West 47th (7 page)

At that point the stones, enclosed by cotton in individual glassine bags, were on the sofa table where Mitch had placed them. Maddie considered for a moment, then her fingers went straight to the lavender and took it up, as though she knew surely which was which.

“Is that one the lavender?” Mitch asked.

“Well, isn't it?”

“How could you tell?”

“Just guessed.”

He watched Maddie raise her wine glass precisely to her lips. She'd ordered the house red. She took a sip preclusive to a gulp.

“Elise was always such a wine snob,” she said. “It never failed to irk me, the way she went on about a wine's staying power or well-structured flavor or roundness of character and all that. What shit.”

“Maybe since she's been in Europe she's been shamed out of that.”

“Let's hope. That and all things like that.”

Elise was Maddie's mother. Biological mother was how Maddie qualified her, not bitterly, just to be truer about it.

“What do you think about Elise and Marian wanting to move to Barcelona?” Maddie asked.

An indifferent shrug from Mitch. He sometimes forgot Maddie couldn't see such body language.

She went on. “For some ridiculous reason they seem to feel your approval is required, or rather that I need it.”

“Has there been any mention of how much it would set you back?”

“Not yet, but if it's anywhere near what it cost for their move from Paris to Marbella or their one before that, from Capri to Paris, it'll be a small fortune. Why do you suppose they all of a sudden believe you have the power to cinch my purse strings?”

“I've no idea.”

“Maybe I should nurture the fear. If I wanted to be mean I would.”

Mitch couldn't imagine her mean. She could be tough at times but never mean.

“Would that appeal to you?” she asked.

“What?”

“The power to cinch.”

“You've asked that before.”

“Numerous times but you might have changed your mind.”

“We should order,” Mitch said. A waiter was standing at the ready. Maddie went right through the suggestion. “Sunday afternoon,” she said, “afterward, when you were snoozing, I was remembering when the only kisses Elise and Marian exchanged were hello-goodbye, left and right pecks on the cheeks. Uncle Straw contends that one night in parting they happened to put a lingering one smack in the middle and that was that.”

Marian had been Uncle Straw's wife. Thus, Maddie's aunt by marriage. She and Elise bore such a resemblance they were often taken as sisters. They frequently fibbed about that, told people they were fraternal twins.

Mitch had met Elise and Marian only once. Not at the wedding. They didn't show for that. At the last minute Elise phoned to prove by sounding hoarse and sniffily that she had a terrible flu. Said she'd caught the bug while shopping in a chilly Paris rain for a wedding present, said it didn't matter, that nothing, not even her near death could keep her from attending, said they were merciful dears for not insisting she fly considering what a mess her sinuses were, said her heart would be with them.

The present, a pair of Christofle crystal candle holders, arrived miraculously intact two weeks later. Carelessly packed in a regular cardboard box rather than securely so in a Christofle carton. Reason enough for Mitch to suspect Elise had owned them for a while.

Two years after then Elise and Marian came over on the Concorde for a visit that actually was a combined inspection and refinancing, so to speak. They came dressed in Ungaro suits and matching matinee-length strands of ten-millimeter pearls.

From first sight, first cheek kisses, Mitch and Elise endured one another. She talked through her teeth at him and only barely tried to conceal her disdain. He, on the other hand, was tactfully polite and amiable while finding her little more dimensional than the photos he'd seen of her.

She was visually attractive, though. Mitch had to give her that. Slender and conscientiously kept up. No doubt she'd had tucks and redraping here and there. The sort of time-fighting, well-off woman whom Mitch had known practically all his young life as the typical client of the Laughton jewelry store up on Madison. Known without knowing them. Those who came in to sell away what they'd once cherished came in escorted by avarice and gossamer excuses for indulgence such as ennui, in need of a lift, deserving of reward. The kind who never twitched a lash when told the price of a piece, a diamond and platinum bracelet, say, that had struck their fancy, was a hundred thousand.

