Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (51 page)

His weekly paycheck had arrived punctually until two weeks ago, a harbinger, and not really unreasonable after three months; but this belated letter had an edge to it: after the ejection of Martin Daugherty from the Ann Lee Home we have the ejection of George Quinn, both coinciding with the decision by the Democratic politicians to punish Matt and Quinn, a pair of pains in the ass, by punishing their fathers. The district attorney had smiled at Quinn yesterday in a corridor at the Court House and said cryptically but jovially, “You forgot your father.” Quinn the reporter should have considered the fallout before publishing all that slum blather against the Mayor and the Party.

Renata came into the parlor bearing solace, two rums on the rocks, extra ice, and the bottle of Bacardi dark from Puerto Rico, where the distillery had relocated after Fidel won the war. Quinn watched her move and saw in her all the elements he had always loved; also saw another creature with no resemblance to the original: a chameleon, duplicitous, schizoid. But you bought into it, Quinn. Yes, but how could I have understood such shape-shifting when I was under the influence of the simple declarative sentence? The simple declarative sentence is an illusion.

“Did I put too much water?”

“Not at all,” said Quinn, tasting.

“What’s the mail?”

“I have a useless book tour ahead of me, and George has been fired.”

“Why?”

“Why is the book tour useless or why George?”

“George.”

“He’s overdue at the office and he can’t think or function or even find the Court House without a guide. It was inevitable. They’ve been kind to George even though they think they’re punishing me by firing him. We lose his $34.50. How can we possibly live without it?”

“They did the same thing to Matt’s father.”

“You are perspicacious. We hurt them, they hurt us. I decided to write a novel about it.”

“About George being fired?”

“About him, Matt and Martin, Tremont, Roy, Zuki, you, me, the Mayor, Gloria and Max, and on it goes. No end to the cast of characters.”

“Do you want a refill?”

“The last time I refused a drink. Did you hear Martin and Pop talking about World War One tonight?”

“Bits.”

“Pop always told World War stories, also his father’s stories—from the Civil War, and riding with the ragtag Fenians, and with those ex-slaves fighting Spaniards in Cuba. But he was only eight when his father died, and he never sorted out the specifics of any of those wars.”

“So your new novel is about George?”

“More about you than George.”

“I’m not worth a novel.”

“You’re worth two or three novels. I have to put Tremont in it too. He’s worth two or three novels. If I wrote your story would you be afraid of it?”

“You don’t know my story.”

“I know quite a lot.”

“I’m not afraid of what you know.”

“You should be.”

“Your own imagination is all you know.”

“It is a novel, after all. I’d have to write about our reunion at the Fontainebleau, that lovely mobbed-up luxury.”

“That was Alfie. Max asked him about a hotel on the Beach and Alfie made a call to one of his friends.”

“I knew that. Alfie also set up your flight out of Havana—your cousin Holtz again to the rescue. But back then I knew nothing about what was going on.”

But when Quinn walked into the suite at the Fontainebleau, he knew everything. He called the front desk and asked for another suite; can’t have your honeymoon on somebody else’s hot mattress. Max had abdicated and Renata was now a bleached blonde (under that occasional blond wig), free of Batista and Robles, and reunited with this new arrival, the husband Quinn, but unable to hear anything he said. She stepped into her bridal lingerie, crotchless, and from the moment they touched in the new bed she delivered every element of passion in her repertoire, spoke to him in the language of love she had been learning since puberty, and convinced him that he was all there was in the world for her, that they’d be together forever, nothing could separate them, she would die before leaving him, and yes, he felt blessed in reclaiming her, possessing her in their new bed was a union beyond loving—it was consummation.

And, yes, they would continue forever, beginning here and into a second day, sixteen hours of love and food and sleep and rum and more love. He would repeat in memory every phone call to airlines, police, hospitals, friends, the investigation that failed. But Max hadn’t failed. He’d found her through a Brazilian diplomat and launched the rescue without calling Quinn or Renata’s family (who knew where she was and told no one—out of fear for her). Quinn had actually called the Brazilian embassy and two dozen others: My wife is lost, are you giving her asylum? No,
señor
, call the police. Max sent her an exit package: foofy blond wig, white dress, white heels, white sunglasses (did Max know how partial the adepts of Santeria were to white clothing?) and told her to wear them tomorrow. He arrived at the embassy with Alfie’s friend Inez, who was wearing the same wig, white dress, heels, and shades, and ten minutes later Max left the embassy with Renata, the white simulacrum, while Inez changed into black for her departure.

“It may be I’ve been seducing Max since I met him, my dress too low with that young cleavage. I can’t blame him for coming at me if I did that, but I don’t love him, I repeat,
I do not love Max
. He’s gone to Cuba forever and we have his money and I don’t want his love. I’m sorry it wasn’t you who rescued me from villains, Daniel. I’m sorry.”

Quinn mixed a second nightcap for himself and Renata. She exuded calm, poise, a notable achievement in restoration after the Albany Garage, where they had gone at each other in a bout of brief, savage, self-vindicating sex and ended breathless, sweating, and temporarily purged.

“When did you first think about leaving me?”

“I got bored, Daniel.”

“I asked you when not why.”

“You were bored too.
El ladrón juzga por su condición.
Takes one to know one. We had never talked about ending it.”

“Easy. You pack your lingerie and go. I keep the house, you take the nine hundred thousand.”

“But that was yesterday. Today we have a second chance.”

“What happened today?”

“I decided you were behaving like an Orisha.”

“Changó?”

“Something like that. Subverting things. Throwing bombshells.”

“Who, me? I’m a reporter.”

“Matt said you were writing a bombshell tonight. And you wrote one about him yesterday.”

