Tongues of Fire (15 page)

“I'll pay her going rate.”

“That's understood. You'll have to pay me, too.”

“How much?”

“That depends how much work I have to do.”

“All right.”

“How do I know you can afford to pay?”

“You'll have to trust me.”

Curiosity vanished from the dark eyes, leaving emptiness in its place. “I don't trust anybody, Dr. Vere.”

“Then trust that hundred-dollar bill. I gave it to you to show I wanted everything done in a businesslike way.”

Mr. Cohee began to laugh, a soft rumbling, pleasant laugh from deep in his chest. Leon joined him in a nasal descant. When the laughter had gone, Mr. Cohee said, “I'm all for the businesslike way. That's why I have Leon.” The three men thought their different thoughts about that.

Rehv broke the silence. “Can you help me?” he asked.

“Can we help him, Leon?” Mr. Cohee said.

“Angel,” Leon replied.

“Maybe,” Mr. Cohee said slowly. “Let's go.”

Leon pressed the accelerator, and Rehv again felt himself being pushed deep into the soft seat. Mr. Cohee switched on the television and opened the liquor cabinet. He took out two glasses and set them on a sliding shelf that pulled out from the side of the cabinet. “Scotch? Gin? Vodka? Rum?”

“Scotch.” He suddenly wanted a drink very badly: Something at the edge of his mind was waiting for his attention. Naomi.

“On the rocks?”

“Please.”

Mr. Cohee poured two drinks. “To businesslike ways,” he said, raising his glass.

Mr. Cohee watched the miniature men playing basketball. Rehv tried to drink the scotch slowly and keep the ice from rattling against the sides of the glass. He could do neither. “Just help yourself,” Mr. Cohee said. Rehv did.

The miniature men ran back and forth, jumping, twisting, falling. “Poor white boy,” Mr. Cohee said sadly. He glanced at Rehv: “This is the only time I ever feel sorry for white people—when I see them playing basketball.”

“Say it,” Leon said.

Leon parked the silver car as close as he could to the entrance of a famous disco. It was not very close. The best parking places had all been taken. So had the best double- and triple-parking places: by cars from Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari. They were all expensive and they all had parking tickets on the windshield.

Mr. Cohee reached into an inside pocket and handed Leon a card. “Go get her,” he said. Leon got out of the car and started walking toward the door. For a moment Rehv saw his face—hard, fleshless, with eyes sunk deep and safe in bony nests. It didn't seem to go with his body, a lean, strong body that moved lightly, gracefully, economically. His feet barely appeared to graze the sidewalk as he walked along. Mr. Cohee noticed him watching. “Leon was a Golden Gloves champion,” he said. “Could have gone further than that, much further.”

“Why didn't he?”

“He got mixed up with the wrong crowd,” Mr. Cohee answered with a little smile. “Ended up doing most of his fighting in prison. It took all the purity out of his style.”

Leon spent a long time in the disco. It was owned by a woman whose face appeared in a certain kind of magazine almost every week. It was a greedy petit bourgeois face, not at all softened or disguised by her thick red hair, cut in the latest style. Rehv had seen her on television: The cameras had revealed that her hair was dyed, she couldn't dance, and her face was the way he had thought.

Leon came out of the disco. Beside him walked a woman as tall as he, which Rehv guessed to be a little under six feet. She hadn't put on a coat. She wore a short dress and long leather boots that disappeared beneath its hem. She was slender and might have walked as gracefully as Leon if the high heels of her boots had not lifted up her small, firm buttocks and pushed her pelvis forward.

Leon said something to the woman, walked around the car, and leaned his body against the long hood. He didn't bother to open the rear door for her. She opened it herself. Rehv shifted to give her room. She sat down and closed the door. Her long legs took a lot of room. Despite the size of the car Rehv felt closer to both of them than he wanted to be.

Without switching off the television Mr. Cohee leaned forward and turned to her. “Hello, Angel,” he said. “This is Dr. Vere.”

“Uh-huh.” She was gazing at a ring on her long middle finger: a large dark polished stone.

“He wants to have a look at you.” Mr. Cohee pressed a button on his armrest and a bright yellow light glowed from the back of the seat in front of her. “Look at him, Angel. He can't see you that way.”

