Nine Fingers (28 page)
Authors: Thom August
In the House on the Lake
Saturday Morning, January 25
We walk away from the house toward a road that will take us north and east. There is slush underfoot. We are all wearing the
wrong shoes for this except for Jones, who always wears these black sneaker-boot kind of things. Within a hundred yards my
feet are soaked and frozen. We walk single file, except for Jones and Laura, holding hands in the back.
After another hundred yards, there is a single lane winding through the trees. I stop, look back at Laura. She nods her head.
It’s only forty yards but it takes us two minutes to slog through the mud. After a turn, the house reveals itself. It looks
just as impressive from this angle, silhouetted against the lake.
We come to a set of five stairs, leading up to a wide half-covered porch that wraps around the house. We all stop. Akiko and
Laura come up behind me, step to the front. Jones gives Laura’s hand a squeeze, and Laura turns toward the house, puts her
foot on the first step.
Before she can move, the door opens. Her mother, Amelia, steps outside. She is wearing a green silk bathrobe, tied loosely
in front. Landreau steps out from behind her in a black terry-cloth bathrobe. She reaches over and takes hold of his hand.
Jones steps up and grabs Laura’s hand. We all stand there.
“Hello, darling,” Amelia says, “you set off the motion sensors.”
“Sorry to wake you,” she says.
“We were already awake,” the mother says. She turns to Landreau and smiles. “In fact, we’ve been awake all night.”
“Yeah,”Amatucci says. “So have we.”
“I’ll make some coffee,” Landreau says.
Amelia turns to him, kisses him lightly on the lips. She turns to the rest of us. “You’d better take those shoes off—you don’t
want to be tracking mud in the house.”
We move up toward the porch. Jones lets go of Laura to untie her sneakers. Amelia comes up to her, holds out her hand. “You
must be Akiko,” she says, saying it Ah-KEE-ko.
“Yes,” Jones says, “Akiko,” saying it AHH-kee-ko.
“Ah, AHH-kee-ko,” Amelia says, correcting herself. “Why don’t you and your friends come in and warm up.”
As we step into what seems to be a vestibule, I turn to her. “We’re really sorry to have to impose on you, ma’am.”
She turns. Looks at me. “No, you’re not. You’re here to get Jack, aren’t you?”
“Actually,” I say, “we’re here for you.”
She raises her eyebrows, turns and looks at Laura.
Laura lowers her eyes. She is oddly deferential. She nods her head up and down, twice.
“We’re here to try to help your daughter, and her, uh, friend,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “And it’s going to take both Franco and me to help you do it, isn’t it?”
Amatucci is standing there.
“Franco?” he says.
“It’s a long story,” I say.
At Amelia’s House
Sunday, January 26
Jack’s story came out, eventually: the musical prodigy, the symphony star, Amelia’s engagement to the Don, their affair, his
finger. Ridlin told most of it, Amelia occasionally filled in the gaps, and the rest of us sat there with our mouths hanging
open. Jack himself said nothing to confirm it and not a word to deny it. Mostly he sat slouching behind Amelia, his gaze resting
longingly on the white baby grand piano in the center of the room.
The Akiko/Laura story got told, mostly by me, without either of them contributing much to it. I somehow got located sitting
between them on the couch, the two of them holding hands across my lap, as if I weren’t there. It posed a real dilemma to
my lap, which I fought by talking nonstop. Typical.
Then we went over the plan.
At one point, Amelia turned to Laura, and asked, “Is this who I think it is?” Laura mumbled, “Uncle Josef?” and Amelia held
up her hand. “They don’t call him that anymore.”
Ridlin sat up when she said this.
“What
do
they call him?” he asked, looking straight at her.
She paused, looked straight at him.
“They call him ‘The Cleaner.’ ”
I looked at Paul, and his eyes met mine. Nice. You got a mess? Call the Cleaner.
Then she dropped another bomb.
“And you’d better expect the Nephew to be there, too.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work now.”
“The Nephew?” I asked.
“Gianni Della Chiesa. Johnny Chase,” Ridlin said. “New front man. Supposed to be making all the decisions. Our sources say
different.”
“So do mine,” Amelia said.
Paul jumped in. “I don’t really read that section of the paper. What should we expect him to bring to the dynamic?”
Amelia looked at him, then looked away.
“Chaos,” she said. “That’s all he brings. Chaos.”
