TONY SWUNG AT DEMETRIO.
I tried to stop him, to tell him that it wasn’t what he thought, but it was too late. Tony’s fist flashed toward Demetrio, who expertly deflected it and used the momentum to send my ex-husband tumbling to the ground. When Tony regained his composure, he leapt to his feet, eyeing his rival with an expression of pure rage.
Demetrio, on the other hand, looked incredibly poised. His stance suggested that he’d had martial-arts training. The men circled each other warily. People were streaming into the street, wanting to watch the action. From the corner of my eye, I saw a man pushing his way through the crowd: Demetrio’s bodyguard. He pulled his gun from its holster, pointing the weapon at Tony.
“No!” I screamed.
Suddenly the guard hit the ground with a grunt. Remo had tackled him from behind and both men landed in a heap. I saw the gun skitter along the road and vanish under a car. Demetrio looked at Remo with a look of bewilderment.
Taking advantage of the split-second distraction, Tony swung again. This time he didn’t miss. The blow landed squarely on Demetrio’s jaw with a sickening thud. Demetrio stumbled backward. I tried to get between them, but Tony grabbed my wrist and wrenched me away. He set upon Demetrio again, determined to beat him senseless.
Remo pried Tony away. “Goddamn it, Tony, he’s not worth it! You’re going to wind up with a bullet in your head!”
Tony’s eyes settled on me, standing off to the side, covering my mouth in horror. “Get in the fucking car!”
Terrified, I stumbled toward his Mitsubishi. Demetrio was getting unsteadily to his feet, aided by his security guard. He pointed at Remo and snarled, “You’re fired!”
Remo had labored at Atlántico for years, helping transform it from a modest café into a playground for the island’s elite. In one night of madness it was snatched away from him. Demetrio rubbed his jaw and wiped the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. I wanted to go over to him, but I knew if I didn’t get into the car there would only be more trouble.
The three of us flew out of the parking lot. Tony floored the accelerator, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, while Remo pleaded with him to slow down. How had such a perfect night gone so horribly wrong? Tony screeched to a halt outside of our place, and I followed him out.
He stormed up the steps. “At first I thought you were pushing me away because of my drinking. So I cut down, but nothing changes. Ron tells me it’s hormones, and I got to be patient. So I’m waiting and waiting like a jackass, and now I find out you’ve been fucking someone else the whole time!” He wrenched open the door to the apartment, grabbed a suitcase, and started tossing clothes into it.
“That’s not true!” I protested, following him as he stormed around the place grabbing his stuff. “You’re wrong!”
There was no arguing with Tony once he had an idea fixed in his head. He dumped his suits and shoes into another bag, opened the safe, took out his gun, and started removing wads and wads of money.
“Hey, some of that’s mine,” I objected, but he pushed me away. I watched as he removed his passport and tucked it into his pocket. Then he took Justine’s.
“You can’t take that!” I protested.
Tony tensed up and charged towards me. “I saw how you looked at Demetrio,” he hissed in my face. “You didn’t give a shit about me back there. You only cared about what happened to him.” He grabbed his bags and stormed toward the door. He paused. “By the way, you’re fired. And this time, don’t bother calling Ron. You no longer work for us.” The door slammed, and his footsteps echoed down the stairs.
I WOKE UP HOURS later, feeling sick and disoriented. I sat up in bed and saw the state of the room—gaping drawers and clothes strewn everywhere—and the whole horrible fight came crashing back, along with a horrendous pounding headache. Would Demetrio ever want to see me again? I had told him I was divorced, and alluded to the fact that it had been ages since I had sex. I cringed to imagine what he must think of me now.
Suddenly I recalled Tony emptying the safe, and I stumbled out of bed towards it. The door to the safe was open. Except for a few thousand dollars and my ring, it was empty.
With a sick feeling in my gut, I began looking for my car keys. Instinct told me I needed to retrieve the Daihatsu as soon as possible. I frantically searched the apartment, to no avail. The last time I recalled having the keys was outside Atlántico. Hoping that I had dropped them during the early-morning fight, I showered and had Rosa call me a taxi.
The cab slowed down as the elaborate wrought-iron gates of Atlántico came into view. My car was gone. Tony had taken it. I stared out of the window, biting back tears, and gave the driver Remo’s address.
“OPEN UP! IT’S ME!”
