Scarlet Night (8 page)

“What else besides pornography, do you think?”

“Real estate, restaurants, nightclubs…Mind, it’s all hearsay. And I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it’s legitimate. By now. Julie, some very nice homes and places of business in this crazy town are built in old stables somebody once cleaned out.”

“Like the New Irish Theatre,” Julie said. A building in the far-west Fifties familiar to them both.

Mr. Bourke nodded. “But on a warm day you still smell the horse manure.”

Julie walked over to the newspaper branch of the public library and found it closed. Thursday. From there she went to the New York Times building, stopping for an Orange Julius and a pizza on the way. She spent the afternoon looking up assorted Romanos in the
Times
index. Not having a first name for him she could not be sure of her man until she found a
Sweets
in parentheses: A. A. Romano. In the end she found but one entry: he had contributed a hundred thousand dollars to Columbia University Medical School. All the news fit to print.

Since Jeff was not going to be home for dinner, she decided to go back to Forty-fourth Street. Then, remembering it was Thursday, the day of the memorial Mass for Pete, she decided to go on to St. Malachy’s first.

Mrs. Ryan touched her shoulder with the back of her hand to move her further into the pew, bobbed toward the altar, and eased herself down next to Julie, settling her behind on the edge of the seat. Julie admired people who knelt up straight as saints. Her mind wandered off in search of the Judy Collins song she had liked so much when she was at Miss Page’s school…“The simple life of heroes, the twisted life of saints…” It wasn’t that Julie was a Catholic. She wasn’t anything. But she sometimes wished she were.

On the church steps afterward, Mrs. Ryan voiced her fury at the coming conversion of the chapel into a Senior Citizen Center. “I wouldn’t put my foot in one of them for the world, a community coffin…Have you time to go around to McGowan’s with me and have a glass of beer?”

“I’ll walk over with you, Mrs. Ryan, but I won’t stay.”

“To be sure, your husband’s at home.”

Julie let it go at that.

“You don’t mind stopping a minute at the Willoughby till I get Fritzie? He loves the walk and Billy McGowan never says a word when I tuck him in at my feet.”

Waiting for Mrs. Ryan to fetch the dog, Julie thought about how you always wound up going a little further with her than you intended. She doubted she’d ever have opened the shop if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Ryan. Did she love her? This beery, bigoted old soul? Yes. She even had a certain affection for Fritzie who came out of the building just then like a wobbly torpedo on his nonstop aim for the fire hydrant.

Mrs. Ryan waited and then put on his leash, and the three of them walked at Fritzie’s option across Forty-sixth Street toward Ninth Avenue.

“I
T’S A NEEDLE IN
a haystack, Rubin, and I’ll spend no more time scratching my way through the phone book.”

“Softly, Johnny, softly. I’m inclined to agree with you, but it did give you something to do, landside, for a day or two, didn’t it?”

“I’ve never been more at sea.”

“I am trying to help,” Rubinoff said. “There’s a tailoring shop in Keokuk, Iowa, under the name Abel. But the news from there is not good. They gave me the last address they had for him—Paris. In other words, if he is going home, he has not informed the family.”

O’Grady thought about it. “We’d better give him a day or two more, and wouldn’t he get more of a welcome, arriving without notice—the prodigal son?”

“It’s maddening. I should not have allowed myself to become involved in something like this. I may yet have to abort the whole operation.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Rubin.”

“I may not have any choice.”

“I’ll find the woman,” O’Grady said. He was at the window, staring down at the kids playing stickball between the rushes of traffic. There was one little devil going to get his arm broken, poking his stick at the wheels of the passing cars. “I’m going to hang up now. There’s a youngster on the street who’s going to get hurt if I don’t give him a shout.”

O’Grady opened the window as wide as it would go and leaned out, but the shout died in his throat. Coming down the street, like the empress of China under her hat, was the old lady with her dog, and alongside her, unless he was out of his mind, was the girl he’d been searching the city for. He grabbed his jacket and ran down the stairs where he stalled in the hallway to let them pass. It was the girl for sure. He crossed the street and followed them, no easy matter, traveling at the dog’s pace. He couldn’t even remember the old lady’s name but he could guess where she was going. At the back of his mind was the recollection of a girl she had told him about, the orphaned child of an Irish diplomat. She didn’t look Irish especially, and she sure as hell didn’t look like an orphan.

