MANNY’S FIX-IT IS in a First Street basement that smells hospitably of leather, stain, and heated glue. When O’Hara steps through the door, the stooped repairman is conferring with a would-be It Girl in culottes and heels, and if he notices the arrival of a homicide detective, he keeps it to himself. He focuses instead on the vintage bag the girl has dropped onto his counter, and shakes his head in dismay at the many areas in need of repair. Now that he’s playing himself, instead of a doddering old codger, Manny seems a decade younger.
Having assessed the damage inside and out, Manny looks up apprehensively and breaks the bad news. “One hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
“Manny, that’s more than I paid for it.”
“I would hope so.” With a look of resignation, he reaches for the bag again, and O’Hara notices the black-and-white pin: OBAMA. CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. Apparently, he is now up-to-date on presidential politics.
While Manny reappraises, O’Hara takes in the cluttered space. Completed repairs are stuffed between shelves. Repairs-in-progress crowd his workbench, along with umbrella ribs, trunk locks, and other replacement parts. In the back corner is an old barber’s chair, and above it a hand-drawn sign advertises haircuts for $14, hot shaves for $7. Between Manny and his customer is a display case featuring items for sale—vintage jewelry, flatware, several watches, and a couple cameras, including a Polaroid Swinger. They could be flea-market finds, but more likely they’re the purloined harvest of junkie thieves like the real Gus in ICU.
O’Hara leans toward the photographs on the side wall. In one, Manny stands beside Paulette, his too-young, too-pretty girlfriend. In another, his arm is draped around a slight young man O’Hara recognizes as Popsicle. Side by side, their resemblance is striking.
“It’s a big job,” Manny tells the girl. “The whole back has to be cut out . . . a new lining sewn in . . . the lock replaced. . . .”
“Can’t you just patch the back and fix the lock?”
“I could try.”
“Manny. You’re such a doll!” Before she leaves, O’Hara has to watch her dip across the counter and kiss him on the cheek.
“HI, MANNY.”
“Hi, Darlene.”
“That picture on the wall, that your grandson?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s interesting, because not long ago I saw a fortune-teller named Miss Marla. Perhaps you know her. I’ve been seeing a lot of fortune-tellers lately. She mentioned an old Gypsy who sought reparations for the murder of his grandson. According to Miss Marla, a kris was convened, but in the end they told the old man to take a hike.”
“Darlene, you believe what you hear from fortune-tellers, I got a good deal for you on a bridge that connects Manhattan to Brooklyn.”
“Manny, you already sold me that fucking bridge three times over, and a river full of bullshit to go under it. I were you, I wouldn’t push my luck.”
“How can I help you, Darlene?”
“Let’s start in Florida, the old man’s condo, right after Fudgesicle and your grandson go in posing as employees of the Sarasota Water Authority.”
“Sounds like you already got it figured out.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“According to my grandson, it was the usual drill. They tell the old man they’re checking for contamination and have him bang on his water heater. Two minutes later the guy comes back into the bedroom, banging whatever it is they gave him on the barrel of a rifle.”
O’Hara had grown attached to her version, the one in which Bunny brings back the spoon so he can shove it up Fudgesicle’s ass, but this makes more sense. By knocking the spoon on the gun, Bunny could make it sound like he was still hitting the water heater and take them by surprise.
“Then what?”
“The old man points the gun at Fudgesicle, tells him to get on his knees, or he’s going to kill him. I wish he had. Instead, Fudgesicle bends down and grabs the boy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fudgesicle picks up the boy.”
“To run?”
“The kid doesn’t need help to run. Limp or not, he can run faster than Fudgesicle. Even I can.”
“What are you saying?”
“He picks up the kid to hold him up in front of him—as a shield . . . so the old guy won’t shoot.”
O’Hara had played out the scene a hundred different ways, but not like this. She feels like she’s been kicked in the stomach.
“Holding the boy, Fudgesicle rushes past the old man toward the door. He hits the gun, the gun goes off.”
“I don’t understand,” says O’Hara, although it’s more anger than an inability to comprehend. “What made Fudgesicle think he could treat the boy like that?”
“I can’t answer that one, Darlene. Maybe he’d say ’cause he was the one who adopted him, or maybe because the boy wasn’t a real Gypsy. But he treated my grandson no different or worse, so who cares what that piece of shit thought?”
“How do you know about all this?”
“My grandson called me right before he took the boy to the ER. He thought it might get him killed. I guess he was right, because I never heard from him again.”
O’Hara leans against the counter. The smells that were pleasing when she walked in have turned noxious.
“If the boy was a gadje, why’d he rate a Gypsy funeral?”
“He was born gadje, raised Gypsy. His mother was Christina, the woman from the garden. That day you came with your book, I thought you’d see it. She has the same face. When she was fifteen, she got pregnant. The only one who noticed was the Big Roma who lived on her block. She arranged the whole thing. She had the girl tell her father she was sleeping over at a friend’s house, delivered the baby that night, and sold him to Fudgesicle and his wife, a Gypsy named Gabriella. ”
“I ran into that bitch in Florida,” mutters O’Hara, more to herself than Manny. She winces at the memory of Herc’s stepsister, staring at the TV.
“At the kris,” says Manny, “the old lady came up with the idea of burying the boy in the garden. As if having him back near his real mother made everything right again. She didn’t care about my grandson, just her own bad kasa. So she had Fudgesicle get his body from wherever he’d dumped it and move him to the garden.”
“And who the hell are Pizza and Crisco?”
“His Gypsy grandmothers. Pizza is Fudgesicle’s mother. Crisco is the mother of Gabriella. At one point they were partners, but they had a falling out and have hated each other ever since.”
“Why didn’t you go straight to the cops?”
“I didn’t want to be expelled. Demand a kris, you have to abide. Something called marime. You wouldn’t understand.”
The basement air is suffocating. O’Hara does one last scan of the premises and lands on the sign above the barber’s chair: HAIRCUTS $14, SHAVES $7. She remembers the straight razor across the drain, the wet carpet just outside the door, and the damp corner of the DO NOT DISTURB sign. “Manny, when was the last time you gave someone a shave?”
“Been a while. Kids all growing beards like the sixties all over.”
“You didn’t, by any chance, give one the other night to a shit bag at the St. Marks Hotel?”
“I don’t think so. But you know how it is, Darlene. My age, you forget half the things you do soon as you do them.”