“That’s right,” I said.
“That’s damn right,” said Jimmy Moore. “Now, have some wine, Victor.” He poured a blood-red Chianti into my glass. “There’s plenty more where that came from. And finish your veal. I insist.”
I had lost whatever appetite I once held, and the sight of Moore’s ashes sinking into the ravioli gravy made me positively nauseous, but still I was hacking into the meat with a steak knife when Veronica returned. She smiled as she walked in, glanced at me with a touch of concern, and sat down.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” she said.
“Not at all,” said Moore. “Victor was just telling us how much he was enjoying his chop.”
18
“THIS ISN’T THE WAY,” I said from the back seat of the limousine. I was alone in the car except for Henry, Moore’s driver. With the partition down I could see the back of his head, nappy hair cut short, thick neck, a set of tiny ears. “I told you Twenty-second and Spruce.”
“I be knowing where you live at, mon, believe me,” said Henry in his lilting island accent. “But is some business I need first to do.”
“Can’t it wait until you take me home?”
“No, mon. Just you sit back and be resting yourself. We be done here quick.”
I was too tired and nauseous to argue. From the restaurant we had gone to a bar and then to a place on the river and then to a private club above a storefront off South Street, where the booths had curtains and the lights were low. Through the whole of the evening, whenever Jimmy wasn’t looking, Veronica rubbed her hand across my crotch. Prescott had left us in the restaurant, and I too had tried to leave, but Moore insisted and Veronica smiled and against all my judgment I tagged along. Because the thing was, I knew, somewhere in my weak-willed heart, I just knew that tagging along with Jimmy Moore was exactly what I wanted to do. Jimmy was probably crooked and Chester was most likely his accomplice and Veronica was definitely dangerous, but sitting in those clubs, drinking champagne, laughing my forced laugh, stealing cigarettes, sitting in those clubs, I again felt the knot in my stomach ease and the ice melt. I couldn’t actually say I was enjoying myself after the browbeating I had been given at the restaurant, but for all his faults Jimmy knew something about living I had never learned, something I wanted desperately to learn.
“Have another drink,” Jimmy had said as he filled my glass with champagne. There were others at the table with us now, young girls with bare legs who slurped their champagne loudly, two well-dressed black men, doctors in business with the city, I was told, and, of course, my buddy Chuckie Lamb, who glared at me the whole of our time together.
“I’ve had enough,” I said even as the foam slipped over the top of my glass. “Really.”
“Your lawyer’s very stuffy,” said Veronica to Chester.
“It’s the profession,” said Chet.
“Look over there,” said Moore. A thin-shouldered bald man was leaning over a table, talking earnestly to a young woman with pretty, pouting lips. “Tom Bismark, managing partner of Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox. Who’s that he’s with?”
“I think that’s his wife,” said Chester.
“How unusual,” said Veronica.
“His third wife.”
“I thought he moved out with his secretary,” said Moore.
“He did,” barked Chuckie Lamb. “He’s here with his wife, cheating on his mistress.”
“You have to admire a scoundrel who can’t even be faithful to his unfaithfulness,” said Moore. “What about you, Victor?”
“Not married,” I said.
“You can still cheat even if you’re single.”
“I’m pretty loyal.”
“You’re a boy scout, is that it?”
“I was, as a matter of fact.”
“I was never a boy scout,” said Moore. “I was too passionate for the boy scouts. There was too much I wanted to hold.” He leaned over to Veronica and with his hand turned her face toward him and kissed her with an open mouth. To see it knotted my stomach again.
“How’s your wife doing, Councilman?” I said.
Veronica’s eyes bugged out at me even as she was kissing Moore, but he just laughed when he was through. “Very fine, thank you, Victor. So nice of you to be concerned.”
“I find her very sweet and very sad,” I said. “Lonely, I think.”
“She is all of that and more,” said Jimmy. “But tell me something, Victor, how much sadness can we endure before we run for the light?” He snapped his fingers and one of the young girls with bare legs quickly threw her arms around my neck and her tongue in my ear.
“Hey, Chuckie,” said the councilman. “Victor here thinks you killed that lousy ballplayer.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” said Chuckie.
“You mean Zack?” said one of the girls. “He was so sweet. Why would you do something like that, Chuckie?”
Jimmy started laughing, losing control as he laughed harder, so hard he could barely get out the words, “Victor thinks you’re a murderer, Chuckie.”
“Victor better be careful,” said Chuckie, looking at me with an unkind eye. “He might just be right.”
I had left finally, feeling the tug of too much work and not enough time, the tug of responsibility, downing the last of my champagne and staggering out of the club into the cold misty night. I was looking for a cab on the deserted street when Henry came from behind me and grabbed my arm and led me to the limousine.
So we were traveling north now, across Arch, under the 5th Street tunnel, into the ragged and unlighted sections of Northern Liberties. It was after midnight and still kids sat out on the stoop and young men leaned against boarded up buildings, looking suspiciously into the darkened limousine windows, and teens loitered in groups in the middle of the street, illuminated by our headlights as if caught in twin beams of unreality, unwillingly moving aside as the limousine slid through.
“Where are we going, Henry?”
“We be there soon, no problem.”
“I’m starting to worry.”
“You with me, mon. You safer than safe.”
Northern Liberties was where my grandfather Abraham and his parents, fresh off the boat from Russia, had settled. It was a poor Jewish section then, crowded and hubbubed, Philadelphia’s answer to the Lower East Side. Marshall Street: kosher butchers and discount clothiers and vegetable carts parked wheel to wheel, all catering to the immigrant families crowded four to a row house. My great-grandfather had learned to cobble in a shtetl outside Kiev and so in America he repaired shoes in a little store on Marshall Street, just north of Poplar, and my grandfather shortened his name and went into retail, working the store the whole of his life, even as the neighborhood changed and he moved with his family to the new Jewish paradise in Logan. Logan is no longer a paradise and Northern Liberties has fallen into such disrepair that Marshall Street is deserted and great swaths of the neighborhood are rubble. In the eighties there was an attempt at gentrification and some restaurants and stores opened up in the old Jewish center, but that too failed. There was nothing left of what my grandfather had seen as a little boy in his introduction to America.
We passed north out of Northern Liberties and through another neighborhood of boarded-up buildings and narrow, crowded streets and finally reached a corner that looked like a marketplace from hell. There were at least a hundred people hanging around, sitting on steps or patrolling the curb or just lolling on the outskirts of the crowd, heads jacking back and forth. In the streetlight the scene held a demented quality, unformed, chaotic, deeply dangerous. In front of us a flat-green Pontiac stopped and three kids jostled each other for a place at the driver’s door. Money passed from the car to one of the kids and the kid ran over to an older man with dreadlocks and gave him the money. I watched the man nod to a different kid, who reached for something under a stoop and ran over to the car. In less than a minute from the time it had arrived, the flat-green Pontiac was on its way. Henry stopped the limo and immediately a kid started tapping at the closed window beside my head. Henry turned around and smiled at me.