In Mitch's eyes Elise had that sort of cachet and whatever assets she presented were spoiled by both her smile and her laugh, which in his opinion couldn't have been more artificial. It was as though she had only a certain supply of sincerity and was afraid of running out.

Running out.

Elise and Marian were supposed to stay two weeks. After the third day it was apparent they wouldn't make it. On the sixth, having fulfilled the capital aspect of their mission (a six-figure wire transfer to their joint account at the main Champs-Elysées branch of the Credit Lyonnais), Elise and Aunt Marian each left three-minute messages of contrition on Maddie's answering machine, checked out of the Plaza and put to use what remained of their Concorde round-trip.

“Think they're happy?” Maddie asked.

“Sure, why not?” Mitch replied generously.

“The other day, to let them know for what must be the thousandth time that I don't give a rat's ass what they're up to, I had them sent a needlepoint pillow. You know those little pillows with sayings on them.”

“What did it say, the one you sent?”

“Butch on the streets, femme in the sheets.”

“That should do it,” Mitch remarked wryly.

“I thought so.”

“Let's order.”

“Anyway,” Maddie went on, “I'll bet anything that what Elise and Marian had, their sizzling, inconsiderate hots, have by now dampened down to a much less limiting arrangement, a mere sharing of preference. I picture them hitting on desperate young girls for one another.” Maddie realized her spite, countered it by abruptly taking a bright side road. “Josie Jefferson was wonderful today!”

“I was wondering how it went.”

“She arrived a quarter hour early, her lessons all practiced, a serious little artist eager to get tuned up and into Vivaldi.”

“What piece?”

“Concerto in D Major, the Largo section. She virtually attacked it. For now she has more spirit than artistry but I heaped on the praise and asked her to solo next Sunday.”

Maddie had been strumming and plucking at guitars since she could manage to hold one. She didn't become serious about it, however, until she lost her eyesight at age ten. Until the black, as she put it.

She'd taken instruction from an elderly Spanish man, a once highly recognized artist whose fingers had gone arthritic. Elise went along to his sixth-floor studio in the Carnegie Hall Building for the first few lessons, sat by the window in an ordinary folding chair counting minutes and turning pages of
Town and Country
and thinking why the hell didn't Maddie play something instead of doing those incessant exercises?

At fourteen she'd been accepted at Juilliard.

At eighteen she realized what a saving distraction the guitar had been.

She still played.

Various guitars and mandolins were propped around the apartment for her to take up whenever she was in that state of mind, and it pleased her whenever Mitch asked her to play for him. Some mornings, while he was shaving, she would sit on the edge of the tub and play pieces that she believed were sure to ignite him for his day. “How's this for a starter?” she'd say and go into a Stevie Ray Vaughan or a fandango by Rodrigo and he'd have difficulty keeping his attention on the strokes of his razor.

At other times, on Saturday afternoons or late after a night out, he'd sit close and watch, entranced by her fingers so deftly changing positions along the frets. How sure she was of the music she made no matter how complicated. If she made mistakes, which he doubted, his love prevented him from detecting them. What could he say to convey his appreciation for her performances? He, an audience of one, with thunderous applause and countless bravos in his heart.

His favorite pieces were from the “Castles of Spain” by Torróba, just about anything flamenco and the anonymously composed old piece called “Spanish Romance” or “Forbidden Games.” He could only take infrequent doses of the latter as the melody line of it would get into his head and intrude there for a day or two.

To do her heart good Maddie gave guitar lessons twice or three times weekly to certain underprivileged children. She charged ten dollars a session and they often came pride in hand hoping she'd allow them to owe for a week or two. At one point Josie Jefferson had gotten two months in arrears. Her grandmother, who worked for a midtown janitorial service, got her caught up with six installments.

The reason Maddie charged for the lessons was to increase their importance and give them the strength of sacrifice. To more than even things out her pupils were paid (by her, though they didn't know who) to perform on every other Sunday afternoon at hospital wards and convalescent homes around the city.

