretense that they had heard nothing from or about him in an effort not to discredit the gallery or his reputation. It was, therefore, a mystery that might never be solved.

“Ha!” said Lily, turning the page. “Another hotshot too smart for his own good.”

Lily wolfed down another Nilla Wafer and stretched her back. She figured Doug might stay out partying with Romeo and Perdita after they’d delivered whatever it was they had, and she was thinking that she might just as well go to bed, when the radio brought her up short.

“In Hollywood tonight, a gun battle left two men dead and resulted in the capture of another by federal drug agents, the FBI and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. An illegal cosmetics factory, specializing in the use of unauthorized products and operated in central Hollywood by organized crime, was raided at midnight during a delivery of approximately one solid ton of human placentas. Authorities identified the dead men as Romeo Dolorosa, of Tampa, Florida, and Douglas Fakaofo, of Los Angeles. The man taken into custody was identified as Reginald San Pedro Sula, a citizen of the Central American republic of Caribe. All of the men are suspected members of the crime family headed by Marcello ‘Crazy Eyes’ Santos, which is based in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Dallas, Texas. According to Drug Enforcement Special Agent Woodrow W. Dumas, who led the raid, seizure of the two thousand pound shipment of placentas, used in the manufacture of anti-aging skin creams, and discovery of the illegal plant is a major breakthrough. More arrests are expected. Well, folks, that’s another kind of Hollywood skin factory, isn’t it?”

Lily dropped both her cigarette and the cookie she’d just taken from the box and stood up, knocking over her chair. She rushed to the rear bedroom, unlocked the door and flipped on the light.

“Get up! Get up now!” she screamed at Estrellita and Duane, who were huddled together on the bed. “Get up and get out! Get out of the house! Go, go!”

Estrellita and Duane ran out into the night, taking off down the street as fast as they could. Lily collapsed on the floor of Tutu’s room.

“Doug!” she cried. “Doug, you big brown dummy! You poor, big, beautiful, dead dummy! What’s your ugly old Samoan mama Lily gonna do now?”