Rhode Island Red (20 page)

“Very hot look, Henry,” I said, stepping into the room and slamming the door closed with my foot.

“Oh. It is you, Nanette. How beautiful you are.”

I swung the palm of my hand, which by now held the gun, against the side of his face. It connected just right.

Henry reeled backwards and staggered until his legs gave way beneath him and he was sitting on the factory outlet carpet. The long stemmed yellow beauties were still in his arms. He had not raised a hand against me nor tried to fend off the blow.

I pointed the gun at his stomach. He blinked once, then looked away.

I waited. And waited.

“Nothing to say, Henry?” I spoke at last.

“Yes, my love. I do have something.”

“Good. What is it?”

“I would like to have a cigarette.”

“Oh sure, baby. Sure. Here, let me light it for you.”

I walked over and kicked him in the groin.

The roses went flying. He lay flat on his back, gasping for air, beginning to cry.

“Uh uh, Henry. None of that. Sit up straight like a good boy.”

“Why have you come here, Nanette? Surely there is nothing you could want from me now.”

“It's story time, Henry. I want a story from you. Tell me about Rhode Island Red.”

“It will not help you to know. It will only—”

“Henry, do you believe that I'm prepared to pull the trigger on this fucking thing and walk out of here without a backward glance?”

“I do not know.”

In answer, I pushed the safety catch to the off position.

“What about now?” I asked, holding the weapon straight out in front of me.

He sighed. “All right. But I truly do wish to have a cigarette. May I?” He nodded toward the coffee table where the packet of Dunhills lay.

“Go ahead.”

After he'd taken his first draw, he raised one hand gingerly to the wet slash at his temple. The blood pulsing out of it was like a miniature stream carrying debris.

“Before I tell you your story,” he said, “I want to tell you something else.”

“I don't want to hear anything else, you bastard.”

“But I will tell you anyway,” he pronounced calmly. “I know how angry you are. But how many times can you kill me?”

He had me there. I fell silent.

“It is true that I used you in an inexcusable way. It is true I have no right to even hope for your forgiveness—in this world or any other. But it is also true that I fell in love with you … Yes!” he shouted as I began to smirk. “No matter what you do to me and no matter how terribly I betrayed you, I won't have you say I didn't love you.”

“Okay. Fine. That's out of the way. Now tell me about Rhode Island Red.”

“In a moment. I will in a moment.”

With some effort, he rose off the floor then, my weapon trained on him, and regathered the flowers into a bouquet. “Will you allow me to put these in water?”

“For godsakes, man!”

But he was already at the small tin sink.

The roses gave off a brilliantly sad light in their empty stewed tomatoes tin.

Henry called over his shoulder, the tap still running, “How old are you, Nanette? I never thought to ask.”

“What are you—kidding?”

“No, my love. I want to know.”

“Don't call me that again,” I threatened.

He shrugged.

“I'm twenty-eight. How old are you—were you?”

“And so I am already dead for you?”

“What do you think, Henry?”

“Yes. I know. Well, at least you see why it doesn't matter so much to me that you may kill me. I suppose that is the way it was always meant to be—that someone would kill me. What difference does it make who does it? Coffee, my—I mean, Nanette?”

I could see that he'd filled a cheap tin espresso pot with water and was scooping out coffee grounds from a brightly colored can.

I strode over to him, plucked the can from the kitchen counter, and threw it against the nearest wall.

That did me in. That was my last little explosion of bile.

I sat down heavily in one of the ugly tufted barrel chairs and shook my head. “Listen, Henry, do you have an Uzi hidden in the milk or something? I mean, are you going to catch me off guard and blow me away before I can get you?”

“Don't be insane! I love you!”

“Whatever. Because if you are, I guess I don't really give too much of a fuck either. Just make the coffee and get back over here and talk. And do something about your mother-fucking head! You're bleeding all over the stove.”

