Scarlet Night (3 page)

“And somebody else’s money most of the time. You’re going to a very distinguished collector, young man.”

Abel was still glowering in spite of his good fortune. Julie had never felt more hung up. Or wiped out: that was closer. All she wanted now was to get out. “Well, it’s been nice meeting everybody. Good luck, Mr. Abel.” She offered him her hand.

He caught it and hung onto it fiercely while he appealed to Mrs. Sloan. “Don’t I have anything to say about my own paintings?”

“Not at the moment,” she said amiably, and finally threw a few words Julie’s way: “Some of the other paintings are just as important, Mrs. Hayes. There’s a lovely little circus theme, number eight…”

Julie shook her head. “I’ll watch for your proletarian sketches, Mr. Abel,” she said and got her hand away from him.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hayes,” Rubinoff said. “I know what it’s like in this business when somebody outflanks you.”

“I don’t feel outflanked,” Julie said and pushed her way through the crowd. She tried to hold back the tears until she could reach the street. Anger and frustration…and relief?

Her ardor for looking at pictures had cooled considerably. The next move was up to Jeff. When he had an hour or an hour and a half to spare.

S
EAN O’GRADY WAS NOT
supposed to be there. He was, in fact, supposed to be on the high seas. But blind trust did not come easy to O’Grady. He had been beggared by it more than once in his life. But in the few minutes before the painting was sold he had paid dearly for his curiosity. He had thought at first that the blond girl was to be his connection when the time came and that confused him: he had expected a man. Which was the way it turned out in the end, a man of sorts. While the squabble went on at the desk, O’Grady had looked in the guest book on the table by the door. He had noticed the slick, dark, pudgy fellow sign in with a flourish and wondered then if he wasn’t the one: R. Rubinoff.

Who the girl was he had no idea: she had not signed the book. An innocent bystander. He was sure of it, her going out with tears in her eyes. There would never be tears in an operation contrived by Ginni. Nor surrender. He went outdoors after her, the sweat cold on his back, and watched how she carried herself going down the street. She knew how to walk, her head high and her limbs loose. Class. He was glad all the same that the fate of
Scarlet Night
was not in her hands. She hailed a cab at the corner.

He intended to go then. No one had noticed him. No one would have recognized him, for that matter, except Abel, who was blind at the moment with his own importance. O’Grady tried not to think him a fool. The lad was out of his element. So was Sean O’Grady, but in his case it didn’t matter. He’d not be going this way again.

He crossed the street, proposing to find his way to the nearest subway, but he paused, seeing a white Porsche at the curb with the license RR: R. Rubinoff. Parked illegally, it squatted like a white toad with an eye in the top of its head. He walked slowly around it trying to overcome a terrible temptation to do it some kind of violence in return for the anxiety the man had caused him. He was fortunate in the discovery of a beady-eyed youngster in tattered jeans watching him.

“Hello, sweetheart,” O’Grady said.

She turned her head away.

He stooped and looked into the car. Driving gloves. Naturally. And a clutch of white strings hanging brazenly from the side pocket to advertise a collection of summonses. He caught the man’s reflection in the car window as he came prancing out of the gallery. O’Grady didn’t know whether to run or stand still.

“You, there, what are you doing?”

“Looking,” O’Grady said and stood up to his full height, six foot one. Then he thought, to hell with it: they were going to meet later, why not sooner? “I’m O’Grady,” he said.

Rubinoff was short and soft, if not fat. He wore a blue silk suit fresh from the cleaner’s, but he looked a bit soiled nonetheless. He stared up at O’Grady, furious, his dark, protruding eyes slightly bloodshot. “What are you doing here?”

“Wondering if you’d give me a ride uptown, if that’s where you’re going.”

“We were not to meet until I contacted you.”

“I felt responsible for what’s in there until your arrival.” O’Grady nodded toward the gallery.

“I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”

“I didn’t like what I seen in there, Mr. Rubinoff. You came near to losing it to the young woman, didn’t you?”

“What happened in there is none of your business.”

The little street arab came and stood looking up at them from one to the other, hoping no doubt they would come to blows. And people had begun to come out of the gallery.

“Get in,” Rubinoff said.

