Immoral Certainty (36 page)

As she sang, she heard the rattle of a heavy lock being opened and the squeak of hinges. In a minute, she gradually became aware of a presence hovering near her, a soft breathing, a change in the pressure of the air currents on her cheek, and the smell of frying. She stopped singing. Silence and then a chair scraped and Alonso turned on the light.

The overhead light was dim but it dazzled her. When her vision cleared she saw that he was carrying a brown bag. He said, “I brought lunch.”

“Oh, is it lunchtime already? What did you get?”

“Cheeseburgers and french fries and chocolate milk,” he replied, unwrapping these things.

He pulled his chair closer and made as if to lift her head up and bring the cheeseburger to her mouth, but she whined and turned her head away.

“What’s the matter? I thought you liked cheeseburgers.”

“I love cheeseburgers, Alonso, but I want to eat them myself, with my own hands. Couldn’t you untie me? Just my hands?”

He looked doubtful. “I’m not sposed to.”

“Come on,” Marlene urged. “What am I gonna do, beat you up and escape? You’re a great big boy and I’m just a girl.”

He considered this for a while, chewing his puffy pink lips. Then he said, “OK. But don’t tell, all right?”

She smiled at this and nodded for all she was worth and he reached over her and untied the ropes that held her hands to the cot. He smelled faintly of some light and distressingly familiar perfume. Baby powder, she realized with a shock, and something sweeter and not as wholesome underneath it.

Then he handed her the food and watched her as she tore into it. “Mmmm, chocolate milk,” she said through a full mouth. “I used to love this when I was a kid. St. John Bosco was my favorite saint because I thought he invented chocolate milk.”

Blank look.

“Because of Bosco—you know, chocolate syrup.”

“What’s saints?” he asked.

“Saints? You know,
saints
—people who were very holy and had special grace of God, and intercede for us in Heaven.”

Alonso frowned. “We don’t like that,” he said, with a dull finality she decided not to challenge. Catechism class could wait.

“No, I guess not,” said Marlene quietly. The giant continued to watch her as she finished her meal. She licked the grease from her fingers and then said, “Well, Marlene needs to go potty now. Could you untie my feet?” Be polite and others will be polite to you. Sister Marie Augustine, she thought, I hope you knew what you were doing.

He loosened her ropes and led her, wrapped in her blanket and grasped tightly by the arm, out of the coal cellar through what appeared to be a furnace room, past a heavy door with a big outside hasp and padlock, and down a dim corridor.

Off this corridor was the toilet. Marlene had shameful drug-dimmed memories of being carried to this room and placed on the toilet while her captor watched. Now when she started to close the door, Alonso stepped forward and stood dumbly on the threshold.

“Can’t I have some privacy?”

“I want to watch.”

“You can’t! It’s naughty. Don’t you know that? Didn’t your Mommy tell you that it’s naughty for girls and boys to go to the bathroom together?”
This is the right play,
Marlene thought.
This is the weak place. He’s never had a real adult to deal with before, except her.
She had understood, almost instinctively, that the key to controlling Alonso was using the same tone she had used with her little brothers and their friends when she was eleven. It worked. He pulled back, his face worried and confused, and she slammed the door shut.

Later, back in the coal cellar, Marlene sat on the cot while Alonso played with his dolls. He seemed restless and irritable. The little dolls fought one another and conversed, through the man, in high-pitched angry squeaks. He broke off the game after a few minutes and placed the dolls between layers of tissue in a gold candy box.

He rose and came toward her. “I have to tie you up now,” he said.

“Alonso, please. I can’t escape. You have that big door with a lock….” She made her voice high and trembly. “And I’m scared of the dark.”

He looked confused. “You can’t be scared. You’re a bad witch. My Mommy said.” He said this with absolute finality and Marlene was not about to contradict him. Something flashed into her mind.

“Yeah, right, but, if you don’t tie me up, I’ll give you my evil eye. Then I won’t be able to do anything magic to you, or escape.”

Marlene saw his huge round face light with interest at this suggestion. “Really?” he asked.

“Sure. But only if you don’t tie me.”

He held out an immense hand and she removed her glass eye from its socket and solemnly handed it to him.

