Scarlet Night (9 page)

“If I invited you to one of my readings, would you come?” O’Grady said. “The New Irish Theatre probably, and there’d be some Yeats in it.”

Déjà vu.
Only it was Pete Mallory speaking. Julie said, “It will depend, I’m afraid, on whether my husband and I have an engagement that night.”

He looked taken aback and Julie regretted saying what she had: it was full of air.

“I’m glad to have met you in any case, Mrs. Hayes.”

“I didn’t say just what I meant, Mr. O’Grady, and it sounded rude. But there are occasions when Jeff commits us far ahead. If I’m free, I’d love to come.”

“Bring him along if you like. If his name is Hayes he can’t be that far from the old sod.”

“All right.”

Mrs. Ryan looked as though she had bitten into a lemon. Obviously she had not mentioned the husband, much less ever thought of his joining them. “You need more lights in here, dear. It’s terribly dreary.”

“I like it,” Julie said, at a loss for the moment for a stronger touch of venom.

“All you need, well,” O’Grady said, nodding at the picture, “is the touch of color and a bag of poems.”

O
’GRADY ASKED THIS QUESTION
and that of Mary Ryan; then as soon as he got out of her sight went home as fast as his legs would take him. He called Rubinoff. “I found her, Rubin! By God, I found her. And I saw the picture with my own eyes hanging in her shop on Forty-fourth Street.”

“I knew you could do it, Johnny. I never doubted for a moment.”

“The queer thing is I could have met her before this.” He told him about Mary Ryan and her conniving to bring them together.

“It’s a small world,” Rubinoff said.

“She’s married to the columnist Geoffrey Hayes. Do you read the
Times?”

“That’s not very good news, Johnny. We shall have to be most circumspect. Did she wonder where she had seen you before?”

“I don’t think she saw me at the gallery. It hit me like a flying fish, seeing the painting there. But I covered myself. It’s a colorful bit of paint.”

“Has she other paintings? What sort of a place is it?”

“It’s a hole in the wall, the ground floor of a tenement with a practicing prostitute overhead. She must think it has atmosphere, the way Ginni does the working-class streets of Naples. To hear Ginni talk of the proletariat makes me roar with laughter.”

“I asked about other paintings, Johnny.”

“There are none. There’s an electric plate, a typewriter, and a crystal ball. Make something of them, if you will.”

“Where does she live?”

“With her husband you mean? Down near the Village, the old lady says. It’d be in the book, I wouldn’t wonder.”

“Then what’s the painting doing on Forty-fourth Street? I’d like to know what’s between her and Abel. You don’t buy a painting for five hundred dollars and hide it away with a hot plate.”

“Maybe she’s only keeping it for him. Maybe she’s supposed to turn it over to you, Rubin. How about that?”

“That’s brilliant of you, Johnny, if it’s true. And it sounds right. As long as it’s safe, let’s give the matter some thought over the weekend.”

“I don’t like sitting around waiting, not after what I’ve been through.”

“Look at it this way, Johnny: we are ten days ahead of schedule. There was never any thought of my taking possession until the show closed.”

“But the show is closed, Rubin, and if you saw the place, you wouldn’t be so damn sure the painting was safe.”

“You’re letting your nerves victimize you, Johnny.”

“It’s my stomach as well and the need to pay my rent while I’ve still got a roof over my head.”

“Then you must find gainful employment, however temporary. Let me ask you a question: suppose I crashed up in the Porsche tomorrow, what would you do?”

“I’d be at your bedside praying that with your dying breath you’d tell me where the picture was going.”

Rubinoff laughed. “Have a lovely weekend, Johnny.”

“It’s only Thursday, man,” he said, but into a dead phone.

I
T BEGAN TO RAIN
as Julie stepped into a bus that would take her across the park. She had worn her raincoat. She always felt invulnerable in raincoat and sneakers. Someday it might not work, but on her present mission she enjoyed the feeling of security the outfit gave her. Except that she wasn’t wearing sneakers. Sandals, and beneath her raincoat beige slacks and a blue tunic with a tasseled belt.

