Scarlet Night Read online

  Tony wheeled around on her. “You were thinking of ‘In the Spotlight.’ Is that it?” Once a week he devoted most of the column to a profile, just short of actionable, on someone in the news. “I’ve got a deal for you, Mrs. Hayes: you do me an interview with Sweets Romano and I’ll take you on.”

  NINE

  “I UNDERSTAND PERFECTLY,” JEFF said later that night.

  “It’s not that I’m trying to compete with you. Ha! As though I could.”

  “Would that be so terrible?”

  “I hate women who compete with their husbands. I’m not all that great a competitor with anybody.”

  “And yet, Julie, you’ve asked for a job in the most competitive field in journalism, the gossip column. Of all the people I know you’re the least susceptible to gossip.”

  “But I’m curious. I’m a very curious person.”

  “You certainly are,” Jeff said, grinning. He shook out his bathrobe and put it on.

  “But Sweets Romano. That really threw me.”

  “Tell me about him. Why is he called Sweets?”

  “Somebody told me it was because he looks that way—rather plump and immaculate and cherubic. And then I heard it was because he owned a piece of a chain of candy stores.”

  “That sounds more likely. But his main line is pornography?”

  “That’s how I got to him.”

  Jeff laughed aloud.

  “It’s true. Pete Mallory had made a porn film…”

  “Acted in it?”

  “Yeah. He was one of the principals. He needed money. It was when Laura Gibson, the actress, was dying and he was trying to take care of her. When I first went to see Mr. Romano, I thought it was Pete he was interested in…”

  “Is Romano homosexual?”

  “Jeff, I don’t know what he is. He told me he’d been in love with Laura Gibson for years. He called himself the ultimate voyeur. He makes a great thing of not having touched another human being in twenty years. And yet he has all this marvelous painting and sculpture, and the first thing he said to me when I was looking at one of the sculptures was, ‘Do touch. It is the greatest tribute.’ He speaks beautifully, Jeff. And it sounds natural. But natural he isn’t.”

  Jeff grunted. “Are you afraid of him?”

  “Well, I was pretty shaky when I got out of there.”

  “Concentration will help. It always does for me.”

  The idea of Jeff’s ever being afraid hadn’t occurred to Julie.

  “Oh, yes,” Jeff said, reading her eyes. Then: “Did he like you?”

  “I think maybe he did, you know, the idea of my seeking him out and coming to see him about Pete on my own. And I really did admire his art collection.”

  “That might be it, don’t you think,” Jeff suggested gently, “a way in?”

  “I’m not the greatest authority on art,” Julie said, and thought of Scarlet Night. Something she had not yet told Jeff about. It didn’t seem exactly relevant at the moment.

  “Even if you were, you would want to defer to him under the circumstances. Do you know how to contact him?”

  “I have his unlisted number at the shop.”

  “I have only one word of advice at the moment, Julie: don’t wait too long. Make your contact.”

  TEN

  JUANITA WAS BACK IN front of the shop when Julie arrived in the morning, trying to make her gallant band of crippled dolls shape up. Her mother was in the upstairs window, elbows to pillow to windowsill. “Hi, Mrs. Rodriguez. How was the vacation?”

  “No good. My husband’s brother—he wants us to bring the whole family to New York.” A business catastrophe for Mrs. Rodriguez, Julie thought.

  She spoke to the child. “Did you miss me?”

  If Juanita had she wasn’t saying. The only word in her vocabulary that Julie knew of was “bad.” Someday she was going to break out in two languages and either tell Papa that Mama was a moonlight hustler or tell Mama what she could tell Papa if it seemed to her advantage. Blackmail: childhood’s ultimate weapon. Juanita needed an ultimate weapon.

  “Julie…?” the mother crooned.

  “No messages,” Julie said and let herself into the shop.