Ridlin turned to Amelia and asked if she saw any angles we could use, maybe talking to her ex, reasoning with him, maybe using
the Don against the Nephew, using the Nephew against the Don. With every alternative she just shook her head. We talked and
talked but there were no great insights. Ridlin was set on grabbing the assassin, and we never really pushed him on it. Akiko
was firm on her need to confront them head-on, and for Laura to be there with her. Laura herself sat there as calm as a cat
on a rock and did everything but purr. Landreau was fidgeting, but fighting it. Ridlin and Paul and I kept at it. We would
find these little threads, and we’d pull on them, but they’d break off as soon as we tried to tie them together. We couldn’t
seem to get past the setup. Every next step seemed to involve someone shooting someone else.
We broke for coffee, and everyone but Ridlin wandered away.
I stepped up to him.
“Can I ask you a favor?” I said, sotto voce.
He shrugged.
“Let’s find a way to leave Paul and Sidney out of it?”
He stared at me.
“I mean, they can’t really help, all they can do is get hurt.
It’s not their fight.”
“You wanna be the one to tell them?” he asks.
I looked down. “My idea was to tell them we’ll all meet up someplace, but the wrong place, far enough away that once they
figure out it’s bogus, they won’t be able to get to the real spot on time,” I said. “You know; my specialty: something lame
but simple.”
“I see your point,” he said. “What’s the Professor gonna do? Hit Joe Zep with his tuba?”
I nodded.
“OK, we’ll do it the way you want.”
Akiko and Laura came down the stairs, Amelia swung out of the kitchen with coffee and some pastry, and we all got back to
talking, but it went nowhere. Around midday, we all crashed. Amelia and Jack excused themselves. Paul leaned his head back
and fell asleep immediately—he’s always been able to do that, and I have always hated him for it. Laura and Akiko fell asleep
leaning on my shoulders, and I slumped down and crashed in between them.
Around three o’clock, I heard a sound and roused myself. I limboed out from between the two women without waking them. The
sound was coming from outside, so I slid the door open, stepped out, and eased it closed behind me. It was Paul, playing long
tones on his horn into a mute, the sound rippling out across the lake. I stood there, pulled the pipe out of my pocket, took
a couple of hits, and let the sound wash over me. There was no melody, just long individual notes, each one starting crisply,
then dropping down to pianissimo, building steadily in intensity, then slowly fading away until at one second the note was
there and at the next only its echo remained. It sounds easy to do, one simple note at a time, but it’s not. I studied the
French horn when I was a kid before taking up the piano, and it was precisely this exercise that made me switch; it took enormous
control, and I didn’t have it, and I didn’t have the patience to develop it. It can be boring to listen to, but at that moment
it filled a deep hole in my soul. My hand had been aching all day, and suddenly it stopped. I felt my breath go a little deeper,
my shoulders drop a little lower.
He must have sensed me there, because he turned around, without breaking his concentration, raised his right pinkie from the
horn and wiggled it at me. I gave him a little nod, and he turned back toward the lake, and continued for another few minutes,
working steadily up in his register until it must have required a phenomenal effort to hold each note. But each note was like
a rounded little pearl, fat and shiny and hard, even the high ones. Paul wasn’t one of those screechers—“hernia trumpet,”
he called that style—with him every note was full and ripe. That was because he worked at it, constantly, just like he was
doing right now. But listening to it, it didn’t sound like work.
That’s the thing about technique: when you really have it, it doesn’t sound like technique.
When he was done, he opened his spit valve, blew the moisture out, and turned around. A cloud of steam was coming off his
head in the cold air. He twisted off his mouthpiece, slipped it into his pocket, and tucked the horn under his arm.
“So what do you think, Vince?” he asked.
“I think you’ve never sounded better.”
“That’s not what I was asking,” he said.
I lowered my head. “Yeah…”
He turned to me. “Maybe if we just shot the Don and shot the Cleaner and walked, let Ridlin explain it all away…”
“And the Nephew,” I added.
“And the Nephew, of course, we can’t forget the Nephew,” he echoed.
Paul is usually a complete pacifist; do your own thing, live and let live. I had had the same thought but had kept it to myself,
and was shocked to hear it coming from him.
“What, you have a gun?” I asked.
“No, but I’m sure I could get my hands on one,” he said.
“You? Where?” I asked.