O’Grady went around the car and when Rubinoff opened the door to him he got in backside first and swung his legs in, his knees just clearing the dashboard.

Rubinoff opened the roof vent. He started the motor, revved it a time or two, and took off, bouncing from pothole to pothole. After a couple of blocks he pulled over and stopped. He fastened his seat belt, easing it under his belly. He seemed unable to bring himself to even ask O’Grady where he was going.

O’Grady didn’t like him, but he was well aware that without the next step all that had gone before would be for naught. Or worse. “Look, man. We’re in this together, no matter who’s fore or who’s aft. It’s true, I wasn’t supposed to be there, but it’s a lonely business to be on the waiting end of a thing like this, and damned frightening to see how close it came to disaster.”

“You simply do not know what you’re talking about. If I had moved any sooner, there are people in that crowd who’d have said I was a shill for Maude Sloan, and that unfortunate young fool would not have sold another canvas.”

“Are people buying them?”

Rubinoff ignored the question. “I have a reputation for taste. As it is now, Maude thinks I did her a favor. She knows the boy is an atrocious painter.”

At least he was talking to him, O’Grady realized. He had never thought much of the pictures himself, but he put that down to his own ignorance. Rubinoff kept riling the motor: the Porsche sounded like a beast growling to be set loose. “I don’t think Ginni had a very wide choice, Mr. Rubinoff. And it was to coax Ginni home that her mother agreed to give him the show.”

“I know as much as I need to know,” Rubinoff said. “I only hope your Ginni has not been too clever for her own good—for the good of all of us.”

“Her calculations have worked till now.”

“So it would seem.” Rubinoff sighed and turned in his seat as though he could finally bear to look at him. “Sean O’Grady, is it?” He offered his hand, a wet sponge that O’Grady wrung lightly.

“Most people call me Johnny. Sean’s my professional name.”

Rubinoff put the car in motion. “Where do you want to go?”

“I’m going to McGowan’s Bar and Grill on Forty-fifth and Ninth, but you can drop me anywhere midtown.”

They turned north on Sixth Avenue.

“You’re an actor?” Rubinoff asked, harking back to the professional name.

“I’m a merchant seaman, but I read a bit of poetry now and then from the stage—you might say for political purposes.”

Rubinoff threw him a furtive glance. You had to know that politics was not his game. An aging fag, O’Grady decided, which was sad. Except that he had money, at least a part of which had to be legitimate. Otherwise he would not have been all that persona grata among the crowd at the gallery. Or with Ginni. This was no caper for a common crook. An uncommon one maybe.

Rubinoff said, “I haven’t seen Maude for years. She used to be a beautiful woman. Would you believe it?”

“I would, knowing the daughter.”

“Do you know her
well?”
He trailed the word out in a way that you could not escape its meaning.

“Intimately.” O’Grady laid it on heavier than he might have with another man.

“Oh, dear,” Rubinoff said, as though he didn’t approve of intimacy.

“This operation might never have come off otherwise, Mr. Rubinoff.”

The man looked at him with amazement.

“Watch the road,” O’Grady said and then went on defensively: “She knew who she was picking. It was no small matter, bumping another seaman from his berth at Naples in order to take his place. Otherwise, how would I have been on the docks here to get our boy through customs?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.” Rubinoff shook his head. Nor did he want to know.

But O’Grady was determined to rub his snooty nose in the dirty end of the business. “It was a good fight till the police broke it up. And in the end they did my work for me, giving the poor bastard a crack on the skull and carting him off to sober up before presenting him to the American Consul. By that time his boat was well out in the Mediterranean and me in his berth.”

“Remarkable,” Rubinoff murmured, patient now, as though deciding it was better that O’Grady unburden himself to him than to a stranger.

“Customs was the easy part. I’ve a friend, an inspector on the Brooklyn docks, see, and every time I’m overseas I bring him back a little vial of Rumanian pills for his mother’s arthritis. All I had to say was I knew the boy, and him and his paintings sailed through without a question.”

Rubinoff made a noise of approval.

Having told it all, O’Grady wished he hadn’t. It didn’t sound like much, laid out. “It’ll be a trickier business, the return trip.”

