Interlude Three
From “Wild Card Chic,” by Tom Wolfe, New York, June 1971.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little egg rolls, filled with crabmeat and shrimp. Very tasty. A bit greasy, though. Wonder what the aces do to get the grease spots off the fingers of their gloves? Maybe they prefer the stuffed mushrooms, or the little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts, all of which are at this very moment being offered them on silver platters by tall, smiling waiters in Aces High livery….hese are the questions to ponder on these Wild Card Chic evenings. For example, that black man there by the window, the one shaking hands with Hiram Worchester himself, the one with the black silk shirt and the black leather coat and that absolutely unbelievable swollen forehead, that dangerous-looking black man with the cocoa-colored skin and almond-shaped eyes, who came off the elevator with three of the most ravishing women any of them have ever seen, even here in this room full of beautiful people is he, an ace, a palpable ace, going to pick up a little egg roll stuffed with shrimp and crabmeat when the waiter drifts by, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a syllable of Hiram’s cultured geniality, or is he more of a stuffed mushroom man at that…
Hiram is splendid. A large man, a formidable man, six foot two and broad all over, in a bad light he might pass for Orson Welles. His black, spade-shaped beard is immaculately groomed, and when he smiles his teeth are very white. He smiles often. He is a warm man, a gracious man, and he greets the aces with the same quick firm handshake, the same pat on the shoulder, the same familiar exhortation with which he greets Lillian, and Felicia and Lenny, and Mayor Hartmann, and Jason, John, and D. D.
How much do you think I weigh? he asks them jovially, and presses them for a guess, three hundred pounds, three fifty, four hundred. He chuckles at their guesses, a deep chuckle, a resonant chuckle, because this huge man weighs only thirty pounds and he’s set up a scale right here in the middle of Aces High his lavish new restaurant high atop the Empire State Building, amid the crystal and silver and crisp white tablecloths, a scale like you might find in a gym, just so he can prove his point. He hops on and off nimbly whenever he’s challenged. Thirty pounds, and Hiram does enjoy his little joke. But don’t call him Fatman anymore. This ace has come out of the deck now, he’s a new kind of ace, who knows all the right people and all the right wines, who looks absolutely correct in his tuxedo, and owns the highest, chic-est restaurant in town.
What an evening! The tables are set all around, the silver gleaming, the tremulous little flames of the candles reflected in the encircling windows, a bottomless blackness with a thousand stars, and it is that moment Hiram loves. There seem to be a thousand stars inside and a thousand stars outside, a Manhattan tower full of stars, the highest grandest tower of all, with marvelous people drifting through the heavens, Jason Robards, John and D. D. Ryan, Mike Nichols, Willie Joe Namath, John Lindsay, Richard Avedon, Woody Allen, Aaron Copland, Lillian Heilman, Steve Sondheim, Josh Davidson, Leonard Bernstein, Otto Preminger, Julie Belafonte, Barbara Walters, the Penns, the Greens, the O’Neals… and now, in this season of Wild Card Chic, the aces.
That knot of people there, that cluster of enthralled, adoring, excited people with the tall, thin champagne glasses in their hands and the rapt expressions on their faces, in their midst, the object of all their attention, is a little man in a crushed-velvet tuxedo, an orange crushedvelvet tuxedo, with tails, and a ruled lemon-yellow shirt, and long shiny red hair. Tisianne brant Ts’ara sek Halima sek Ragnar sek Omian is holding court again, the way he must have done once on Takis, and some of the marvelous people about him are even calling him “Prince” and “Prince Tisianne,” though they don’t often pronounce it right, and to most of them, now and forever, he will remain Dr. Tachyon. He’s real, this prince from another planet, and the very idea of him-an exile, a hero, imprisoned by the Army and persecuted by HUAC, a man who has lived two human lifetimes and seen things none of them can imagine, who labors selflessly among the wretched of Jokertown, well, the excitement runs through Aces High like a rogue hormone, and Tachyon seems excited too, you can tell by the way his lilac-colored eyes keep slipping over to linger on the slender Oriental woman who arrived with that other ace, that dangerouslooking Fortunato fellow.
“I’ve never met an ace before,” the refrain goes. “This is a first for me.” The thrill vibrates through the air of Aces High, until the whole eighty-sixth floor is thrumming to it, a first for me, never known anyone like you, a first for me, always wanted to meet you, a first for me, and somewhere in the damp soil of Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy spins in his coffin with a high, thin whirring sound, and all his worms have come home to roost now. These are no Hollywood poseurs, no dreary politicians, no faded literary flowers, no pathetic jokers begging for help, these are real nobility, these aces, these enchanting electric aces.
