Mexico, 1953
They left for Mexico City that same afternoon, in a cream-colored Bentley from Señor Perusquia’s garage. Slim behind the wheel, driving like a fury. She pushed it close to a hundred once they got up to the skinny, two-lane strips of blacktop that cut across the plateaus. Barely slowing even for the hairpin turns on the winding roads up and down the interminable mountains. He was going to tell her to slow down, aware that one pothole, one crumbling shoulder would leave them flattened like the glistening silver wrecks of armadillos scattered along the asphalt. But when he had to ask himself why it was the two of them shouldn’t end up with such a fate, he couldn’t think of a single reason.
He made her slow down only when they approached Cuernavaca. Aware by then they couldn’t make Mexico City before dark. Less afraid of dying than of breaking an axle, or running out of gas in the middle of nowhere, and having to spend whole days out on the road with only each other.
“All right, but I won’t go stay in Shangri-La with that fucking Henry Fink,” Slim said, not looking at him, her face half hidden by the pastel Chanel scarf she had wrapped around her head and the sunglasses she was still wearing even though it was nearly dusk. “It’s Friday night, and they’ll all be there. All his Big Crowd, and the old vampires. I couldn’t stand the sight of them.”
“You won’t have to,” Tom told her as they drove down into the valley, already smelling the sweet, heavy scent of the rose fields, and the waxy, white tuberoses from Chiconcuac.
They stopped along the cobbled road into the town, to speak to the same procession of mestizo women headed back into town at the end of the day. Between Slim’s Spanish and Tom’s money they were able to get a room in the small, pink house of an elderly woman, high up on the hillside. The house was neat and airy, and well swept—much cleaner than the bungalows of the Shangri-La. The old woman served them a roast chicken and a couple of glasses of beer out on the tiny patio, then left them to each other.
As it happened, the house was a block or so up the hill from the nightclub, and angled enough to allow them to look right into its shabby bar and courtyard. Eating in silence as they watched the staff prepare for the evening’s festivities.
There was a small bleating noise, and they both looked down to see the band walking up the hill from the zocalo in the gathering dusk. They were dressed already in their mariachi costumes, tuning their instruments as they came, a few more notes from a horn or a guitar floating up to them.
“This should be good,” Tom said, but Slim only blew some more smoke out through her nose.
“It’s about as authentic as Henry is,” she said. “Half the time, they end up playing ‘Shine On, Harvest Moon,’ or ‘Stormy Weather’ for the expats.”
An ice truck pulled up, then the Coca-Cola truck, and after that the Cadillacs began to arrive from Mexico City, big and black, or white, growling powerfully along the driveway. Disgorging first the Big Crowd, dressed in impeccable evening clothes, none of them sitting yet, but looking around at one another in seeming expectation. The American expats came later—older and imperious, most of them dressed in rumpled and even stained jackets, or tired dresses. Their appearance brought Henry Fink dancing out across the terrace, and everyone felt released to sit down. The band broke into a mariachi number, then the love ballad that he remembered Charlie singing in the car.
Lisboa Antigua reposa
lena de encanto y belleza—
“Don’t you hate them,” Slim breathed. “Don’t you just hate them?”
“Who?”
“The Americans. Look at how they’re dressed—it’s a calculated insult, right there. And the Big Crowd, too—for taking it.”
“You used to like it.”
She looked at him, her gaze level and unsmiling. “I loved it. When we first got down here, it seemed like such a goddamned relief. At least from what was going on in the City. And Charlie was almost like his old self again. Before everything went wrong.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “I should have tried to see you again, to get down here and check in on him. Maybe—”
“Maybe nothing,” she said, cutting him off. “There wasn’t anymore us by then. As we just discovered. And Charlie was very happy to be down here. He was even happy with me. At least, until the Kefauver hearings. It was a good thing for him to leave the City. He just should have done it earlier. And never gone back.”
“Maybe that’s so,” Tom said softly into the Cuernavaca night.
New York, 1950
He had gone to see Charlie when he was readmitted to the hospital. Lying on his back, his face on the hospital pillow shrunken and sallow. Opening his eyes just as Tom sat down next to his bed, looking as fearful and disoriented as a child.
“Which one?” he asked.
“Which one what?”
“Which hospital am I in this time?”
“Ah. Doctors Hospital.”
“Well, that’s good. Best to have a hospital with doctors.” He winked at Tom. “How d’ya like my inspection tour of the City’s medical facilities?”
“Lovely. You can stop anytime now.”
“Hey, how’d you get in here unannounced?” he said, propping himself up on one elbow and looking around. “What happened to Joe Boyle?”
“Your cop? I think he went to get something to eat.”
