Nelson Ferrare looked at me through bleary eyes and scratched himself through his Fruit Of The Looms. Behind him, I could smell the stale sweat and spoiled-food aroma permeating his apartment like a fever.
“You want me to sit on this guy?”
Daniel Griffin looked terrified, but I don’t think it was Nelson he feared yet, though he should have. It was Nelson’s apartment.
“Yeah. Till midnight. Three hundred bucks.”
He held out his hand and I put the bills in them.
He stepped back from the doorway and said, “Come on in, old man.”
I pushed Daniel Griffin over the threshold and he stumbled into the living room.
“Handcuff him to something if you have to, Nelson. But don’t hurt him. Even a little bit.”
He yawned. “For three bills, I’ll make him breakfast. Too bad I can’t cook.”
“This is outrageous!” Griffin said.
“At midnight, kick him loose,” I said to Nelson. “I’ll see you.”
Nelson turned and shut the door.
As I walked down the hallway of his building, I heard his voice through the thin walls: “One simple rule of the house, old guy: You touch the remote control, I cut your hand off with an old saw.”
I took the subway back downtown and picked up my personal car from the garage on Cambridge Street where I keep it stored. It’s a 1963 Porsche I restored much in the same way Jay restored his Falcon—piece by piece over many years before it was even roadworthy. And after a time, it was the work, and not the result, that I felt a fondness for. As my father once said when he pointed out a building he’d helped construct before he’d become a fireman, “The building don’t mean shit to me, but that brick there, Patrick? And that whole row on the third floor there? I put them there. The first fingers to ever touch them were mine. And they’ll outlive me.”
And they did. Work and its results always outlived those who labored at it as any Egyptian slave-ghost will tell you.
And maybe, I thought as I pulled the cover off my car, that’s what Trevor can’t accept. Because the little I knew of his businesses (and I could have been very wrong; they were so diversified), his stake in immortality was very slim. He didn’t seem to have been much of a builder. He was a buyer and a seller and an exploiter, but El Salvadoran coffee beans and the profits they yielded weren’t tangible once the coffee was drunk and the money spent.
What buildings bear your fingerprints, Trevor?
What lovers retain your face in their memory with joy or fondness?
What marks your time on this earth?
And who mourns your passing?
No one.
I kept a cell phone in the glove compartment and I used it to call Angie on the cell phone in the Crown Victoria. But she didn’t answer.
I parked in front of my house and engaged the alarm, went upstairs, and sat around waiting.
I called her cell phone ten times in the next two hours, even checked my own phone to make sure the ringer button was in the “On” position. It was.
The battery could have died, I told myself.
Then she would have used the adapter and plugged it into the cigarette lighter.
Not if she was out of the car.
Then she would have called here.
Not if she didn’t have time or wasn’t near a phone.
I watched a few minutes of Monkey Business to get my mind off it, but even Harpo chasing women around the ocean liner and the prospect of the four Marx Brothers doing their Maurice Chevalier imitations to get off the boat with the singer’s stolen passport wasn’t enough to hold my concentration.
I turned off the TV and VCR, dialed the cell phone number again.
No answer.
That’s what I got the rest of the afternoon. No answer. Nothing but the ringing on the other end and the ringing in my head.
And the silence that followed. Loud, mocking silence.
38
The silence followed me as I drove back to Whittier Place for my six o’clock meeting with Desiree.
Angie wasn’t just my partner. She wasn’t just my best friend. And she wasn’t just my lover. She was all those things, sure, but she was far more. Ever since we’d made love the other night, it had begun to dawn on me that what lay between us—what, in all probability had lain between us since we were children—wasn’t just special; it was sacred.
Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.
Without her—without knowing where she was or how she was—I wasn’t merely half my usual self; I was a cipher.
Desiree. Desiree was behind the silence. I was sure of it. And as soon as I saw her, I was going to put a bullet in her kneecap and ask my questions.
But Desiree, a voice whispered, is smart. Remember what Angie said—Desiree always has an angle. If she was behind Angle’s disappearance, if she had her tied up somewhere, she’d use her as a bargaining chip. She wouldn’t have just killed her. There’s no profit there. No gain.
I came down the expressway off-ramp for Storrow Drive and then swung right so I could loop around Leverett Circle and pull into Whittier Place. But before I reached the circle, I pulled over, engine idling, and put my hazards on for a minute, forced myself to take some breaths, to cool the broiling blood in my veins, to think.
The Celts, the voice whispered, remember the Celts, Patrick. They were crazy. They were hot-blooded. Your people, and they terrorized Europe in the century before Christ. No one would mess with them. Because they were insane and bloodthirsty and ran into battle painted blue with hard-ons. Everyone feared the Celts.
Until Caesar. Julius Caesar asked his men what was all this nonsense about these fearsome savages in Gaul and in Germany, in Spain and Ireland? Rome feared no one.
Neither do the Celts, his men answered.
Blind courage, Caesar said, is no match for intelligence.
And he sent fifty-five thousand men to meet over a quarter million Celts at Alesia.
And they came with blood in their eyes. They came naked and screaming with fury and hard-ons and complete and utter disregard for their own well-being.
And Caesar’s battalions wiped them out.
By implementing precise tactical maneuvers, without any emotion whatsoever, Caesar’s garrisons conquered the passionate, determined, fearless Celts.
As Caesar rode in his victory parade through the streets of Rome, he commented that he’d never met a braver leader than Vercingetorix, the commander of the Gallic Celts. And, maybe to show what he truly thought of simple bravery, Caesar underscored his point by brandishing the severed head of Vercingetorix throughout the course of the parade.