“So, you’re thinking what?” Karp asked. “That Eddie was going to spill this whatever? That’s why he was killed?”
“No, I’m not saying that, necessarily, but it was something like that,” said Guma reflectively. “You hear stories, too. They don’t have much domestic felicity at the Bollanos, which is not that common either, the cugines like peace and quiet they come home from a hard day at the rackets, and the girls ain’t into calling the cops they get rapped in the chops a couple times. So, that could hook up, too, someone’s fucking someone, I mean for real, in a bed. But we don’t know. It’s like I was saying about the prairie dogs and the hawks. There’s a message there for somebody, but we can’t read it yet. We don’t even know who’s eating who. But that kind of stuff, that’s where we should be looking.”
Marlene, driving back to Manhattan on autopilot, thinking about selective amnesia, thinking Jesus fucking Christ I tried to kill my mother, and about her daughter, the ticking bomb. Of course, Marlene hadn’t actually connected with that hot iron, but on the other hand, the kid had access to more sophisticated weaponry. The pistol in the glove compartment was sending out malign rays. Wondering why your kids hate you is a winless game, but one with the addictive qualities of a slot machine. She turned on the stereo, cranked the volume up, punched buttons, rejected rock ’n’ roll, immature mooning after love, music of youthful rebellion, yes, she really needed more of that just now, settled on WQXR, Haydn sweetly blaring, a symphony. She blanked her mind, a necessary technique in many professions, including hers, and let the harmonies massage her. By the time she reached the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the yammering in her head had been reduced to the usual low buzz of demonic voices conveying the usual neurotic messages, familiar as road signs: you’re wasting your life, you’re making your family miserable, you’re going to end up dead in an alley or in prison; your kids will get shot by a maniac, bad mother baaaad mother, worthless, worthless, worthless. .
The traffic gelled at the entrance to the tunnel, and Marlene called the dog into the front seat. “Sweety, come talk to me. I need the wisdom of the deep animal spirits.” He came up from the rear deck of the station wagon and, with a damp sigh, draped himself across the front seat, his hindquarters down on the floor and his immense, hideous head resting on Marlene’s thigh, or rather upon the old towel that she had placed across her legs. She stroked him behind his velvety ears.
“Oh, tell me about memory, Sweety. How can we live with each other if we can’t agree about what happened? Now that I know I’m suppressing stuff, I wonder what I suppressed with Butch, or Lucy. I realize sometimes the family walks on eggs around me, and of course Butch is the world champion of papering over, pretty rich for a professional confronter of crime, but not in the sacred hearth, oh, no, the poor bastard, and Lucy, who knows what’s cooking in there? I could’ve done something horrible and never remembered it. It would have to be pretty bad compared to what I can remember. And they talk about what trauma does to kids, and I think Lucy, a year old, some maniac grabs her out of her stroller and Jim Raney blows the guy’s brains all over her, four years old, her dear Mom has a little nervous breakdown over practically getting raped by her boss, drags her out of town barely functional, at seven she procures a murder weapon for a kid who kills a cop, Mom covers that up, of course, and never mention, at ten she watches Mom blow away a guy who’s after one of her clients, right there on the street, and a little later a friend of hers gets murdered and stuffed in a trunk by a bent cop, and the next year she watches Tran shoot a guy dead and even helps a little, and now what? I’m upset she’s a little tense, a little withdrawn? Doesn’t want to make fudge with Mommy anymore? I should be thankful she’s still in the church, but God forgive me, that irks me, too, like she is just doing it to piss me off, the famous religious failure, I can do it, Mom, and you can’t, nonny nonny nonny, oh, Jesus, is that an unworthy thought, or what, Sweety? Christ in heaven, how does this crap get into my brain? No, she’s sincere, otherwise she’d probably be a serial killer already. And why can’t I, Sweety? Why doesn’t the grace come to me anymore? It used to. Come on, Sweets, you must have some religious ideas. Is there a secret Church of Dog? Does Dog exist, as the dyslexic agnostics ask? No, you don’t need it, because you don’t know you’re going to die. Or maybe you do. How the hell would we know? We can’t even talk to each other and we can talk.”
The car entered the filthy, gleaming tube, and the radio was cut off, leaving Marlene with static, with the swish of traffic outside and the stentorian breathing of the dog inside.
“Meanwhile, Sweets, let’s use this moment. In a couple minutes, unless there’s a tanker explosion that fries us all to a crisp or a crack in the tube, which is also something to worry about-of course, in that case you would heroically save me by dragging me out in your mighty jaws-but absent that, we will emerge into bright sunlight on Third and go uptown to talk to Harry Bello and get a lecture full of good sense, and it really is an absolutely gorgeous day, gorgeous, far too good for New York, if you ask me, and we will feel good again, through the dark tunnel into God’s light, like Dante. Here we go.”
And it was so, the sunlight flooded the broad canyons, Haydn came back with the final chords, and the fruity QXR voice informed us all that it had been the Ninety-fourth Symphony, called The Surprise, which made Marlene chuckle and bounce the dog’s head on her knee, thinking, yeah, it always is a surprise, the good stuff amid the shit, and how pathetically grateful I am for it. The dog shuddered in delight and slobbered into God’s lap.
Chapter 6
The offices of Osborne Group, Inc., were housed in a twenty-four-story building on Third in the Sixties. The building was an undistinguished crate in the usual degraded International Style (glass over steel, and on the columns and in the lobby marble facings colored like pale toast and as thick), the den of small firms in fields representative of the city’s business, including especially the innumerable parasites that cling like lice to the creative spirit-agents, producers, publishers, packagers, ad agencies, tax lawyers-plus a scatter of legal and medical professionals, and on the ground floor behind glass windows a discount brokerage and a health club. It was a respectable if not prestigious building and right for a security agency that liked to think of itself as having some class.
Marlene had her own marked parking space in the underground garage, which was a nice perk, and meant, among other things, that she could shop at Bloomies and get home without schlepping packages on the bus or trying to hail a cab or taking out a second mortgage to pay for parking. Many women in New York would work for Satan to get a deal like that, and Marlene knew it and was grateful that she only had to work for Lou Osborne, who was a pretty decent guy. In fact, she only had to report to her pal and former partner, Harry Bello.