Charlie sighed. “I have some bad luck with bodyguards, all right. Just yesterday, a little old lady got by him. Said I had promised to make her nephew Elmer a magistrate.”
“What’d you say?”
“I asked, ‘Can’t young Elmer wait?’ You know what she did?”
“No.”
“She looked me up an’ down, then she said, ‘I don’t know, Charlie, the way you look, anything can happen.’”
When they stopped laughing, Tom could see that his brother’s eyes were filled with tears, but there was a look of relief there, as well.
“So you’re really going?”
“I am at last,” he confirmed. “Mr. Secretary Acheson’s got me Mexico, just like he promised. The paperwork’s all done an’ submitted. All that’s left is to announce it to the press.”
“And then Vinnie Impellitteri will be mayor of the greatest city in the world.”
“Then Impy will be mayor,” Charlie confirmed—and added in a voice like a remorseful boy’s: “Are ye mad at me, Tom?”
“No, Charlie,” he said, and smiled sadly at his brother. “I didn’t want you to run again in the first place, if you’ll remember, and I don’t want you killin’ yourself at your job. The City’ll get by. We’ve survived worse than Vincent R. Impellitteri in the past, an’ we will again. You just go down to Mexico an’ get well again.”
“Thank you, Tommy,” he said, clutching his hand. “God bless you, boy. God bless.”
Cuernavaca, 1953
“So we went down to Mexico,” she said. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know, he wanted to have a ticker-tape parade when we left?” she asked him.
“No. I did not.”
“‘A big sendoff with all the trimmings,’ was how he put it. He kept bringing it up before Neddy Moran. Finally I put my foot down. I told him I was not taking part in any parade, and that if he threw one for himself, I would stay behind.”
“Thank God,” Tom said, and sighed.
They sat silently for a few more minutes, looking down the hill at the club terrace. A few couples were dancing now—almost all of them from the Big Crowd, most of the expats sitting about and watching. The band playing a very credible rendition of “If I Didn’t Care.”
“But you know,” she said slowly, turning her head to look at him, “why shouldn’t he have had a parade?”
“What?”
“I mean, besides the fact that it would be pompous, and self-aggrandizing, and a great waste of money,” she added. “If he wanted to have a parade for himself, well, why not? Isn’t that one more part of the great boys’ adventure of the O’Kanes?”
“Well . . .” He fumbled for the words, and she nodded triumphantly, whatever she was thinking confirmed.
“You know it as well as I do,” she said. “Because there was something wrong. Because there was something not right about it all along—”
“About what?”
“About all of it. About him. He knew it, too, as much as he ever admits anything to himself. He didn’t fight me on the parade. Instead, we just had the official car take us down the driveway at Gracie Mansion. I remember the cop there jumping to a salute. Charlie had us go around town, to say thanks to some of the doctors and nurses at all his hospitals. But that was as much of a parade as he pulled. I remember it was a very quiet day in the late summer, barely a soul on the street.”
She leaned over toward him now, speaking quietly.
“We crept out of town like a couple of thieves in the night. And why was that, Tommy O’Kane? What was it you’ve dug up? What was it we all knew was wrong all along?”
“I’m still not sure,” Tom told her, rubbing his chin. Wondering if he really wasn’t, or if this was the last lie he would tell her.
Slim laughed unexpectedly, the sound tinny and grating against the music floating up the hill.
“You’re not sure? My God, have three people ever been so able to keep a secret? Even from themselves?”
“I’m not sure—not yet.”
She sat watching him, curious, waiting for him to continue. Then she understood.
“So you’re going to ask him it—whatever it is—straight out.”
“I am.”
He sat rubbing the folded-up strip of paper in his pocket. The one from the medical examiner’s report on Abe Reles: Withhold information by order of DA. Wondering if he should show it to her, try to explain.
“My God. And you really think he’s going to tell you? Now? When all he’s got is what you think of him?”
“That’s what I’m worryin’ about.”
“But . . .”
“But I think it’s only going to work if I start with a confession.”
“A confession. From you.” He nodded his head, and she looked at him for a beat. “And you want to know if I want to go first.”
“That’s right.”
She laughed again, even more unpleasantly than the last time. “And they say chivalry is dead. No, please, be my guest. He’s already sure he knows what I am.”
That night they slept together for the last time, under the pink bedspread in the neat, pink house of the nice old lady. Neither of them saying anything, spooned up together because they had to be in the narrow bed. Tom held his arms around her, and she was stiff and unmoving against him at first, but eventually she reached up a hand, then another, to hold his wrists. Her body started to shake, and he realized she was crying, and all he could think to do was hold her tighter, and nuzzle his face along her hair. Wondering, as he did, what the hell he could ever tell Ellie.