The Betsy (1971) (34 page)

The blond girl reappeared in the doorway. A surprised expression chased the bored look from her face as she saw me. She looked over my shoulder. “Did anyone just come in?”

“No,” I answered. “I just threw out a cigarette.”

She looked at me. “Are you waiting for someone else?”

“No,” I said. “Still waiting for Mr. Simpson.”

“Wasn’t his secretary out to see you?”

“No.”

“Damn!” she said, a hopeless look coming into her face. “This is the most disorganized place I ever worked in. She was supposed to come out and tell you he was out of town.”

I looked at her. “Is he?”

“Mister,” she said in a disgusted voice, “the way things are run around here, he might be the next man on the moon for all I know.”

She slammed her way back into the inner office and I left. The daylight had almost gone while I was waiting and I stopped to light another cigarette on the steel landing before starting down the steps. I supposed that it had been naïve to expect that Simpson would have seen me under any circumstances. Not after the way he took off from Weyman’s office the other day. From beneath the steps I heard the voices of the pressmen leaving their work as I walked down.

The voice came from behind me as I reached the bottom step. “Hey, buddy, got a match?”

“Sure,” I said, turning around. From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a large hamlike fist coming at my face.

Instinctively I started to duck. But not fast enough. The fist exploded into my face with all the force of a trip-hammer. I felt myself begin to fall backward, a shower of sparkling lights dancing before my eyes. I shook my head groggily, trying to clear my vision.

Hands grabbed me by the shoulders and began to drag me back into the alley. Even then I didn’t suspect that it was anything more than a mugging. I tried to tell them that my wallet was in my back pocket but my lips felt paralyzed and couldn’t move.

I felt myself being propped against the building wall. I managed to squint at them through half-shut eyes. There were three of them but I couldn’t see their faces. It was too dark.

Then the pain began. Slow. Deliberate. Methodical. And professional. In my ribs, my stomach, my guts, my balls. I slid down the wall slowly and the pain began again on my face. I felt it bursting against my ears, nose and mouth, and I could taste the warm blood pouring back into my mouth as I sank to the ground.

And still I didn’t lose consciousness while they put the boot to me. There was a distant nagging thought dragging in the back of my head.

Someone had warned me to be careful. But I couldn’t remember who. Somebody had said I would learn they could play rough and dirty. But I couldn’t remember who.

I started to pick myself up. I got as far as my knees and was beginning to straighten up when I saw the heavy boot.

There was nothing I could do about it. It caught me under the chin and I felt myself lift into the air and somersault backward into the wall.

I was almost happy to find that night finally had come.

 Chapter Eight

In the distance I heard the girl crying. “Angelo! Angelo!” I felt her warm tears spilling on my face. Slowly I fought my way up to her.

In the night her white, frightened face was very close but her features seemed blurred through my puffed and swollen eyes. I felt her arm go under my head and draw me close to her breasts. The tears kept spilling on my face as she held me there, rocking back and forth as she knelt.

“Cindy.” My voice was an alien croaking sound that came from my throat. “Help me up.”

“Don’t move,” she whispered. “You’re hurt. Let me call an ambulance.”

I tried to shake my head but there was too much pain. “No!” I tried to push myself up. “Take me home. My father is a doctor.”

“Angelo, please.”

“Help me up!”

She responded to the urgency in my voice and put an arm under my shoulders. I almost screamed when I felt the pressure against my sides as she pulled at me. It seemed like hours but she finally had me on my feet, my back supported by the building.

“Don’t walk,” she said. “Let me bring the car back here.”

I nodded.

“Can you stand?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes,” I rasped.

She looked into my face for a moment. I don’t know what she saw there but a moment later she turned and I could hear her footsteps running down the alley. I didn’t look after her because it hurt too much to turn.

Again time seemed to drag and there was the vacuum of space churning around in my head. Then I heard the heavy throat of the Maserati coming toward me, its bright white headlights cutting up the dark. I blinked with the pain of it.

She was a shadow coming around the car and opening the door. She came toward me. “Can you put an arm around my shoulder?” she asked.

I raised my arm and she slipped under it. I let my weight rest on her and we made the half mile to the door. She turned me around and let me slip to the seat back first, then she picked up my feet and put them in the car. Quickly she buckled the seat belt around me and let the seat back down gently until I was almost stretched out. “You all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I grunted. In the reflected light I could see bloodstains all over the front of her dress.

She closed the door and came round to the driver’s side and got in. She leaned across me to press down the door lock.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I ruined your dress.”

