Dog Bites Man (4 page)

S
huj! Shuj!
(pronounced
shouesh
) and
Pusho! Pusho!
were Albanian, and the strapping young man who shouted those words was Genc Serreqi. Now, in the dark recesses of Central Park, he caught his breath and tried to calm himself, rubbing the front of his sweaty T-shirt to help untie the knot in his stomach. The knot that always came when there seemed to be a chance that his status in the United States might be challenged.

Officer Braddock had been right. Serreqi was an illegal, here on a tourist visa that had expired a year earlier. Prior to his travels, he had earned a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Tirana. Confronted with high, double-digit unemployment in his impoverished country, he had worked at a series of menial jobs, bricklayer the most dignified, until he had saved enough to leave.

Here in the States, he had hooked up with an acquaintance from home who worked as a doorman at a fancy Park Avenue apartment building. He was able to get Genc a job as the substitute handyman there and in another one nearby. The newcomer's skill as an electrical engineer had proved useful and he was in constant demand in both places. Within nine months he was able to rent a one-room apartment of his own in the East Village.

Serreqi worked on his English and diligently tried to read the throwaway newspapers available in the boxes on his corner, including the newly free (given away, that is)
Village Voice.
It was in the classifieds in
The Voice
that he saw the ad for a houseboy for a "middle-aged widow." This sounded more appealing to him than his handyman job; the widow was likely to be a better boss than
the rather disagreeable and demanding supers he reported to. And he knew that his good looks had not hindered his popularity with the housewives, if they could be called that, in the buildings where he worked; perhaps he would be popular with the widow, too. The job offered would certainly beat most of the other jobs available to him as an illegal: busing slots in marginal restaurants (those willing to flout the immigration laws) or drug dealing (not appealing, and dangerous besides).

The prospective employer turned out to be Sue Nation Brandberg, widow of Harry Brandberg. She hired Genc after the briefest of interviews, expressing indifference to his illegal status. "I myself am a Native American," she explained, "without much use for the United States government."

The new position turned out to be a comfortable one. He had his own room—the biggest he had ever occupied—and ate well at the hands of the motherly Jennie, Sue's cook. His duties originally were quite light, walking Wambli three times a day, doing some shopping and errands, fixing things up around the capacious brownstone on East 62nd Street.

After about two months, Genc and Mrs. Brandberg, on Jennie's night off, found themselves alone in the house. Normally Sue would have gone out with her cook away, but her dinner date that evening had canceled. Genc offered to make supper and the two ate together in the kitchen, washing down his veal goulash with a superior bottle of Chardonnay.

At the end of the meal, Sue thanked him for preparing it. Then, before he knew it, she was kissing him full-front and fondling his crotch. He responded, and nightly service in his employer's bed was added to his job description. Genc, at 26, was half Sue Brandberg's age but she was in excellent shape, with a sexy
figure. Now, leaving aside her affection for Wambli, she seemed to direct her passion and feelings toward the Albanian hunk who shared her bed.

Gradually Genc's stomach calmed down and he reviewed in his mind the horrid scene he had just fled. Who the hell were the three men in black suits, one of them noticeably drunk? Gangsters, most likely, though their appearance would have seemed more natural on Tirana's streets than New York's. The fact that they were armed did not surprise him; he came, after all, from a country where at least half the population was said to have weapons. Nor, as an abstract proposition, did murdering Wambli disturb him. Like most Albanians, he did not have any particular use for dogs; they were an extraneous expense in a poverty-ridden country. But as a very concrete matter, he now pondered how he would break the news to Sue about her beloved pet.

Making sure he was not being followed, he made his way home as he planned a strategy. By the time he had come to the steps of the town house he had decided to join Sue in bed (she would be waiting), have a more than usually passionate romp and tell her about Wambli's demise in the morning.

.    .    .

The night's adventure had taken a greater emotional toll than Genc had realized. Once he slid under the Porthault sheets in Sue's bed, and was toyed with and embraced by his half-awake mistress, he realized that he simply was not up for the sexual frolic that was part of his plan. She petulantly turned away after muttering crossly that perhaps he needed a dose of Viagra.

Genc quickly went to sleep. Sue, on the other hand, now fully awake and angry, pitched about for most of the night. By dawn she
had reviewed the whole course of her life, which had not always involved a king-size bed in an elegant Manhattan home, with a de Kooning
Woman
on the opposite wall to stare at. ("I'll never sleep alone again," her husband had boasted after he had successfully bid for it at a Christie's auction.)

Sue had been born as Marie Bravearrow on the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian reservation in southwestern South Dakota, beginning her life in an honest-to-goodness tepee, later upgraded to a secondhand house trailer when her father landed a construction job in Rapid City.