I kept on banging on the door until a bleary-eyed, unshaven Remo opened it a crack. I pushed in past him. I noted that his suit from last night was lying in a pile on the floor, caked with dirt. “Jesus,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Where did you sleep—a building site?”
Remo still looked shell-shocked. “Three-and-a-half million men on this island,” he said, “and you have to cheat on your husband with my boss.”
“Ex-husband, remember? And what do you call what Tony’s been doing with Gabriella?” I sat down and put my aching head in my hands. “I wish I had slept with Demetrio,” I groaned. “You have no idea how badly I wanted to. I didn’t, and I still have to deal with all of this.”
Remo looked lost in thought. “I guess we’re both out of a job,” I ventured. The silence stretched. “Look,” I said comfortingly, “at least you can go back to the States. I’m stuck here. Tony took Justine’s passport. And anyway, I’m sure Demetrio will take you back.”
“I just humiliated the man with the world’s biggest ego in front of his adoring public,” Remo said. “He won’t take me back. Ever.”
“You’re being melodramatic. As soon as everybody finds out what really happened, life will go back to normal. You’ll go back to Atlántico and I’ll go back to Tomaju.”
Remo turned very serious. “You can’t go over there!” he said urgently. “Marisa, promise me you won’t go near Tomaju!”
“Calm down!” I said. “Jesus, you think Tony’s that angry with me?”
His eyes blazed. “Just promise, okay? He told them not to let you in.”
Hearing a knock at the door, Remo took a sharp intake of breath. “Shhhh,” he whispered. After another knock, a white envelope sailed underneath the door. Remo picked it up and tore it open. His face dropped as he read it. “Your boyfriend just evicted me,” he said bitterly, slumping onto the couch. “On top of everything else, I’m now officially homeless.”
“Demetrio is your landlord?”
“Was my landlord,” he groaned. “I didn’t have all my papers in order when I was looking for a place, so he let me rent this one. He owns a bunch on the island. Now I’m completely fucked.”
The consequences of my impromptu dinner with Demetrio were exploding out of control. How could Demetrio be so vindictive as to evict Remo? He’d always seemed like such a gentleman. Were my instincts about him so wrong?
“Let me talk to him, Remo. Do you have your papers in order now?”
Remo winced. “Well … not exactly, no. I’ve never had the money to do it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard. I’ll lend you money, okay? I still have some, so problem solved.”
Far from being cheered, Remo looked like his entire world had come crashing down about him. I wanted to ask him what was wrong, but he seemed so desperately sad that all I could do was pity him.
“I think you need to get some sleep,” I said gently. “Things’ll seem better tomorrow, you’ll see.”
I left him there, dazed. Before I left I stopped and asked him something that had been bothering me since I’d woken up. “Why did Tony come looking for me last night, anyway?”
Remo sighed heavily. “He wasn’t looking for you. He was looking for me. I guess you’d call his finding you with Demetrio an unexpected bonus.”
I WAITED FOR A few days before I called Tony. He owed me money, I needed my car, and I needed to get back to work. Hoping that he would have calmed down enough to talk to me, I tried his cell phone. From his tone I knew I had underestimated the depth of his anger.
“What?”
I took a deep breath. “Can I have my car back, please? And the money you took?”
“Your car? You don’t have a car. It’s my car, I paid for it.”
“But you bought it for me.”
“And I gave to Horacio. And funnily enough, it was already registered to him.” Furious, I decided to hang up before I said something to further inflame the situation. Before I could, Tony pressed on.
“By the way, you owe me money,” he said. “Horacio just read me the terms of our divorce.” My heart sank. “Apparently, I have joint custody of our daughter and I don’t have to pay child support or alimony.”
My blood ran cold. Those were the terms of my quickie divorce, but I’d never thought that Tony would someday use them against me. Surely he’d still help support his daughter?
“Also,” he went on, “I want to remind you that the contract for the apartment is in your name, so I won’t be paying rent anymore.”
The full weight of what he was saying hit me all at once. Without a job, I wouldn’t be able to support us, or pay Rosa’s salary or Justine’s exorbitant private-school fees.
“I didn’t do anything!” I screamed.
“You can’t make it here on your own. Let me know when I can have Justine.”
With that, Tony hung up on me.
