Paradise Man (23 page)

But she wouldn’t hide. Should he give her to one of the doormen as a package to hold? But she’d wind up in some shelter for little girls. Holden didn’t like that. He’d rather keep her and suffer the consequences. If he stood close enough to the door, he could whack both homicidals and run. Run where? The bumper could hardly move. And he had spots in his eyes, like coals on a leopard’s back.

Lord, he begged, please don’t let me drift. But he couldn’t even tell which Lord he was praying to. His father didn’t believe in any Grand Seigneur. Holden Sr. was a bloody atheist. And Holden himself never had much use for God. But he prayed.

Lord ...

And Holden had to smile. Because the Lord had a funny apparatus. Men with white hair had come into the Yale Club, Mariels. They were impeccable this afternoon. Wore neckties with their quilted suits. It didn’t matter that each Mariel had one brown shoe and wore glasses with a missing lens. None of them had violated the club’s strict code.

Barbara got off the couch and danced over to the men. And Holden could afford to dream. Billetdoux wouldn’t have messed with Bandidos inside the Yale Club. The bumper closed his eyes, thinking of palaces, popes, his darling, and his dada’s dead mistress.

F
AY DREAMT OF RED
shoes in the window at Fausto Santini. She’d been waltzing down Madison Avenue like a fisherman’s wife, searching for shoes. It was almost three months ago. She’d stopped at Vittorio Ricci. But the red was too red, and it didn’t match the gown she had to wear at the lieutenant governor’s ball. She hadn’t been out with her husband in such a long time. She’d forgotten the nature of his eyes. Green, but how green? She’d been hanging around with Paul. And people trembled at the sight of her. Paul Abruzzi’s date and daughter-in-law. They held hands at the lieutenant governor’s table. And she didn’t care what all those assemblyman’s wives thought of her. They were frightened of Paul. A district attorney could dig into anyone’s past. And she’d come to a den of thieves. Fat wives with jewels on every finger. Hubbies with gold money clips. She drank matzoh-ball soup in the land of beg and borrow. College deans, assemblymen, bankers, crooked lawyers and their cronies would line up and pay homage to Paul. They bent so far, Fay could see their bald spots. They brought her flowers and boxes of Godiva mints.

“Where’s the great author?” they asked.

“He’s busy,” Paul would growl. “Busy writing plays.”

People stopped mentioning Rex. And she didn’t have to make excuses. She was with Paul in a pair of red shoes from Fausto Santini. She’d stroke his neck while some grubby little man was at Paul’s feet, asking for favors. But she didn’t love Paul. She admired him, liked him, fed off his power, but she’d never have run away with Paul. She ran away with Sidney ... to Tenth Avenue. Sidney could shake her blood. He didn’t fondle her in Cadillacs, take her to the lieutenant governor’s ball, see her in red shoes. Paul liked to belittle Sidney and say, “Sidney’s a gentle psychopath. He has no more brains than his dad.” But she hadn’t been introduced to his dad.

“I knew him,” Paul had told her at the lieutenant governor’s table. “The man was an ape. He belonged in a textbook on abnormal psychology. The son’s like his dad ... only he’s had more of a success. He’s good at killing people.”

“I care for him,” she’d said.

And Paul had slapped her in front of a thousand people. The lieutenant governor’s wife peeked out at her from under her husband’s armpit. And all the other wives started to sneer. Fay could have written a treatise on assemblymen’s wives and the jewelry they wore. The relationship between gold in an ear and the lack of sex. But she wasn’t a sociologist any more. She didn’t have to weigh lives in terms of silver and gold. She ran from the table and Paul shoved assemblymen aside and followed her to the door.

“You can’t go,” he said.

“I am going.”

He seemed much more passionate than Rex, who liked to slouch in pajamas with a pencil in his hand.

“I won’t let you,” he said, and he had eyes like a little boy. She could have done anything with Paul, undressed him, sat in his lap, stole his handkerchief, delivered a speech at the lieutenant governor’s table about assemblymen’s wives and their rubbery tits. But he turned sullen and played district attorney when he should have rubbed and kissed her where he’d slapped her face. “Come back ... you can’t humiliate me like this.”