Rubinoff aimed the Porsche between a bus and a mail truck, both heading into the same lane. The Porsche shot out front like a spurt of toothpaste. Rubinoff drove like a teenager and he had to be fifty.

“You pulled that one off well,” O’Grady said, grudging admiration.

“Tell me a little about Ginni,” Rubinoff said.

“Have you not met her?”

“No.”

“Ah, she’s a wild, beautiful woman. Her father’s a count or some such. He’s well off.”

“That I know.”

“She plays him like a mandolin, coaxing money out of him for this artists’ commune she’s set up.”

“Are they all as talented as Ralph Abel?”

O’Grady laughed. “Don’t be too hard on the lad. Flattery makes fools of the best of us. Ginni’s up to a number of things I don’t think would interest you, Mr. Rubinoff.”

“I dare say.”

“She was on the other end of a commission I had once for an organization I belong to.”

“Shall we leave it at that?”

“If you like, but they were great days,” O’Grady said and lapsed into silence. All in all, they had been the best days in his life.

Johnny, or Sean as he signed himself, was the son of Irish immigrant parents who had nothing in common except their determination to make it to America. With that accomplished, and the seed that became Johnny implanted, the old man took off and thereafter showed up every year or so expecting a celebration of his return. Johnny’s chief recollection of him was chasing Ma around the miserable West Side flat trying to get her into the bedroom. Ma generally made it to the kitchen where she kept the bread knife handy. It was a wonder to O’Grady himself that he had not grown up like Rubinoff. He learned his reading and writing from the nuns as well as a love of Irish song and poetry. Everything he knew that was practical he had learned on the streets. When his mother died, their parish priest had been instrumental in getting him the promise of a job on a deep-water vessel and hence his maritime papers.

O’Grady was thirty-three, handsome in a rough, sandy-haired way except for the cold blue eyes, a feature he could not abide in himself. That his voice was rich and warm was some compensation. From childhood he had been devoted to the cause of a united Ireland, and it was in service to the I.R.A. as a gun procurer that he had met Ginni. She was his Italian-Yugoslavian connection.

He had made two successful runs. The third ended in disaster, and he had had to dump the entire cache into the Galway Bay. He had told himself, answering Ginni’s call in the present matter, that every cent he made on it would go to the Cause. And so it would. But deep down he knew that wasn’t why he was in it. Ginni had set it up, and he was her pigeon.

Stopped at a red light, Rubinoff took a long look at O’Grady. “Now that you have satisfied yourself as to my competence, what do you propose to do for the next two weeks?”

O’Grady overlooked the sarcasm. “Does it have to be two weeks?”

“At least. The show doesn’t close until a week from Sunday.”

“I don’t know. I’m damn near broke financing myself.”

“You’re not to go near the gallery again.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“Nor to get in touch with me. When I’m ready I’ll contact you. You ought not to be in the city at all.”

“It’s my home, man. Where else would I be landside?”

“I understood you would not be landside, as you call it, until afterwards.” They moved ahead with the traffic. “That understanding was one of the conditions of my agreement.”

“With who?” O’Grady said.

Rubinoff kept his eyes on the street. “With
whom.”

J
ULIE WAS OUT EARLY
in the morning. She bought a dozen golden daisies with rich brown eyes, and then, at Pierre’s, two croissants which were still warm from the oven.

Jeff had dressed and made coffee by the time she got back; his valise was packed and standing at the door. She had either forgotten or not been told that he was catching the shuttle to Washington. She was sure it was the latter; he was sure he had told her, and both of them repeated that it didn’t matter. He’d be gone overnight and, since they were to have dinner the following evening at the Alexanders,’ they arranged to meet there, Jeff not knowing at what hour he would get back.

Julie opened the shutters on the back windows after he had gone, and looked out over the straggly garden to where the machines were already humming in the factory across the way. A long row of dark Puerto Rican women worked on pieces of fabrics that would turn into some dress manufacturer’s fall line. At lunchtime when the machines were off, you could hear their radios—salsa, calypso, and rock. You could hear their laughter and their harsh, excited voices. Julie thought about Mrs. Rodriguez over the shop on Forty-fourth Street where she planned to go later. She wondered if Juanita, the child with Orphan Annie eyes, would be out front to greet her.