Rhode Island Red (10 page)

“What questions?” I managed to shake out of my throat.

“Why is a nice colored girl like yourself hanging around with gangsters?”

I could only guess how stupid I must have looked at that moment, scared to death, confounded, yet half convinced that someone was playing a practical joke on me.

“What gangsters?”

“Henry Valokus.”

Oh, okay. So it was a joke.

“That's ridiculous.”

“He's a made member of one of the New England crime families.”

Having a gun pointed at my larynx had been shock enough for one afternoon, thank you. But now I'd been given this new bit of information, casually spoken by a pale-eyed killer in a raincoat. His words had the absolute ring of veracity and so I quickly set about trying to refute them.

My knees were knocking but I had to speak up. “The worst thing Henry's ever done is put a cassette back in the wrong case.”

“I'm not going to argue with you, Nanette. You want to hang with wise guys, hang with wise guys. What I care about is you shooting off your mouth about Rhode Island Red. You are not going to shoot off your mouth anymore.”

For a second there—just a second—I forgot I was being held captive. I leaned forward eagerly. “You know what it is?” I asked the interrogator. “I was only trying to find out what it means.”

At his nod, the young woman beside me pushed the gun into my neck. My head slammed hard against metal.

“Okay, Nanette. I'm through talking,” the grand inquisitor pronounced. “I hope you're through talking too. Because if you mention Rhode Island Red again, your big mouth won't be the only hole you've got in your head. Understand?”

I said nothing for a minute, hypnotized by those eyes.

“Do you understand me?”

I thought I'd better not force him to ask again. I nodded my understanding, the gun like dry ice on the side of my face.

The van door scraped open then. And they threw my ass out on the street like a bundle of newspapers. I landed on all fours, lathered in sweat, shaking.

I brushed myself off a little and stumbled into the Emporium. I was told by the manager, as if I were the biggest fool who ever lived, that Aubrey “doesn't work days.” The bartender on duty was not named Earl and nothing I said could convince him otherwise. Furthermore, he wouldn't have called me on a bet, he said.

You've been all kinds of set-up, I thought. Better have a bourbon. The fellas who had come in for a midday fix of flaccid titties and domestic beer were casting strange looks at me. Fuck em.

All right. So two crazies had put a gun against my head and warned me about Rhode Island Red. And it had to have been Wild Bill who told them about me.

I ordered another Jack D.

All right. So I was not wrong about the words the killer had shouted in Inge's apartment.

I drank another.

All right. Henry was in the mafia.

Preposterous.

Did I drink that next one, or was it drinking me?

Two girls with bad permanents were writhing in unison. The weirdest sister act you can imagine. The men pressed closer to the stage. I needed to get out of there.

Out on Sixth Avenue, I placed one foot in front of the other. That was about the limit of my capability for the moment. I was going to walk to Henry's house, sobering up on the way. I'd straighten this shit out. Henry and I were lovers. We were friends. The only secrets involved belonged to Charlie Parker. And I was supposed to reveal those to him.

The doorman waved me in with a tip of his cap.

When Henry didn't respond to my knocks, I used my key.

The living room was empty, abandoned. Everything was gone—the Bird museum, the books, the stereo set-up. Same story in the bedroom; no clothing, no papers, no personal items—all gone. Some mischievous little fairies had blown through the apartment and left nothing but a few dust mice and the odd issue of
Stereo Review
.

I walked into the kitchen and drank water from the tap. Drank and drank and drank. And then bathed my face a little.

I stood for a long time in the center of the living room, looking from corner to corner, not an idea in hell what to do.

Where was he? Oh, Jesus, where was Henry? Kidnapped? On the lam? Dead?

I might have lost it altogether then, might have fainted dead away, or started shrieking or pounding my head against the wall. Except I had suddenly become aware of a queer odor in the room. I knew what it was and yet I didn't know.

Oh, yes, I did know. Something was burning!

In a furor I ran to all the closets and began ripping them open. Nothing was alight inside them. But in a minute I was able to trace the source of the smell.

