He thought. He had no answers, but he had suspicions that started off as vapors then took on human shape, like evil genies, and the more he thought the madder he got. He was surprised at his own grit when, around ten-thirty, he called Joey Goldman and said they had to talk, right now, at his cottage, and to bring along Vincente.
39
"Giovanni," said Bert the Shirt, "what the hell are we doin' here?"
The chihuahua looked up from its ashtray-ful of dog food mixed with flaxseed. It blinked its enormous eyes that were milky with cataracts, then went back to its tardy dinner.
Bert got up from the foot of the hotel bed and strolled over to the window. Down the side street, past the darkened theater marquees, he saw the lights and billboards of Times Square. A gigantic ad for color film showed a ski jumper flying off the sign and heading skyward; endless news briefs spelled out in bulbs wrapped themselves around an alabaster building. At sidewalk level, dented wire trash cans lay tumbled in the gutters; homeless people hunkered down on slabs of cardboard tucked into doorways; patches of filthy snow survived in places reached by neither sun nor shovel. The retired mobster put his hand on the cold glass; it left a print in frost.
It had not been a good day for Bert the Shirt. After the disaster of Perretti's, he'd had himself driven to the Airline Diner, near La Guardia, a sometime hangout for old family friends. He was discreetly told that Tony Matera hadn't been around in weeks, and Sal Giordano came in occasionally but seemed to be spending more time in the Village. So Bert directed the Haitian cabbie to Manhattan, where he poked his head into a couple of linguine joints, then made inquiries at a pasticceria three steps down from the sidewalk on Carmine Street. There he learned with a sinking heart that he'd missed Sal by maybe twenty minutes; he'd been coming in most days for morning coffee— morning, for Sal, commencing around noon.
Bert's cab fare was nearing a hundred twenty dollars by then, and he knew he had caught a cold. He'd caught it at the airport; he knew the precise instant it happened: as he trudged coatless, with a sweaty back, to the taxi line. The cold was under his right shoulder blade; he felt it knotted there, radiating out to chest, throat, stomach. He'd told the driver to head uptown; he wanted to get a hotel room and lie down.
Manhattan hotels did not take dogs, even dogs in carriers, and after being turned down twice, Bert ditched the chihuahua's cage at curbside and held the little creature under his coat; white hairs the length of eyelashes had come off on his mohair suit. He checked into a semidump called the Stafford, was shown to this room, whose water-stained wallpaper was like a foulard tie one wouldn't wear. He'd gotten comfortable, then decided to work the phone.
It was at that point he realized he had no one to call. No wife, no girlfriends. No buddies, no colleagues. No business associates, no people he'd been asked to send regards to. No one. What he felt at realizing this was not loneliness, exactly, but a dislocation so intense that it was itself a kind of death, a numbing transport to a realm of silent shadows, a sphere where there were movements but no events. He felt like he'd outlived all things familiar; he felt like he'd outlived himself, was watching his mortal shell from some great distance.
He was slightly lightheaded; he was probably running a fever. He took a nap, slept too long, woke up around 8 p.m. Now it was nearly eleven and he was thoroughly disoriented in time as well as place. He stood at the frosty window, looking with recognition but no connection at the narrow slice of nighttime city.
Then he sneezed. It was a racking sneeze that squeezed his chest and burned his eyes, and it was echoed by a tiny sneeze from floor level, a chihuahua sneeze followed by a snort and a shake of droopy whiskers. Dog and master sniffled, crinkled up their noses, and looked earnestly at each other with glazed and rheumy eyes.
Arty was sitting in the middle of his living room, on an ancient vinyl hassock whose splitting seams leaked oily straw. He'd put his bag of ice away; his ankle was just barely swollen, his bare instep faintly discolored with a purplish tinge like that of spoiled meat. "I'm trying to be logical," he was saying. "I'm trying not to be paranoid. But really, what else could it be?"
Neither Joey nor Vincente answered right away. Joey had been perched on the edge of a wicker chair. Now he sprang up and walked the length of a worn hemp rug; his stride took him almost to the ratty table from which the notebooks had been stolen. Vincente sat far back on the rattan settee. He sat very still and barely seemed to be breathing. His black eyes had settled deep into their bony sockets, his brows hung down like mossy eaves to hide them.
"Debbi had no business saying anything," Joey said at last. He said it not to Arty but to his father; it had the flat and basic sound of a family closing ranks, turning its doors and windows inward toward some somber courtyard where visitors were not allowed.