Talk Talk (14 page)

A week, that was all he needed. The reports would be in his hands by then and the new credit cards too, though Bridger Thomas Martin, whoever he was, wasn't exactly a tycoon and the credit limits were lower than he would have liked ideally, but that wasn't a worry--he had plenty of cards, cards were nothing. No, he had something else in mind for this clown, something else altogether. A week. A week to wrap things up, and then they'd be gone, and he saw it already, the new car--he was going to look at a Mercedes this afternoon, on the way back from his workout--with plenty of room in back for Madison and her toys and pillows and blankets, he and Natalia sitting up front in style, stopping wherever they liked, first class all the way, a nice little vacation and educational too, good for the kid. See the country. The sights. Pike's Peak. The Great Lakes. Gettysburg. And Vegas, definitely Vegas. Natalia could hardly object to that.

When he'd got what he wanted he shut down the computer, went out to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich. For a long while he stood at the counter, his jaws working mechanically, gazing at the Mexican tile, the pottery and baskets and whatnot Natalia had picked up to give the place a little charm, the new microwave, the Navajo rugs. The light played through the windows and rode up the walls. It was exclusive light, the light of the sun reflected up off Shelter Bay, rippling and fluid, and there were times when he could just sit for hours with a cocktail and watch it move and transform like an image on a screen. He was going to miss it. Miss the fog too, the way it wrapped itself around everything in the visible world, like snow in suspension, making and remaking itself all over again. All the anger he'd felt earlier was gone now--if he felt anything, he felt drained.

But he wasn't going to let it get to him. He had things to do. He rinsed the plate, stuck it in the dishwasher, then dug his gym bag out of the closet. Working out always cleared his head, the endorphins flowing, the reps on the weight machine his own kind of zen, almost unconscious, counting off, counting off again, his breathing deep and steady. When it went well, when he got into the rhythm of it, he almost felt as if he were rooted to the bench--or no, as if he were the bench itself, no more aware than a slab of steel. And after he worked out, he was going to look at that car, and then he had to stop at the market. Tonight it was veal cordon bleu, and he had to pick up the boneless chops, the prosciutto and the Emmentaler he liked to use (pound the veal, bread it, lay on two wafer-thin slices of the ham and two of the cheese, wrap it up, pin it with a toothpick and bake at 350), and he was thinking maybe he'd do gnocchi with a white sauce and a quick sauté of baby zucchini on the side. Or maybe fava beans in tomato and basil. And he'd pick up two bottles of that Orvieto Natalia liked, and if he was in the mood, and if he had the time, he might whip up a couple of almond tortes. That would please her. And some spumoni for the kid.

He went out the door, bag in hand, and didn't look back.

For what he wound up paying for the attorney he could have spent a month in the best hotel in Manhattan, no expense spared, room service, show tickets and bar tab included, but the man got him a shrink to testify before the judge that what Peck had done to Stuart Yan (and the ancillary damage to his wife's car and to the not-so-innocent bystander) was an aberration, the result of temporary insanity, and that it would be ridiculous to say he was a threat to society when in fact he was no threat at all. The attorney talked of mitigating circumstances--the defendant was only trying to protect his family from this interloper, this stranger, Yan, whom he saw, rightly or wrongly, as threatening his wife and child, and he'd over-reacted in the heat of the moment. He accepted his culpability. He was contrite. Willing to make full restitution. Further, he had a clean record and he was a successful small business owner whose incarceration would deprive the community of his services and put at least seven people out of work. But the assistant DA came right back at him, claiming that this was a case of attempted murder or at the very least assault with a deadly weapon likely to produce great bodily harm--the defendant was a black belt in karate, after all, and knew perfectly well what he was doing in attacking Mr. Yan, who, incidentally, had temporarily lost the use of his voice due to damage to his larynx and could very well suffer permanent incapacitation.

Peck had to sit there and take it, but he was seething. Under other circumstances--outside in the street, a bar, anyplace--he would have taken the man apart because he'd never felt such hatred for anybody in his life, not even Yan or Gina. Who “was” this guy? What had he ever done to “him?” As it turned out, though, it was just posturing on the assistant DA's part: neither side wanted to take the case to trial. The outcome--and it could have been foreordained given what it was costing--was a plea bargain.

