Blood Money Page 5

  He was silent for a few seconds. She heard him draw in a deep breath and blow it out slowly. “I don’t understand. Or maybe I do, and I just don’t agree. I can’t pretend that I do. Arguing about it isn’t going to do any good, is it?”

  “No,” said Jane. “It isn’t.”

  “I love you, and I’ll be in the usual places waiting to hear from you. You already know that if I can do anything to help you, I will.”

  “Thanks, Carey,” she said. “I promise that the second I can come home, I will. I love you. Got to go.” She hung up.

  As she walked to the ladies’ room she felt guilty and sorry and, most of all, unsettled. What she had been doing from a year before they had met in college until the day they had married had always been hard to talk about. She had considered agreeing to marry him to be a promise to stop being a guide. But she had been away twice since then.

  The first time it had been Pete Hatcher—a man she had hidden before she had made the promise. One night she had learned he’d been spotted, and was running again. She had considered him unfinished business, and she had gone off to make him disappear for good.

  In the year after that, she and Carey had both gotten attached to the idea that making people disappear was just something she used to do when she was young and single. When they talked about the past, it was the shared past—things that had happened to both of them—or the distant past inhabited by parents, aunts, and uncles. But Richard Dahlman had changed that.

  Dahlman was a doctor, the older surgeon who had taken Carey on as a novice and taught him. Jane had never met him until the night when he had turned up at Carey’s hospital with a policeman’s bullet in his shoulder. Jane had plucked Dahlman out of the hospital and kept him invisible while she had tried to sort out how a respected surgeon had gotten into that kind of trouble. She had done it because Carey had asked her to.

  But apparently then, or in the months after that, something had quietly changed. It seemed that when Carey had asked her to make one more person disappear, he had forfeited—no, knowingly spent—his right to demand that she never do it again. She had heard it in his voice tonight, and she didn’t like it.

  While she was listening to the girl’s story this afternoon, she had acknowledged that Carey would not be pleased. Then she had told herself that Carey would understand why this, too, was an exception. But to Carey, this had been merely the first instance to occur after he had given up his right to an opinion. Marriages were more fragile and complicated than she had ever imagined. Trouble came in quiet, unexpected ways. Things had to be said over and over again, all existing agreements renewed and clarified.

  When Jane returned to the car, the girl was half-turned in the front seat and the old man was leaning forward in the back, while they talked. As soon as the girl saw Jane coming, they stopped and both stared straight ahead. Jane wasn’t sure that she liked that, either. She got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and drove off onto the highway.

  It took only a few minutes for the old man to speak. “You know, I think I’m going to need a car. Mansfield is big enough to have a couple of used-car lots. Suppose Rita comes in with me to buy one. I’m old, so nobody is shocked if I’m old-fashioned enough not to trust banks. I pay cash. Rita makes a big deal about what a crazy old coot I am—you know, like she’s embarrassed—and the salesman sells it to me. That way I don’t need a bank account with a name on it and all that.”

  Jane muttered, “If you have a valid driver’s license, I assume it must be in your own name. Otherwise it might work.”

  “What might work better?” asked Bernie. “How about if we rent an apartment, you buy a car under a false name, wait for the ownership and registration to come in the mail, and sign the pink slip over? Would that be better?”

  “You know it would,” said Jane. “But I’m not staying in an apartment with you for a month while the state of Ohio gets around to mailing a lot of papers. I own this car—not in my real name, of course. We’ll go to Mansfield. I’ll sign the car over and Rita and I will be on our way.”

  “Oof,” moaned Bernie.

  Rita turned in her seat. “What’s wrong?”

  “Uh … nothing,” said Bernie. “I guess I’m just tired.” To Jane he said, “Keep going.”

  “I don’t have much choice,” she said. “There’s not much point in stopping unless we come to a hospital.”

