The Misfortune Cookie: An Esther Diamond Novel (3 page)

So pretending to be in a good mood that night at Bella Stella helped me focus on thoughts and feelings that supported this pretense, and I started actually having a good time and enjoying myself.

True, the façade was fragile enough that if anyone asked me to sing a ballad, let alone a torch song, there was a real risk I wouldn’t get through it without choking up. But since it was New Year’s Eve and everyone was in party mode, all the requests I got were for upbeat numbers:
Fly Me To the Moon
,
Mack the Knife
(boy, do gangsters love that song),
Beyond the Sea
,
That’s Amore,
and, of course,
New York, New York.

Jimmy “Legs” Brabancaccio, a Gambello soldier who actually had quite a good voice, rose from his dinner table to wow the crowd with his rendition of
My Way.
Then, at the insistence of our customers, a waiter named Ned sang
Mack the Knife
(I mean, they
really
love that song). Then Ronnie Romano, also from the Gambello crew, sang a traditional Italian ditty that was unfamiliar to me, but that our accordionist knew. Ronnie had a reedy, off-key voice, but he sang with heart.

Ronnie and Jimmy Legs were sitting at a table in my station, at their insistence. I was sort of a favorite with the Gambello crime family, since my friend Max and I had inadvertently wound up helping them out a couple of times. Victor Gambello, the Shy Don, had made it clear in public that he considered us friends of the family. He had also tried to help us when Max and I were recently held prisoner for about eighteen hours by Fenster & Co. (Call it a misunderstanding. We’d had a slight arson mishap while confronting Evil.)

Despite Stella Butera’s connection to the family, I found it a little odd that wiseguys hung out regularly at the restaurant, since three Gambellos had been murdered here in recent years. First there was Handsome Joey Gambello, who was shot to death. Two or three years later, Frankie Mastiglione got fatally knifed here while he was only halfway through his dinner. Then just seven months ago, Chubby Charlie Chiccante was shot while I was waiting on his table. I was an eyewitness, which had led to my becoming more familiar with the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB) than I’d ever expected to be.

Of course, all the shooting and stabbing probably made it a little odd that
I
hung out here, too. But between Stella’s management style and the good tips I earned, it was the best non-acting job I’d ever had, despite the mortality rate.

“Hey, Esther! Another round!” Jimmy Legs shouted at me, trying to be heard above the cheerful din of the crowd and the soaring tones of Ned giving his all to
Feeling Good.

“Not for me,” said Lucky Battistuzzi.

“Aw, come on, Lucky!” Ronnie urged.

“Nah, you get to be my age,” said Lucky, “and you gotta pace yourself. Besides, the boss said he might want to see me later.”

I knew that references to “the boss” meant Don Victor Gambello, who was in his eighties, chronically ill, and seldom left his Forest Hills house, out in Queens. He also seemed to be an insomniac, since it wasn’t unusual for him to summon Lucky in the middle of the night.

“Tonight?” I said. “But Lucky, it’s New Year’s Eve.”

The old hit man shrugged philosophically. “We don’t really get days off in Our Thing, kid.” He added, “Just like you, huh?”

Due to the way that facing off against Evil encourages the most unlikely people to become bedfellows, so to speak, Alberto “Lucky Bastard” Battistuzzi, who’d gotten his nickname by surviving various attempts on his life, was someone I considered a trusted friend. Somewhere in his sixties, with short gray hair, an expressive, heavily lined face, and shrewd brown eyes, he wasn’t inclined to share any “professional” secrets with me, and I wasn’t rash enough to encourage him to do so. But I had seen enough to know that Lucky, a semi-retired Gambello
capo
, was someone on whom the Shy Don relied.

“And I’m
glad
to be working New Year’s Eve,” I assured Lucky. “No income, no eating.”

“So get your
boyfriend
to take you out for dinner,” Ronnie said darkly. “Cops get regular salaries, don’t they?”

Ronnie had never approved of my dating a police officer—let alone one who was a detective in the OCCB.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “We have nothing to do with each other.”

“How’s that?” Lucky looked puzzled. “When we was investigatin’ that polterheisty demon business at Fenster’s last week, I thought it kinda seemed like you and NYPD’s Boy Wonder were getting ready to start choosing china patterns.”

“No, you imagined it,” I said tersely, feeling my stomach sink. “So that’s another round for Jimmy and Ronnie, but nothing for you?”