The woman turned her head and faced him. In his mind Rehv felt a sharp prick of self-disgust that made him want to shake his head, or close his eyes, or say, “Oh, God.” But he forced himself to look at her.

The color of her skin was perfect, perhaps a shade lighter than Mr. Cohee's. It was smooth and unmarked, except for a tiny curved scar under her lip. That would not matter. Her face was thin, angular, Cubist, he thought, suddenly realizing that the twentieth-century ideal of female beauty somehow had its roots in twentieth-century art. She wore green makeup above and below her eyes, eyes the color of dull brass. They didn't appear to be seeing him at all.

“Satisfied?” Mr. Cohee asked.

Again he felt a pang of self-disgust. He wanted to squirm away from himself. Instead he nodded. “But I'll have to talk to her.” To the woman he said: “I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

“He wants you to talk, Angel,” Mr. Cohee said. “Talk.”

“Talk?”

Rehv looked at her. Her eyes still were not seeing him, but the tiny plucked lines that were the remains of her eyebrows had lifted in puzzlement. “Just for a few minutes,” Rehv said gently. “Tell me a little about yourself,” he suggested, feeling so stupid he almost blushed.

“I'm a whore,” Angel said. “I charge one hundred dollars an hour. Five hundred a night.”

There was a long silence while Rehv tried to think of something else to say. Mr. Cohee watched television. Angel gazed at her ring, which in the light he could see was an amethyst.

Finally he said: “Have you ever thought of modeling? I think there's a lot of money in that, too.”

The woman laughed bitterly, but did not reply. Mr. Cohee laughed as well. She jerked her head toward him, the brass eyes suddenly hooded and seeing very clearly. “What are you laughing about, you bastard?”

Mr. Cohee leaned across Rehv and slapped Angel across the face, very hard. “You fucker,” she said. Rehv felt her saliva spray on his face.

“The other cheek, Angel?” Mr. Cohee said very calmly.

“Stop it,” Rehv said. He must have said it very loudly, because Leon sprinted to the door where Mr. Cohee sat and yanked it open.

“Something wrong, Mr. Cohee?” Leon's little eyes peered at them from their deep craters.

“Nothing at all, Leon. Close the door. It's freezing.”

“Keep that fucking murderer away from me,” Angel said, raising her voice.

Leon leaned far into the car, tilting up his chin, and held his face very close to hers. “Touch me,” he whispered. “Go on. Just touch me.”

She glared at him, but she didn't move a muscle.

“It's cold in here, Leon,” Mr. Cohee said. And colder after he said it. Leon withdrew and closed the door. He left behind an odor that made Rehv think of iron filings.

He looked at Mr. Cohee. “I've got nothing more to say.”

“And? She'll do? Or not?”

“I don't think we should discuss that in her presence.”

“Why not, Dr. Vere? She's not applying for a seat on the stock exchange.”

“Then it's no.” He wanted to say something polite to her, like “I'm sorry,” but he could not think of anything that wouldn't sound ridiculous.

“Split, Angel,” Mr. Cohee said.

“I want some money.”

“You're lucky you still have a face.”

Angel got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked quickly away. Leon called after her, words that Rehv could not quite distinguish, but she didn't turn.

Mr. Cohee turned to him; the curious eyes searched his face. “Why not?” he asked.

“She just wasn't right. I can't really explain it,” Rehv said. But he could very easily: If she wasn't smart enough to handle Mr. Cohee, she wasn't nearly smart enough.

Leon got into the car. Mr. Cohee looked thoughtfully at the back of his shaved head. “Where to, Mr. Cohee?”

Mr. Cohee didn't answer him. Instead he looked at Rehv and said: “Have you got another one of those envelopes?”

“No.”

“What about what was in the envelope? Any more of those?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Cohee smiled. “Better give me one. With a car like this it's nice if everyone chips in on the gas.” Leon didn't laugh: He was no longer in a laughing mood, Rehv thought. He gave Mr. Cohee another one-hundred-dollar bill. Mr. Cohee slipped it inside his jacket pocket and tapped Leon very lightly on the shoulder. “Paulette.”

“Paulette?” Leon said, with a little whine in his voice. “She's too dark.”

“I don't think so.”

“She's got no class.”

“I don't think Dr. Vere cares very much about that. Do you, Dr. Vere?”

