“So how do Americans fuck?”
“Fast. Like rape, except at the end they always say âI love you.' Real crap. Have you ever seen
From Here to Eternity?
A classic, dear Michelle tells me. She owns her own copy. Burt Lancaster on the beach on top of that blonde. Real fast. Awful.”
“Who's Burt Lancaster?” He grinned. He knew who Burt Lancaster was.
She pouted and turned away, resting her cheek on the right dragon's back. My princess.
“I'm sorry,” he finally said. “Sometimes I get . . . nervous, edgy. It's hard to relax sometimes.”
“I know.” He could feel her sighing breath on his bare chest. “That's why I never tell you anything until we've finished. But that doesn't seem to matter anymore. You're always this way.”
Shit. Don't pull this shit on me now. Please. “I'm sorry. Sometimes I can't help myself. Things will get better. Soon, I hope.”
“No they won't.” She pushed herself up and glowered at him. There were bitter tears brimming in her eyes.
She was so dramatic. She just liked to see him get upset. For some reason, women like to see their men get rattled now and then. Stupid. “Well, what is it? Talk to me.”
“Do you want the bad news or the worse news?”
He frowned. “I don't like these games.”
“D'Urso told his wife he's going to kill Antonelli.”
She settled down on her elbow, waiting for his angry reaction. He wasn't going to give her the satisfaction. Instead he looked up at the carnations. Fuck.
“You're not surprised?”
He stared at the carnations and wondered how you paint on velvet. “D'Urso told me he had something big planned. I guess this is what he was talking about. I thought the bastard was smarter than that.” He pulled Reiko's head back down onto his chest and stroked her hair as he pondered how this would affect him and his defection from the Fugukai to a partnership with D'Urso. If D'Urso was strong
enough to pull this off, it would be great for the slave business. The competition from Antonelli and Hamabuchi would be eliminated. They'd be the only game in town. But if D'Urso tried to get rid of his boss and failed, he could get caught in the crossfire of Antonelli's retribution. Nagai tugged on his earlobe. Maybe it would be better for him if he remained uncommitted to D'Urso until this power play was settled. It's never smart to be caught backing the loser in one of these things.
“Does D'Urso have any support within the family?” he asked, recalling his own attempt to have Hamabuchi killed and the supposed supporters he thought he had.
“I've heard D'Urso and Bobby discussing their friends in the family. Some of them are âreal good guys,' they say. They seem to imply that these men are more loyal to D'Urso than to Antonelli. They mention names, but I can't remember them. Italian names all sound alike to me.
Ip-pee, del-lee, roh-loh, roh-lee
.” She wrinkled her face in disgust.
“Did D'Urso say how he was going to kill Antonelli?”
Reiko shook her head. “He never discusses details with his wife. Dear Michelle usually gets hysterical enough with what little he tells her. I thought she was going to have a fit when he told her about this. She turned white. Later she warned Bobby that someone named Vincent would kill them first.”
Nagai nodded. Ah, yes . . . Vincent. Quite formidable, supposedly. Mashiro could take care of this Vincent for D'Urso. If Nagai decided to go over to D'Urso's side. If . . .
Nagai sunk down into the pillows and stared at the red carnations. But why was D'Urso even considering it? Hadn't he learned anything from Nagai's own big blunder? Still, part of him wanted to advise D'Urso so he could re-enact his own attempt on Hamabuchi and prove that it could have worked. But the Mafia practices a hard art: Force is met with equal force, automatically. Antonelli won't play the wise old master with D'Urso the way Hamabuchi had with him. No. This wasn't smart.
“I told you there was more bad news,” Reiko said, breaking into his thoughts. “Don't you want to hear it? You don't seem very concerned.” She didn't hide her annoyance with him. She hadn't always been this bold and testy with him. It was only after she started spying for him that she started talking back like this.
He stared her in the eye and considered a hard slap across the face to remind her where her place was. “I'm listening. Speak.”
“D'Urso and Michelle had a fight over me. He wants to take me out of the house and make me a prostitute in his whorehouse.” She said it like a threat.
