Waxman asked, “Where did you go when you left their house?”
Frank shoved the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. His head seethed with fervent whispers. When he took his hands away he reached for the sugar bowl mindlessly and fingered a half dozen packets, slipping them into his coat pocket.
“That’s all I got to say,” he said, looking up in a daze, “till I see some cash.”
Abatangelo waited in his car outside the Brighton Hotel as an immense American sedan drifted from its parking space. Good omen, he thought. Right in front.
Waxman had refused to tell him where the meet was being held, insisting he see Frank alone. So Abatangelo had driven over in the Dart, parked down the street from Waxman’s apartment, and, when the cab appeared, followed. Wax, Wax, Wax, he’d thought- you simply do not understand the stakes involved. I deserve a good look at this character. It won’t do, letting you sit there and get lied to- not if I’m the one who’s got to risk five more years in stir just to pay him off.
He steered the Dart into the parking spot and hustled inside the hotel. Brunch patrons queued at the hostess stand. Abatangelo worked past them gently, murmuring apologies. When he reached the hostess she bristled, glaring up from her seating chart, which she’d rendered into a chaos of crayon smears. She looked ready to let go with a good long scream. Abatangelo smiled, said, “Meeting a friend,” and kept moving.
He spotted them across the room. Obscured behind a waiter pushing a flambé cart, he made half the distance between the hostess stand and the table before Frank looked up. Don’t be hostile, he told himself. Just mosey up, introduce yourself, sit down, and take it from there. For the fraction of an instant it took to tell himself this, the plan worked well. Then Frank’s eyes turned wild. Maybe I’m walking too fast, he thought. Maybe there’s blood in my eye. Whatever the reason, Frank bolted up from his chair, spilling coffee across the tablecloth as Waxman stared down at the stain oozing toward him.
“Don’t,” Abatangelo shouted, sensing it was the wrong word just as the whole situation went wrong.
Frank checked every direction, bat-eyed, ashen, then hurdled the next table. Four middle-aged women launched to their feet, screaming. Waxman stared, dabbing his trousers mindlessly, as Abatangelo, acting on instinct, lunged past the screamers and caught Frank’s ankle. Porcelain shattered, glass and flowers sailed airborne. “Stop it,” Abatangelo shouted as a searing pain shot through his wrist. Frank had doubled on himself, sunk his teeth through the skin, clear to bone. He went at Abatangelo’s face with his nails, gouging the eyes. He broke loose of Abatangelo’s hold, teeth and fingernails dark with blood, and one of the four women collapsed in a faint. Waiters and busmen drifted back against the high walls uttering, “God, Oh God, My God.” Blind, the ripped eye hot against his fingers, blood clouding what he could see, Abatangelo flailed, lunging again, grabbing Frank’s coattail from the back and with the other hand reaching out for his belt. Frank kicked free, tore at him again, hissing like an animal. He twisted back and bit Abatangelo’s face, found the eyes with his nails again. Abatangelo recoiled, Frank scrambled to his feet and shoved his way through the crowd past the hostess stand shrieking into faces, tumbling out into the lobby, pulling fiercely on the heavy brass door.
Abatangelo closed distance behind. Frank tumbled down the stairs onto the sidewalk, struggled up crook-kneed. Abatangelo caught him, snapped him up into a headlock, grabbed his hair, drove his face hard against the Dart’s window twice, dazing him, then lifted him by the scruff with one hand, the other digging in his pocket for his keys. He opened the trunk, lifted Frank and threw him inside.
He drove one-eyed, hyperventilating, not really clear on which turns he made, how fast he took them, who was ahead or behind. What the hell was that, he wondered. His pulse throbbed as his keys chimed faintly against the steering column. Behind him, the constant muffled pounding and shouts from the trunk intensified.
Some time later, how much he wasn’t exactly sure, he was on his feet again, beside the car. Behind him stretched an empty pier in the shadow of a looming skyway. Warehouses, locked up for the weekend, defiled for blocks in each direction. He caught his breath, listening to the shrieks of the seagulls overhead and the fading cries from his trunk, the dull thud of shoes and hands against metal.
He settled down onto the pier to sit, facing the water and dabbing at the cut near his eye. Midday haze obscured the distance, even the bridge dissolved from view. Nearby, the seagulls rose up slowly and then settled down again on the rotting pier. Tenderly, he inspected the places where Frank had bit his face, feeling puffed skin.
Get him to talk to you, he reminded himself. Scare him if you have to, use what force you have to, but get him talking. Keep him talking till he tells the truth.
He rose to his feet, returned to the car and removed his keys from his pant pocket. Frank had fallen quiet inside the trunk, as though gathering up his strength for the next round. In one movement, Abatangelo inserted the key, popped the trunk, and with his right hand stiff like a blade dug deep into Frank’s midriff beneath the sternum cartilage. He drove his left thumb beneath the trapezius, paralyzing Frank’s right shoulder and arm. Frank did not scream. His face turned white and the popping eyes displayed their veins.
“You know who I am, right?”
“No,” Frank whispered. Then: “Yeah. Don’t. I didn’t do anything. I can help.”
“Help what?”
“Find her.”
“Oh yeah? Find her how?”
“I know who’s got her.”
“You don’t have her?”
“Me? No, no.”
“The Mexicans.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I’ll tell you. First- ”
Abatangelo dug his thumb deeper into Frank’s shoulder. “You love her?” Abatangelo whispered. “Come on, cocksucker, you don’t have to think about it. Do you care what happens to her?”
Frank said, “Yes.”
The word made Abatangelo want to spit.
“There’s an envelope in my pocket. Take it out.”
Frank’s left hand, shaking, managed to tug the packet of photographs out. Images of Shel, bruised, scratched and bloody, tumbled across his chest and face.
“Take a good, long look,” Abatangelo said.
Frank began to cry.
“Look at them,” Abatangelo shouted. “Or I’ll kill you right here.”
Frank tried to finger the print nearest his face but his hand shook too badly. He stammered, “I’ll help you, anything, don’t- ”
Abatangelo released his grip finally and stood back a little. When Frank continued sobbing, Abatangelo said quietly, “Stop it.” His eye fastened on one of the prints of Shel, the one showing the bruises down her back where Frank had beaten her with the stock of the shotgun. The next thing he knew he had his left hand around Frank’s throat as the right hand battered his face. He was shouting, “Shut… the fuck… up,” until Frank curled up into a ball, head shielded by his arms. His cries died down to a whimper.
Abatangelo stood back again. He inspected his hand, laced with blood. The fury drained from him and left behind a residue of dread.
You’ve changed, he thought. You used to be smarter.
Chapter 19
Shel had been alone in the whitewashed room for about an hour, listening to the rats scuttling inside the walls of the empty house. More faintly, from outside, she heard the squatter children shrieking as they played and tormented one another, or the nearby windmills groaning like a rusted metal choir. Now it was a new sound that rousted her, the approach of a car crushing gravel outside.