He examined it closely, openmouthed in amazement, and then carefully placed it in the inside pocket of his black suit jacket. He turned to go, then spun around on her with a fearsome scowl. “You, you better not try to run away, all right? If you run away, I’ll be in big trouble. I’ll have to squoosh you, just like him.”

“Like who, Alonso?”

“The little man. He stole a doll and it was my fault. Mommy said. And I got a licking and I had to squoosh him. I squooshed him with my feet.”

Marlene felt a rush of guilt. Junior Gibbs had taken her hint and died for it. She swallowed hard and said, “You’re really a good squoosher, aren’t you, Alonso. Did you squoosh a lot of people?”

The great head shook vigorously from side to side. “No. Only him.”

“Not Lucy.”

He looked hurt. “No! Lucy was my friend. But she got broken. I put them in the garbage when they get broken.” He smiled and said proudly, “That’s my big-boy job.”

She stared at him, and felt the smile curdling on her face. He gave her a little wave. “I hope you don’t get broken for a long time. I like you,” he said and walked out.

Marlene waited until she heard the sounds of the furnace room door shutting and the lock scraping against its hasp as he locked her in. She stood up and began to explore her prison.

She quickly determined that there was no longer any chute from the old coal cellar to the outside. There was a patch of relatively new brick to show where one had been in the past. The doorway from the coal cellar led to a room measuring about three yards by five yards, containing the dusty hulk of an old coal burning furnace that had long since been converted to oil. Next to it was a shiny new forced-air oil burner feeding into three wide galvanized sheet metal ducts.

The work looked brand new. There were still chips of glittering sheet metal lying on the floor. Marlene felt a thrill of hope. She recalled that on one of her early visits to the day-care center, Mrs. Dean had been supervising duct work. It must have been part of this furnace installation, which meant that she was still in Manhattan, probably in the basement of St. Michael’s.

She went over to the door and pushed on it without much expectation. It was firmly padlocked from the outside. No chute, the door locked—come on, Marlene, use your noodle! She paced back and forth waiting for something to enter her mind. It was warm in the furnace room and she had dropped the blanket. She looked down at her nude body. She appeared to be putting on some weight from all that junk food. Still, she remained pretty skinny. If there was a window, even a small one, she might be able to … suddenly she stopped pacing and struck herself on the forehead.

The ducts! She pulled Alonso’s little desk across the floor to the new furnace and stood on it with her ear against the warm metal. Nothing but the gush of the blowers. That was surprising. If these ducts led to the school she should be hearing voices or at least some indication of an active building. Alonso had said that the meal she had just eaten was lunch, but that could mean anything. But if there was no one in the school, it was probably late at night. She stood listening until her legs grew tired, and then jumped down.

She decided to move at once. Alonso had just left, which meant he might not be back for several hours, which would give her enough time to open a duct, crawl through, and run. She examined the duct joints, and found that they were held together by four sheet-metal screws. A screwdriver, she thought, there’s always an old screwdriver in a furnace room, sometimes two, along with the babyfood jar of assorted screws.

She searched with growing frustration, running her hands along the base of the walls, peering behind both furnaces, but nothing like a screwdriver turned up. There was a fuse box, but no cabinets to search. The only drawer in the place was in the little desk. She yanked it open. Some marbles. A comic book. A gold candy box. The sweetish odor that she had detected on Alonso seemed stronger here. She opened the box.

It was Alonso’s doll collection. He had five of them, each one dressed carefully in a different color, in clothes made from little scraps of bright cloth. They were not, however, as she had thought, miniature celluloid dolls. When she saw what they actually were, she dropped the box and staggered backwards, biting her lip to keep from shrieking in horror. Little fingers.

Guma had never actually met Giancarlo Ferro, but he had heard plenty about him, little of it complimentary. If Vinnie Ferro had been the brains and guts of the clan, Giancarlo had been in charge of cruelty. He was a heavyset, almost squat man with a face as round and yellow and cratered as the moon, a face to which his narrow pouched eyes gave a decidedly Oriental cast. He affected double-breasted suits in pale colors and sported a thin mustache, which explained his nom-de-street.

He really does look like Charlie Chan, Guma thought. They were sitting in the back room of a restaurant the Ferros owned off President Street in Brooklyn: Guma, Tony Bones, Charlie Chan Ferro, and Billy Ferro, an otherwise colorless thug, present only because family matters were being discussed.