He looked at me. “I live on Forty-seventh, remember? All I’d have to do is walk one block to the north and wait for someone
to offer me one. It wouldn’t take five minutes, I’m sorry to say.”
“Hey,” I said, “I live off Fifty-ninth, all I’d have to do is walk south across the Midway and be in the same kind of neighborhood.”
“If you walked south of the Esplanade, you’d get a gun, all right,” he said. “Someone would stick it right in your ribs.”
“And you? Nobody would jack you?” I asked.
“Yo, yo, yo, you be forgettin—, man,” he said. “I’m a ‘person of color,’ dawg, or, at least, I could pass for one in the presence
of my brothers.”
“As long as you didn’t go flappin—yo’motherfuckin—gums, blood,” I said.
He chuckled. “Word,” he said.
“ ‘Word’?” I echoed. “I didn’t know you knew that one.”
“I must have read it somewhere,” he said, a slight smile creasing his face. “Which means no one uses it anymore.”
We had always been tight, he and I, and I hadn’t been sure if the recent craziness had affected that. My attention had been
on Akiko, on Laura, on Ridlin. Shit—my attention had been on
myself
. Paul’s focus had stayed on the music, where it had always been.
I shifted my weight, and changed the topic. “Would you really kill someone so Akiko and Laura could be together?” I asked.
“Check your premise, Vince,” he said. “I doubt they’ll be ‘together’ all that long,” he said. “Laura, from her history, doesn’t
seem to be the ‘together’ type.”
I nodded. There was truth in that, for sure.
“But would I kill someone so that Akiko could have the
right
to be together, with whomever? If the one I had to kill was himself a killer, who had killed Jeff and that guy Roger Tremblay,
and almost killed you?”
I nodded again. That was the question, when you got down to it.
“It’d be a ‘righteous shoot,’ as they say,” I said.
“And add one more condition to it: would I do it if I were assured I could get away with it? I’m afraid I have to admit that
I probably wouldn’t go to prison for twenty-five-to-life so Akiko could get herself some choice Eye-talian pussy,” he admitted,
and I loved him for it. “But if I could walk away, clean? I’d consider it, Vince. It’s Akiko, you know? And besides, it’s
a ‘rights thing,’ you know, and I’m kind of predisposed to be ‘down with that.’ ”
“Yeah, when you put it that way…” I said. And as I thought this, my resolve to keep him as far away as possible from
this mess only strengthened.
“But—”
“Yeah?”
“But I can’t see walking away from it, not unless a whole lot of people happen to die. And I’m trying not to think of scenarios
in which a whole lot of people happen to die.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Myself, every thought that goes through my head seems to push me one way or the other. I can’t seem to find
the middle way, that Taoist line, anywhere in there.”
“That’s because you’re trying to find it by thinking,” he said. “That’s not Taoist, that’s Confucian, or maybe just confusion.”
I laughed. “Yeah, OK, I hear you. So what do you do? I mean, what the fuck do you do?”
He took the trumpet, raised it to his lips, blew some more spit out of it.
“I was doing it before you interrupted me,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. That’s what I’ve been missing. I can’t slide back into the music like I used to be able to.”
He looked at me. “Why not?” he asked.
I held up my left hand, knocked the cast on the porch railing. “Can’t fly on one wing.”
He looked at me again. “Why not?”
“Why not?”
“Hey,” he said. “I’m just saying. It’s not like your right hand is perfect and a little practice would mess it up. It’s not
like there aren’t any options. I mean, Jesus, look at Jack.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but he’s Jack, he’s from another fucking universe, and I’m only me.”
He looked at me, paused, looked back down.
“This might be a good thing, Vince. We’ve talked about this before—how everything has always come easy for you, how you sometimes
have to handicap yourself, just to keep it interesting. You know—creating an impossible double major at Columbia; picking
an insane thesis topic even your advisors don’t understand; driving all around this crazy city in that Black Maria totally
stoned; always having to fall in love with the one woman you know is totally unattainable…”
“Yeah, well,” I muttered, thinking, “make that the
two
women who are totally unattainable,” and adding, out loud, “That’s me, making the simple shit difficult.”
“You can also make the hard stuff easy. But this is a
real
handicap. Might be interesting.”
It was bracing to hear that he was thinking of options, not obstacles.
Stop, I told myself. Be patient. There’s still plenty of time for them to kill you and relieve you of having to commit to
anything.