Madeleine's Ghost (19 page)

“Yeah, but don't ask me where that meat came from,” he says. “Or what kind of meat it was.”

“Did you buy any?”

“Are you kidding?” He is a big man with a stiff, pointy mustache like the kaiser and a thick head of black hair. He speaks to me because he knows I am a friend of Chase's. Non-Gypsies, unescorted, are not tolerated at Le Hibou.

Chase has yet to say anything. She looks from me to Jamal and back again and frowns.

“It's for you,” I say, pointing to the dog when Jamal turns away.

“Why?” she says.

I shrug and decide to be honest. “I need your help with a problem.”

Chase picks up her dog, and we go and sit at a table beneath the arbor of plastic grape leaves, on the little terrace reserved for couples on Saturday nights. From here we have an unobstructed view through the glass partition of the front door and the pool table, where a quartet of Gypsy men lounge sullenly, pool cues in hand, cigarettes dangling from lower lips, their black hair shiny with mousse. It is still early, and there isn't much of a crowd yet. By midnight the place will be full of Gypsy men in Armani knockoffs, and their hard women in fuck-me heels and
spandex. The knife fights usually start about one, after everyone has got a good gut full of arak.

Chase is in a glum mood tonight, which is nothing new for her these days. She will not meet my eyes. From time to time she winds up the dog and lets it do a somersault on the tablecloth.

As efficiently as possible, I relate everything that has happened with the ghost. I feel rather silly about my confession because I have spent all the years of our relationship denying the existence of the supernatural. But the recent visual manifestation has got me really shaken up. It is time to make a serious effort to get rid of the ghost, and Chase has Gypsy relations with connections on the Other Side. Her great-aunt, known as Madame Ada, runs a sort of tearoom-tarot parlor in downtown Brooklyn. The woman was once a friend of Aleister Crowley, the famous diabolist, and is widely known as a great spirit doctor and medium. About a year ago I saw a feature story on her on the eleven o'clock news. She is incredibly old and rather crazy and will not see anyone new without an introduction.

Chase is quiet awhile when I am done, staring into her glass.

“So, my dreams were right on target,” she says. “Someone was trying to contact you from the Other Side. And I've been right all along about the Spirit World. You admit that now?”

“Yes,” I say, cringing a little, but she is not gloating.

“Thing is, you let a haunting go on too long, and it's like cancer,” she says. “Can be too late to operate. The ghost gets into the grain of your life, and you're stuck. You have to do whatever it wants you to do. No other way out.”

“You're sure about that?” There's a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Yes. Why didn't you tell me sooner?”

“Pride, I guess.”

“Is that it?”

“And all those years of scientific rationalism,” I say. “Modern people just don't go around talking about ghosts. I guess I was in denial,
hoping it would turn out to be something else. Rats in the walls. Electrical disturbances. Insanity, anything.”

“But you told Rust.”

“Yes.”

“It's all right,” Chase says in a small, sad voice. “People don't trust me. Why should they? I found the apartment for you in the first place. I thought it would be a good place for you. I was wrong. I fucked up. No wonder people don't trust me.”

“Don't say that.”

She waves me away. “How can you trust somebody with a face like this? Give me your hand.”

She has managed to turn the conversation to her favorite topic. I give her my hand reluctantly, and she takes it and passes it up her chin and across her reconstructed cheeks, and an involuntary shudder passes through me.

“See,” she says. “It even feels bad. Sort of unfinished. I blamed my mother for a long time, but she was a drunk when Father married her. A rich socialite drunk from a family full of drunks. He married her because she was white, you know, and he was a Gypsy boy on scholarship. He thought she looked like Jackie Kennedy. Shit. See what they got.” She points at her face with two fingers.

“Chase …”

“You think I'm drunk,” she continues. “For once I'm sober as a judge. The Greeks have a little parable I want you to hear. They sent their greatest warriors to capture Silenus, the wise centaur, because he was the only one who knew what all the Greeks wanted to know, the answer to the question, What is the greatest thing of all? When they finally got him in the nets and demanded the answer under pain of death, he warned them. ‘You're not going to like what you hear,' he said. But they kept at it, and finally Silenus gave in. ‘The greatest thing of all is to never have been born,' he said. What do you think of that, Ned?”