Henry had changed into a dark brown turtleneck and black trousers. On the fake wood coffee table, the ice cubes inside the hotel wash cloth he had used to staunch the blood dripping from his wound melted one by one.

I sat smoking one of the Dunhills, not speaking, watching his lips move, refusing to cry, wanting his mouth on me, hating myself.

“You know almost as much as I do now,” he said. “But you don't know the history. The story, as you say.

“As you can see, I do not have the thing called Rhode Island Red. I will never have it. I know that now. I don't know where it is. I just know that it's gone. Gone—again.

“It is so much like you to think you could go to the library and find out what you need to know about criminals. You cannot, Nanette. Any more than I could expect to absorb this—what?—this essence of a great black musician by listening to his music and worshipping his image.”

Henry looked depleted, sick around the edges. His eyes were swollen from the two-way crying jag we'd had in the bathroom.

“And when you could find nothing from the books, to think that you walked into the lair of this lieutenant … Tom …”

“Justin Thorn,” I corrected, no life whatsoever in my voice. “And he's hardly a lieutenant.”

Suddenly he was rushing over to my chair, eyes wet again. He tried to take my hand, kiss it.

“Don't!” I pulled my fingers out of his grasp, shaking my head violently. “Just don't.”

Slowly, he backed away from me and onto his own seat again.

He continued. “In your research did you read of a man called Tonio Abbracante?”

“I don't know. Perhaps.”

“He was a hard man. A mafioso. As bad as they come. Long ago, it was he who controlled everything in Providence. In the late 1940s and early 1950s.

“He may have been a vicious criminal, but first he was a man. And one day he fell in love with a woman. A different kind of passion than he had known before. For a different kind of woman. She was a rich and beautiful lady from Newport who had fancy horses and fancy ancestors.

“Abbracante was not content to have an affair with her. He wanted to marry her. To this woman he probably represented excitement, adventure. Or perhaps the only reason she ever gave him the time of day was to scandalize her family. To rebel. Who knows what she really thought of Tonio? He may have been nothing but a clown in her eyes.

“One thing about this lady, though: she was absolutely fearless. Fearless enough to play with Tonio Abbracante as if he was no more than a college boy suitor. Tonio never stopped asking her to marry him. And finally she relented. It was a very foolhardy thing to do. In a way she set her own doom in motion with that acceptance. She said she would marry him if he could get the great Charlie Parker to play at their wedding.

“Can you imagine it? She'd marry him
if
he persuaded Bird to play at the wedding! As if he were on the same level as the caterer or the seamstress who sewed her veil.

“She may have been mad, but she was interesting, this woman. She made Tonio understand that Parker would have to come—or be enticed to come—of his own free will. That Tonio must not threaten him in any way. For if he did, not only was the wedding off but their relationship would end. Period. He must
persuade
Bird. She must have known it was an impossible task.

“Abbracante was an ignoramus about music. He likely had never heard of Parker and could not have cared less about his genius. But he wanted that woman. He did what had to be done.

“From his ranks he chose a trusted underling to be sent as an emissary to Parker. It could only help that this underling loved music and had been an amateur guitarist.

“That man was my father.

“Needless to say, Bird laughed in his face—the first time. But Abbracante was persistent. He would buy Bird or die in the effort. After all, he was a criminal, and he knew that every man has his price. After trying just about everything else, he sent my father to a pawn shop to buy an ordinary saxophone. Then he filled the saxophone with pure heroin and soldered the top shut, and all the stops, with gold. He offered it to Parker as the fee for one night's work.

“Parker accepted. It was the one lure he couldn't walk away from. And so he played at the sumptuous wedding.

“For a little while Tonio Abbracante was happy in the unlikely marriage he had made with the woman who had so obsessed him. He had gotten what he wanted.

“And about eighteen months later he had her murdered. No one seems to know why.

“Shortly after that, my father must have offended Tonio. Because he killed him too.