So beautiful. Aurora, sitting on Hiram’s bar, showing the long, long legs that have made her the toast of Broadway, the men clustered around her, laughing at her every joke. Remarkable, that red-gold hair of hers, curled and perfumed, tumbling down across her bare shoulders, and those bruised, pouting lips, and when she laughs, the northern lights flicker around her and the men burst into applause. She’s signed to make her first feature film next year, playing opposite Redford, and Mike Nichols will direct. The first ace to star in a major motion picture since- no, we wouldn’t want to mention him, would we? Not when we’re having so much fun.
So astonishing. The things they can do, these aces. A dapper little man dressed all in green produces an acorn and a pocketful of potting soil, borrows a brandy snifter from the bartender, and grows a small oak tree right there in the center of Aces High. A dark woman with sharply sculpted features arrives in jeans and a denim shirt, but when Hiram threatens to turn her away, she claps her hands together and suddenly she is armored head to toe in black metal that gleams like ebony. Another clap, and she’s wearing an evening gown, green velvet, off the shoulder, perfect for her, and even Fortunato looks twice. When the ice for the champagne buckets runs low, a burly rock-hard black man steps forward, takes the Dom Perignon in hand, and grins boyishly as frost rimes the outside of the bottle. “Just right,” he says when he gives the bottle to Hiram. “Any longer and I’d freeze it solid.” Hiram laughs and congratulates him, though he doesn’t believe he has the honor. The black man smiles enigmatically. “Croyd,” is all he says.
So romantic, so tragic. Down there by the end of the bar, in gray leather, that’s Tom Douglas, isn’t it? It is, it is, the Lizard King himself, I hear they just dropped the charges, but what courage that took, what commitment, and say, whatever happened to that Radical fellow who helped him out? Douglas looks terrible, though. Wasted, haunted. They crowd close around him, and his eyes snap up and briefly the specter of a great black cobra looms above him, dark counterpoint to Aurora’s shimmering colors, and silence ripples across Aces High until they leave the Lizard King alone again.
So dashing, so flamboyant. Cyclone knows how to make an entrance, doesn’t he? But that’s why Hiram insisted on the Sunset Balcony, after all, not just for drinks out under the summer stars and the glorious view of the sun going down across the Hudson, but to give his aces a place to land, and it’s only natural that Cyclone would be the first. Why ride the elevator when you can ride the winds? And the way he dresses-all in blue and white, the jumpsuit makes him look so lithe and rakish, and that cape, the way it hangs from his wrists and ankles, and then balloons out in flight when he whips up his winds. Once he’s inside, shaking Hiram’s hand, he takes off his aviator’s helmet. He’s a fashion leader, Cyclone, the first ace to wear an honest-to-god costume, and he started back in ‘65, long before these other aces-come-lately, wore his colors even through those two dreary years in ‘Nam, but just because a man wears a mask doesn’t mean he has to make a fetish of hiding his identity, does it? Those days are past, Cyclone is Vernon Henry Carlysle of San Francisco, the whole world knows, the fear is dead, this is the age of Wild Card Chic when everyone wants to be an ace. Cyclone came a long way for this party, but the gathering wouldn’t be complete without the West Coast’s premier ace, would it?
Although-taboo thought that it is, with stars and aces glittering all around on a night when you can see fifty miles in every direction-really, the gathering isn’t quite complete, is it? Earl Sanderson is still in France, though he did send a brief, but sincere, note of apology in reply to Hiram’s invitation. A great man, that one, a great man greatly wronged. And David Harstein, the lost Envoy, Hiram even ran an ad in the Times, DAVID WON’T YOU PLEASE COME HOME? but he’s not here either. And the Turtle, where is the Great and Powerful Turtle? There were rumors that on this special magical night, this halcyon time for Wild Card Chic, the Turtle would come out of his shell and shake Hiram’s hand and announce his name to the world, but no, he doesn’t seem to be here, you don’t think… god, no… you don’t think those old stories are true and the Turtle is a joker after all?