I am saved from a response by the noisy arrival of a long white limousine in the street out front. Disco music blares from its open moon-roof as a group of Gypsy men in shiny suits and a few women in gauzy
dresses descend and enter the club to a wave of applause and whistles. Jamal leaps over the bar to embrace one of the newcomers, a dark, striking-looking young man with perfect hair and a profile that reminds me of portraits I have seen of Lord Byron. Even from this distance it is possible to see his eyes are predatory and piercing and black as coal.

Chase stands from her chair, excited. “It's Ulazi!” she cries, plucking at my sleeve. “Ulazi's back!” Then she is around the table and into the crowd and in the arms of the young man with the profile. She gives him a bear hug. He smiles thinly and avoids kissing her face. In a moment they approach the table arm in arm and sit down. They are followed by a pouty-looking big-haired blonde got up like Miss America in a strapless minidress of red, white, and blue spangles, who takes a seat beside me.

“I've told you about Ulazi,” Chase says to me. “Ulazi, this is Ned Conti. A friend of mine from Brooklyn.”

“Oh, yeah.” Ulazi shakes my hand with a grip of iron. His black eyes are veiled and dangerous, and for a moment I am reminded of Dothan Palmier.

Then Jamal comes over from the bar with a bottle of arak and some glasses.

“On the house, my friends,” he says to us. Then he leans forward and whispers a few words of Romany in Ulazi's ear.

“I'll be there in a minute,” Ulazi says angrily in response. “You tell them I'm talking to my sister.”

Jamal withdraws, and Ulazi pours four hefty shots of the arak into the glasses. This stuff is blue-tinted and nasty as shoe polish and illegal in the United States.

“To my sister,” Ulazi says. Chase raises her glass and smiles dumbly. She can't seem to take her eyes off him. Suddenly she is a different person, docile, happy, and starstruck.

“But, honey,” the blonde says to him, “you know I can't drink your nasty old liquor. I want a bourbon and water. Can't you tell the boy to bring me a bourbon and water?”

“You will drink what we drink, Cheryl,” Ulazi says in a hard voice. “You will not insult me in front of my sister. That is final.”

“Oh, shit,” Cheryl says, but she puts her nose into the glass and wets her tongue like a cat. Her accent sounds like the hills of North Carolina. I take a good look at her. I would like to say that she is not attractive, but this is impossible. I've seen girls like her lounging away the summers on Myrtle Beach by the thousands, busting out of gold bikinis that are little more than scraps strung together with thread, their makeup melting in the sun, and despite myself, I wanted every one of them, at least for an hour. New York is full of Cheryls. Big-boned southern girls with a certain native beauty who leave Asheville or Winston-Salem for the lights of the city. The best of them after brief careers on the kick lines of off-Broadway shows end up as the wives of Italian construction subcontractors or police sergeants from the Bronx. The worst of them end up with men like Ulazi.

I remember now the few things Chase told me about her stepbrother: He is an actor, a gigolo and a thug, something of a celebrity in the Gypsy community here. After a bit of modeling work in New York, he went out to Hollywood to make his fortune in the movies and does supporting roles as a heavy in the Mexican soap operas produced in Los Angeles. He is the son of the Spanish Gypsy whom their father married after divorcing Chase's mother. Chase dotes on him; this is plain to see. A few years back she hid him out in Providence when he was wanted by the NYPD in connection with fraud and assault charges brought by a wealthy widow of Fifth Avenue. After sleeping with the unfortunate lady for six months at two thousand dollars a week, there was a falling-out, and Ulazi hit her and took some jewelry; we never got the full story. Eventually the charges were dropped.

We drink a few more toasts of the arak. The stuff tastes like lighter fluid. Cheryl almost chokes getting it down and pounds her breastbone with her fist.

“Damn,” she says. “Damn.”

“How have you been, little brother?” Chase says. She has a tight hold on his arm to keep him from escaping. “I haven't heard from you all year. Did you get my Christmas card? I sent you some expensive socks for your birthday; they were real cute. Did you get the expensive socks?”