It was in the stripped bathroom that the odor was the most intense. Still, there was no smoke. Then I understood: that odor was the aftermath of a fire. But what could have been burning? He hadn't left so much as a bar of soap in there.

I looked behind me then, at the plain white bathtub where Henry and I had showered together, come together, where he had washed and soothed me so tenderly. Fear shot through me, freezing my brain. Oh no … no … please no …

Slowly I pulled back the shower curtain, trying to prepare myself for the horror that was surely there waiting.

But the only thing I saw in the tub was a large scrub bucket. I peered into it. Inside were some shreds of partially burned paper. And when I looked down at the floor I could see a trail of soot going over the lip of the tub, across the tile, and up the front of the toilet bowl.

Clearly Henry had burned a pile of papers in the pail and then flushed some of the debris down the toilet. He had vacated the premises in such a hurry that there had been no time to do the job thoroughly or clean up after himself.

I opened the linen cabinet and found a bath towel he had left behind. I took it into the living room and spread it out on the rug. Then I retrieved the pail from the tub and placed it next to the towel.

I set about reconstructing the shards of blackened paper, trying to force them, will them, back into a coherent whole. For more than an hour I worked in deadly, fevered seriousness—as though I had the tatters of Kunta Kinte's birth certificate in my fingers.

The tatters beat me, though. I couldn't make them anything close to coherent. All I had were pieces of charred paper on which hundreds of numbers in small print and the words Arrivals and Departures kept showing up. I couldn't make out much of anything else.

I stood up in disgust, legs and back aching. There were tears of frustration and hurt threatening to burst from my system and wash the room away.

And at the very moment when I lifted my boot heel to grind the papers into the towel in a fit of hatred and rage, another set of disembodied figures and letters flitted across my brain. They had to do with Inge.

As she had lain sleeping in her apartment, right after I told her Sig was dead, I had rifled through the collection of books on her shelf. In one of the steamship books, I had seen a reproduction of an art deco menu from the dining room on a luxury liner, and on the opposite page there was a reproduced Arrivals/Departures schedule.

A link between Inge—or more likely, Siggy—and Henry. What the hell was up with that? If it was a link at all. More likely, I was just grasping at straws.

Another thought occurred to me. One not nearly so fantastical. At least it had a nodding acquaintance with logic and reality: Henry wasn't interested in the same arcane kind of reading as Sig; romantic devil that he was, he was simply leaving the country—by ship.

I knelt once more and again rooted methodically through the charred pieces. I began to turn some of the larger pieces over to reveal their flip sides. There was printing on a few of the scraps, but nothing new appeared, just the same tiresome numbers and symbols. I had almost given up when one of them startled the hell out of me. “ORK HERALD TRIBU” the tiny type read, and the paper appeared to be photocopy stock. The old
New York Herald Tribune
?

Not the International Trib, which I'd read once in a while when I was in France, but the
New York Herald Tribune
. In reduced type. And Xeroxed.

Either Henry was linked to Sig by an interest in ships—which meant nothing and was hardly a crime—or he had planned an escape based on information in a newspaper that had last appeared on the stands some thirty-five years ago—which meant he was nutty as a fruit cake.

I took aim and kicked the pail halfway into the next dimension.

Back in the lobby, “Where did Mr. Valokus go?” I asked the doorman.

“Who?”

“Mr. Valokus. In 31G. He moved in a hurry, didn't he?”

“I don't believe we have a tenant by that name.”

“Don't give me that shit.”

“As a matter of fact, miss, I think 31G is unoccupied.” His expression was serene and vacuous.

“Yes,” I said at last, “you got that one right.”

CHAPTER 9

Blue monk

Why hadn't I been more shocked when the door opened onto Henry's vacant apartment?