“Parker was set to tour Europe a few days after the wedding. He was to go over by ship. At the last minute, the tour was canceled without explanation. Bird had been spotted at the dock. But no one could explain why, at the last minute, he refused to sail. The theory is that he canceled because the sax was stolen from him somewhere on or near the ship.

“There were a dozen whispered stories about what happened that day. Rumors. Nothing was ever proved. But the most likely one said the theft had been engineered by a group of New York longshoremen.

“I was no more than a boy then, of course. After my father was killed, I was sent back to Greece to live with my widowed grandmother. My poor mother must have believed that that was the only way to keep me out of the life of crime that had killed my father. She was wrong. By the time I was twenty-five I was back in the States and eager for all the things I thought the mob could provide me with. Money. Women. A beautiful car.

“But it was a disaster, start to finish. Not only was I the world's worst criminal, no one seemed to understand that I had been raised in Europe and would naturally be different, strange to them. They made fun of my manners, of the way I spoke English, of my interest in music and so many other things. I was called a homosexual, a fool, a coward.

“Of course I spent a fair amount of time in prison. Where else could my life have led me?

“And then, during one of my many terms, I met Wild Bill. He was a difficult man, but a decent man then. And I grew to like him. If nothing else, we had music in common.

“It turned out we did have more than that in common, though. We spent many hours talking about the legend of this golden saxophone called Rhode Island Red. And he told me he knew the waterfront in Manhattan like the back of his hand. That he had contacts in Hell's Kitchen. And that he had a lead on some of the longshoremen suspected in the theft. When he got out he was going to New York to find it. And we would be partners.

“I'm sure you don't know what prison life is like. Most of the time you'll talk about anything, do anything, simply to relieve the boredom. The chances were a million to one that Wild Bill was ever going to get the sax. Most likely he was living in a dream world and had no clue how to find Rhode Island Red. But I believed him, because I needed to.

“And against all the odds the miracle happened. He actually located the horn. But he forgot about me. In the end he couldn't hang on to what he'd found. Someone took it from him. And now everyone with even a remote connection to the horn has been destroyed. My one and only consolation is that I did not kill anyone for it.

“It shouldn't be hard to write the ending to this story yourself, Nanette. When I found out about the man you were involved with, I had to discover how much you knew about the sax. I couldn't know how I would come to feel about you.

“What I should have known is that I'd never have Rhode Island Red—or probably much of anything else. I'm a gangster without a gang, I've run out of money, I have no friends, no work, and … well, I …”

“You no longer have me. Is that what you were going to say?”

He merely nodded, out of words now.

We sat in silence while the city came to life eight stories below. The autumn sun grew steadily stronger, like a patient taking surer and hungrier sips of broth.

About eleven o'clock, Henry fell asleep.

There was one question he hadn't answered. But I knew why: he didn't have the answer. Where was Rhode Island Red now? Had a corrupt Internal Affairs cop snatched it? Was it in a flophouse in Hell's Kitchen? At the bottom of the Hudson, still leaking poison after forty some years? Still killing people and their dreams.

Wherever it was, I hated it. Hated it for the way it had poisoned all our lives. For the sleeping greed it had wakened in good people like Walter and Sig. For the freaky way it had destroyed my chance for happiness with the man who sat across from me snoring softly, while I held his life in my hands. He trusted me. Jesus, it was all so stupid.

I found myself wondering whether Bird was in heaven or hell. And was he laughing now, or crying.

I stood and retrieved my coat and bag. I took the gun out, examined it one last time and headed over to Henry's chair.

I rested the barrel on his shoulder, perhaps an inch from his ear.

He slept on for a while, but then he must have sensed me there. His eyes fluttered open.

“This is for you,” I told him. “I think it's time you learned a trade—my love.”

The hotel lobby was no busier than when I'd arrived nearly five hours ago.

The clerk I'd bribed gave me what I guessed was his sexy look and hailed me winningly. “Well, hi there. Was he surprised?”

“No,” I said, regretfully. “He wasn't a bit surprised.”