The judge, a skeletal little dark-skinned man in his forties--his name started with a “V” and went on for six unpronounceable syllables--gave him a five-minute lecture, rife with sarcasm, as Peck stood there trying to hold his gaze. Yan was in the back of the courtroom, wearing a neck brace, and Gina and her parents were there beside him, looking like Puritans ranged round the ducking stool. About the only thing Peck could be thankful for was that Sukie was at a friend's house, because as unforgiving and vituperative as Gina might have been, even she realized there was no point in having her witness her father's public humiliation, not after what had happened to the window of the car and the rain of those splinters of safety glass and the way her father had fired up the Mustang and scorched the pavement till the tires smoked and all the birds blew out of the trees. The judge gave him three years probation and imposed a restraining order enjoining him from coming within five hundred feet of his wife. The order further prohibited him from having any contact whatever with her, not by telephone, e-mail, the postal service or through a third party, except as arranged by the court according to family law and visitation rights for his daughter. At the end of it, the judge leaned forward, and in his high clipped Indian accent, asked him if he understood.

“Yes,” Peck said, though it was wrong, all wrong, and he was sick with the aftertaste of it. “I understand.”

“Good,” the judge said, “because I sincerely hope you do. If you obey the directives of this court and keep out of trouble--any trouble whatsoever--this felony charge will be reduced to a misdemeanor upon completion of probation and payment in full of restitution to the victims.” He paused. The courtroom was silent but for the faint distant moan of the air conditioner. “But if I see you here before me again, no matter what the charge, you'd better have your toothbrush with you because I will remand you directly to jail. Do I make myself clear?”

Peck remembered feeling like something scraped off the bottom of somebody's shoe, even though the attorney seemed pretty pleased with himself and to everyone's mind the incident was closed. His mother was there, with one of her sack-like friends, both of them probably drunk already though it wasn't yet noon, and two of his own drinking buddies, Walter Franz and Chip Selzer, from the ex-bar at the ex-restaurant, had turned up to show support. Lunch, people wanted lunch and a celebratory drink or two, his mother grinning, Walter and Chip crowding in on him, but he wasn't having it. “Hey, congratulations, man,” Walter crowed, throwing an arm round his shoulder. “It's over, huh? Finally over.”

They were out in the hallway, a crush of people coming and going. Fat people. Stupid people. The dregs. And then he saw Gina and her parents pushing through the swinging door at the end of the corridor, Yan trailing behind them like a retainer, and he couldn't help himself--he shoved Walter away, a shrug of the shoulder that knocked him up against the wall, and when Chip moved in, his palm spread wide for the high-five, he just turned his back and stalked out the door.

For the next few weeks he put his head down and tried to forget about it. Focus on the business, that was what he told himself, shake it off, straighten things out. Though he'd never let it show, the legal convolutions--the endless meetings with the shrink and the lawyer, the postponements, the general level of harassment and pure unadulterated crap--had really got to him, and Pizza Napoli wasn't what it was or what it should have been. Sales were flat, people cooking out and going to the beach, and they just didn't think pizza as much in the summer as when school was on and the kids were sitting there at the kitchen table every night screaming to be fed. For the first time ever, and against his better judgment because in his eyes it reduced the place to the level of Pizza Hut or Domino's, he gave in to Skip and offered a two-for-one coupon in the local paper.

It didn't do him much good--if there was a blip in the receipts it was too small to notice. But the ad itself (it wasn't even an ad, just a cheesy coupon in the Thursday morning insert), aside from costing him money, seemed to suck the last shred of class out of the place. He hated it. Hated the way it looked on the page, the lame line drawing of a stereotypical grinning potbellied mustachioed greaseball of an Italian chef holding up a vertical pizza in defiance of gravity beneath the legend “Pizza Napoli, Buy One Regular Size Pizza with One Topping, Get the Next One Free.” Christ, he might as well have been selling hula hoops.