She didn’t answer. Instead she reversed the car out of the alley and turned back toward Michigan Avenue. “Now, where do we go?”

Very carefully and very explicitly I gave the directions to my parents’ house. I felt a hole in my mouth with my tongue where some teeth used to be. I hoped at least they were caps and not some of the few I had left.

She moved onto the avenue. “Now you rest,” she said.

I closed my eyes, then opened them. “How did you find me?”

Her eye stayed on the road. “By five thirty, when you hadn’t come back, I got curious. The building was completely dark and I had seen everyone go home. So I went around the back, up the stairs and tried the door. It was locked. I knocked. No answer. Then I heard you moan. I ran down the steps and found you behind the corner of the building.” She stopped for a light and looked down at me. “Now, no more talking until I get you home. Rest.”

I closed my eyes and sank back into the dark. I opened them again as the car came to a stop in the driveway of the house.

“I’ll help you out,” she said, opening my door and reaching in for me.

We managed to get my feet out of the car but I couldn’t make it any further. Even with her help, the pain wouldn’t let me walk. I clung to the car door. “Ring the bell,” I said. “Gianno will help me.”

She ran up the steps and pressed the doorbell. A moment later the entrance lights came on and Gianno opened the door. All she could manage to say was my name when he was down the steps and picked me up in his arms as if I were still the baby he used to carry around.

“Dottore! Dottore!”
he shouted at the top of his lungs as we entered the house. “Angelo, he is hurt!”

My mother was the first one there. She took one look at me and clutched a fist to her mouth.
“Figlio mio!”
she cried. “What have they done to you?”

My father was right behind her. He took one look at me. “Carry him into my office,” he said, his face settling into grim lines.

Gianno carried me through the house to the wing that Father used as his office when he saw patients at home. We went into the examination room and Gianno put me gently on the white table.

My father opened a cabinet and took out a syrette and hypodermic. “Call the hospital and have them send an ambulance right away,” he told Gianno.

“No hospital,” I said.

Gianno hesitated but my father shot a glance at him and he went right to the telephone.

“What happened?” my father asked quietly as he prepared the hypo.

“Three men worked me over,” I said, watching him.

I heard my mother gasp. My father turned to her. “Mamma!” he said sternly. “You wait outside.”

“But Angelo—” Her voice faltered.

“Angelo will be all right,” he said firmly. “I promise you. Now wait outside.” He looked past her at Cindy who was standing right behind my mother. “You too, young lady.”

My mother took Cindy’s arm. “You tell me everything that happened,” she said as they left the room.

I looked at the needle in my father’s hand. “What’s that for?”

“Pain,” he said. “I’m going to start cleaning you up and it’s going to hurt a lot more than it does now.”

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said. “I have to make some calls.”

“Who do you want to call?” he asked, casually looking down at me. “Maybe I can help you.”

I scarcely felt the prick of the needle in my hip as my father deftly slid down my slacks and hit me with the hypo all in one practiced motion. “First I want to talk to Uncle Jake,” I said.

“Uncle Jake?” he asked. I just managed to catch the note of surprise in his voice as the hypo knocked me back into dreamland.

Gianno and I were playing cowboys and Indians in the shrubbery at the side of the house. Right now I was Tom Mix and he was my faithful horse, Tony, and I was firing my six-shooter after the Indians we were chasing through the brush, just as we had seen them in
Riders of the Purple Sage
yesterday at the Saturday children’s matinee.

“Whoa, Tony!” I yelled, pulling at his shirt collar as we got to the edge of the driveway. “I think I hear a covered wagon.”

I jumped off his back and crouched down in the shrubs. My grandfather’s giant black-and-tan Duesenberg came up the driveway. I waited until it had passed us, then I jumped on Gianno’s shoulders. “After them!” I shouted. “We have to warn them about the Indians!”

Gianno galloped wildly up the driveway at the side of the car, holding onto my legs so that I would not fall off.

I fired my six-shooter into the air, the caps exploding and making a racket. “Look out, Grandpa!” I yelled. “The Indians are coming!”

Through the windows of the closed tonneau behind the chauffeur, I could see my grandfather. He was sitting on the back seat between two men. Another man was seated on the jump seat in front of them.

The automobile stopped in front of the house. Gianno and I waited for them on the steps as they got out. The two men who were on the back seat with my grandfather waited, leaning against the car as he and the other man came up the steps toward us.

I brandished my six-shooter in the air. “There’s Indians in the hills!”

Grandfather stopped in front of us. He was not a tall man, slight, almost small; in fact Gianno, who was five foot eight, towered over him. But it made no difference. No matter who was around my grandfather, he was the big man.