  She was glad when she heard Mrs. Rodriguez call the child upstairs. She could never quite overcome a feeling of responsibility when Juanita was hovering outside the shop door. She ought to have brought her something from Paris, a doll, one more doll to tear the limbs from. What she might do was give her the Tarot cards and defy in herself that lingering superstition. But the cards had a certain beauty, worn though they were by perhaps a generation of gypsy hands…Señora Cabrera, whom she knew only from Mrs. Rodriguez’s description. She might mount the cards or make a collage of them and hang it alongside Scarlet Night. She glanced at the painting where she had hung it on the plasterboard partition between the front and the back of the shop. She had turned her desk sideways to that wall. If anything in the room looked temporary it was Scarlet Night with its bold heavy frame. The goose-neck lamp shone bleakly on the notebook, open to two empty pages. There were three director’s chairs around the table she had cut down to knee height for reading the cards. On the table were the crystal ball through which the most she had ever seen was the magnified grain of wood in the table, and the collected poems of William Butler Yeats.

  Sweets Romano. She dialed the unlisted number.

  As had happened on the previous occasion, the man who answered took her name and number and promised to call right back.

  She waited, her heartbeat noisier than the drip of the tap in the bathroom sink. Mrs. Ryan was right: the place needed more air and light. On the other hand, considering the things that came out from the walls to play, who wanted to see them?

  The phone rang.

  “Romano here, Mrs. Hayes.”

  “I don’t know if you remember me, Mr. Romano…”

  “I do. Someone who cared what happened to Peter Mallory.”

  “I’d like to talk to you for a little while, Mr. Romano, if we could make an appointment.”

  “It would give me pleasure. Today? Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow would be better for me.”

  “Come for lunch. My car will pick you up. Is it the same address?”

  “Yes, but Mr. Romano, couldn’t I just come on my own?”

  A second or two of hesitation. “Very well. Alberto will be waiting for you in the lobby. Twelve-thirty.”

  One step at a time, Julie cautioned herself when she hung up the phone. She had twenty-four hours for preparation. She wound up the cords on the spotlights in the front room, put the lights in a shopping bag, and went to see Mr. Bourke. It was he who had obtained Romano’s phone number for her. He had given it with deep reluctance. In fact, her fear of Romano derived in large part from him.

  Mr. Bourke had spent all his life in the neighborhood. He was one of those people whose age Julie could not begin to judge. Forty? Sixty? She could imagine him at seven, a myopic child with smudged glasses already taking root on his nose. He lived at the Willoughby when he wasn’t at his electrical-equipment shop, which was most of the time. Mrs. Ryan had confided to Julie that he had once been in trouble: he liked young boys. Julie knew him as gentle, solicitous, street smart, and religious, but she had figured out early on that his “trouble” had made him vulnerable to pimps, police, and other assorted bullies. Mack, the pimp, who had once been Romano’s bodyguard, had used the shop as a “cover” for his girls, including Rita.

  Mr. Bourke would not take a cent from Julie for the rental of the two spotlights. “I don’t think you operated at a profit. Did you?”

  “I got a lot out of the experience,” Julie said.

  “Give a little something to St. Malachy’s. They’re about to convert the Actors’ Chapel into a seniors’ club.”

  They would do better, Julie thought, setting up a hostel for runaway girls. Maybe not. There were a lot of seniors—like Mrs. Ryan—hanging onto what was left of respectability in the neighborhood.
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  “Mr. Bourke, has Mack been around again?”

  He shook his head, and pushed his glasses back into place. “Not since Peter’s death. Even the police have stopped inquiring. And I must say I haven’t missed him.”

  “Mr. Romano told me they wouldn’t find him.”

  “He ought to know.”

  “Meaning?”

  Mr. Bourke looked startled. “I said nothing, Julie. Nothing.”

  “What could he do to you?”

  He was upset, but as he thought about the question, he calmed down. “I don’t suppose anything—himself, and that’s what you mean, isn’t it?” Julie nodded. “I doubt if he knows I exist. It’s the noncommissioned officers I have to deal with. From what I’ve heard, Romano is a perfect gentleman himself. And a very generous one. I don’t know, Julie: I’ve never heard of a hospital or any other charity turning down his contributions. He disappeared himself from the streets several years ago, but men who call themselves his enforcers are still around. Oh, yes.”