I stared at the phone in my hand, thunderstruck. Then a wave of fury started to build inside of me. Did Tony really think he could separate me from the person I loved more than anyone else? From my own daughter? I may have made a stupid mistake with our divorce papers, but I knew that one call from me to Ruth Gordon could put Tony in jail for years.
His next meeting with Ruth Gordon was scheduled for May. I would just have to ride it out until then. I picked up the phone and called Veronica, the head of the modeling agency.
“DARRRLING!”
Veronica sashayed over to me as I stepped into the Agencia de Modelos, waving her cigarette holder by way of greeting. She stopped dead, as if noticing that I had lost a limb.
“What on earth did you do to your hair?” She tapped the ash from her pink Russian Sobranie cigarette into one of the several ashtrays she kept strategically placed around the room. “Come back and see me the moment you are blond again, so we can update your portfolio.”
By this point Leslie had returned to California, where she would stay until she gave birth. I had no choice but to go to a salon to have my hair bleached. The Jaragua seemed like the logical place. I headed over, and insisted they squeeze me in. I sat down and told the stylist that I wanted my hair blond. She covered my hair with a thick, pungent paste, put a cap over it, and left me to read the latest issue of Cosmo.
After five minutes my scalp began to tingle. After ten it was seriously burning. I had never had to bleach my hair before, and had no idea it could be so painful. I called the girl over and asked her to rinse the mixture off. The cool water felt good against my scalp. Then she added shampoo, and I winced in pain. Something was wrong. The girl left me, mid-wash, and rushed off to fetch another woman, who took one look at my head and let out a horrified gasp. I sat forward, and burst into tears when I saw my reflection. My scalp was bright red. The roots of my hair were white, and the rest a light fluorescent green.
Stunned, I reached out to touch it, and a clump came off in my hand. There was a commotion in the salon as I wailed and asked how on earth this could have happened. The stylist tearfully confessed that she had never lightened Caucasian hair before. My scalp was raw and would need to heal before anything else could be done to my hair. In the meantime, the only solution was to cut what remained as short as possible.
When I walked into the apartment, the dumbstruck expression on Rosa’s face sent me running to my room, where I cried harder than I ever had in my life. I looked in the mirror, taking in the beet-red face, blood-red scalp, and cropped snow-white fuzz. I sobbed miserably. I looked like a fucking chicken.
Then, from out of nowhere, a burst of laughter erupted out of me. The utter ludicrousness of the situation had suddenly become apparent. After everything I had endured in my life, after everything I had endured in the last year, did my hair really deserve this many tears? It was just hair. It would grow back. I had bigger problems to deal with.
“OPEN UP! IT’S ME!”
Two days later I was banging on Remo’s door. I was determined to drag my friend out of his slump. If I could manage to pull myself together after my disastrous start to the new year, then so could he. When he refused to open the door, I threatened to kick it down. Finally, he opened it a crack and I pushed myself inside.
I pulled open the curtains and he squinted against the morning light. He looked at me quizzically, then reached his hand out to touch the auburn wig I was wearing. “What’s with the hair?” he muttered.
“I got it in Miami,” I said.
“Why?”
I pulled off the wig and endured the horrified expression on his face. “The short version? The only capable hairdresser on the island is in America, having a baby.” In addition to the auburn wig, I had three blond ones in different lengths and shades for modeling.
I wrinkled up my nose at the smell in his apartment. “Jesus, Remo, you have to pull yourself together!” Remo was unwashed and unshaven; empty food containers were piled up next to a stack of dirty dishes. I opened the blinds and window to let some fresh air in. “Are you still being evicted?” I asked.
“I have to be out in three days,” he moaned.
I took a seat on the edge of the sofa. “Listen, Remo, you can stay with me. You can have the room upstairs.”
“I don’t think your husband would approve.”
“Ex-husband. Anyway, he knows we’re just friends, so that’s not a problem. He also knows that you lost your job trying to protect him. He owes you. He should give you a job.”
“I’m American. The police don’t want Americans working there.”
“Carmine and Vinnie work there. So why not you?” Remo’s eyes were inexplicably welling with tears. “Look, if you’re worried about the police, you could grade. Tony has four people working full-time through the night grading tickets. Nobody would even know you’re there, and you wouldn’t be taking bets. The pay’s just as good.”
A spark of interest appeared in his eyes. “I am used to working nights,” he said.
Remo and I needed each other. If we pooled our resources, we could have a steady income and a place to live. I laid out the situation for him. Without getting help with the rent soon, I would lose the apartment. I could practically see the cogs turning in his brain.