Cyclone is telling Hiram that he thinks his threeyear-old daughter has inherited his wind powers, and Hiram beams and shakes his hand and congratulates the doting daddy and proposes a toast. Even his powerful, cultivated voice cannot cut through the din of the moment, so Hiram makes a small fist and does that thing he does to the gravity waves and makes himself even lighter than thirty pounds, until he drifts up toward the ceiling. Aces High goes silent as Hiram floats beside his huge art-deco chandelier, raises his Pimm’s Cup, and proposes his toast. Lenny Bernstein and John Lindsay drink to little Mistral Helen Carlysle, second generation ace-to-be. The O’Neals and the Ryans lift their glasses to Black Eagle, the Envoy, and the memory of Blythe Stanhope van Renssaeler. Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards, and Broadway Joe toast the Turtle and Tachyon, and everyone drinks to Jetboy, father of us all.
And after the toasting come the causes. The Wild Card Acts are still on the books, and in this day and age that’s a disgrace, something must be done. Dr. Tachyon needs help, help for his Jokertown Clinic, help with his lawsuit, how long has that been dragging on now, his suit to win custody of his spaceship back from the government that wrongly impounded it in 1946-the shame of it, to take his ship after he came all that way to help, it makes them angry, all of them, and of course they pledge their help, their money, their lawyers, their influence. A beautiful woman on either side of him, Tachyon speaks of his ship. It’s alive, he tells them, and by now it’s certainly lonely, and as he talks he begins to weep, and when he tells them that the ship’s name is Baby, there’s a tear behind many a contact lens, threatening the artfully applied mascara below. And of course something must be done about the joker Brigade, that’s little better than genocide, and…
But that’s when dinner is served. The guests drift to their assigned seats, Hiram’s seating chart is a masterpiece, measured and spiced as precisely as his gourmet food, everywhere just the right balance of wealth and wisdom and wit and beauty and bravura and celebrity, with an ace at every table of course, of course, otherwise someone might go away feeling cheated, in this year and month and hour of Wild Card Chic…
DOWN DEEP
by Edward Bryant and Leanne C. Harper
As she dodged cabs, crossing Central Park West and entering the park, Rosemary Muldoon knew she was in for a difficult afternoon. She distractedly maneuvered through a late-afternoon mob of dog-walkers gathered on the sidewalk and looked for Bagabond.
As an intern with New York’s Social Services Department, Rosemary got all the interesting cases, the ones no one else would handle. Bagabond, the enigmatic transient she had drawn this afternoon, was about the worst. Bagabond had to be at least sixty, and smelled as if she hadn’t bathed in half that time. That was something Rosemary had never gotten used to. Her family was not what one could call nice, but each person bathed daily. Her father insisted on it. And nobody refused her father.
She had been drawn to the detritus of society precisely because of their alienation. Few had any connection with their pasts or their families. Rosemary recognized this but told herself that it did not matter what the reason was; the result was the important thing. She could help them.
Bagabond was standing beneath a grove of oaks. As Rosemary approached her, she thought she saw Bagabond gesturing and talking to a tree. Shaking her head, Rosemary pulled out Bagabond’s file. It was slim. Real name unknown, age unknown, place of origin unknown, history unknown. According to the sparse information, the woman lived on the streets. The best guess of the previous social worker was that Bagabond had been released from a state institution to provide space. The bag lady was paranoid but probably not dangerous. Because Bagabond had refused to give any information, there had been no way to help her. Rosemary put away the paperwork and marched toward the old woman dressed in layers of ragged clothing.
“Hello, Bagabond. My name is Rosemary and I’m here to help you.” Her gambit failed. Bagabond turned her head and stared at two kids throwing a Frisbee.
“Don’t you want a nice, safe, warm place to sleep? With hot meals and people to talk to?” The only response she received was from the biggest cat she had ever seen outside a zoo. It had walked over to Bagabond and was now staring at Rosemary.
“You could take a bath.” The bag lady’s hair was filthy. “But I need to know your name.” The huge lack cat looked at Bagabond and then glared at Rosemary.
“Why don’t you come with me and we’ll talk?” The cat began to growl.
“Come on …” As Rosemary reached toward Bagabond, the cat sprang. Rosemary jumped back, tripping over the handbag she’d set on the ground. Lying on her back, she could see eye to eye with the very angry feline.
“Nice kitty. Stay right there.” As she started to get up, the black cat was joined by a slightly smaller calico cat.
“Okay. I’ll see you another time.” Rosemary grabbed her bag and the file and retreated.