  “Unless they’re Mack,” Julie said.

  Mr. Bourke did not say anything.

  “What else besides pornography, do you think?”

  “Real estate, restaurants, nightclubs…Mind, it’s all hearsay. And I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it’s legitimate. By now. Julie, some very nice homes and places of business in this crazy town are built in old stables somebody once cleaned out.”

  “Like the New Irish Theatre,” Julie said. A building in the far-west Fifties familiar to them both.

  Mr. Bourke nodded. “But on a warm day you still smell the horse manure.”

  Julie walked over to the newspaper branch of the public library and found it closed. Thursday. From there she went to the New York Times building, stopping for an Orange Julius and a pizza on the way. She spent the afternoon looking up assorted Romanos in the Times index. Not having a first name for him she could not be sure of her man until she found a Sweets in parentheses: A. A. Romano. In the end she found but one entry: he had contributed a hundred thousand dollars to Columbia University Medical School. All the news fit to print.

  Since Jeff was not going to be home for dinner, she decided to go back to Forty-fourth Street. Then, remembering it was Thursday, the day of the memorial Mass for Pete, she decided to go on to St. Malachy’s first.

  Mrs. Ryan touched her shoulder with the back of her hand to move her further into the pew, bobbed toward the altar, and eased herself down next to Julie, settling her behind on the edge of the seat. Julie admired people who knelt up straight as saints. Her mind wandered off in search of the Judy Collins song she had liked so much when she was at Miss Page’s school…“The simple life of heroes, the twisted life of saints…” It wasn’t that Julie was a Catholic. She wasn’t anything. But she sometimes wished she were.

  On the church steps afterward, Mrs. Ryan voiced her fury at the coming conversion of the chapel into a Senior Citizen Center. “I wouldn’t put my foot in one of them for the world, a community coffin…Have you time to go around to McGowan’s with me and have a glass of beer?”

  “I’ll walk over with you, Mrs. Ryan, but I won’t stay.”

  “To be sure, your husband’s at home.”

  Julie let it go at that.

  “You don’t mind stopping a minute at the Willoughby till I get Fritzie? He loves the walk and Billy McGowan never says a word when I tuck him in at my feet.”

  Waiting for Mrs. Ryan to fetch the dog, Julie thought about how you always wound up going a little further with her than you intended. She doubted she’d ever have opened the shop if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Ryan. Did she love her? This beery, bigoted old soul? Yes. She even had a certain affection for Fritzie who came out of the building just then like a wobbly torpedo on his nonstop aim for the fire hydrant.

  Mrs. Ryan waited and then put on his leash, and the three of them walked at Fritzie’s option across Forty-sixth Street toward Ninth Avenue.

  ELEVEN

  “IT’S A NEEDLE IN a haystack, Rubin, and I’ll spend no more time scratching my way through the phone book.”

  “Softly, Johnny, softly. I’m inclined to agree with you, but it did give you something to do, landside, for a day or two, didn’t it?”

  “I’ve never been more at sea.”

  “I am trying to help,” Rubinoff said. “There’s a tailoring shop in Keokuk, Iowa, under the name Abel. But the news from there is not good. They gave me the last address they had for him—Paris. In other words, if he is going home, he has not informed the family.”

  O’Grady thought about it. “We’d better give him a day or two more, and wouldn’t he get more of a welcome, arriving without notice—the prodigal son?”

  “It’s maddening. I should not have allowed myself to become involved in something like this. I may yet have to abort the whole operation.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Rubin.”

  “I may not have any choice.”

  “I’ll find the woman,” O’Grady said. He was at the window, staring down at the kids playing stickball between the rushes of traffic. There was one little devil going to get his arm broken, poking his stick at the wheels of the passing cars. “I’m going to hang up now. There’s a youngster on the street who’s going to get hurt if I don’t give him a shout.”