And then there was Gina. He wasn't allowed to contact her, but he still had the right to see his daughter every Sunday, all day Sunday, whether Gina liked it or not, and his lawyer contacted her lawyer and worked out an arrangement whereby Gina's mother would bring Sukie to some neutral place and he would pick her up. They agreed on McDonald's--she loved McDonald's, more for the playground than the food, the vanilla shake thick as sludge and the shrunken little patty of whatever it was they slipped between the grease-soaked bun, no ketchup, no mustard, no onions, neither of which seemed to interest her beyond the first sip and the first bite--and Gina's mother was consistently late. He sat there in the Mustang, checking his watch every ten seconds, kids all over the place, but not his kid, and when Gina's mother did show she never apologized or even said word one, handing Sukie over as if she were giving her up to a child molester. Did he hate that woman, with her surgically restructured face and her liposuction and frozen hair and the way she locked up her features and threw away the key as if just to look at him was an ordeal? Yes, sure he did. And he hated Gina for what she'd done to him. And the Bullhead--just hearing his voice on the phone, the hectoring nag of a voice going on and on about the menu at Pizza Napoli, the books, the bottom line: “You're not offering the public what they want. You know why? Because you get stuck on one thing. Listen to me: you're screwing up. Big-time. Wake up, will you?” Not to mention Stuart Yan, who was suing him for damages in civil court. It had to come to a head. A saint would have broken under the pressure, and he never claimed to be a saint.

It was a Sunday and he was sitting in the car outside McDonald's, reading the sports page, watching the leaves change, checking his watch--nine o'clock, nine-thirty, ten--and Gina's mother never showed. His first impulse was to drive out there and do some damage, confront the bitch, tear the house down if that was what it took, but he suppressed it: that was a ticket to jail. He checked his watch again. A guy came out the door, a nobody, a nonentity in flip-flops and shorts, and he had his two kids by the hand and they were one happy family, their Egg McMuffins tucked away and the park or a football game in their immediate future or maybe a cruise up the river to see how the leaves looked against the water. He wanted to call, but that was against the rules too. At eleven, sick with rage, he gave it up and drove to the restaurant to discover a message on the machine: “Just to let you know,” Gina's mother's pinched voice came at him as if she were hollering down a tunnel, “Sukie won't be coming today because of the ballet at Carnegie Hall. The whole family's going.”

He listened to the message twice through, standing there over the phone in his office at the back of the building, struggling for control. There were stains on the wall. The place smelled of marinara sauce, a dark ancient funk of it, and of the grease extruded from the pepperoni and the cheese burned to the walls of the oven. They thought they'd beaten him down, marginalized him, taken him out of the equation--before long, he'd be erased altogether. That was what they thought, but they were wrong. He could have called his lawyer and started up that whole dance again, could have complained, and yet he didn't see what good that would do--they had their own lawyer. Up to this point, he'd played by the rules. Now the rules were off.

In the morning, as soon as the offices were open, he put in calls to the phone company, the gas, electric and water, identifying himself as John Marchetti and ordering a stop service on all utilities at the house. He filed a change of address at the post office, then called American Express and Visa--the two cards he'd seen the Bullhead flash--and claimed he'd lost his wallet and wanted replacement cards overnighted by FedEx. When the new cards arrived at the post-office box he'd set up, he began to order things for delivery to 1236 Laurel: a new washer and dryer; an antique slate pool table that weighed over a thousand pounds; a pair of purebred Dalmatians; a deluxe fourteen-jet hot tub that could accommodate six people comfortably. That was just the beginning. He canceled Gina's cell, canceled her credit cards, went down to the bank and closed out their joint savings account. And Yan. He went after Yan too, but in a more immediate way. A week later, after he'd closed the restaurant for the night and made the rounds of the bars, he found Yan's Nissan parked out front of his apartment and poured six plastic jugs of muriatic acid over the finish, then slashed the tires and took out the windshield for good measure. The night was cold, his breath steaming, the tire iron flashing under the street lamp like a sword of vengeance, and maybe somebody saw him there or maybe it was the post-office box, maybe that was it. He never knew really. In fact, he was still asleep when they came for him, and he never did remember his toothbrush.