  “No,” said Bernie. “I don’t need a doctor, and if I did, the price of stopping would be a little steep. I’m just not used to the excitement, and I’ve been out a lot today. When we got to the hotel and Rita wasn’t there, I went to see the Falls. Pretty spectacular.” Jane expected him to be quiet, but he added, “The day I died we were in San Antonio, Texas. Before the credit report came telling us where to find Rita, I got to see the Alamo.”

  It was clear to Jane that he wanted to continue talking, but she was not sure whether he was trying to ignore some pain or keep her occupied. “What did you think of it?”

  “All my life I’ve been hearing about it,” he said. “But it’s not much to look at. A crappy place to die. Don’t you think so?”

  “I’m not a believer in last stands,” she said. “I’m a believer in running.”

  Bernie chuckled. “That comes with the high I.Q., I guess.” He was quiet for only a few seconds. “I wanted to go to all of those places.”

  “You mean since you died?”

  “No. I’ve wanted to see Disneyland, for instance. I’ve wanted to know what the fuss was about since they started building it in the fifties.”

  “Danny was going to take you to all those places?”

  “Others, too. He was a good kid. He was scared shitless for this trip, but I kept him at it. We just got to Niagara Falls this morning.”

  When they reached the Mansfield city line, Bernie said, “Honey, I hate to be trouble, but I’d like it if you could stop at a motel around here. I got to rest.”

  Jane was careful not to pick the first one. She wasn’t ready to trust Bernie the Elephant.

  When the car came to a stop beside the third motel, Jane saw that Rita was sitting stiffly, pretending to stare straight ahead, but her eyes had sneaked to the corners of their sockets to see what Jane was going to do.

  “Thanks, honey,” said Bernie. “Get three rooms. If they see you two go into one with an old man, they’re not going to respect you.”

  Jane reached across Rita to open the glove compartment and take an envelope out.

  Bernie said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m signing the pink slip to the car.” She put it back into the glove compartment and closed it. “This way, if my sanity returns in the middle of the night, Rita and I can get a cab without waking anybody up to say good-bye.” She got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked toward the motel office.

  4

  Jane awoke, already aware of the sound. It was a man walking along the corridor. She heard him stop at her door, and she identified the disturbance that had brought her out of her sleep. The man had been trying to walk quietly. She rolled off the bed, picked up the heavy ashtray from the nightstand, stepped close to the door, and waited in the darkness.

  She heard something go into the lock, then saw the door open until the chain caught it. A bent coat hanger snaked inside, hooked onto the last link of the chain, slid it to the end of its track, and removed it. The door opened a few more inches, and Jane saw him through the crack at the hinges.

  “Hello, Bernie,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, there you are,” said Bernie. “Can I come in?”

  “It’s a little late to ask for an invitation.”

  The old man stepped inside and closed the door, then flipped the light on, and quickly averted his eyes. “Sorry,” he said.

  Jane remembered, picked up the jeans and white blouse she had left at the foot of the bed, and slipped them on. “How did you learn to open a hotel door?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, it’s just an old trick fro
m when I was young. I was so broke I couldn’t afford hotels in those days, so once in a while I needed to use one without paying.”

  She shook her head. “Bernie, when they’re unoccupied, the chain isn’t fastened.”

  “That’s a different trick. I thought you meant the lock. Motels like this don’t give a shit about what happens to their customers. The doors are hollow and easy to kick down, so they put cheap locks on them to save the expense of replacing them.”

  Jane decided that she didn’t really care why the old man had once broken into occupied hotel rooms: armed robbery, probably, but that had been long ago. “What do you want, Bernie?”

  “Just friendly concern. I went out for a walk, and I happened to notice the light in the window. I thought I’d see why you were up.”

  “If there was a light, it wasn’t in my window,” she said. “Let’s get beyond the preliminary lies and get to the big ones. You want me to take you to some safe haven.”

  “That would be nice,” he agreed. “But I guess I’ll have to figure out how to close out my own life.”