She tried to think of the questions she would ask him if she got the chance. Not a one came to mind. She had tried to do her homework as Jeff would have, but it didn’t work for her. If Romano answered her with one syllable, she’d be stuck with one syllable. The great improviser. At least there was one thing about this assignment—she wasn’t fantasizing the results, she wasn’t dreaming of Julie Hayes, investigative reporter, she wasn’t imagining Tony taking Jeff by the arm at the club and saying, “By God, the girl is good!” She wasn’t hearing Jeff say, “I must admit, Julie, I hadn’t expected…” She wasn’t?

As soon as she gave her name to the doorman, a good-looking young man with sad dark eyes came to her and said, “Mr. Romano is expecting you, Mrs. Hayes.”

They rode up in the elevator without a word. He wore a spotless white shirt, open at the throat, the cuffs turned up.

Romano himself opened the door of the penthouse apartment. He dismissed the younger man with a “Thank you, Alberto.”

The blue eyes did not seem as remote as she had remembered them; the round soft face which looked freshly scrubbed and shaved
was
cherubic—like one of his porcelain sculptures come to life. He too was wearing blue silk, but ornamented with lizards. “How nice of you to come and see me again, Mrs. Hayes.” He held his hands high and limp, waiting to take her coat. They weren’t out for the shaking, certainly. “May I?”

She couldn’t very well keep it on through lunch although she would have liked to. “Thank you.”

“You’ve been in Europe, I understand.” An Actors Forum informant, probably.

“With my husband,” Julie said.

“A distinguished member of the fourth estate.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that. Julie looked around the foyer while he hung her coat. Some of the paintings she remembered, some she had forgotten, or more specifically, she’d forgotten where she had seen them.

“I have something I must show you,” he said as they stepped down into the living room with its vast skylight on which the rain now fell with a soft patter. “You were kind enough to admire my Vuillard. Do you like Edvard Munch?”

They came up to a stark Munch woman, blacks and grays and only a little color, a whisper of red. Out of the depths.

“Oh, yes,” Julie said with fervor. She did like it.

The little caesar beamed. “Isn’t it splendid? I have been over five years acquiring it.”

Just that brief escape from herself into the Munch and Julie felt more at ease.

“I wish I could understand suffering,” Romano said.

Julie glanced at him: it seemed an odd thing to say.

“Does it seem strange to you, my curiosity?”

“A little.”

“Think of all the
Pietàs
in the world. How do you think the artists prepared themselves?”

“By substitution maybe, the way an actor does?”

“Hurt for agony? A pinprick for the stigmata?”

“I think most of us have suffered a little more than pinpricks,” Julie said.

“Ah-ha, you include yourself.”

Julie felt herself blushing. “I was speaking generally, Mr. Romano. Actually, I was thinking of you.”

“How intuitive of you. My life is one great substitute for living. Perhaps at this stage one might call it sublimation, but there is nothing sublime about it. Well, we’ve made an earnest start to our visit, haven’t we?”

“I’d better tell you why I’m here, Mr. Romano. I’ll feel a lot better.”

He motioned her toward the same chair she had sat in before and drew the same one he had sat in at an angle to it and seated himself. The old man in the Vuillard painting looked down on them.

“I’d like to do an article about you for Tony Alexander’s column in the
Daily News.”

He blinked his eyes. Nothing in his expression betrayed either pleasure or dismay. He sat quietly and folded one small plump hand into the other. “What would you like to know?”

“At this very minute? I’d like to know what happened twenty years ago that you haven’t touched a human being since. You told me that yourself and I’ve thought a lot about it. I mean the way you touch sculpture—with love, like something alive…”

He was looking at his hands, turning them palms upward. Then he looked at her. “This is information you would like to put in a column in the
Daily News?”

The blood rushed to Julie’s face again. “It isn’t something I planned to ask you, Mr. Romano. But when you said, ‘What would you like to know?’ that’s what came to the top. I’m not very tactful, maybe, but I am discreet. I don’t think you’d have to worry about my saying something in print that you wouldn’t want me to.”

“But my dear, those are the very things Tony Alexander would want to know—the source of my wealth, the number of people I’ve had rubbed out, to speak in the vernacular, where I stand in the Family hierarchy…and what ever happened to Mack the Pimp. Come now, can you tell me honestly that you have come here
not
wanting to know what happened to him?”

“I did wonder, it’s true.”

Romano folded his hands again and massaged them gently. “Shall I tell you he is alive and well in Costa Rica?”

