No such luck. Antony lunged toward her, grabbed her blouse by its shoulder. She felt the fabric tear. “Where's the money?” Antony shouted. “Where's the money you get by selling your tail?”
Gredel held out her pocketbook in trembling hands. “Here!” she said. “Take it!”
It was clear enough what was going on, it was Antony Scenario Number One. He needed cash for a drink, and he'd already taken everything Nelda had.
Antony grabbed the pocketbook, poured coins into his hand. Gredel could smell the juniper scent of the gin reeking off his pores. He looked at the coins dumbly, then threw the pocketbook to the floor and put the money in his pocket.
“I'm going to put you on the street myself, right now,” he said, and seized her wrist in one huge hand. “I can get more money for you than this.”
“No!” Gredel filled with terror, tried to pull away.
Anger blazed in Antony's eyes. He drew back his other hand.
Gredel felt the impact not on her flesh but in her bones. Her teeth snapped together and her heels went out from under her and she sat on the floor.
Then Nelda was there, screaming, her hands clutching Antony's forearm as she tried to keep him from hitting Gredel again. “Don't hit the child!” she wailed.
“Stupid bitch!” Antony growled, and turned to punch Nelda in the face. “Don't ever step between me and her again!”
Turning his back was Antony's big mistake. Anger blazed in Gredel, an all-consuming blowtorch annihilating fury that sent her lunging for the nearest weapon, a furniture leg that had been broken off when Antony had smashed a chair in order to underscore one of his rhetorical points. Gredel kicked off her heels and rose to her feet and swung the chair leg two-handed for Antony's head.
Nelda gaped at her, her mouth an O, and wailed again. Antony took this as a warning and started to turn, but it was too late. The wooden chair leg caught him in the temple, and he fell to one knee. The chair leg, which was made of compressed dedger fiber, had broken raggedly, and the splintery end gouged his flesh.
Gredel gave a shriek powered by seventeen years of pure, suppressed hatred, and swung again. There was a solid crack as the chair leg connected with Antony's bald skull, and the big man dropped to the floor like a bag of rocks. Gredel dropped her knees onto his barrel chest and swung again and again. She remembered the sound that Lamey's boots made going into Moseley and wanted badly to make those sounds come from Antony. The ragged end of the chair leg tore long ribbons out of Antony's flesh. Blood splashed the floor and walls.
She only stopped when Nelda wrapped Gredel's arms with her own and hauled her off Antony. Gredel turned to swing at Nelda, and only stopped when she saw the older woman's tears.
Antony was making a bubbling sound as he breathed. A slow river of blood poured out of his mouth onto the floor. “What do we do?” Nelda wailed as she turned little helpless circles on the floor. “What do we do?”
Gredel knew the answer to the question perfectly well. She got her phone out of her pocketbook and went to her room and called Lamey. He was there in twenty minutes with Panda and three other boys. He looked at the wrecked room, at Antony lying on the floor, at Gredel standing over the man with the bloody chair leg in her hand.
“What do you want done?” he asked Gredel. “We could put him on a train, I suppose. Or in the river.”
“No!” Nelda jumped between Antony and Lamey. Tears brimmed from her eyes as she turned to Gredel. “Put him on the train. Please, honey, please.”
“On the train,” Gredel repeated to Lamey.
“We'll wake him up long enough to tell him not to come back,” Lamey said. He and his boys picked up Antony's heavy body and dragged it toward the door.
“Where's the freight elevator?” Lamey asked.
“I'll show you.” Gredel went with them to the elevator. The tenants were working people who went to bed at a reasonable hour, and the building was silent at night and the halls empty. Lamey's boys panted for breath as they hauled the heavy, inert carcass with its heavy bones and solid muscle. They reached the freight elevator doors, and the boys dumped Antony on the floor while they caught their breath.
“Lamey,” Gredel said.
Lamey looked at her. “Yes?”
She looked up at him, into his accepting blue eyes.
“Put him in the river,” she said. “Just make sure he doesn't come up.”
Lamey looked at her, a strange silent sympathy in his eyes, and he put his arm around her and kissed her cheek. “I'll make it all right for you,” he said.
No you won't, she thought, but you'll make it better.
The next morning, Nelda threw her out. She looked at Gredel from beneath the slab of grey healing plaster she'd pasted over the cut in her forehead, and she said, “I just can't have you here anymore. I just can't.”
For a moment of blank terror, Gredel wondered if Antony's body had come bobbing up under Old Iola Bridge, but soon Gredel realized that wasn't the problem. The previous evening had put Nelda in a position of having to decide who she loved more, Antony or Gredel. She'd picked Antony, unaware that he was no longer an option.
Gredel went to her mother's, and Ava's objections died the moment she saw the bruise on Gredel's cheek. Gredel told her the story of what had happened-not being stupid, she left out what she'd asked Lamey to do-and Ava hugged her and told her she was proud of her. She worked with cosmetics for a long time to hide the damage.
And then she took Gredel to Maranic Town, to Bonifacio's, for ice cream.
Ava and Lamey and Panda helped carry Gredel's belongings to Ava's place, arms and boxes full of the clothing Lamey and Caro had bought her, the blouses and pants and frocks and coats and capes and hats and shoes and jewelry, all the stuff that had long ago overflowed the closets in her room at Nelda's, that was for the most part lying in neat piles on the old, worn carpet.
Panda was highly impressed by the tidiness of it. “You've got a system here,” he said.
Ava was in a better situation than usual. Her man was married and visited only at regularly scheduled intervals, and he didn't mind if she spent her free time with family or friends. But Ava didn't have many friends-her previous men hadn't really let her have any-and so she was delighted to spend time with her daughter.
Lamey was disappointed that Gredel didn't want to move into one of his apartments. “I need my Ma right now,” Gredel told him, and that seemed to satisfy him.
I don't want to live with someone who's going to be killed soon. That was what she thought to herself. But she wondered if she was obliged to live with the boy who had killed for her.
Caro was disappointed as well. “You could have moved in with me!” she said.
Shimmering delight sang in Gredel's mind. “You wouldn't mind?”
“No!” Caro was enthusiastic. “We could be sisters! We could shop and go out-have fun.”
For days, Gredel basked in the warm attentions of Caro and her mother. She spent almost all her time with one or the other, enough so that Lamey began to get jealous, or at least to pretend that he was jealous-Lamey was sometimes hard to read that way. “Caro's kidnapped you,” he half-joked over the phone. “I'm going to have to send the boys to fetch you back.”
Gredel began to spend nights with Caro, the nights when Ava was with her man. There was a lot of room in the big bed. She found that Caro didn't so much go to sleep as put herself into a coma: she loaded endorphins into the med injector and gave herself one dose after another until unconsciousness claimed her. Gredel was horrified.
“Why do you do it?” she asked one night, as Caro reached for the injector.
Caro gave her a glare. “Because I like it,” she snarled. “I can't sleep without it.”
Gredel shrank away from Caro's look. She didn't want Caro to rip into her the way she ripped into other people.
One night, Lamey took them both to a party. “I've got to take Caro out, too,” he told Gredel “Otherwise I'd never see you.”
The reason for the party was that Lamey had put up a loan for a restaurant and club, and the people hadn't made a go of it, so he'd foreclosed and taken the place over. He'd inherited a stockroom of liquor and a walk-in refrigerator full of food, decided it might as well not go to waste, and invited nearly everyone he knew. He paid the staff on for one more night and let all his guests know the food and drinks were free.
