Fifty-to-One

Tricia felt the man next to her lean forward, heard a slap of metal against flesh. The car swerved a little. Bruno kept his mouth shut from then on.

When the car drew to a stop, she was led out by the elbow, across a stretch of what felt like gravel underfoot, and through a door that could’ve used a bit of oil on its hinges. On the way up the stairs inside, Tricia counted 37, 38, 39 steps and she was suddenly reminded of a movie she’d seen when she was a kid, at the local picture palace in Aberdeen. It was an old one, made before she was born, but she’d enjoyed it, people chasing each other around with guns, all sorts of peril and adventure. It had all seemed like so much fun then, when all she had to do was sit in the dark and watch it happen to people up on the screen. She’d never thought someday she’d be marched up a flight of stairs at gunpoint herself.

“Stop.” Mitch walked around in front of her and she heard a door opening. “Okay.” A hand at her shoulder pushed her forward. After she’d taken a few steps—onto a thick carpet, it felt like—he said, “You can take the bag off.”

Tricia didn’t wait to be told twice. She dropped the sack on the ground and took in big gulps of air as she looked around the room they were in. It was a sort of a library, with bookshelves running from the floor to the ceiling all the way around. The spines of the books were mostly dark leather with gold lettering, though a few looked newer, with paper dust jackets, and on one table she saw a disorderly stack of familiar-looking paperbacks. The one on top was I Robbed the Mob! and she winced when she saw its condition. The cover was bent back, several pages folded down or torn. Next to it she saw Stella staring up at her from the front of The Crimson Cravat by Bill Grewer. Someone had circled Stella’s face in red ink.

“Young lady,” a man’s voice said, and Tricia hunted about for its source. She found it finally in a doorway off to one side, where a fat man stood wiping his hands on a towel. He was wearing a scarlet vest, a watch chain stretched across it like the equator on a globe. His shirt looked like silk, his hair like the sleek black coat of a wet seal. He tossed the hand towel onto a chair and came forward.

“Young lady,” he said again, “I hope you don’t think me rude, but let me tell you I am very disappointed in you. Very disappointed.”

Tricia recognized him from the newspaper photos she’d seen, but only barely. The scar was there, the heavy brows—but his body had ballooned from years of luxurious shipboard living and his already swarthy skin was baked a deep, nut brown. He had on a medallion on a gold chain, glittering under his open shirt, and he had rings on three of his fingers. He looked like a portly pirate captain, she thought, lacking only the beard and eyepatch to complete the picture.

“Mr. Nicolazzo,” Tricia said, “I’m sorry you—”

“Nick,” he said. “Uncle Nick.”

“Nick,” she said.

“Uncle Nick,” he said. “It’s what everyone calls me.”

“Okay, Uncle Nick. I’m sorry you—”

“Don’t apologize. It makes you sound weak, like a little girl. Stand up for yourself. You’re going to steal from powerful men like me, you’ve got to face the music like a grown-up.”

“I didn’t steal from you,” Tricia said.

“Ah, that’s even worse than apologizing. Lying, and so poorly too. Come, now, child, do you think your Uncle Nick is a fool? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“No, sir. Not at all.”

“Stand up straight.”

She straightened, a sense of annoyance and embarrassment mingling with fear. She could see, as he waved his hands about, the backwards letter N protruding from the ring on his right index finger.

“I’m told I owe you something—Trixie, is it? I’m told audiences come to the Sun each night just to see you. Not to listen to Roberto’s wretched music, not to see the other dancer—to see you. You’ve made me a good deal of money, with your dancing. I have been encouraged by my manager at the Sun not to harm you physically. I’d be stabbing myself in the pocketbook, if you take my meaning.

“But Trixie, you have been a bad girl. A very bad girl. You’ve cost me a good deal of money, and more than just money. There’s also the respect of my peers, you’ve cost me that as well—and that’s not the end of it either. As I believe you know, there was more than money in my safe the day of the break-in; and there is less than money in it now. This is not acceptable. What was taken I must have returned. If you refuse, I promise you, pocketbook or no pocketbook, you will suffer.”

“Mr. Nic—” she started, but he raised a warning finger. “Uncle Nick. I don’t know who robbed you. Honest, I don’t know. I didn’t even know till today that you had been robbed.”

“Your friend Stella told me otherwise. Are you calling her a liar?”

“Absolutely,” Tricia said. “But it’s hardly her fault. I mean, with what you were doing to her.”

“What I was doing? What I was doing?” He looked around incredulously, seeking a bit of justice in an unjust world. “My nightclub gets broken into and robbed, and I’m the one that’s doing wrong? Madonn’.”

“You branded her on the cheek!”

“I let her off easy,” he said. “Do not expect me to do the same for you.”

“What do you want me to say? I can’t tell you something I don’t know.”

“Very simple,” Nicolazzo said. “Who was it? Which of my men seduced you into helping him rob me, and then had the palle to write a book about it? You’ll notice I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt—I am assuming you didn’t seduce him into doing it.”

“Nobody seduced anyone,” Tricia said. “I had nothing to do with the robbery. Nothing.”

He picked up the paperback, waved it at her. “But somebody told you this story.”

“No,” Tricia said. “I just made it up—all of it, out of my imagination. None of it really happened. None of it was supposed to, anyway.”

“But it did happen,” Nicolazzo said. “Just the way it’s described in here: the broken window, the chiseled doorknob, the sawn-open door, the missing cart. And the empty safe. For heaven’s sake, child, if you made it all up, how could you possibly know the combination to my safe?”

“You mean it was right?” Tricia said, and he glared at her. “I just guessed! I’d read the Daily News article about your sister and her daughters and the flowers every week for the one who died, and I needed a combination for the safe, and I just thought, well, what would I choose if I were him?”

“That’s preposterous,” Nicolazzo said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, concocting such an absurd story.”

“It’s the truth.”

He waved a hand in Mitch’s direction. “Bring one of them up here,” he said. Then to Tricia: “We will see how long you continue to lie when the life of someone you care about is at stake.”

Mitch left the room. She heard him stomp down the stairs, then the creak of the door, then a few minutes later two sets of footsteps returning. When they reached the top she expected to see Erin or Charley come marching out, hands raised, but instead it was Roberto Monge, his wrists tied behind his back, stumbling as Mitch prodded him with his gun.

“Ah, Roberto,” Nicolazzo said, patting the bandleader on the side of his face. “Pretty soon they’ll be waiting for you at the club. For both of you. What will they do when you don’t show up? Elect another bandleader? Maybe Joey with the clarinet? Or Hugo with the drums?”

Monge didn’t reply. His skin was pale and Tricia saw sweat beading at his hairline. His eyes kept darting over to her, then back at Nicolazzo.

“Robbie. Robbie. Did you do this thing to me? You and your little dancer?”

“No—no, Uncle Nick,” Monge said. His voice was shaking. “She is nothing to me, this one. You know I love my wife.”

“Your wife,” Nicolazzo said. “She was my niece before she was your wife, Robbie. And maybe you love her, maybe not, but your little minchia, she likes to wander, no? Maybe I should get a knife, cut her off, so she can wander far away?”

Monge was shaking his head. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I don’t have to,” Nicolazzo said, “but maybe I should.”