  O’Grady opened the window as wide as it would go and leaned out, but the shout died in his throat. Coming down the street, like the empress of China under her hat, was the old lady with her dog, and alongside her, unless he was out of his mind, was the girl he’d been searching the city for. He grabbed his jacket and ran down the stairs where he stalled in the hallway to let them pass. It was the girl for sure. He crossed the street and followed them, no easy matter, traveling at the dog’s pace. He couldn’t even remember the old lady’s name but he could guess where she was going. At the back of his mind was the recollection of a girl she had told him about, the orphaned child of an Irish diplomat. She didn’t look Irish especially, and she sure as hell didn’t look like an orphan.

  It was a long walk, the two short blocks from the corner to McGowan’s. It gave him time to change his mind several times over on how to proceed. Should he meet her square on after Mrs….Mary Ryan! He had it…after she introduced them? Didn’t I see you in a SoHo art gallery the other day? And what in hell would she think he was doing in a SoHo art gallery? Or should he pretend to nothing and let Mary Ryan do all the contriving to bring them together? As his mother used to say, if God had intended him for a thinker, He’d have given him the head for it.

  Outside McGowan’s the two women parted and O’Grady followed the girl. Mary Ryan was safely put for a while. He’d observed it before of the young woman: she knew how to walk. It was a pleasure to keep pace with her. A few doors short of the avenue she stopped and spoke to a child with her thumb in her mouth. Then she put a key in the door of one of those shops carved out of the bottom story of a tenement building; she went in and closed the door in the child’s face.

  People were parking their cars on that side of the street. Six o’clock. O’Grady watched for a minute or two and then crossed over, lingering near a car he could pretend was his if he had to, and took a long look at the building. She couldn’t be the one Mary Ryan said told fortunes. Or could she? There was no sign on the place and the windows were hung full-length with green curtains. He could see a light shining through but nothing more. The child had her nose to the glass to where there might be a part in the curtains.

  “Señor down there, hello!”

  O’Grady looked up. From the second-story window a woman was smiling at him, a glint of gold in her smile and in the comb at the crown of dark hair, and her cheeks as red as a bloody sunset. He had seen her like in a hundred windows, the sailor’s first welcome landing on perilous shores. Jesus.

  “You are looking for someone, señor?”

  “No, no one particular. I used to know someone who lived in the neighborhood.”

  “A young girl?”

  “No
. An old lady. She must be dead by now.”

  “Señora Cabrera! She don’t live here no more, but the same arrangement is all right. I am Rose.” She gave a toss of her head that was supposed to fetch him up the stairs.

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, edging away. “I’ve to see a man now I’ve got an appointment with.”

  “Señor…Not after nine o’clock. Never. And not Sunday.”

  He circled the block before he returned to McGowan’s and eased his way into the bar next to Mrs. Ryan. “It was on my mind that I owe you a drink.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing, Johnny.”

  “Is the girl I just saw you with the one you were telling me about?”

  “Why didn’t you speak if you saw us?”

  “I’m a shy fella when it comes to the girls.” Not to say a sly one, Johnny.

  TWELVE

  “JULIE…” THE CALL WAS combined with a tap, tap, tap on the window out front, Mrs. Ryan’s wedding ring.

  Julie paused on her way to the door long enough to turn on the floor lamp in the front of the shop. She opened the door to Mrs. Ryan and a man who stood head and shoulders above her.

  “I was afraid you were gone, dear. This is the lovely man I told you about who reads the poetry, Sean O’Grady. Meet Julie Hayes, Johnny.” Mrs. Ryan stood back and looked from one to the other of them in triumph.

  Julie saw at once what Nurse Brennan had meant about the eyes, their penetrating blue, as of a zealot priest. And yet the smile was warm. “Mrs. Hayes,” he said, as though the name were a benediction.

  Fritzie skittered into the shop trailing his leash over Julie’s feet.

  “May we come in?” Mrs. Ryan said.

  “Of course.” Julie wasn’t sure why she hesitated. A feeling of…what? Not invasion exactly…of something being contrived to involve her.

  “We won’t stop long, Mrs. Hayes,” he said, his voice deep and resonant. “I’m walking the two of them home on my way somewhere and Mary Ryan was determined you and I had to meet.”