Her father never understood why she wanted to deal with the poor of the city, the “filth,” as he called them. Tonight she was going to have to suffer through another chaperoned evening with her parents and her fiance. An arranged marriage, in this day and age. She wished it was easier to stand up to her father and say no. Her family was a creature of tradition. She just did not fit in.
Rosemary had her own apartment which, until recently, she had shared with C.C. Ryder. C.C. was a vocal hippie. Rosemary had made sure that her father and C.C. never met.
The consequences were too horrible to consider. Keeping her two lives separate was essential.
It was a line of thought that took her too close to the pain. C.C. was gone. She had disappeared into the city. Rosemary was frightened for C.C. and for herself, for what it meant about the city.
Rosemary looked up from the park bench where she had collapsed. It was time to get the file back to the office and head for Columbia and class.
“What a terrific night.” Lombardo “Lucky Lummy” Lucchese was feeling great, just great. After two whole years of working numbers and small-time protection, he had at last made it into the foremost of the Five Families. They knew talent and he had plenty. Walking down 81st toward the park with his three friends, he was on top of the world.
He had to go pay his respects to his fiancee, Maria. What a mouse! But a mouse who was the only child of Don Carlo Gambione could be very valuable in the years to come. Later he would celebrate with his buddies. Now he had to get some cash so he could buy mousy Maria some nice flowers to show his devotion. Maybe carnations.
“I’m gonna go downstairs. Pick up some money,” Lummy said.
“Want some company?” Joey “No-Nose” Manzone asked. “Nah. You kiddin’? After next week, I’ll be in the big money. I just wanna do one more job. For old time’s sake. See ya later.”
Splashing through oil-iridescent puddles, Lummy whistled as he swung along toward the illuminated globe marking the stairs to the 81st Street subway station. Nothing could bring him down tonight.
What a perfectly dreadful evening, Sarah Jarvis thought. The sixty-eight-year-old woman had never in her life expected to be invited to an Amway party. The very thought. It had taken hours for her friend and her to leave. Of course, it was raining by that time and, of course, there was not an on-duty cab to be found. Her friend lived in the next building. Sarah had to go all the way uptown to Washington Heights.
Sarah hated the subway. That stale smell always nauseated her. She disliked the noisy parts of the city anyway, and the subway was among the loudest. Tonight, though, everything was quiet. Alone on the platform, Sarah shivered under her twee jacket.
Peering over the edge of the platform and along the tunnel, she thought she saw the light of the uptown AA local. Something was there, but it seemed to move so slowly. Sarah turned away and looked at the advertising placards. She examined the poster calling for the reelection of that nice Mr. Nixon. In the adjacent newspaper vending machines, the headlines told of burglars breaking into a Washington hotel and apartment house. Watergate? What a funny name for a building, she thought. The Daily News led with a story about the so-called Subway Vigilante. The police were attributing five slayings over the past week to the mysterious killer. The victims had all been drug dealers and other criminals. The murders had all taken place in the subways. Sarah shuddered. The city was quite different than it had been in her childhood.
First she heard the steps, clattering down the stairs and past the deserted token booth. Then whistling, a peculiar tuneless drone, as the person entered the station. Despite herself, she was caught between apprehension and relief. Somewhat ashamed of her reaction, she decided she wouldn’t mind a little human company.
As soon as she saw him, she was not so sure. Sarah had never been all that fond of black leather jackets, particularly those worn by slightly greasy, smirking young men. She turned her back firmly and focused on the wall across the tracks.
As the old woman turned her back, Lucky Lummy grinned broadly and touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip.
“Hey, lady, got a light?”
“No.”
One corner of Lummy’s mouth twitched as he moved toward her back. “Come on, lady, be nice.”
He missed the tension gathering in her shoulders as Sarah remembered that self-defense class she had attended last winter.
“Just give me the purse, lad-aiee!” He screamed as Sarah turned and crushed his instep with her sensible but sophisticated beige pump. Lummy jerked back and aimed a punch at her face. Sarah evaded him by stepping backward and slipping on something slimy. Lummy grinned and started toward her.
Wind rushed past them from the tunnel as the AA train approached the station.