“Have they told you to pack your things yet?”
“No. She wants me to stay with the child. But he's determined and he always gets his way. I'm telling you right now, though. I am not going to be a prostitute! I'll run away first.”
He stared at her. He didn't like this belligerent pushiness of hers. She'd picked that up in D'Urso's house. “You're not there yet. Don't worry about it until it happens.” He wondered if he could change her mind. Having a spy down at the whorehouse in Atlantic City could be advantageous. It wasn't as if she'd never done it before. Maybe he could convince her, make her a few promises. Not now, though. Later. After she cools down.
“He likes me, you know. I always catch him staring at me, saying little suggestive things to me.”
Nagai furrowed his brow. “Who?”
“D'Urso! He wants to fuck me. One of these days when Michelle is out shopping, he's going to do it. He's going to rape me.” She didn't sound worried. Just more of that threatening defiance in her voice.
“You never told me this about him.”
“Well, I'm telling you now. It's true. He wants me very badly.” She sounded like a little spoiled brat.
“If you let him,” he said slowly, “consider yourself just another slave. That's a promise.”
She pouted and whined. “But what if I can't stop him?”
“That's your problem.” Her face was on the verge of crumpling into tears. She knew he meant it.
He looked up at the branching cracks in the ceiling. They didn't look like anything in particular. He shut his eyes. He could've drifted right off, but he knew she'd wake him up as soon as he did.
He heard her sniffing back her tears. “What are you going to do?” she demanded. “This is serious.”
He opened his eyes and stared at her, annoyed with her badgering. “I'll decide what to do and when to do it.”
“But youâ”
“But nothing. Everything is under control for the time being. You're not in the whorehouse yet, and I happen to know that Antonelli is in Florida right now. D'Urso won't try a hit on unfamiliar territory.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“I know.” I was there. D'Urso wants revenge. He wants to see it, at least be near enough to feel it. Another mistake.
Reiko sat up and hugged her knees. “I don't see how you can say everything is under control. You haven't done a thing yet.”
“I don't have to do anything. If D'Urso tries to move you out of the house, we'll deal with that then. But as it stands, no one's bothering us. As Mashiro always says, let the attackers come to you, don't go chasing them. Until they bother us, we won't bother them.” But if I ever find out D'Urso is getting it on with you . . .
She reached across his chest and took a cigarette from his pack of Marlboros on the nighttable. “This sounds like the spiritual bullshit the karate teachers used to hand us in school. You going zen on me now?” She lit the cigarette, then tossed his lighter back onto the nighttable. It bounced off and hit the floor. She didn't bother to pick it up.
When she mentioned school, Nagai thought of that slave at the chicken factory, Takayuki, the one she went to school with. Had she been a ball-buster like this when the poor bastard tried to win her affections with English tutoring? She could be cruel when she wanted to be.
He glanced at his lighter on the cheap blue shag rug. “I'm not zen, just smart. A little strategic thinking works in these situations. Ask Mashiro about it sometime.”
She blew smoke out of the side of her mouth. “No thanks.”
“There's a lot to be learned from him.”
She didn't answer. He knew that she thought of Mashiro as just another thug in the gang, someone definitely below her status and unworthy of her consideration. But is a good woman worth more than a loyal man? A man of Mashiro's abilities? He didn't have to wonder. Mashiro didn't talk back.
She was pouting again, still hugging her knees, watching the smoke rise from the tip of the cigarette in her hand. He took the cigarette from her and stuck it in his mouth as he picked out a strand of her hair and slid it through his fingers, making a small noose with the
end. Squinting through the rising smoke, he looped the noose over her nipple and tightened it until she brushed him away. He laughed softly. Suddenly she threw her arms around him, burying her head in his chest and covering his tattoos with all that ebony hair. He smiled. This was what he liked to see.
“I love you, Nagai. All I want is for us to be happy together. That's all I want.”
He felt the tears on his skin, and he hugged her, sliding his fingers through all that hair. His smile faded. I love you. Just like the Americans in the movies, he thought. Burt Lancaster and the blonde on the beach . . . getting it on . . . getting sand in their bathing suits . . . just before Pearl Harbor.