He held out his hand to me. “Give me the gun, Angelo.”

I looked in his eyes for signs of displeasure but I could read nothing there. They were dark brown, almost black like his hair, and unfathomable. Silently I handed down my six-shooter.

He took it in his hand and looked at it with distaste. He turned his gaze back to Gianno. “Who gave him this?”

“
Padrone
, it’s only a toy.” Gianno almost bowed but couldn’t manage it with me on his shoulders.

“I don’t care,” my grandfather said in a flat voice. “I thought I said no guns. Not even toy guns. They are a bad thing for children.”

This time Gianno managed to bow even with me on him.
“Si, Padrone.”

Grandfather gave him the six-shooter. “Get rid of it,” he said, then held his arms up for me. “Come, Angelo.”

I slid from Gianno’s shoulders into Grandfather’s arms, glad that he wasn’t angry with me. Grandfather kissed me as he carried me up the steps into the house. “Guns are dangerous for children to play with,” he explained. “Even toy guns.”

We walked into the living room where my mother and father were waiting. The moment my mother saw him, she began to cry. Awkwardly, Grandfather shifted me to one arm and put the other around Mother.

“Now, now, Jenny,” he said gently. “Don’t cry. Sicily is not the end of the world.”

“But you’re going to be so far from us,” she wept.

I began to cry also. “I don’t want you to go away, Grandpa!”

“Now, Jenny, see what you did?” my grandfather said reproachfully. “You made him cry.” He turned to my father.
“Dottore
, tell your wife to stop. It’s not good for Angelo to be upset like that.”

My father’s eyes weren’t exactly clear either, so I took advantage of his momentary hesitation to let out an even greater yell.

“I don’t want you to leave me, Grandpa!” I clung to him sobbing fiercely.

This one was so loud that even my mother stopped crying and looked at me. “He’s getting hysterical!” she said, reaching for me.

My grandfather brushed her arms away. “I told you,” he said triumphantly. “Let his grandpa handle him.”

My mother fell silent as my grandfather swung me around in his arms so that he could look into my face. “I’m not leaving you,
Angelo mio,”
he said. “I’m going to Sicily, to Marsala and Trapani where I was born.”

I was losing ground but at least he had forgotten about the six-shooter. I tried one more yell. “I’ll never see you again!”

Now the tears filled his eyes. He hugged me very tightly. I could hardly breathe. “Of course you will,” he said in a choked voice. “In the summer you can come to visit me with your mamma and papa and I will show you the vineyards and the olive groves on the side of Mount Erice where your grandpa grew up.”

“Can we play cowboys and Indians there?” I asked, my eyes round.

“No, that’s a bad game,” he said. “All games are bad where you play at killing people. You be like your father, a doctor, where you can save people, not kill them.” He looked at me, not quite sure that I understood him. “Besides there are no Indians in Sicily,” he added.

“Only good guys?” I asked.

He knew when he was licked. “There are only good guys in Sicily,” he said, giving up and resorting to his ultimate weapon. Bribery. “Besides Grandpa is going to send you a very special present when he gets there.”

“What kind of present?” I wanted to know.

“Anything you want. Just tell your grandpa.”

I thought for a moment. I remembered the movie Gianno and I had seen the week before. It was with Monte Blue and he played a daredevil race-car driver. “A real race car that I can drive?” I asked tentatively.

“If that’s what my Angelo wants, that’s what he’ll get. I will have a special Bugatti racer built for you!”

I squeezed my arms around his neck. “Thank you, Grandpa.” I kissed him.

He turned to my parents. “See,” he said triumphantly. “I told you. He’s perfectly all right now.”

All the while this was going on, the man who had come in with us was watching and kind of smiling to himself. Now my grandfather waved him forward. “Jake, come here.”

“This is my son, Dr. John Perino,” my grandfather said proudly. “And his wife, Jenny. This is Judge Jacob Weinstein who I told you about.”

Judge Weinstein, a brown-haired man of about my father’s height and age, shook hands with my parents.

“Don’t forget me,” I said, holding out my hand.

He turned, smiling, and took my hand. “I don’t think I can,” he said.

“I made a lifetime contract with Jake to look after family business affairs while I’m away,” Grandfather said. He put me down. “Now you go and play while your father and the Judge and me talk a little business.”

“Come with me to the kitchen,” my mother said quickly. “I just baked some cookies. You can have them with a glass of milk.”

She took my hand and began to lead me to the door. I pulled her to a stop and looked back. “Will I see you again before you go away, Grandpa?”