  “That’s how you’re seeing this?”

  “How can it be anything else?” he asked. Then he said thoughtfully, “Did you hear how I got killed?”

  Jane nodded. “I watched the television news before I went to bed. They said that a seventy-year-old woman died when you did. How did that happen?”

  “She was the one who shot me.” He looked sad. “I guess the excitement was too much for her heart. She died on the way to the hospital.”

  “You were supposed to be killed by an old woman?”

  Bernie sighed. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me.” He looked at her, and the pain in his eyes seemed genuine. “I loved her. Francesca Giannini.” The eyes looked colder now, as though they were judging Jane. “People saw her near the end, and they probably saw this old lady with hard, sharp black eyes like a hawk, and wrinkled skin. They wouldn’t have been able to imagine what she was like in the old days.”

  Jane could tell that Bernie was testing her: whether she was smart enough to know that she would be old too. She sat at the foot of the bed beside him.

  Bernie said, “I met her at the Fontainebleau in Miami. She was twenty, I was twenty-two. In those days, mob sit-downs were different. They used to meet in places like that. It’s hard to believe now, but they’d bring their wives, kids, dogs. Her father was Dominic Giannini. He brought her along, like it was a vacation. Looking back on it now, I think he probably did it because he was afraid to leave her home alone. Not that she was in danger or something—he had Detroit sewed up tight. He just knew that if he left her home, what he told her not to do was only talk.”

  Jane nodded. “I guess things like that don’t change much.”

  “You have to understand what the problem was,” said Bernie. “She was beautiful.” Jane could see his eyes glaze over, and then he gave a little shake, as though coming back to the present was painful.

  Jane was astonished. “You’re not just remembering, are you? You’re seeing it.”

  Bernie touched Jane’s arm gently, as though he were a parent soothing and reassuring her. “That’s part of it, too, you know. You don’t just get to bring back what will make you happy. Once you’ve seen something, you’re stuck with it. If I think about it, I can see her now. She isn’t any different from the way she looked then. Where every long black hair was, every pore of that smooth white skin, whatever was reflected in those huge brown eyes at different times; even things I didn’t notice at that moment—things in the room. There was a lace cover on the counter behind me, and the corner was folded up, just like this.” He folded the edge of Jane’s sheet to demonstrate. “There was a sand fly that was on its way to the window to get out.”

  Jane’s throat was dry. She cleared it, and said, “It must be hard.”

  “Not in the same way as it used to be,” said Bernie. “I told you we were at the Fontainebleau. The big guys were in a meeting in a suite upstairs with their consiglieres. Their caporegima were mostly in the bar by the pool keeping an eye on each other. There were a few soldiers, mostly older guys sitting in the hallways on those French chairs with the squiggly gold edges that nobody ever sits on, pretending to read newspapers. I saw her in the dining room. She looked right at me, not peeking and looking down, or any of that. She came to me and took me by the hand. We went for a long walk, and talked. All of a sudden she stopped, turned around, and started leading me back. I said, ‘Do we have to go back now?’ She said, ‘I thought you’d like to see my room.’ ”

  “You don’t need to tell me this.”

  “Yes,” he insisted. “I do. She locked the door and started taking off her clothes. It wasn’t like she had any experience at it, just determination. This was something she was going to do. She got down to the skin in about five seconds—sort of a ‘There. That’s done’ look on her face. Then she looked up at me for a minute. I’m still standing there with my mouth open. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Tell me what to do.’ Do you understand?”

  Jane remembered. The event that you were warned about as most to be feared slowly became an obsession, until virginity was like carrying a handful of hot coals. “I think I do.”

  He nodded, and gazed at the rug for a moment. “That was how it happened. It wasn’t one of those things where she just lays there with her eyes shut tight and tolerates it while you work your will on her. She wanted to do everything a man and a woman ever did together. She just didn’t know how.”