“I’ll have a cup of coffee,” Lucky said. “What’s wrong with these young guys? The way the good detective looked at you, especially when he thought you was about to go down for the dirt nap, I thought for sure—”

“Are you guys done with these dessert plates?” I asked loudly. “Why hasn’t the bus boy removed these yet? Ralph! This table needs clearing!”

“Coming!”

“If Esther’s not interested in that guy,” Ronnie said censoriously to Lucky, “that’s for the best, case closed, and you shouldn’t poke your nose in.”

“Thank you, Ronnie,” I said.

“A girl like Esther with a
cop?”
Ronnie shook his head. “It ain’t right. It was never right. It’s good that it’s over.”

“It never got started,” I said firmly, as Ralph the bus boy started clearing their table. “We went on a few dates. That’s all. There was nothing else between us.”

“Oh, if I were gulling-bull enough to believe that,” Lucky said, “you really think I woulda survived this long in
my
line of work?”

I frowned. “I think you mean gullible.”

Ralph, who was moving with more rapidity than grace, knocked over an empty wine glass while clearing the dishes.

“Careful!” I grabbed it before it could roll off the table, then I wiped up the spot where a few remaining drops of red wine had spilled.

“Oops! Sorry,” Ralph said anxiously. “Did it spill on you?” He almost tipped over another glass as he gestured at Jimmy.

“Watch out,” I said, moving this other glass out of Ralph’s reach before he wound up knocking it into Lucky’s lap.

“Sorry!” Ralph said again, agitated now. “Are you okay?”

“We’re fine, kid,” Lucky said to the bus boy. “But do us a favor and back away slowly with your hands in plain sight.”

Coming from a notorious Gambello hitter, the comment, though intended as a joke, obviously made Ralph nervous. I thought he probably didn’t have the temperament for working at Stella’s. Or the coordination to work in a crowded restaurant.

Jimmy Legs confirmed that impression, after Ralph headed toward the kitchen with his load of dirty dishes, by saying, “That kid nearly scalded me last week when he was topping up my coffee. He’s a menace to society.”

“They shouldn’t oughta let guys that dangerous circulate freely,” Ronnie said with a disapproving frown.

Going straight back to the topic that I had hoped was finished now, Lucky squinted at me and said dubiously, “So you and Mr. NYPD really ain’t together?”

I didn’t have to answer, since Ronnie jumped in: “Jesus, give it a rest, would you? The cop’s out of her life. She said so. Let’s not go diggin’ up that corpse.”

I winced at the imagery.

Jimmy Legs added, “Ronnie’s right, Lucky. If Esther broke the engagement—”

“We were never engaged,” I said.

“—then you should leave it alone. She can do a lot better than that guy.” Jimmy continued, “Good riddance to him. He don’t know how much he’s lost, letting go of a girl like her. Someday he’ll regret it. But there it is. Whaddya gonna do?”

Oh, great, now I felt like crying again.

“I’ll go get your drinks,” I said quickly. “We’re getting close to midnight. The bar is swamped, but I’ll try to make it quick.”

When I returned to their table a few minutes later, Lucky had decided to accept the drab news about my love life. “I gotta admit I’m surprised,” he said, “but I guess it’s just as well you’re not dating the detective.”

“This is what I been saying!” Ronnie clinked glasses with Jimmy.

“Because, lemme tell you,” Lucky said with feeling, “that guy is giving me
such
a pain in my . . . you know where.” He didn’t like to use crude language in front of a lady.

“Uh-huh,” I said, setting down his coffee.

“The boss’ lawyer has been on the phone every day this week with the DA’s office. And with OCCB, too, so he’s talked to your boyfriend a bunch of times.”

Well,
that’s
probably making Lopez’s holidays merry,
I thought with grim satisfaction. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“The boss is protestin’ their outrageous intrusions into his family’s perfectly legitimate business interests.”

“I see.”

“I swear, by now those mooks at OCCB probably know how many times the boss gets up at night to use the john.” Lucky shook his head. “Victor Gambello don’t need this kind of aggravation at his age.”

I tactfully refrained from pointing out that the Shy Don could have avoided all this by choosing a different career.

“You figure that’s why the boss might want to see you later?” Jimmy Legs asked Lucky. “
More
trouble with OCCB? And on New Year’s Eve, for the love of God!”

“Probably,” Lucky said gloomily.