The waiter had brought more rolls and replenished the butter.

“Why don't we order,” Maddie said a bit plaintively. “I'm starved, practically skipped lunch, had only a roast beef and cheese on rye.” She was a big eater, ate mannerly but a lot, and it was unreasonable that she was able to remain so ideally slender. Mitch imagined within her a roaring metabolic furnace, knew she wasn't bulimic, as some suspected and rumored.

This night she started with the
mille-feuille
of crabmeat with spiced mint vinaigrette, went clean-plate through the grilled yellowtail, baby carrots, baby turnips and all, and ended up with a lime soufflé.

As though saving best for last, she waited until the decaf was brought and she was stirring it cool and contemplating the tray of little, fancy gratuitous cookies the waiter placed on the cleared-off table, to ask Mitch: “How did your day go, precious?”

He was certain she didn't want to hear about his command appearance in Boston and all the routine waiting he'd had to endure. His need to bitch about that to someone had already receded and taken its place in that remote region in him where all his similar low-level needs to bitch resided.

No. Such dry stuff wasn't what she was after. She wanted to know what new had occurred on and around 47th. For years Mitch had been bringing the street home to her and the darker side of her was definitely hooked.

To Maddie the vagaries of West 47th were more intriguing and often more extravagant than those of New York's upper social layer.

Like the prominent diamond broker whose embittered wife knew his combinations and, while he was in London on business but really in Barbados for side kicks with a pretty, nineteen-year-old hard body, went to his office on 47th and helped herself to twelve million worth from his safe.

Like those sanctimonious 47th big dealers who kept three or four sets of books and got peeled down to the bone of evasion by the IRS.

“Allenwood's okay. If you got a choice take Allenwood. They got a kosher line at Allenwood.”

And like the recent but already legendary misunderstanding between two partners that grew so heated one threw a whole trayful of their best goods out the fourth-story office window. (It's hail! No, it's diamonds from outer space maybe.) Causing, on the 47th sidewalk and gutters below, such a free-for-all that ambulances and an aggregate 152 stitches were required.

Such 47th Street tribulations appealed to Maddie. They were indeed larger than life and she, so dependent on imagination, dilated them even more.

Mitch also let her know when the more spectacular deals went down. She found them interesting and would have felt shorted had he left them untold. However, more colorful than the big deals were the raw deals and the double deals, the scams and swindles, petty and large.

So it followed that, for her, the most fascinating of all were the robberies, and the bolder the better.

Like the one last year, which had been premeditated a year before when a couple of guys bought a restaurant on the north side of 46th Street between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas. A narrow, short-order sort of place with no booths, just ten stools at a counter and a small, trap-doored cellar for storing supplies. The rear of the restaurant coincided with the rear of a major jewelry arcade on the south side of 47th. What separated the two was an air shaft one hundred and fifty feet wide where sumac grew and the raw earth surface glinted like pavé with decades of pieces of broken glass.

It took the two fellows and two others eight months to mole their way underground across the air shaft to be directly beneath the strong room of the jewelry arcade. That was where all fifty of the concessions of the arcade kept their goods each night and weekend.

With professional patience the guys waited two weeks for the advantages of a holy holiday. Took their undisturbed, own good time burning through the floor of the strong room. Emptied it of six million worth. Left behind not even a 14k bale.

Maddie knew that robbery inside out. First from what Mitch told her about it, the generally exposed scenario, then from the privileged intricacies she extracted from Mitch's detective friend James Hurley.

Mitch hung out with Hurley quite a bit. Their affinity was West 47th. As a captain out of Midtown North Precinct, Hurley's domain included the street. It was both a trouble spot and a centerpiece for him and he made the most of it.

So there they'd be having a whiskey and talking Knicks or something and Maddie would sideroad in with: “You'll never catch those guys.”

“Which guys?”

“The ones who pulled off the mole robbery.” The tabloids had dubbed it that.