  In spite of her resistance, Jane could feel it in her own memory. Of course that must always have been a part of it since time began—she remembered the fumbling and clumsiness because she hadn’t been exactly positive about how things were supposed to happen, and had been so afraid that she might be awkward. She remembered the longing to have everything be beautiful and seamless, but it was impossible because she had been watching herself with a critical, unforgiving eye.

  “I didn’t know anything either,” said Bernie. “In those days, at that age you were just a kid. But we learned, like everybody does. We sneaked off six more times. Every time the bosses would disappear into the suite upstairs, she would find me.”

  “What happened afterward?”

  He sighed, and there was a rattly sound in his throat. “She said she was going to work it out with her father, and we would get married. I was a kid, and an outsider. I didn’t know what a job that was going to be. See, I didn’t really fit in. I was only there because I was working for the Augustinos in Pittsburgh.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Not much. In my one conviction, I was in with Sal Augustino. We were the same age. They didn’t have libraries and college courses and counselors. Radio wasn’t allowed. There weren’t many TVs anywhere, and there sure weren’t any in that prison. What you had was a cell and a bunk. I used to do tricks to keep myself from going crazy—describe baseball games I’d seen, batter by batter, you know? I had read a few books, so once in a while I’d recite one out loud to them. When I got out, Sal told the family about me. They didn’t know exactly what to do with me, but they put me on the payroll. I was a city housing inspector. I had to show up bright and early every Friday for five minutes to get my pay.”

  “I take it that wasn’t impressive enough for her father.”

  “Worse than that,” he said. “At those big meets there were lots of people around, so a lot of little side deals got made.”

  “What kind of deals?”

  He sadly shook his head. “You have to understand. These were—are—people for whom everything is for sale. The only issue is price.”

  Jane said, “He arranged a marriage for his daughter?”

  “No,” said Bernie. “Two things were decided that week. The first was the reason the Augustinos brought me along. They sold me.”

  “Sold you? Like a baseball player?”

  “Yeah, it was a lot like that. They wanted something from the Langustos in New York. You got to reme
mber what happened after Capone. They got him for tax evasion, and everybody realized that was the easy way to get all of them. I had been keeping the books for the Augustinos in my head, moving money around and keeping track of it. If having a lot of money you can’t explain is a crime, you have to hide it. The Augustinos didn’t have that much, so it didn’t take a lot of time. But the New York families had a lot. I was supposed to go live in New York under the care of the Langustos. The Langustos had worked out a side deal in advance. I would start keeping track of money for all five families in New York. That way, all of them had some protection from the government, and they all had a stake in protecting me.”

  “When I heard of you I always wondered how that came about,” said Jane. “I mean, these people don’t seem to trust each other very often.”

  “It was a special time,” he said. “Some of these guys hated each other, but the idea of going to jail just for having money was new, and it was killing them. And the New York families had been breathing down each other’s necks for thirty years by then. I was a way to protect their money from each other, too.”

  “And you agreed to the arrangement.”

  “Who asked me?” said Bernie. “What happened was that my friend Sal got called upstairs. When he came back down, I’d barely made it back from meeting Francesca in her room. I was almost into the bar before I noticed I’d forgotten to tuck my shirttail in my pants. Sal hugs me and says, ‘Bernie, I just got the best news in the world about you. You’re going to be an important man, and you deserve it.’ ” The old man sat silent for a moment. “I told him, ‘Sal, I met a girl. I can’t go to New York.’ He said, ‘Bring her with you.’ I told him who she was. I told him all of it. He looked sick. After about a minute, he says, ‘You’re my friend, and I’ll try to help you. If she really loves you, then no father is going to stand in the way. Just go to New York and I’ll call you when I’ve got it arranged.’ I told him, ‘I can’t go to New York.’ He said, ‘Bernie, if you’re in New York, you’re an important man. You’ll have money, respect.’ He could see I wasn’t getting it, so finally he said, ‘If you’re with the five families, he can’t kill you.’ ”