He stroked her hair, looking at his cigarette lighter on the floor, listening to the traffic outside the drawn curtains. It must be getting late. Mashiro was waiting. D'Urso's wife would be expecting her home from her “walk” soon. It was time to go.
“WHERE'S THE RUSSIAN?” Tozzi looked pissed.
Gibbons slathered mustard on the two halves of his pastrami on pumpernickel as Tozzi made faces at his sandwich. Now what the hell was bothering him? “What's the matter?”
Tozzi didn't answer. He was staring at their waitress, trying to get her attention, but Rudy's Deli, like every other halfway decent place to eat in Lower Manhattan, was always mobbed at lunchtime, and she was busy taking orders at another booth.
“I must come here at least twice a week,” Tozzi grumbled, “and nine times out of ten I order the same thing, turkey on rye with coleslaw and Russian
on the sandwich
. And every time they get it wrong. They always forget to put the coleslaw on the sandwich, but today it's something new. Today they forget the Russian.” The waitress was rushing over to the sandwich counter now. Tozzi started waving to her. “Selma! Over here!”
“Normal people eat coleslaw on the side,” Gibbons said, considering the sandwich half in his hand. “Why do you have to have it on the sandwich? You special?”
“Because that's the way I like it, and that's the way I goddamn ordered it. Selma!”
Gibbons bit into his pastrami, wishing Tozzi'd just shut up and eat his goddamn sandwich the way it was. Who the hell wanted to hear Selma now? She was the reason he didn't come here all that often.
That sick cow face and the dramatic sighs and the breast beating as she cried on your shoulder with that same old story of hers. Jesus.
Gibbons ate as Tozzi kept waving and eventually Selma came waddling over, jiggling her D-cups, pencils stuck out of either side of the lacquered red hairdo that didn't move. “What can I do for you, hon?”
Tozzi explained his big problem in great detail. He sounded like some old lady complaining down at the Social Security office. Gibbons kept eating, trying not to pay attention, hoping he could ignore what he knew was going to come next, the sad tale of Lydia and Morris.
When Tozzi finished with his complaint, Selma shook her head slowly and clucked, pulling the sick cow face. She sighed and squeezed into the booth next to Tozzi, shoving him over with her hip. Shit. Here we go.
“You know Rudy never used to make these kind of mistakes,” she said with another long, dramatic sigh. “You have to forgive him. He hasn't been the same since Lydia left him.”
Gibbons looked over at the short guy with the bad toupee making sandwiches behind the counter. He didn't look so bad.
She sighed again, paused, then started her story. “That Lydiaâa beautiful woman, I can't deny thatâbut trouble from the word go. Never wanted to work here in the deli. She thought it was beneath her. Not even hostessing she would do. âIt's okay,' I told Rudy at the time. âWe can manage.' I mean, who needed her, the Jezebel? She couldn't pour a cup of coffee without spilling to save her life. And the few times she did work here, she just flirted with anyone who'd pay attention to herâand believe me, everybody paid attention to Lydia. Even my Morris, the schnook.”
Selma looked up at the ceiling now and rapped her knuckles on her chest a few times. “Six days a week my brother and I ride the Long Island Expressway at the crack of dawn to open this place up. Four-twenty in the morning, every morning, Rudy picks me up. For twenty-two years we've been doing this. So how were we supposed to know that back in Hempstead, my sister-in-law Lydia was keeping the sheets warm for that son-of-a-bitch husband of mine? Come to find out they'd been doing it for years, practically from the day that
bitchâexcuse my languageâstood under the
chuppah
with my poor brother. Can you imagine? We don't know nothing, Rudy and me. We're busy working here. Then one day the two of them troop in here just before the lunch rush and tell us that they're in love and that they're leaving together. Rudy's stunned, he can't work for the rest of the day. Me, I want to kill her. One of the dishwashers had to stop me, actually physically had to stop me. I had the bread knife right here in my hand. I was going to slice her up like a
challah
, the
farshtinkener
bitch.”