Ghostheart (26 page)

Inside, the walls were covered in velvet-embossed paper, the floors were wooden, the recliners and chaise-longues out of something by F. Scott Fitzgerald. There were fresh flowers in crystal vases, an antique grandfather clock ticking like a gentle heartbeat and echoing down the corridor, and when they turned the corner at the end and entered the reception lounge Harry took in his breath and held it like it was his last.

The girls were right out of
Harper’s
and
Vogue
. Tall, blonde,
elegant, brunette, slim, olive-skinned, redheaded, legs that ran all the way to their waists, bodices and bustiers, silk stockings and suspenders …

King Mike appeared with a throng of half a dozen women and walked towards Harry. He was grinning, seemed in his element, and when he clapped Harry on the shoulder and shook his hand Harry felt as if he’d been led into paradise by Hasan-i Sabbah himself.

So this is one of three places we run, King Mike told him, and before you take a look around we figure it would be appropriate to sample the goods, so to speak. Go meet the girls, take your pick, two or three of them if you like, and then we can look at whether or not you want in.

So Harry met the girls – Cynthia, Mary-Rose, Jasmine, Louella-May, Claudette, Tanya, others whose names he couldn’t remember. But the afternoon he did remember, would have remembered it for the rest of his life regardless of what else had happened, and when he came down again to talk with King Mike in a small office to the right of the reception lounge, there was little he could do but listen and nod and confirm that yes, he would be very interested in some kind of investment plan.

Tend to turn over somewhere in the region of fifteen to twenty grand a week in each hotel, King Mike told him. We have three right now, hoping we can set up another three before the end of the year. That’s something like forty-five to sixty grand a week, and with an initial investment of a hundred grand we can cut you in for ten percent for the first twelve months, and then depending on the number of places we have going we can renegotiate further investments for the future and work out new profit-sharing schemes. You like that? Profit-sharing schemes. Got ourselves a real honest-to-God accountant here and everything.

Harry was in, up to the hilt, and the following day the same driver came with the same car, and Harry went to the Gentleman’s Hotel & Bar with a hundred grand in cash.
Claudette gave him head while King Mike counted the bills, and once they were done they shook hands. First payment will come in a week, King Mike said. But if you wanna come down and party with any of these ladies you feel free. Investors have an open ticket seven days a week.

Nothing to sign? Harry had asked him.

Sign? King Mike said. What the hell would you wanna be signing anything for? This is as big an operation as you’re gonna find in Manhattan, and the less that’s on paper the better. You figure any of the families around here want us to be taking the best part of three mill a year?

Harry understood. They shook hands again, and the driver took him home to Astoria across the Triborough Bridge.

A week passed. No-one came. Harry left it another two days and then he couldn’t take it any more. He went out there, crossed the river into Manhattan, and after a little unwanted sightseeing tour of the lower end of Yorkville, he found the street, found the Gentleman’s Hotel & Bar, the front door unlocked, the hallway empty, the reception lounge nothing more than an empty shell of nicely painted walls and a broken packing crate in the middle of the room.

He kicked his way into the small office where he and Mike had done their business, and he found the same thing – an empty room.

Panicking, his heart thundering in his chest, he charged up the stairs, burst through the door of each of six rooms on the second floor, and found the room where he had been entertained on his first visit – the only one decorated. The rest were empty, not even a rug on the floor, and then he sat on the top riser of the stairwell and buried his face in his hands.

He’d been taken for a hundred grand by a fat guy and half a dozen hookers.

Harry Rose was gutted, mentally and emotionally devastated. He sat on the stairs of that house with his head in his hands and he cried – not out of self-pity or grief, but at his own stupidity. Stupidity that had made him blind to everything but
the way those girls had looked, and the way they’d taken his teenage dick and sucked it dry. He’d let his balls rule his head, and that had been the biggest mistake of all. He thought less of the hundred grand and more of the work that it had taken to make that hundred grand. He thought of how that money had been his future, and now it was nothing more than a memory. Had he been a weak man he perhaps would have drunk himself to death, or sucked a .38 and blown the back of his own head off. But he was not a weak man. He had survived Dachau, had seen his own mother beaten and tortured and raped, had killed a man with his own bare hands and carried the light of that man’s eyes in his own.