Neither noticed that a dozen people had all managed to get to the subway entrance simultaneously. Most of the crowd had attended a late showing of The Godfather and were continuing an animated discussion of whether or not Coppola had exaggerated the Mafia’s role in modern crime. Someone who hadn’t been at the screening was a transit worker who had had a long and trying day. He just wanted to go home and get dinner, not necessarily in that order. The newspapers had been pushing again; even that joker Rights stuff couldn’t keep them occupied all the time. The transit man had been pulled off his regular track-checking duties to spend eighteen hours searching vainly for alligators in sewers and subway tunnels, conduit shafts, and deep utility holes. He mentally cursed his employers for kowtowing to the sensationalist press, and especially cursed the bird-dogging reporters he’d finally ditched.
The transit worker hung back a little, trying to stay out of the melee as the group fumbled for tokens and started through the gates. The moviegoers chattered as they went.
With a roar and braking screech of metal on metal, the AA local burst out of the tunnel.
On the platform, all manner of people confronted each other. Swearing in Italian, Lummy let go of his victim and looked around for a bolt-hole.
The first two couples had entered and were staring at the scene in front of them. One of the men moved toward Lucky Lummy as the other man grabbed his date and tried to retreat.
The doors of the local hissed open. At this time of night, there were few passengers on the train and no one got of. “There’s never a transit cop when you need one,” said the would-be rescuer. Momentarily, Lummy considered leaping for the punk and punching out his lights. Instead he feinted at the man, then half-limped, half-ran into the last car. The doors snapped closed and the train began to move. It might have been the light, but the bright grafitti on the sides seemed to change.
From inside the car, Lucky Lummy laughed and gestured obscenely at Sarah, who was feeling for bruises and trying to rearrange her soiled clothing. Lummy aimed a second gesture at the woman’s inadvertent rescuers as the entire group converged on Sarah.
Abruptly Lummy’s face contorted with fear and then outright terror as he began beating on the doors. The man who had tried to stop Lummy caught one last glimpse of him clawing at the rear door of the car as the train sped into darkness.
“What a creep!” said the date of the would-be rescuer. “Was he one of those jokers?”
“Naw,” said his friend. “Just a garden-variety asshole.” Everyone froze as they heard the screams from the uptown tunnel. Over the diminishing roar of the local, they could hear Lummy’s hopeless, agonized cries. The train vanished. But the screams lasted until at least 83rd Street. The transit worker moved toward the downtown tunnel as the hero of the hour was congratulated by the mostly unharmed Sarah, as well as by the rest of the onlookers. Another transit employee came down the steps at the other end of the platform.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Sewer Jack! Jack Robicheaux. Don’t you ever sleep?”
The exhausted man ignored him and let himself through a metal access door. As he walked down the tunnel, he began shedding his clothes. A watcher might have thought she had seen a man squatting down and crawling along the damp floor of the tunnel, a man who had grown a long snout filled with sharp, misshapen teeth and a muscular tail capable of smashing the watcher into jam. But no one saw the flash of greenish-gray scales as the erstwhile transit worker joined the darkness and was gone.
Back on the 81st Street platform, the spectators were still so transfixed by the echoes of Lummy’s dying screams that few noted the rumbling, bass roar from the other direction.
Her last class over, Rosemary walked wearily toward the 116th Street subway entrance. One more task completed for today. Now she was on her way to her father’s apartment to see her fiance. She had never had much enthusiasm for that, but these days she had little enthusiasm for anything at all. Rosemary moved through the days wishing that something in her life would be resolved.
She shifted her armload of books to her right arm as, onehanded, she sifted through her purse for a token. Walking through the gate, she paused, standing to one side to stay out of the path of the other students. Judging from the placards carried by a number of the people, the latest antiwar rally must have just ended. Rosemary noted some apparently normal kids carrying signs lettered with the joker Brigade’s informal slogan: LAST TO GO-FIRST TO DIE.
C.C. had always been into that. She had even sung her songs at a few of the less-rowdy gatherings. One day she had even brought home a fellow activist, a guy named Fortunato.
While it was nice that the man was involved with the joker Rights movement, Rosemary didn’t like pimps, geishas or no geishas, in her apartment. It had caused one of the few fights she had ever had with C.C. In the end C.C. had agreed to check with Rosemary more closely about future dinner guests.
C.C. Ryder had tried and tried to convince Rosemary to become active, but Rosemary believed that helping a few people directly could do as much good as standing around shouting condemnations of the “Establishment.” Probably a lot more good. Rosemary knew she came from a conservative family. Her roommate rarely let her forget it.