“Okay.”

“Alive, in any case. I didn’t know you were a newspaper woman, Mrs. Hayes.”

“Let’s say I’m an apprentice. Tony is a friend of my husband’s and I got up my courage the other day and asked him for a job. I’ve gotten to know some pretty colorful people lately.”

“And do you think I’m colorful?”

“Yes. But I also think that Munch painting is colorful. A lot of people wouldn’t say that.”

“You are clever.”

“What I thought we might hang the story on is your art collection.”

“Is Mr. Alexander interested in art?”

“No. Collectors, yes, if they’re famous.”

“Or infamous. We must give the matter further thought.”

“I won’t have more than five hundred words,” Julie said.

“Yes, but I shall want the last one, and I doubt Mr. Alexander would consent to that.”

“He might—as long as he has the first ones, you know—things like Mr. Romano is the alleged…he is reported to be…things like that.”

“Leaving you the second act in which to discourse on the part of Romano which bears public scrutiny.” He glanced over his shoulder and Julie looked around to see Alberto in the doorway, now wearing a white coat. “Shall we have lunch and talk of old friends? I hope you like trout. They came out of the stream at dawn this morning.”

Consommé with a thin lemon slice, the trout broiled just to the point where the skin was spotted with brown and cracked. Alberto showed them the fish and then boned them at the end of the table. Asparagus, an endive salad, and a cheese more delicate than brie. Espresso. Jeff would have approved. Julie resolved to open the article, if she ever got to write it, describing the luncheon, the silver, and the deeply polished, knife-scarred wood of the refectory table at which they sat. The wine was a Soave. Julie wished she liked wine better. Jeff wished it too and she kept trying.

Mostly they talked of Pete Mallory and Laura Gibson, the actress both men had loved, the Actors Forum, and theater as Romano remembered it. He was a lot older than he looked. His best memories were of the 1930s and 1940s, which made Julie wonder if he had got his start in the underworld during Prohibition. She hoped so. Nostalgia. She realized that he was saying things he did not mind her quoting, and for a few seconds when she realized this, anxiety took over and she missed part of what he was saying. He was talking about Shakespeare.

“I do believe,” he said and paused, his hands folded on the table almost as though he were posing, “that I am among the few moderns who can accept
Othello
as completely believable.”

Julie merely nodded.

“I thought you would understand,” he said, and at that moment she was struck with what he might be telling her. Othello’s problem was jealousy and he wound up strangling his wife. Killing her with his own hands anyway…Surely not.

“Shall we go now and look at the paintings you’ve not seen before?”

He had a great American collection, people Julie especially liked—Levine and Sloan and Bellows. He had nonobjectives too, but you knew from where things were hanging which were his favorites. There were painters, too, unknown to Julie, so that she thought of Ralph Abel, but it was a long time before she said anything. They were looking at a Reginald Marsh, blousy women on the move. “Do you know an art dealer by the name of Rubinoff?” she asked.

“I’ve heard the name.”

“I think he buys for collectors with a lot of money.”

“It’s a common practice. One rarely knows who buys at auction, for example, unless by association. And then there are people in the market, believe it or not, who don’t trust their own tastes.”

“That’s very funny,” Julie said. “I was just going to ask you if you’d look at a painting I bought. This Rubinoff wanted it, but I got it from the painter. It’s in my shop on Forty-fourth Street. I like it, but…”

“You would like your taste confirmed.”

“I would like your opinion. The artist is a friend of mine.”

“You ought not to seek opinions on the work of friends, my dear, if you’ll forgive the advice of an aging man.”

“Well, you see, I’m hoping you’ll like him.”

“Ah-ha! I no longer leave this apartment, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” Julie said.

“But if you would care to send it to me with my driver, I will look at it and be as frank with you as you have been with me. And by the time we talk again, I shall have decided whether you are to launch your career as a newspaperwoman on the revelations of Romano.”

T
HE DRIVER, MICHAEL, TOOK
Julie to the door under an umbrella and waited outside until she brought him
Scarlet Night.
He was a tough, thin little man with a limp, and with a scar on his cheek that made her wonder if he was a gang-war veteran. She had never had a good look at him until then. There was a lot of space between the front seat and the back seat of the limousine. If Romano never left his apartment, what did he need with a limousine and chauffeur?