Harry Rose believed he’d learned a lesson. Manhattan wasn’t Queens, and it sure as hell wasn’t Astoria. Manhattan was where the big boys came to play. Wanted to play up this side of the park then you came with the same artillery and the same intention. Didn’t matter a fuck who you were before, it was who you were now that counted. It happened to be King Mike Royale, but sure as shit it could have been anyone. Harry had been taken for all he had, and now he was back to the beginning again. Broken down he might have been, but he’d been down on his bare ass before and made it back. He would do it again. If anything, he had learned resolve, a willingness to fight against whatever came his way and make it through. The scam with Mike Royale had made him stronger, he had to believe that, for to believe anything else was to succumb to fate and destiny. Such things did not exist in Harry Rose’s vocabulary. Destiny was what you made it, good, bad or indifferent, and fate was something the weaker guy blamed when things went belly-up and bad.

A fortnight later he left his apartment on Shore Boulevard. He didn’t take a trip out to Rikers Island, didn’t tell me where he was going. He just vanished. He took with him eleven thousand dollars – all the money he possessed in the world – three suits, a pair of loafers, a good pair of hand-made
cordovan wingtips, two white shirts, a collection of ties, and a .38 caliber snubnose with four shells that once belonged to me. He put some money down on a small apartment in midtown, moved in the same day, and when he sat down at the beat-up kitchen table, a bowl of chicken soup and a half-dozen crackers for his evening meal, he made a resolution. The day would come when he’d find King Mike and his pretty girls, and once he’d hung the fat bastard out to dry he’d fuck Claudette in the ass while he choked her with her own silk stockings. That was the way it was going to be, and that was the real deal.

November came. Ike was re-elected. Christmas was around the corner, the New Year of 1957, and in the year that would see Humphrey Bogart dead; all the shit that went down in Arkansas when Faubus mustered State troops to stop nine little black kids going to school; a year that would see Eisenhower floored by a stroke and Elvis enlisting in the army, Harry Rose started watering the seeds of an empire. Muscle counted for shit in Manhattan. Muscle was okay for Queens and Brooklyn, may have worked the trick in Harlem, but here it was smarts and quick-thinking, the better plan, the faster sleight of hand that gathered the greens and kept you one step ahead of the competition.

He started once again with what he knew best – the gamblers and bookies – and by the time Sugar Ray took the middleweight championship for the fifth time in March of 1958 Harry was in his stride. He kept the small apartment, never told a soul where he lived, and from there he started working the lines, changing lanes when he had to, gathering a few compadres in the NYPD who would roll over a leech or a late payer for no more than twenty or thirty bucks a time. Manhattan was as dirty as any place Harry had been, but there was a certain class to the Manhattan style of corruption, a layer of airs and graces that veneered over the surface of what was nothing more than a crew of cheap hustlers and lousy drunks. Harry was six months or so from his twentieth birthday, he grew a mustache and looked twenty-five, and when he started to cut into some
of the heavier deals and transactions that were run by the Jewish families and some of the Italians that were brave enough to edge their way out of the Lower East Side, he was taken seriously. Harry Rose was earning back the kind of credentials and reputation that he’d possessed back in Queens. Harry was a good guy, Harry paid on time, Harry was a man you could work with but you wouldn’t want to cross. Rumor had it he’d killed a man, and though the rumor was never substantiated it was safe to say that anyone with that kind of reputation earned a degree of respect from his associates.

