“So, you’re saying Little Sal commits several major felonies breaking in here, and the don hires a high-priced mechanic to scare the shit out of me, because. . why? Because he thinks you might have learned about who killed your father? Bernie and Leung brought you speculation, stories. That’s pretty much all I brought you. It’s like who killed Kennedy; there’s no danger to the Bollanos in it, because only they and Charlie Tuna know the real story and they’re not talking. So, Vivian, tell me, why is Big Sally nervous? Why is the coolest, most cautious don in the city taking these chances?”
Marlene took the pill vial out of her bag and shook it like a maraca. Thirty seconds went by, with the only sound in the room the hiss of traffic outside, and the communal noises of the shelter, and the rush of Vivian’s rapid breathing.
Then she sprang across the bed at Marlene, snarling and whining, inarticulated phrases of desire spurting from her mouth, grasping for her pills. Marlene flung the vial against the far wall of the room, where it cracked open, spilling its contents. Vivian squealed and tried to escape, but Marlene backhanded her across the throat with her left forearm, throwing her body behind it. She pinned Vivian prone across her bed, with her head against the corner of the wall, and lay atop her, her fingers gripping the woman’s hair. Vivian’s eyes were bulging in their sockets. Marlene relaxed the pressure of her forearm and hissed into Vivian’s ear. “What was it? Tell me! Goddamn you, he threatened my children! Tell me!”
“He. . he. . he made me. . he made me have sex with him. After. . after. . Crespi. In the car, after Crespi.”
Marlene was dumbfounded. “What? Jesus, Vivian, you were sixteen, that’s not even statutory rape. Little Sal wouldn’t even think twice about something like that. And he married you later. It doesn’t make any-”
“No! Not Little Sal. Big Sal.”
“Oh,” said Marlene. “And his son knew about this?”
Vivian Bollano’s face changed now into something that needed snakes on top of it instead of a rinse and set, and from deep in her throat issued a burbling sound that rose through the register and increased in volume until Marlene’s ears rang with it, the hopeless cry of a ruined soul. It would have been unbearable were it mere noise, but there were words in it, which made it worse.
“Know about it? Did he know about it? Oh, yeah, he knew about it. They took turns, except where it was both at once. And each other. And they brought girls in, too. And boys.” Once started, Vivian did not seem capable of stopping. There followed in a rush a litany of details that might have fit, without editing, into Justine, by the Marquis de Sade. After a good half hour of this, Marlene asked, “Vivian, how long did this go on?”
“How long? Until three days before I left. Now, for the love of God, please, please, please, please. .”
For twenty years? Twenty years? Speechless, Marlene rolled away from her, and watched as Vivian Fein Bollano scrambled across the floor on her hands and knees, snatching up the scattered yellow pills and popping them into her mouth.
Twenty minutes later, Marlene was back at the loft, having stopped for a quick vomit on the corner of First and St. Marks, attracting little notice, it being quite the custom in that quarter. She went immediately to the bathroom and brushed her teeth and washed her face. Karp was not in bed, or (when she looked) in the living room. She heard a noise from the kitchen and went there. Lucy, dressed in one of the gigantic T-shirts that were her favored sleep apparel, was sitting at the kitchen table with a book, a glass of milk, and a pile of chocolate chip cookies.
“Hi. Where’s Dad?”
“He had to go out. They caught Leung.”
“Oh, thank God! Where?”
“At Mr. Kuen’s place. They tapped his phone, and Leung called up and said he was going to come by that night and for Mr. Kuen to have a lot of cash ready. They had the place staked out and they caught him.”
“Anybody hurt?” asked Marlene, and sat opposite her daughter.
“Dad didn’t say. I don’t think so. Do you want a cookie?”
“No, thanks, dear. How are you feeling? You still look tired.”
“I’m okay, I guess. Sad, is all. Hollow. I keep wanting to call Janice, or thinking about going by their apartment or the Mall. It’s like somebody died. Mom, why did she do it? I mean, it’s one thing to like have a fight, or an argument, like kids do, but she must’ve known Leung wanted to kill me, and she got Aunt Sophie’s address out of me and gave it to him. I can’t understand it.”
“Probably she was scared. People do a lot of nasty, irrational things when they’re frightened. And, you know, her parents were involved. Janice. . well, she does what her parents tell her to do. Plus, maybe there was some jealousy involved.”
A cookie halted halfway to her mouth, Lucy goggled at this. “Jealous? Janice is gorgeous. How could she be jealous of me?”
“There’s more to a person than tits and ass, darling, though it may not seem so,” said Marlene, and was rewarded with the sight of a blush springing to her daughter’s cheeks.
“Easy for you to say,” snarled Lucy.
Marlene rose. “Wait here,” she said, and left, and was back in three minutes holding a fat brown envelope. She sat again and dumped a stack of photographs out on the table, old-fashioned snapshots, with pinked edges. After riffling through them she selected two and handed one to her daughter. Lucy examined it. Four girls she didn’t recognize, in one-piece bathing suits, squinting into a summertime glare with the sea behind them.
“That’s me, second from the right,” said Marlene.
“This is you?”
“Yep, age thirteen. I was a pool table that summer, dead flat. This,” handing over the other snap, “is the next summer.”
Here was a recognizable Marlene, grinning glorious in a nicely filled two-piece bathing suit, supported on the shoulders of a pair of adoring lifeguards.
“You never showed me this stuff before,” said Lucy sulkily.
“I would have, but we haven’t had a civilized interaction in at least a year.”
“You were too busy.”
“And you were too ratty. Why don’t we call it even?”
“Snarl,” said Lucy around a tentative smile.
“Snarl yourself. How much money have you got in the bank of Kuen?”
“About a thousand fifty.”
Marlene whistled. “What are you going to spend it on?”
“Oh, you know, drugs, maybe a tattoo. Condoms. How much does Sacred Heart cost?”
“Why? You said suicide was preferable. Change your mind?”
“Sort of. I guess. . I guess I need a break from”-she waved her hand around-“Asia. I don’t mean. . the Chens and Tran and all, the street, Chinatown, it’s in my heart, it’s always going to be part of me, but. . it’s not all of me. I’m not Kieu. I don’t have to haul that weight, do I?”
“No, you don’t,” said Marlene, thinking of Vivian Fein, of what she must have been like before her father died and what she was now. Tears ate at her eyelids, but she turned them back.
“Also, if I go to Sacred Heart, Mary will be there. .”
“What? Mary’s going to Sacred Heart?”
“Yeah, it’s all arranged, I sold her on it. I told her parents it was like a cadre school, and I was going there and they think we’re like the lords of creation. She’ll apply for a scholarship and get it-I mean, they’d have to be crazy not to-and she likes the idea, and if I’m uptown, I can run across to P and S, and keep up at the lab. Dr. Shadkin’s got a lot of new stuff he wants to try out on me when the regular term starts.”
“Um, Lucy, Sacred Heart is a lot rougher than anything you’ve done in public school. Do you think you’ll have the time?”