It was a long walk, the two short blocks from the corner to McGowan’s. It gave him time to change his mind several times over on how to proceed. Should he meet her square on after Mrs….Mary Ryan! He had it…after she introduced them? Didn’t I see you in a SoHo art gallery the other day? And what in hell would she think he was doing in a SoHo art gallery? Or should he pretend to nothing and let Mary Ryan do all the contriving to bring them together? As his mother used to say, if God had intended him for a thinker, He’d have given him the head for it.

Outside McGowan’s the two women parted and O’Grady followed the girl. Mary Ryan was safely put for a while. He’d observed it before of the young woman: she knew how to walk. It was a pleasure to keep pace with her. A few doors short of the avenue she stopped and spoke to a child with her thumb in her mouth. Then she put a key in the door of one of those shops carved out of the bottom story of a tenement building; she went in and closed the door in the child’s face.

People were parking their cars on that side of the street. Six o’clock. O’Grady watched for a minute or two and then crossed over, lingering near a car he could pretend was his if he had to, and took a long look at the building. She couldn’t be the one Mary Ryan said told fortunes. Or could she? There was no sign on the place and the windows were hung full-length with green curtains. He could see a light shining through but nothing more. The child had her nose to the glass to where there might be a part in the curtains.

“Señor down there, hello!”

O’Grady looked up. From the second-story window a woman was smiling at him, a glint of gold in her smile and in the comb at the crown of dark hair, and her cheeks as red as a bloody sunset. He had seen her like in a hundred windows, the sailor’s first welcome landing on perilous shores. Jesus.

“You are looking for someone, señor?”

“No, no one particular. I used to know someone who lived in the neighborhood.”

“A young girl?”

“No. An old lady. She must be dead by now.”

“Señora Cabrera! She don’t live here no more, but the same arrangement is all right. I am Rose.” She gave a toss of her head that was supposed to fetch him up the stairs.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, edging away. “I’ve to see a man now I’ve got an appointment with.”

“Señor…Not after nine o’clock. Never. And not Sunday.”

He circled the block before he returned to McGowan’s and eased his way into the bar next to Mrs. Ryan. “It was on my mind that I owe you a drink.”

“You don’t owe me a thing, Johnny.”

“Is the girl I just saw you with the one you were telling me about?”

“Why didn’t you speak if you saw us?”

“I’m a shy fella when it comes to the girls.” Not to say a sly one, Johnny.

“J
ULIE…” THE CALL WAS
combined with a tap, tap, tap on the window out front, Mrs. Ryan’s wedding ring.

Julie paused on her way to the door long enough to turn on the floor lamp in the front of the shop. She opened the door to Mrs. Ryan and a man who stood head and shoulders above her.

“I was afraid you were gone, dear. This is the lovely man I told you about who reads the poetry, Sean O’Grady. Meet Julie Hayes, Johnny.” Mrs. Ryan stood back and looked from one to the other of them in triumph.

Julie saw at once what Nurse Brennan had meant about the eyes, their penetrating blue, as of a zealot priest. And yet the smile was warm. “Mrs. Hayes,” he said, as though the name were a benediction.

Fritzie skittered into the shop trailing his leash over Julie’s feet.

“May we come in?” Mrs. Ryan said.

“Of course.” Julie wasn’t sure why she hesitated. A feeling of…what? Not invasion exactly…of something being contrived to involve her.

“We won’t stop long, Mrs. Hayes,” he said, his voice deep and resonant. “I’m walking the two of them home on my way somewhere and Mary Ryan was determined you and I had to meet.”

That was it, Julie thought: a Mary Ryan production.

Fritzie poked his head out beneath the curtain that partitioned the room, yapped, and vanished behind it again.

“Look at him, right at home,” Mrs. Ryan said.

By the time Julie had closed the front door, O’Grady, no doubt so directed by Mrs. Ryan, was holding aside the curtain, and the older woman was sailing through. Julie followed but adjusted the curtain herself while the others hovered near the chairs. “Do sit down,” she said. “Will you have a cup of tea? I’m afraid I don’t have milk for it.”

“Nothing at all, dear. It’d spoil our suppers.” Mrs. Ryan gave O’Grady a nudge and pointed to the book on the table.