“The
nerve
of those guys,” Ronnie fumed. “Ruining the boss’ holidays. There oughta be a law.”

Jimmy grunted in agreement.

Lucky said to me, “So it’s not like I’d be dancing at your wedding to Detective Lopez, kid.”

“We weren’t engaged,” I said wearily. In fact, the closest Lopez and I had ever even gotten to a dinner date was when he bought me a chili dog in the park a couple of nights before Christmas.

“Hey, Esther, we need another song!” Freddie the Hermit called from his table. He was here tonight with a date—and his companion wasn’t Mrs. Freddie. In any other setting, I’d have thought she was a hooker, based on her big hair and tiny clothing; but among wiseguys, very few of whom practiced monogamy, her look was fairly standard for girlfriends and mistresses.

“As soon as the ball drops,” I promised Freddie over my shoulder. Midnight was only minutes away, and Stella had turned on the TV so we could watch the annual countdown ritual in Times Square, about fifty blocks north of here.

“A duet!” shouted Tommy Two Toes. “Esther and Ed should do a duet!”

“Ned,
” said Ned. “My name is Ned.”

“Whatever. We want you should do a duet with Esther.”

“As soon as the ball drops,” I repeated.

Brushing past me on his way to the bar, Ned muttered, “Anything but
Mack the Knife
again.”

“Agreed.”

“I swear, I hear that song in my sleep ever since I started working here.”

“I’m glad you weren’t as serious with Lopez as I thought,” Lucky said to me, still riffing on his theme. “Because it really burns me up that he ain’t helping us at all.”

“That bum!” said Jimmy Legs.

“Well, he is an OCCB detective,” I pointed out, though I had no interest in defending Lopez. “Helping the Gambello family isn’t anywhere in his job description. Just the opposite, in fact.”

“But he
knows
we wasn’t involved in the Fenster hijackings!” Lucky said in outrage. “He knows that better than anybody, since he’s the one who arrested the real culprits. And now who’s suffering for the crimes committed by a couple of rotten kids with too much time on their hands?
We
are. How is
that
fair? But is your boyfriend standing up for us? No!”

“He ain’t her boyfriend,” said Jimmy Legs.

“Good riddance,” said Ronnie, clinking his glass again with Jimmy’s.

After several heavily loaded Fenster trucks were hijacked during the Christmas shopping season, the NYPD came under heavy pressure from the media to solve the crimes. Consequently, OCCB came under heavy pressure from the Police Commissioner, because the Gambello crime family, who had a history of hijacking Fenster trucks, were the obvious suspects. But, actually, the heists were the brainchild of a vengeful Santa and a demented Fenster who used mystical means to recruit unwitting accomplices for the robberies. (According to news accounts this week, the NYPD vaguely attributed the couple’s control of their unwilling accomplices to drugs and “psychological conditioning.” None of the dupes could remember anything about those events, there was no evidence against them, and the two villains who had manipulated them were pleading guilty. So it looked like the case file was closing quickly on that one.)

Nonetheless, the initial erroneous assumption that the Gambellos were involved in the heists meant that OCCB—which “had to show juice,” as Lucky had put it, due to all the media scrutiny—brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “thorough investigation,” digging deep into the Gambellos’ lives in their search for evidence. And this was still proving to be extremely uncomfortable for the Gambellos, though they were cleared in the Fenster hijackings when the arrests were made a week ago.

That was the same night Lopez came to my apartment and had his way with me, then left a few hours later for his shift on Christmas morning. And never looked back.

That bum.

“Here we go!” Tommy Two Toes shouted, startling me.

Stella Butera, wearing tight leopard-print clothing covered in sequins, appeared next to me and bellowed, “Ten! Nine! Eight!”

I blinked and realized the old year was ending. The big ball was descending in Times Square. The crowd on the TV screen, like the crowd inside Bella Stella, was counting down to a fresh start. A new beginning. A chance to get it right this time.

I joined in. “Three! Two! One! Happy New Year!”

Everyone in the restaurant started cheering and embracing. Stella gave me a bone-crushing hug, then allowed Jimmy Legs to kiss her. I gave Lucky a hug and kissed his weathered cheek. Ralph the bus boy tried to hug me and somehow wound up nearly poking my eye out. In a way, this was a relief, since it gave me a convenient excuse to let a few tears trickle out of my eyes. I was feeling emotional now.