Rosemary took a deep breath and launched herself into the flood of people. All the late classes had evidently gotten out at the same time.
As Rosemary walked onto the platform, she moved around the rear of the crowd so she could end up at the far side of the waiting area. She didn’t feel like being that close to people right now. Moments later she felt the flood of dank tunnel air and shivered inside her damp sweater. Deafening, depressing, the local swept by her. All the cars had been defaced, but the last car was even more peculiarly decorated. Rosemary was reminded of the tattooed woman in the Ringling Brothers show she had seen in the old Garden. She had often wondered at the psychology of the kids who wrote on the sides of the trains. Sometimes she didn’t like what their words revealed. New York was not always a nice place to live.
I won’t think about it. She thought about it. The image of C.C. lying comatose in the I.C. ward of St. Jude’s glittered in her mind. She saw the shiny life-support machines. Because C.C. had had no relatives to notify, Rosemary had even been there when the nurses changed the dressings. She remembered the bruises, the black and poisonously blue patches that covered most of C.C.’s body. The doctors were unsure exactly how many times the young woman had been raped. Rosemary had wanted to empathize. She couldn’t. She wasn’t even sure how to begin. All she could do was to wait and hope. And then C.C. had vanished from the hospital.
The last car looked to be empty. As Rosemary started toward it, she glanced at the graffito. She stopped dead, her eyes tracking the words written on the dark side of the car:
Parsley, sage, Rosemary? Time .
Time is for others, not for rne.
“C.C.! What?” Disregarding the other people who had spotted the unoccupied car, she pushed her way to the doors. They were closed. Rosemary dropped her books and tried to claw the doors open. She felt a nail break. Failing, she beat on the doors until the train began to pull slowly out of the station.
“Not”
Rosemary’s eyes filled with tears at the final sight of her name and another of C.C.’s lyrics:
You can’t fight the end, But you can take revenge.
Rosemary said nothing else, only stared after the train. She looked down at her fists. The apparently steel door had been soft and yielding, warm. Had someone given her acid?
Was it a coincidence? Was C.C. living underground? Was C.C. alive at all?
It was a long time before the next train came.
He hunted in the near-darkness.
The hunger was upon him; the hunger that seemed never to be fully satisfied. And so he hunted.
Dimly, ever so faintly, he recalled a time and a place when it had been different. He had been someone-what was that?—something else.
He looked, but saw little. In this gloom and especially in the foul water choked with debris, his eyes served little use. More important were the tastes and smells, the tiny particles that told him both what lay in the distance meals to seek patiently-and of the immediate satisfactions that hovered, unsuspecting, just beyond the length of his snout.
He could hear the vibrations: the powerful, slow movements from side to side as his tail muscled through the water; the crushing, but distant waves beating down from the city above; the myriad tiny actions of food scurrying about in the darkness.
The filthy water broke around his wide, flat snout, the current streaming to either side of the raised nostrils. Occasionally the transparent membranes would slide down across the protruding eyes, then slip up again.
As large as he was-barely able to fit through some of the tunnels he had traversed during this time of feeding-he made very little noise. Tonight most of the sounds that accompanied him came from the prey, were cried out during the devouring. His nostrils gave him the first inkling of the feast to come, but was shortly followed by messages from his ears. Although he hated to leave this sanctuary that covered nearly all of his body, he knew he must go where the food was. The mouth of another tunnel loomed to one side. There was barely enough room in the passageway for even so flexible a body as his to turn and enter the new watercourse. The water became shallower and ended altogether within two body-lengths of the entrance.
It didn’t matter. His legs worked well enough, and he could move almost as silently as before. He could still smell the prey waiting for him somewhere ahead. Nearer. Near. Very close. He could hear sounds: squeaks, squeals, the scurrying of feet, the brush of furry bodies against stone.
They wouldn’t expect him; there were few predators in these tunnels deep down. He was upon them in an instant, the first one crushed between his jaws, its death-cry warning the others. The prey scattered in panic. Except for those without escape routes, there was no attempt to fight back. They ran. Most who lived longest scurried away from the monster in their midst-and encountered the bricked-up end of the tunnel. Others tried to s Tint around him-one even daring to leap across his scaly back—but the lashing tail smashed them against the unyielding walls. Still others ran directly into his mouth, cowering only in the split second before the great teeth came together.