“The first thing I noticed,” he said, “Willie Yeats.”

Willie. All right.

Mrs. Ryan settled herself in a chair whose every joint squeaked. She removed her hat.

O’Grady waited for Julie to sit, and then seated himself, facing the door. He noticed the painting and let a small grunt escape. Mrs. Ryan turned to see what he was looking at.

“Isn’t he the observant one?”

“It took me by surprise, the one picture in the room,” he said. “It’s a colorful thing.”

Julie shot him a brief glance. He didn’t seem able to quite control his lower lip—a sensual mouth, but hardly strong. She wondered if he might be an ex-priest, but that was the association with Miss Brennan. She had the feeling of having seen him before, which was easily possible in the neighborhood. “It is colorful,” she said, utterly lost for small talk.

Mrs. Ryan said, “Julie brought it from Paris. She’s just back a few days.”

She might have told them the true story: it would have been something to talk about, but she doubted it would hold their interest. “It’s a grand city, Paris,” O’Grady said. “I’ve been there a time or two, but the prices are perishing.”

“What do you do, Mr. O’Grady?”

“I’m a merchant seaman, but that’s not how I got to Paris. It’s the rare occasion you can ship out to where you’d want to go.”

“And where would you want to go?”

He looked at her and away and back again while he mused, as though well aware that his eyes put people off. “Well, now, I’m partial to the coast of Italy—you can name the ports—Genoa, where Columbus sailed from, but you know that without my telling you, Naples and around to Brindisi—the Isle of Corfu which is a gem set in an azure sea…and I’ll go to Ireland, any port at all. I’ve business there now and then.”

Julie could almost hear the singing heart of Mrs. Ryan, for his voice was indeed musical and he did have a way with words. And you knew from the way he narrowed his eyes what he meant when he said of Ireland: I’ve business there now and then. The I.R.A. He wanted you to know that.

“I was telling Johnny about your father, I hope you don’t mind. None of the personal things, mind, only that you hadn’t seen him since you were an infant and him having to do with the Irish government. Johnny is well connected over there. Was it the U.N. he was at, Julie?”

“It was not the U.N.,” Julie said, furious with the old gossip. “And I do mind.”

“Ah, I’m a blathering old woman. We’ll say no more about it.”

“Ireland wasn’t admitted to the United Nations until 1955,” O’Grady said, “with them holding her and Spain hostage you might say for countries the Russians wanted in. Have you ever been in Spain, Mrs. Hayes? There’s a wild country for you. They’ve still got gypsies camping around.”

“Are there none left in Ireland?” Mrs. Ryan wanted to know.

“A few in the west, but they’re called travelers now. In my mother’s day they were tinkers. If you call them that now they take grave offense. ‘If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no use for tinkers’ hands.’ I used to wonder what the devil she meant by that.”

“What did she mean?” Julie asked.

“The tinkers went around in their caravan from village to village mending the pots and pans.”

“Oh.”

“Shall we go, Mary Ryan? We’re keeping the girl from whatever she was doing.”

“There used to be a gypsy woman in this very shop before Julie and I discovered it empty. Do you remember the day, dear?”

“All too well.”

Mrs. Ryan pursed her lips and lowered her eyes. She groped around her legs for the dog’s leash. Julie almost regretted her sharpness. But not quite.

“When I grew up here on the West Side,” O’Grady said, “It was nearly all Irish. You had to go to Harlem to find a Hispanic.”

“I’d have thought you were born in Ireland, Mr. O’Grady.”

He leaned forward and said, with a self-deprecating smile, “I’m a professional Irishman.”

Julie had to laugh, something that cheered Mrs. Ryan considerably.

“I should never have taken off my hat, but I can’t hear well with it on, and I didn’t want to miss a thing you two would have to say to each other.”

“You can only rehearse yourself, Mary Ryan, unless you’re going to write a script.”

“Isn’t that the truth? You never know what people are going to say. But I’m glad you got on.”

Had they got on? Mrs. Ryan was always a step ahead in her manipulation. A nice Doctor word. Julie got up before Mrs. Ryan could change her mind about going.

O’Grady gave a sharp whistle for the dog. He could have saved his whistle, for all the attention Fritzie paid it: he was a city dog, born and bred.