The hundred grand came back hard: he broke sweat and talked his mouth dry. He ran hookers and drugs, he hit the protection circuit and oversaw a crew of six thugs who looked after the nightclubs and bars in the rougher neighborhoods. He took what he earned and he rigged fights and races, card games and football games. He played hundreds of dollars on the college circuit, and once he got the machine going the money started crawling back through blood and sweat and tears. The second hundred grand came easier, and for a young man who lived in a scarred tenement on East 46th, no more than a hop, skip and a jump away from Broadway and Times Square, things were coming back to battery. Harry had fought to get his life back, and retrieve it he had, and from one Christmas to the next he didn’t think of me.

I, however, thought a great deal about Harry Rose. I didn’t bear a grudge, didn’t harbor resentment or bitterness towards Harry himself. I had expected him to vanish from the face of the earth, would have done the same myself, and I knew my old sidekick would be out there taking on the world, harvesting those greens in fat, ripe handfuls, and that all I had to do –
all
I had to do – was find some way out of Rikers and I would own the world again.

And that’s where my mind went as the decade drew to a close. I heard about Ingemar Johansson slaying Floyd Patterson in Yankee Stadium in June 1959. That fight gave the world
heavyweight title to a non-American for the first time since Primo Carnera in 1934. I also knew – if Harry Rose was still the same Harry I’d known and loved all those years before – that such a fight would have given him God only knew how many thousands of dollars, a significant percentage of which were rightfully mine … for hadn’t I risen at the stand, given my name, and taken the fall for us both? Sure I had. I knew that, and Harry would know that too. Time would come when dues had to be paid, and Harry would pay them. Sure he would.

That thought – and possibly that thought alone – kept me out of trouble on Rikers Island through the next seven years.

As Annie turned over the last page a thought seemed to hover at the edges of her mind. She tracked it, felt it skirt around Forrester and settle somewhere between David Quinn and Jack Sullivan. She was uncertain; perhaps it was nothing.

Annie glanced at her watch: it was a little after seven-thirty. David would be over anywhere between eight and nine that evening, as far as she recalled. She looked at her watch again, touched the face with the fingers of her right hand and imagined her father wearing it. Dead twenty-three years. Times were he would look at this self-same watch, perhaps late for an appointment. An appointment where? Engineering things perhaps. What things? Annie sighed and shook her head. She had no idea. Her disappointment at Forrester’s failure to appear that evening surely had less to do with Forrester and more to do with the fact that there were no further letters. There had been no more questions asked or answers given regarding who her father was, what he did, what became of him.

Annie frowned.

Christ, she thought. I know so little about him. My own father, and I know almost nothing
…

A momentary sadness overcame her, slow and quiet and almost intangible. Seven years old, and he was gone. She couldn’t even remember being seven, let alone the moments, the hours, the days that she must have shared with him. Or the feeling she must have had when she knew he was coming home. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Her sixth birthday. These were things she
should
remember, and yet try as she might to
send her mind backwards she found nothing. Had there been something so painful that she would not allow herself to remember?

I don’t know, she thought. I just don’t know
.

And then she thought:
Sullivan
.

She felt a surge of anxiety, electricity skittering through her nerves. The hairs on the nape of her neck stood to attention.

Sullivan could find out something. Why didn’t I think of this before?

Because you didn’t want to know, a voice answered.

Hell, of course I wanted to know
.

Maybe now you want to, but not then … not before …

Before what?

Before someone came and reminded you that there might be something you were missing.

And who might that be?

Forrester of course. Robert Franklin Forrester. He brought you the letters. He told you about the reading club. He reminded you that Frank O’Neill existed somewhere back then, that he possessed a life just as real as anyone else’s, and that you were never really old enough to become part of it. That’s who. He reminded you that you were once somebody’s daughter …

Somebody’s daughter. I was somebody’s daughter
.

Annie looked at the watch-face again. She closed her eyes, her fingers still touching the smooth glass surface, and holding her breath she could hear the sweep hand ticking, the tiny metronomic movements encased in something that had once encircled her father’s wrist.

She thought she was going to cry, but she did not. She breathed deeply, and then rose from the chair and went to the sink in the kitchen, a vantage-point on the world beyond the window. She wondered if there was anything in her line of sight that her father might have built. If indeed he had built things at all.