Charlie and Tony did most of the talking, which largely concerned violence, chicanery, and sex in the Brooklyn streets of twenty years past. Guma was familiar with many of the names and knew some of the individuals personally. He had been part of that life. He found himself (uncharacteristically) wondering what had kept him in school and sent him to college and law school while all the referenced fucking, shooting, and stealing had been going on. Bad luck, was what he guessed.

The talk drifted on: The two mobsters seemed to have no urgent appointments. Guma grew bored and, since liquor was apparently on the house, he drank two Teachers’ on the rocks, and a Schaeffer. He tore little holes in a napkin. Suddenly he became aware that the hum of talk had ceased; the three men were looking at him expectantly. It was his cue.

“We know who did Vinnie,” Guma said. “And we’re gonna take him in.”

Charlie Chan looked sideways at Tony and a sneer twisted across his wide face. “Is he fuckin’ serious? Forty people saw Joey Bottles do Vinnie.” He glared at Guma. “You gonna bring him in? Go ahead and try. You gonna find forty people was tying their shoelace.”

Guma stared back at him. “Wrong. We got him already, plus Harry and the Bollanos. Joey’s wheelman ratted him out.”

“I heard,” said Charlie. “So what the fuck does that do for me?”

“We need another witness. Your guy DiBello saw it too. We want him to talk.”

Charlie snorted in contempt. “DiBello? That lame? He saw shit!”

“He saw it. We’re holding him as a material witness. All you got to do is call him and tell him to spill the whole story on Joey B.”

Charlie Chan came up out of his chair violently, shaking the table and spilling drinks. “What the fuck makes you think I’m gonna do that, asshole? Who the fuck you think you’re talkin’ to? You think I can’t take out Joey?” He turned to his other guest, his features now writhing with anger.

“Tony, what the fuck you doin’ to me here? You think I can’t handle the Bollanos. You think I need fuckin’ help from the fuckin’ D.A.?”

Tony smiled icily and said, “Guma, why don’t you wait in the car?”

Half an hour later, the door to the white limo opened and Tony Bones climbed in. Guma had been watching
Dialing for Dollars
on the little TV and making free with the bar. He switched off the set and said, ‘That’s some tough guy in there. I was worried about you there for a while, Tony.”

After a sharp look to make sure Guma was joking, Tony laughed. “Yeah, he’s hard as nails. Fuckin’ guy! I’m trying to break it to him gently, if he doesn’t go along with this, put the Bollanos out of action, he’s dead. In a oil drum with an ice pick up his nose. No, he’s gonna get them. Fuckin’ ludicrous, right? Him going against Harry Pick? But he don’t listen, does he? The Ferros! The fuckin’ family hasn’t shown any sense in twenty years. At least Vinnie had brains. This one—
un’ scimmia, un scicco!”

“So he won’t?”

“He will, he will—what d’you think, I can’t roll a scumbag like Charlie? Yeah, he’ll do it. You know what I told him? He’d have a better chance to put it to Joey, if Joey was in the slams. He figures, if there’s no Bollanos left outside, Joey won’t have no cover inside. Like Joey needs cover.”

“He doesn’t know Big Sally’s going to walk?” asked Guma with a nervous laugh.

“Hey—that’s our little secret,” Tony answered, grinning.

“Right,” said Guma. “We going to see Bollano now?”

“Yeah, it’s all set up. I got to get this shit over with and get back down south. The fuckin’ spics’ll be all over me as it is.” Tony spoke to the driver and the big car moved smoothly away from the curb.

Guma finished his drink, and said, “Tony, one last thing … I need a couple of minutes alone with the old man.”

“Alone?” Tony frowned. “How come you want to see him alone?”

“Let’s say if he wants to stay out of jail, I got to put something in his ear. Otherwise the whole deal falls apart.”

“You just tell this to me now? I’m hanging out all over the street on this.” Guma was startled by how quickly the pleasantness had drained out of Tony’s face. He did not like looking at what was left.

“I know, Tony. There’s no problem. We’re under control here. But you understand, unless I can tell Big Sally a couple of things, he’s gonna go up with the rest of them.”

Tony calculated briefly and then slipped back into a cool smile. “OK,
paisan,
for you, I’ll see what I can do.”