alongside Doc.
There was a musing smile on Samantha’s lips. “Yeah, screw the Gypsy,” she said, and crossed her long, slimly booted legs. “You know. I went to the same school with him. Right here in Spanish Harlem, when there were a lot of ginzos around. He was way ahead of me, but I kind of hung out with his sister, Adela. I used to help her with her arithmetic.” Samantha laughed, displaying splendid white teeth.
“Lordy, was she dumb.” She tapped her forehead. “Solid bone, solid. We called the Gypsy the Pope then, because he never scored as far as we knew.”
The green Coupe de Ville moved smoothly and arrogantly into an intersection on the yellow, cruised on slowly and insolently against the red.
In a squad car a young uniformed cop spotted the infraction and reached for the ignition key, but his partner, a seasoned old bull, looked at him and shook his head. “No way. That spook’s off limits to you and me.”
The Harlem night was blue with a smog reflecting brilliant neon lights in dancing patterns, and in the cruising green Cadillac, Samantha’s mood was as blue as the night itself, a mix of emotions that turned her thoughts toward her childhood and her drunken giant of a father, rotting with syphilis, his own eyes turned inward in bitter recollections of old angers, dead illusions.
Samantha’s father used to say to her, “The game ain’t worth the shame, honey. You win, you just shippin’ some tired shit. Lose, you turn it around. You the tired shit gettin’ whipped.”
It was Gypsy Tonnelli who was darkening her thoughts, she knew, because the only reason Tonnelli would call her was that he needed help, but helping Whitey was the thing that gave Samantha those migraines. .
Manolo Ramos dressed hastily in his most provocative gear, a pale-gray silk shirt open to his navel, a short white fur jacket, stacked blue leather boots, and midnight-blue suede pants that fitted his rounded buttocks like a second layer of skin. He patted a sweet cologne on his cheeks and hair, which he had already teased into a halo of brown curls. Flashing a brilliant professional smile at himself in the mirror above his hand sink, Manolo let himself from his room and ran down dirty, uncarpeted stairs to catch the crosstown bus to Central Park.
Six hundred ninety dollars, he was thinking. Shit, I’m a bargain. .
At eleven thirteen P.M. on the fourteenth of October, engine and ladder companies were dispatched to a fire in a shabby tenement west of Ninth Avenue in the middle Fifties of the borough of Manhattan. Firemen contained the blaze that was smoldering in a mattress in the first-floor bedroom and that had been started by an elderly wino who had fallen asleep smoking a twisted stogie.
The hissing of water under compression, the sound of shouted orders, the thud of firemen’s boots, had alerted and terrified a nursing alley cat nesting in the basement of the tenement with four lively kittens. The big tabby bitch, in panic, began evacuating her young, carrying them in her teeth with a soft but firm grip on the backs of their necks, running with them through an open window to the safety of an unoccupied garage in another area of the block. She made three such trips, but when she returned for her fourth and last kitten, she couldn’t find it. She circled restlessly, whining in distress and anxiety, but receiving no answer at all to her plaintive, demanding calls, she leaped a last time through the open window and ran off into the darkness.
The lobby of the Plaza Hotel at Fifty-ninth Street near Fifth Avenue was in brilliant contrast with the slum district where firemen had doused the flames in a mattress and chewed the ass out of a dumb Puerto Rican wino who had fallen asleep smoking a cheap black stogie-and where in the dim brain of a nursing tabby gleamed the distant, receding memory of some part of her forever lost.
Crescent Holloway was making a harried, distracted entrance into the lobby of the Plaza, blinking with jet-lag weariness and irritation at the exploding flashlights of a phalanx of news photographers. In Miss Holloway’s van and wake streamed protective and supportive members of her personal entourage, forces beefed up by baggage-laden bellhops, a brace of assistant managers, and several executives from National Films, whose firm had become a financial phenomenon among the majors by distributing back-to-back smash hits displaying the explosive sexual pyrotechnics of Miss Holloway, who had become known in the trade papers as the Stacked House Kid.