The agonized squeals peaked and subsided. The blood flowed deliciously. The meat and hair and bones lay satisfyingly in his stomach. A few among the prey still lived. They crawled away from the slaughter as best they could. The hunter started to follow, but his meal sat heavily. For now he was too sated to follow, or to care. He made it as far as the edge of the water and then stopped. Now he wanted to sleep.
First he would break the silence. It was allowed. This was his territory. It was all his territory. The great jaws opened and he issued a penetrating, rumbling roar that echoed for many seconds through the seemingly endless labyrinth of tunnels and ducts, passageways and stone corridors.
When the echoes finally died, the predator slept. But he was the only one.
Rosemary said hello to Alfredo, who was on security duty tonight. He smiled at her as she signed in, and shook his head when he saw the stack of books she carried.
“I can get you help with that, Miss Maria.”
“No thanks, Alfredo. I can manage just fine.”
“I remember carrying your books for you when you were just a bambina, Miss Maria. You used to say you wanted to marry me when you grew up. No more, eh?”
“Sorry, Alfredo, I’m just fickle.” Rosemary smiled and batted her eyes. It wasn’t easy to joke or even be pleasant. She wanted this evening, this day, to end.
She was alone in the elevator and took the opportunity to rest her head against the side of the car for a moment. She indeed remembered Alfredo carrying her books to school. It had been during one of the wars in her childhood. What a family.
When the elevator doors opened, the two men in front of the entry to the penthouse came to attention. They relaxed as she approached, but each looked unusually solemn.
“Max. What’s happened?” Rosemary looked questioningly at the taller of the two identically black-suited men.
Max shook his head and opened the door for her. Rosemary walked between the oppressive, dark oakpaneled walls toward the library. The ancient oil paintings did nothing to relieve the gloom.
At the door of the library, she started to knock, but the heavy, carved doors swung inward before she struck them. Her father stood in the doorway, his silhouette illuminated by the lamp on his desk.
He took both her hands and held them tightly. “Maria, it’s Lombardo. He’s no longer with us.”
“What happened?” She stared at her father’s face. The areas beneath his eyes were dark. His jowls sagged even more than she remembered.
Her father gestured. “These young men brought the news. “
Frankie, Joey, and Little Renaldo stood clumped together. Joey literally held his hat in his hands.
“We told Don Carlos, Maria. Lucky Lum—er, Lombardo was coming right over here but he stopped for a minute in the subway.”
“He wanted to get some gum, I think.” Frankie volunteered the information as if it had some significance.
“Yeah, anyway. He didn’t come out. We were just hanging around,” said Joey, “so we decided to find out what was going on when we heard about… . disturbance in the station. When we got there, we found out what happened.”
“Yeah, they found him in about two dozen—”
“Frankie!”
“Yes, Don Carlo.”
“That will be all for tonight, boys. I will see you in the morning.”
The three young men nodded and touched their foreheads in Rosemary’s direction as they left.
“I’m sorry, Maria,” said her father.
“I don’t understand. Who would have done this?”
“Maria, you know Lombardo worked with our family business. Others knew that. And they knew he was about to become my son. We think it may have been someone trying to hurt me.” Don Carlo’s voice sounded sad. “There have been other incidents lately. There are those who want to take away what we have worked for a lifetime to achieve.” His voice hardened again. “We won’t let them get away with this. I promise, Maria!”
“Maria, I have some nice lasagna. Your favorite. Please, try to eat.” Rosemary’s mother spoke from out of the shadows. She rose to take Rosemary to the kitchen, escorting her with an arm around her shoulders.
“Mama, you shouldn’t have held supper for me.”
“I didn’t. I knew you would be late and so I saved some for you. “
Rosemary said to her mother, “Mama, I didn’t love him.”
“Ssh. I know.” She touched her daughter’s lips. “But you would have grown to care for him. I could see how well you got along.”
“Mama, you don’t-” Rosemary was interrupted by her father’s voice following them from the library.
“It has to be melanzanes, blacks! Who else would be attacking us now? They have to be coming down from Harlem through the tunnels. They’ve wanted our territories for years.”
“Especially they want a susina like Jokertown. No, jokers would never dare do this on their own, but the blacks could be using them as a distraction.”
Rosemary heard silence, followed by tinny squeaks from the telephone. Her mother tugged at her arm.
Don Carlo said, “They must be stopped now or they will threaten all the Families. They’re savages.”
Another pause.
“I do not exaggerate.”
“Maria…” said her mother.