AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You still here?” he said.
“The blue in their eyes was just like the blue in the eyes of Leslie Rosenberg’s invalid daughter,” I said.
“See? There you go. You let your imagination loose. That’s what these guys want us to do.”
“Which guys?”
“Mark Shondell and the people he’s a hump for. A guy like
that doesn’t have the smarts to amass all that money on his own. I bet that money with the dye on it was his.”
“I saw Richetti in a newsreel with Benito Mussolini.”
“You saw a guy who looked like him. Here’s a more serious subject. What about the Balangie woman? You got feelings for her? You had a weak moment and wanted to get your ashes hauled? What are we talking about here?”
“Guess.”
“Okay, so you were on the square. But it’s got to end, noble mon. If she’s done it with you, she’s done it with others. I got a feeling those ‘others’ are in a landfill or a swamp courtesy of her husband. Sorry, I forgot. He’s not her husband.”
I stared out the passenger window at the miles of wetlands slipping past us into the darkness, a solitary ember of sunlight dying on the horizon.
“Come in, Earth,” he said.
“Leslie has dreams about flames crawling on her skin.”
“That’s what nightmares are,” he said. “Falling from cliffs, mountains crashing on our head, getting buried alive, stuff that early man was afraid of.”
“You saw Richetti, Clete. He hung you upside down. That wasn’t a dream. Stop lying to yourself.”
He put both hands on the wheel. I could see him breathing, his knuckles ridging.
“What are you hiding?” I said.
“One of those books talks about an infamous executioner in the sixteenth century. He burned a lot of Jews. His name was used to scare children. It was Gideon Richetti.”
* * *
THE CLUB WAS overflowing, strung with Christmas lights, the dance floor packed with young people. Johnny and Isolde were on the stage and having a love affair with the crowd. She looked like a mermaid in her white strapless dress plated with sequins, a nimbus surrounding her hair, her mouth small and red, her tattooed bouquet dry and cool and pale on her shoulder. Johnny was equally radiant, without a line in his face. Who would believe he had recently been in rehab, doubling over with cramps during withdrawal and thinking of life in terms of one minute at a time?
Clete and I had to stand against the back wall. He went to the bar and brought back a whiskey sour for himself and a Dr Pepper with cherries and ice for me. “Do I feel old,” he said.
“That’s because we’re old,” I said.
He sipped from his drink, his brow furrowed, and I knew something other than our age was on his mind.
“Guess who’s over there in the corner,” he said.
I looked through the crowd but couldn’t see anyone I knew.
“Mark Shondell and Eddy Firpo,” Clete said. “I need to get Firpo alone.”
“Bad idea.”
“Firpo set me up with Richetti in Key West,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for Johnny, I would have died in a fire an inch at a time. I still have nightmares.”
“What’s Firpo going to tell you?”
“Maybe we’ll get the gen on Richetti,” he said.