Ulazi nods, somberly, lifts his leg, and pulls up his trousers to show off the socks. This particular pair is embroidered with tiny shields bearing the fleur-de-lis of the arms of France.

“I meant to call,” he says. “You know how it is.”

Chase gives a girlish laugh that is shocking. I have never seen her like this. “You never call, you never write,” she says as if it is a good thing. “That's just you.”

The spectacle is a little painful, so I turn to the blonde.

“You're from North Carolina?” I say.

She smiles, showing a mouthful of even white teeth. “Hey, that's pretty good,” she says. “How did you guess?”

I give out a mysterious smirk. “You and Ulazi here been going out for a long time?”

“Around a year now,” she says. “Ully and I see each other every time he comes to New York, and that's pretty often. About every other month.”

“Oh!” Chase looks over at the blonde with a hurt expression, then looks back at her brother. “You mean, you've been coming to New York for a year and haven't managed to see me?”

At this Ulazi nods sharply to Cheryl, who gets up quickly, pulling Chase with her.

“Let's go to the little girls' room, honey,” Cheryl says nervously. Chase is too confused to resist, and I am left at the table alone with the brooding Gypsy. There is a moment of silence. Then Ulazi turns his odd black eyes on me.

“Are you hustling my sister?” he says.

I give him a blank look.

“You know what I mean. Is she paying you to fuck her?” He is serious.

“No,” I say, aghast. “We're just friends.”

He stares at me, his eyes narrowed. “O.K., I believe you,” he says at last. “Given the way she looks, you'd have to be a real weirdo to fuck her, money or no money. You look a little cheap, but you don't strike me as a weirdo.”

“Hey, thanks,” I say.

“But you never know. It takes all kinds. I ran into a guy in L.A. who will only screw amputees. He's a good-looking guy, too. Strange, huh? Don't get me wrong. Chase is a great kid. It's just hard for me to hang out with her because of my career. You never know when you'll run into someone from the fashion magazines or some producer, and it helps to be seen with a certain kind of woman. Someone more like Cheryl. Ugliness, just like bad luck, it rubs off, you know?”

I think this despicable but consider it best not to tell him so.

A minute or so later the girls return, and after another round of arak, Ulazi and Cheryl rise and take their leave.

“Nice meeting y'all,” Cheryl says brightly.

“Yeah, we've got to hang out with a couple of business acquaintances,” Ulazi says. “You know, business.” He flashes a false, perfect-toothed grin.

“Will I see you soon?” Chase says, panic rising in her voice. “Come to dinner. Why don't you come to dinner?”

He shakes his head. “I'm really busy this time, Chase,” he says. “I'll call you.”

Then they disappear through a padded door to the private party rooms in the back.

An hour later Chase and I walk up Doyers Street through Columbus Park, its concrete bandshell quiet at this hour, and up Baxter to a Vietnamese Pho place at Canal where the soup is cheap and good. But when we try the door, it is locked from the inside. The last couples sit finishing their spring rolls at the small tables, and the proprietor wags his finger at us through the glass.

“We close,” he says.

Chase turns away and takes out a cigarette. For a moment she stands on the sidewalk, blowing smoke up toward the banner of the Italian and American flags strung between Forlini's and the sushi place across the street.

“I can't believe he's been coming to New York all this time,” she says to the burnt-out sky over Manhattan. “And he's never called me. Not once. I sent him money every month till he got established out in L.A., and these were in the days when I could barely make my rent. Then I wrote him letters, so many letters. You know, I don't think he even bothered to read them. The bastard.”

We walk up to Canal to catch a cab but stand lingering on the corner as the traffic shoots down to the bridge.

“It's the fucking banquet,” she says. “I'm denied a place at the banquet of life. All these years I thought I could fight my way in. I thought style or toughness would be enough. No. The banquet is open only to the beautiful. There's a guy out front who checks your face.”

“Don't be hard on yourself because your stepbrother's a jerk,” I say, but she has stopped listening. I flag her a cab and, as she bends toward the door, lean down and kiss her gently on the lips.