“I was doing a serious, far-out story on Tremont, but they wouldn’t print it.”

“That was the assassination plot, no? Matt told us.”

“The editors said they didn’t believe it, but really they were afraid of it.”

“Then that was a Changó story.”

“If so then Tremont was Changó. He was the one with the thunderbolts. I watched it happen and took some notes I can’t use. I’ll have to put them in the new novel.”

“Then it will be a Changó novel.”

Quinn saw new activity on the television screen and he turned up the volume. Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press secretary, spoke into a microphone: “Senator Robert F. Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. With Senator Kennedy at the time of his death were his wife, Ethel, his sisters Mrs. Stephen Smith and Mrs. Patricia Lawford, his brother-in-law Mr. Stephen Smith, and his sister-in-law Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was forty-two years old.”

Mankiewicz stepped away from the microphone.

The phone rang. Quinn looked at Renata who did not move. He answered in the dining room and Renata turned down the TV.

“Dan?”

“Doc.”

“Your niece Gloria’s in the burn unit at Albany Hospital, so is Roy Mason. Very bad fire.”

“Wait a minute, Doc.” Quinn gestured with the phone for Renata to listen. She stood beside him. “Go on, Doc. Gloria and Roy you were saying.”

“They were in Roy’s apartment on Van Woert Street. The whole house is gone. Man on the third floor died, firemen couldn’t get inside to save him. His room didn’t have any windows. Joe Crowley told me heavy flames were already going up the front and back stairs when they got there, and the Engine Two firehouse is only three and a half blocks away. Gloria and Roy went out a second-floor window with blankets, and the fall hurt them both. Dan?”

“I’m here.”

“They’re burned pretty good. Roy couldn’t talk. And they got some smoke.”

“Doc, the fire was set?”

“Too soon to say. And you know I can’t say that out loud.”

“But that’s what you think. You.”

“When you find fire in two separate places in one house . . .”

“Are you at the hospital?”

“I just got here.”

“Wait for me if you can. I’m out the door right now with Renata.”

“Listen, Dan, I saw them both. They’re hurt and they’re burned, but they’re not dead. I’m telling you what I saw.”

“Does Cody know about this?”

“No.”

“You got his number?”

“I’ll get somebody on it.”

“Things have changed, Doc.”

“Yes, they have. Look both ways at the crosswalk.”

George came down the stairs wearing his navy blue gabardine suit with a gray felt fedora, a solid gray tie, and his gray shoes with the black cap toe: the full dude.

“I heard the bell ring,” he said. “Are we ready?”

“That was a phone call, Pop. We’ve got to go out.”

“We’re going to the club?”

“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I have to go somewhere, but I can’t take you along.”

“I’ll stay with George,” Renata said. “We can’t leave him.”

“You’ve got to see Gloria.”

“I’ll see her. I’ll have Ursula take a cab and stay here tonight. She won’t have to do any work, just take care of him. He does what she tells him. She can make a pot of tea with one arm. I’ll pay her double. It’s more important for you to be there if anything needs to be done, things I wouldn’t know how to do. I’ll join you as soon as she gets here.”

“That’s good on Ursula.”

“You should do something with that money. You can’t ride around with it.”

“I’ll do something.”

Quinn, using a flashlight in his dark garage, its door closed, opened Max’s suitcase in the trunk of his car, separated a hundred and fifty thousand of wrapped cash, and put it in the cloth sack where he kept his road maps. He went down the garage’s interior stairs to the cellar and put the sack on a low shelf beside his electric saw. He found two soft rags and went back up to the garage and rubbed all fingerprints off the exterior and interior of the suitcase. He then did the same to the two top layers of the bundled cash. He had never touched the bottom layers. Max had. He closed and locked the suitcase and the car’s trunk, opened the sliding garage door, and backed the car out into the driveway. He got out and padlocked the garage, and then he got back behind the wheel and headed down Pearl Street toward the war zone.

He turned onto Van Woert Street to see the burned-out house. The once-Irish street was now mostly black. Two walls had partially collapsed into rubble and spilled into the street, which was wet and blocked by traffic cones. The ruin was three houses away from where George Quinn had been raised by the Galvins, cousins from Clonmel, after his parents died in the ’95 train wreck. The Galvin house was a three-storied twin of the burned house, the Galvins long gone from Van Woert.

Quinn had met them as a child, making the rounds with George as he collected or delivered numbers money; but George fell out with them in the late ’30s over an unpaid gambling debt. Quinn last visited the house in 1945 when he was a high school senior and went to pick up belongings George had left there in a steamer trunk thirty years earlier.

Quinn called Ben Galvin, who worked in the paint gang at the West Albany railroad shops, and was the only cousin left on Van Woert Street. Ben found the trunk in the attic, where George thought it might be, and there it sat in Ben’s parlor, open and empty.

“What’s he want with the trunk?” Ben asked Quinn.

“He doesn’t want the trunk. He wants the trophies he won in dancing contests, six of them. We talked about them last night. He said his patent leather dancing shoes and a tuxedo were also here.”

“None of them things were in it,” said Ben. “Only this stuff,” and he pointed to two books lying on top of a packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord, and a thick scrapbook jammed with folded newspapers. “Paper is all it is. Paper. That’s the lot.”

Quinn untied the cord and opened the packet: a manuscript written in ink on linen rag paper. He read the first line. “I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns . . . ” The scrapbook was fat with newspaper clippings about Civil War battles, about Fenian troops on horseback moving from Albany toward Canada in 1866, about Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. The cloth bindings of both books had been slit and hung loose when Quinn picked them up:
The Personal Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan
, 1888, and
Going to See the Hero
by Daniel Quinn, 1872. Ben bent over to watch Quinn’s hands closely as he handled the books.

“You knew about these?”