“No.”

“Paulette,” Mr. Cohee said again. Leon started the motor and pulled away.

Outside the night went by. Taxis took over the streets, their drivers hunched forward, watching for shadows waiting on the curb. Rehv began to feel tired. He knew from the whine in Leon's voice that he was tired too. Mr. Cohee did not seem tired at all. He refilled their glasses and gazed into the flickering light of the little television.

Leon stopped the car in front of an old brick apartment building on the East Side. It was the kind of building where doctors and lawyers had lived long ago, and might still if they were very old. Mr. Cohee opened the door. “Wait here,” he said to Leon. To Rehv he said, “Come with me.”

They opened the outer door to the building and went inside. Mr. Cohee ran his index finger over the row of black buttons and pressed one. After a few moments he pressed it again.

“She's probably asleep,” Rehv said.

Mr. Cohee didn't reply. He pressed the buzzer once more and kept his finger on it for what seemed like a full minute. From the square mesh of the speaker came a female voice that sounded deep and harsh and angry: “What is it?”

“It's me,” Mr. Cohee said. The inner door buzzed. Mr. Cohee pulled it open before the buzzing stopped.

He led Rehv to an old elevator with two doors—the outer solid and the inner a folding brass grille. They rode to the sixth floor and got out.

Rehv and Mr. Cohee followed a worn brown carpet to the end of a hall. They stopped in front of number 606. Mr. Cohee knocked. Immediately the door opened wide. A very tall woman stood in the doorway, an inch, perhaps two inches taller than Rehv. She wore blue plastic curlers in her hair and a blue flannel nightgown, which was slightly too tight and revealed the strength of her body. She was much broader than Angel, and darker, too dark, Rehv thought. She had large eyes, larger and darker than Mr. Cohee's, and they weren't friendly.

“What do you want?” she said. Her voice sounded the same as it had through the speaker, only bigger.

Mr. Cohee nodded toward Rehv. “What do you think?”

The woman looked down at him over Mr. Cohee's shoulder. “He can't afford me,” she said. “All those Jewish refugees are stone cold broke.”

Rehv stepped closer to her, pushing Mr. Cohee slightly to the side. “What makes you think I'm an Israeli refugee?”

“I got eyes, man,” she said, tapping the crest of her cheekbone.

He knew she was the one.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“I want a baby,” Isaac Rehv said.

They sat in Paulette's living room: Paulette on an orange corduroy couch that looked new, Mr. Cohee in a patched and faded stuffed chair that had once been either brown or yellow but now had a shiny surface of no particular color, and Rehv on a folding card table chair he had pulled to the center of the gray unpolished hardwood floor. Beneath the window on the far side of the room a tiny old woman was sitting in a wheelchair, a blanket over her knees. Her skin was very dark and deeply creased; her hair the color of old ivory. Her watery eyes were fixed on a very large television screen, where some pirates were fighting with cutlasses. There were no books in the room, no magazines, no newspapers, and nothing hung on the walls except a big oil painting of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., wearing dark suits and standing on clouds.

Mr. Cohee looked at Rehv, frowning. “A baby?” he said. “That would take me two or three days. More than that if you want a white one.”

“Don't be a fool,” Paulette told him. “He's talking about a nine-months baby.”

“That's right,” Rehv said.

“Sure,” Paulette said, leaning forward a little to look at Rehv more closely; her strong shoulders strained the fabric of her nightgown—it was split slightly along the seam, revealing an oval of chestnut-colored skin. “You want me to have a baby. Your baby.”

“Yes.”

“You see?” she said to Mr. Cohee.

“He's crazy,” Mr. Cohee said with annoyance. He turned to Rehv: “You're crazy.” Annoyance grew into anger, and Rehv caught some of it.

“I'll pay. Business. Remember?” He heard a little chuckle in the back of Paulette's throat.

“Leon outside?” she asked Mr. Cohee. He nodded. She chuckled again.

“Talk,” Mr. Cohee said.

“First I want to ask Paulette a few questions.” She narrowed her eyes, assuming the problem-solving face of a schoolgirl called on by the teacher even though she has not raised her hand. Rehv was surprised to see an expression like that on such an intelligent face. He tried to imagine her as a schoolgirl, sitting at a desk in an orderly row, and couldn't.