Because I knew—somewhere inside me—I knew. The great lover with melting eyes who was too good to be true. The Bird-struck musical naif who lived only for my black womanly wisdom. Who boiled milk for my coffee. Massaged my feet. The lonely Greek émigré, who had, he said, like me, bummed around Europe. Who late at night reminisced with me about the cakes in this patisserie in Montmartre and the blood sausages at the brasserie next to the jazz joint on the Rue de Buci. Kind, sensitive, generous. My Henry. Whose mouth I dreamed about. The mafia lackey. Ha ha. Gotcha, Nan. You dumb bitch.

Too bad for him, his scam got blown before he got what he wanted from me. Too bad for me, I'd never really know what that was.

Was Henry dead or alive now? Had those creeps in the van gotten to him? Was he a real criminal whose scene with me was part of a mob plan? Or was the thing with me for real and somehow interfering with what he was supposed to be accomplishing for the mob? Either way, I guess he had fucked up. And he must have been pretty scared to pull up stakes that quickly.

Scared. Like that old bastard, Wild Bill. Who had clearly put those people in the van onto me. I wished I had him in my hands at that moment. I could have shown him a couple of things about playing the blues. And I'd have begun by shoving that fucking harmonica up where the sun never shines.

Mom called. I know because I listened to her leave me a message.

Aubrey called to find out what I had wanted yesterday at the Emporium.

My prospective music coach called to invite me to a party on the Upper West Side, a party for Monk.

Walter called to say what's happening? His voice faltered then and he hung up.

I drank vats of camomile tea. And when that didn't work I found and played the Carmen McRae album that she had autographed for my pop back in 1959. And when that didn't work I made a rogue's gallery of the faces of all the tenor players whose records I had been collecting for the past ten years. And when that didn't work I paced.

The knocking at the front door was loud and desperate. I stood in the middle of the room as the pounding continued. What would I do if it was Henry? I realized how much I wanted it to be him. How much I wanted him to walk in here and laugh at me for thinking my weird nightmares were reality. To tell me I'd been asleep for two days—dreamed all of it—and he was here to wake me with some sprightly Beaujolais and hundreds of kisses on my eyelids.

It wasn't Henry Valokus I saw through the peephole. It was Walter. And he was holding a bunch of flowers.

When I let him in, I could see that the flowers were only part of the deal. He had brought take-out fried chicken and sweet potato pie from a place we used to frequent, up on Amsterdam. He had also brought a couple of arcane Irish beers. Finally, he was toting a huge cardboard box that carried the Hugo Boss label; he had obviously bought a new suit.

I suppose Walter could see how crazy and depressed I was, but he never said a word about it. He just set the table quietly, and when the meal was over, he asked, equally quietly, whether “my thing was over now.”

“Yeah, it's over,” I confirmed.

I did the dishes while he searched the TV guide, looking, I knew, for exhibition basketball games. For the past year and a half he'd been paying for cable service, which was kind of a waste given my crummy black and white set, but there was no way he was going to miss a single Knicks game. I watched him fiddle with the channels, his sleeves rolled up.

Mom liked Walter, she always had. I guess he looked like a real provider, and she figured, correctly, that I was going to require a fair amount of being provided for. I glanced over at him from time to time while I cleaned up in the kitchen. I didn't know how to begin to tell him about all the things that had happened to me in the past few weeks. Especially about Henry. So I put it all away for the night.

I set a bowl of popcorn in front of him, the kind with fake red pepper sprinkled on it, his favorite. He looked up briefly and laid an appreciative hand on my butt for a minute before turning back to the game.

“I'm whipped, Walter,” I said. “Going to bed.”

“I work all day but you're whipped. Nobody like you, Nan.”

I sat up in bed thinking about the dark green sheets on Henry's bed, about the frantic swiftness of Wild Bill's gait, about the feel of that gun on my skin, and about a terrified young Dominican enunciating the goofy words of a country and western song.

What had I really done to Diego's words?

Had I massaged them into the phrase Rhode Island Red? Or translated them? Or debauched them? I had put the phrase together. Diego had not.

But I was a translator. I knew that words lie.

After all, take Verlaine.

Je suis un berceau

Qu'une main balance

Au creux d'un caveau …

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