“Come on, Remo. It’ll be fun. Justine will be thrilled to have you there.”
TWO DAYS LATER, REMO showed up with everything he owned in duffel bags. He refused to take the upstairs room, preferring instead to move into the empty maid’s quarters. It was small and cramped, but private. That way he was completely separated from the rest of the apartment, and had his own private entrance. Rosa was the only one who had difficulty with the arrangement. She offered to swap with him, but he brushed away her overtures.
I soon learned why Remo had been so determined to have the tiny maid’s quarters. A few days later, I opened the door dividing his area from the kitchen and found myself face-to-face with a tall, beautiful Haitian woman. She froze when she saw me, and Remo suddenly appeared behind her.
“Er—oh, hi! Marisa, this is Laurette.” Laurette mumbled a quick goodbye, then disappeared down the metal staircase.
“Isn’t she’s the ladies’-room attendant at Atlántico?”
“That’s right,” Remo confirmed sheepishly, before hurriedly changing the subject. “Anyway, it’s my first night grading. Any last words of advice?”
Just like me, Remo was entering the world of bookmaking without the slightest knowledge of sports or gambling. Even though he wasn’t taking bets, he still had an awful lot to learn.
“Just try not to get discouraged,” I told him. “It’s going to feel overwhelming at first.”
AS REMO SETTLED INTO life at Tomaju, I got back into the routine of modeling. Veronica had been mortified at first when I showed her my ruined scalp, but soon saw the advantages of my new look. I was like a Barbie doll with interchangeable tresses, and my portfolio would reflect that. She was right—I was booked for jobs even before my pictures were developed.
One evening a week or so later, as Remo was preparing to leave for work, I heard the sound of a Harley-Davidson roaring toward the apartment. Remo sprinted to the window and blanched. He hadn’t told Tony he had moved in with me, for fear of upsetting him, and now his worst fears were being realized. “It’s Tony!” he said, his voice laden with panic. “He knows I’m here!”
“No, he doesn’t,” I assured him. “And even if he did, who cares? When did he get the bike?”
“He just had it flown in from Miami.”
Below in the parking lot, Tony looked up, revved the engine and took off. The rumble of the motor hung in the air long after he had disappeared from view. I wondered what on earth had brought him out here.
Remo peeked over my shoulder. “Did you ever tell him about what Sonny LoBue said?”
“Yeah. He didn’t seem bothered, though.”
“You know Sacco’s back, right? And it looks like he’s planning on staying this time.”
That could only mean one thing. “So they finally indicted him,” I said.
This was bad news for Tony and Tomaju. Unlike Carmine, Ron was a high-profile fugitive, especially after 60 Minutes. Even if the local police denied it, the feds would naturally assume he’d fled here. Ron, the founding father of the whole enterprise, was a huge bull’s-eye on Tomaju’s back as long as he was hiding out in the D.R.
“Remo, I don’t think it’s wise for you to keep working at the office while Ron’s around. The FBI will be putting pressure on the Dominicans to hand him over.”
“What about Tony?”
“As far as I know, he’s still in the clear.”
Remo nodded slowly. “What if Ron were caught? What would happen to Tomaju?”
I shrugged. “Well … nothing, I guess. Things would carry on as usual. His girlfriend Joanna would take over paying and collecting in the States.” Remo looked deep in thought. I took some comfort in the fact that I would probably have quit Tomaju anyway, knowing that Ron was hiding out on the island. “Maybe it’s time you tried to get your old job back. Maybe I should talk to Demetrio?”
I had not stopped thinking about Demetrio since that fateful night. My feelings for him had not changed at all. In fact, I was more determined than ever to have him. I knew I couldn’t see him now, not with my hair in the state it was in. But pleading Remo’s case would provide the perfect opportunity to talk to him.
“How long did you work for Sacco?” Remo asked.
“Hmm, it’s been eight years.” I shivered. It was strange to think that I had dedicated almost a decade of my life to Ron and his gambling empire.
“What do you know about him?” Remo pressed on. “I mean, really know about him.”
“Okay, Remo,” I said, sitting down and patting the sofa next to me. “You want to know about Ron? I’ll tell you. But I want some information in exchange.” Remo sat down, looking puzzled. “I’ll tell you about Ron … if you tell me about Demetrio.”