Directly behind Crescent Holloway, who was shielding her eyes in a pretty gesture against the exploding flashbulbs, stood her personal makeup man, Simon Sachs; her press agent, Nate Sokol; and her bulking and belligerent-looking black maid, Honey Hopper.
Directly in front of Crescent-the sturdy prow of this harmlessly beleaguered sex boat-stood Rudi Zahn, her lover, her manager, and her producer, although not necessarily in that order.
Rudi Zahn, a stockily built man in his late thirties, with thinning hair and clear, direct gray eyes, raised both hands and gave the noisy photographers and reporters a friendly, give-us-a-break smile. The smile was not practiced; it was amiable and honest and suggested something true of Rudi Zahn’s character, which tested surprisingly low in the slick cynicism the press expected from Hollywood types.
The reporters and photographers liked the message they were getting from Rudi Zahn and listened to what he had to say, which was: “It was a bumpy flight with a bomb scare. The movie, I mean.” He mentioned a competitor’s product and got a laugh. “It was so bad that people actually walked out on it.” Another laugh.
The jokes were old, but no one minded; Rudi didn’t pretend they were otherwise.
He went on: “We’re tired, but we’ll stay up all night if you’re on deadline. Nate’s got a press kit with some quotes and pix that haven’t been used yet. That’s the
The good news that Rudi Zahn promised the press corps was an early-morning conference, a screening of key scenes from the Stacked House Kid’s next flick, all this graced by a buffet of delicatessen from the Stage Door with champagne for those who were thirsty and whiskey for those who weren’t. .
Within seconds, Crescent Holloway and her group were streaming toward the elevators amid smiles and an eruption of involuntary whistles from the working press.
After midnight, when the important day began (although Gus Soltik did not feel it started until there were streaks of dawn on the horizon), he began to feel drowsy, and the infallible indicator of his mind pointed toward “home.” Using a network of streets and alleys that were like the veins of his own huge body, and subway trains, and the rear tailgate of a truck lumbering along the Major Deegan Highway, Gus Soltik reached 135th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue about an hour after leaving the site of the fire on Ninth Avenue in the borough of Manhattan.
It was very quiet. Rain was falling, and gusts of wind made a noise like scurrying animals in the trash in the curbs and on the sidewalk.
Housing developments, the color of mud, stood in rows stretching toward a dark sky and between them stretched damp, slimy earth, unrelieved by a tree, a leaf, a stretch of grass, a child’s swing, or a chair for an old man or woman to sit in thin sunlight in these barren yards that bordered prison shafts of public housing.
Gus was glad he didn’t live there, glad instead to live in the rotting old tenement with Mrs. Schultz. Senor Perez gave her the money that Gus earned, and sometimes she gave him a few dollars and with that money he could buy all he really needed: hot dogs from street vendors, the cold roll heaped high with onions, a cup of snow ice with sweet bright-colored syrups, or roast walnuts and hot pretzels.
Also, he had a reserve supply of money that no one knew about. Not Senor Perez, not even Mrs. Schultz. Gus had cut a deep flap in the bottom of the heels of his Wellington Boots, and after stuffing these apertures with dimes and quarters, he had pressed the V-shaped pieces of leather back into place, securing them firmly with strips of black friction tape. It gave him a good feeling to know he was walking on his secret money. It was always there if he needed to take a bus or subway or needed to satisfy his sudden, compulsive yearning for things that tasted sweet.
But Gus Soltik disliked spending those precious quarters. That was why he was glad that the kitten purring against his body in the pocket of his jacket hadn’t cost him anything at all.
But while it cost nothing, it would solve a problem that had tormented him for months. How to make “greenropes” cross that street.
Gus Soltik would sleep now, to be wakened by the distant bells of St.
Stanislaus. He knew he would hear Mrs. Schultz going down the creaking stairs, knowing that in her old hands she would be holding a leather prayer book and the heavy wooden rosary from the old country, on her way to his mother’s dead mass.
Chapter 6