And she walked out on him and went to live with Holden. Holden gave her a pistol to wear. It was the oddest romance, because he was hardly ever around. He could have been fighting in some foreign war. But she was crazy about his silences, because she’d been with men who talked all the time. Rex had courted her with speeches out of Pirandello, until she wondered if she’d married Pirandello’s ghost. And Paul had opinions on every ballet in the land. Holden didn’t have opinions. He drank in whatever performance she took him to. He dressed like a British lord. Nothing was accented, nothing stood out. His voice was soft. He never shouted.

He had an angular look, like he was searching for something. A pair of red shoes? His mouth was strong. His eyes sat deep in his head. She’d wanted him the moment she saw him in Far Rockaway, in Michael’s wretched hut. He’d killed the three bothers as silently as he’d looked at her, without even savoring her breasts. No man had ever sized her up with such polite concentration. Michael’s brothers had stared at her bottom, their brains exploding with big ideas.

“Godiva,” Michael had called her after his brothers took her clothes. But her hair wasn’t long enough to cover her ass. She was settling in with Michael, having a good time, a holiday from her husband and Paul, when Holden arrived like some figure out of Pirandello. Sad and doomed. She could tell he didn’t want to kill Mike.

She’d never asked for Holden, and there he was. She’d fallen under his curtain of doom. She belonged to Sidney, not through marriage, not through the shared birth of a child, or the practice of fathers-in-law, but through some elemental song, like a nursery rhyme she might have discovered at three or four. He was her dark, silent partner-prince, her playmate, and it had nothing to do with kissing her, or how practical he was at touching her parts. Michael had driven her insane in that hut. She’d screamed until the walls began to rock like the waves outside her window. She hardly ever screamed with Sidney. But she dug under his arm as if they’d been sleeping together thirty years.

And still she thought of those red shoes. The toes stuck out like a canoe. The heels were thin as wire. She was the tallest cunt at the lieutenant governor’s table. She flirted with the politicians, destroyed their wives with the most ordinary smile, because they didn’t amount to much with all their silver and gold. And she was Lady Godiva in her red shoes. Poor Michael had guessed right. She was a woman who loved to prance without her clothes. She’d have stood on the table at the lieutenant governor’s ball, slapped her hips, and danced with nothing on but her red shoes, and no one would have disturbed her. She’d come with Paul.

Now she was hiding, but she didn’t know who she was hiding from. Sidney had told her to shoot if a man or mouse pushed through their door. She understood eating habits in Melanesia, mating in Manhattan among rich and poor, blue-collar crime ... but she couldn’t even say what Sidney had done. She drank soup in his absence. She thought of Michael’s brothers staring at her body. She dreamt of red shoes, supposing that if she conjured hard enough, Sidney might appear.

She heard footsteps in the hall. Her first impulse was to darken her eyes for Sidney, so he’d think of her as his own big blonde cat. But she didn’t rush into the bathroom for her eyeliner, because it wasn’t Sidney’s steps she’d heard. She removed the pistol from that leather stocking near her heart, aimed it at the door. Someone knocked. She didn’t like the sound of knuckles on wood.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Paul.”

She unlocked the door with her left hand, because anyone could come around and impersonate Paul, and she wasn’t taking chances. Paul was astonished to see a pistol in his face. “Did Holden give you that?”

“Yes,” she answered, without inviting him inside. “He taught me how to fire. We had target practice in New Jersey.”

“Put it away,” Paul said. “You don’t need a gun. I’m the district attorney.”

“But you told me it’s dangerous.” Every time his chauffeur had come for her, and she’d gone to the Algonquin to visit Paul, he’d said how dangerous it was to live on Tenth Avenue, how she could get swallowed up, or disappear, and he was kissing her all the while he said that, standing in his undershirt at the Algonquin, and she could sniff Eau Sauvage on him, because he had aristocratic tastes for a district attorney, and she didn’t trust him on the subject of Sidney Holden.

“It is dangerous. This is Holden’s craphouse. And his enemies might mistake you for his new secretary ... can I come in, or should we have a little chat in front of Holden’s neighbors?”

“There aren’t any neighbors,” she said. “I haven’t seen a soul.”

But he’d already stepped inside and he took the gun out of her hand and undid that leather stocking as if he were removing her bra. He sat her down at the kitchen table with his Christian Dior perfume and she served him crackers that must have been in storage for a year, because that’s how Holden lived, like a man who went from bunker to bunker, and she preferred those crackers to steak au poivre at Mansions or Mortimer’s. Paul chewed the crackers. He didn’t mention the Algonquin, didn’t declare his need for her. He hadn’t come to kiss her in his Cadillac.

“Holden,” he said. “You can’t stay here.”

“I don’t understand you, Paul.”

“He’s gone.”

“Did you hurt him?”

“I made you a promise. I’d protect your little frog.”

“He’s not a frog,” Fay said, but she understood the world according to a district attorney. Paul would pounce on Sidney soon as he could. But he couldn’t pounce and keep her. So he planned Sidney’s destruction in his offices, mapped whole routes for getting at Sidney, but the routes were no good, because he couldn’t work Fay into his plans.

“You’ll have to go back to Rex,” he said, like a father-in-law who hadn’t dug under her dress in the back seat of his Cadillac.

“I’ll wait for Sidney here.”

“He’s wounded ...”

“Take me to him.”

She clutched at Paul.

“I can’t take you,” he said. “Holden’s with some African priests. They sacrifice chickens, drink the blood.”

“You can find anybody, Paul. No one escapes you and your squad.”

“We’re talking about madmen,” he said, “Mariels. They have tattoos inside their mouths. They’ll blow your head off if you look at them the wrong way.”

She had no idea what Sidney did outside of killing people and collecting bad debts. “What’s Sidney doing with Mariels?”

“He was guarding one of their saints.”

“Barbara? She’s just a little girl. Sidney didn’t talk about her much. I thought she was some kind of a niece. She helped me with the cooking. She sang to herself ...”

It was beginning to start, the nervous chatter that possessed her when she was excited or upset. She’d talk like that in the Cadillac, and Paul must have known that her mind was elsewhere, not with him. “I’m waiting. Sidney will come back.”

“I told you. He’s gone. And his enemies are prowling all over.”

“Then it’s simple,” she said. “Have one of your detectives sit with me. I’ll be safe.”

“I can’t get involved. I’m not a small-town sheriff.” His mouth twisted into a sad grin. “And you’re a mother. You have two children at home.”

Good old Paul. He couldn’t use the children against her. “They’re in Arizona,” she said. “Adrianne is. I forgot where Tina went.”

“They’ve been home for a month.”

“Rex can feed them. We have a maid.”

She was the cruel one now. Paul was crazy about the girls. He chauffeured them everywhere in his Cadillac, delivered them to department stores with his siren on, stood them in front of mirrors while he proceeded to buy out the store. It was Paul who dressed them, Paul who took them to the dentist, because he loved them and he had this terrible guilt about his courtship of their mother in the Cadillac.

“If you don’t come with me,” Paul said, “I’ll bring Adrianne and Tina on my next trip to Tenth Avenue. They’ll love Sidney. He can take them on target practice, go with them into the woods ... if he ever comes out of Cuban country alive.”

“And what should I tell them about their grandpa? That he paws me in hotel rooms, puts his hand on my ass while we’re listening to Beethoven.”

His hand started to shake. It wasn’t some kind of miserable palsy. It was punishment for loving a woman who couldn’t love him back. “Fay,” he said, “either you walk with me, or you get carried.”

She watched herself in Holden’s mirror. Her face curled like an enigmatic cat. And Paul couldn’t interpret her looks, even if he’d had all his pathologists in the room.

“Carry me, Paul. Carry me down into the street, shove me into your car and put me under the rug, like Michael did.”

“What Michael?”

“Michael. Red Mike.”

“I won’t discuss that son of a bitch.”

“Why not? Sidney thinks you set it up for Michael to kidnap me.”

“I don’t care what Sidney thinks.”

“He says it was your way to get Michael killed.”

“He’s a psychopath. I could have had Red Mike on my own. Why would I have risked your skin?”

“Because you’re always scheming ... and you hate me almost as much as you love me, Paul.”

“I don’t hate you,” he said. “I don’t.” She’d complicated his life until he’d arrived at some border he couldn’t bear. If he stepped across he’d be in a phantom town, like the Mariels who had her Sidney. He was the chief prosecutor of an enormous village, but he spent his days at the Algonquin, dreaming of her. She started to pack, found her red shoes at the rear of Holden’s closet. Party shoes. But she wouldn’t be going to another lieutenant governor’s ball. She’d felt the language that seemed to loom under the table, like a dry and bitter storm. Paul should have been the next governor. But he’d ruined his chances courting Fay. He’d rather bite her hair in a hotel room than sit in Albany on some wooden throne.