Sue had gone to the reservation school, where she was both admired and envied for her good looks and made fun of for her insistence that she would someday break loose from the reservation. To that end, she had entered and won the annual beauty pageant to select Miss Sioux Nation (long enough ago that it was "Miss" and not "Ms."), and then had been chosen as Miss Native America in the contest in Santa Fe. With long, deep-black hair and mysterious, almost Asian features, she was a striking beauty.

After a year of appearances at Indian-run casinos around the country, avoiding the crude propositions and furtive gropings made to or at her, she chose to use the prize scholarship money that went with her title to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York ("as far from the Platte River as I can get," she explained at the time). And by now she had a new name: no longer Marie Bravearrow, she was Sue Nation. The play on words amused her, though there was almost no one to whom she had explained it.

By then the dirt-poor days were over. (Drinking in Genc's half-covered body, she realized that he, too, had escaped deprivation; maybe her affection for him was more than just physical.)

FIT had been only the beginning of the escape. She had shown
real talent, especially for fabric design. By the time she graduated, she was being sought by the city's garment and textile manufacturers, her striking looks not hindering her job search. Brandberg Industries had made the best offer and she went to work for its Amy Reed division.

At first she had been little noticed as the junior member of the design staff, responsible for dreaming up fabrics for Amy Reed's midline clothes for career women—outfits that made their wearers look businesslike without resembling transgendered replicas of their male colleagues.

As the clothes became more and more popular, Sue Nation was featured in flattering stories in the fashion press and later in mainstream journals that were increasingly feeding their readers trendy pap about styles and clothes in lieu of hard news.

In the hands of Amy Reed's publicity department, she became a beguiling Native American princess, a direct descendant of Chief Red Cloud. (Her father, long since dead from the effects of fire-water, and her mother, more recently deceased from natural causes, were not around to correct the record.) She even went back to the environs of the Platte, to be inducted as a member of the South Dakota Hall of Fame.

Public notice brought private attention to Sue as well, most notably from Harry Brandberg, the chairman of the board of Brandberg Industries (or BI, as everyone called it) and the assembler of the odd cluster of businesses that it owned (from charcoal grills to burial caskets to the Amy Reed division). A
W
piece on Sue had caught his eye and he invited her to lunch at La Grenouille. The chemistry was good and Harry was proposing the next date by the time the cerises jubilee were served.

No fool, Sue had seen a possible opportunity to increase even further her distance from tepee life. She considered several relevant statistics about Harry: his net worth (in excess of $1 billion), his age (72), his girth (46 inches and climbing), his chins (two and a half) and his complexion (ruddy, ruddy red). From her handicapping she concluded that he would not be racing too much longer, so she was enthusiastically receptive to his advances.

There was only one problem: the reclusive little brown wren named Paula Brandberg, sitting quietly in the family nest in Chappaqua. Quietly, that is, until she learned of Sue's insinuation into her husband's life and even less quietly when Harry proposed a divorce.

Fortunately Paula eventually saw the light of day, or more precisely the bottom-line figure of the proposed marital settlement, and quietly flew away from the nest a sadder but much richer chick (her husband's anachronistic term for all women).

Once married, by a Native American federal judge in Florida (a nice touch), Harry proudly showed off his new trophy at every opportunity—charity benefits in New York and Palm Beach, movie premieres (BI owned a studio) and house parties at their new, highly decorated mansion (fabrics by Sue) in Salisbury, Connecticut.

Harry himself had gone through an interesting cycle after the marriage. Energized by his new partner, with sex of a frequency and variety that were not at all wrenlike, he basked in the reflected glamour radiated by his sexy acquisition. Then his excesses began to catch up with him—first a warning siege of gout, then a tricky heartbeat.

Having always been of the
if-
I-die, devil-may-care school, he came to realize that
when
I die, and the question of his post-humous reputation, were more realistic considerations. He retired
from BI, the better to enjoy his sybaritic life while he could and to devote greater attention to philanthropy.

Sue had cheerfully supported Harry's eleemosynary undertakings and had left her own job at Amy Reed to help dispense the largesse; she was well provided for and there would be plenty of money left over for her once Harry's heart stopped pulsing. And she could not deny that she enjoyed being accepted, albeit often with condescension, in what passed for New York high society.

She did have reservations about the medical-scientific focus of Harry's gifts. Why not the arts? she pleaded. Music, dance, the theater, the Fashion Institute. Finally one night, as they frisked in bed, he made her a proposition: for each "Clinton" (his cute expression for oral sex) she performed, he would donate $100,000 to any arts charity she chose. The result was impressive: the Harry and Sue Brandberg Print Room at the Metropolitan Museum, the Harry and Sue Brandberg Production Fund at the Metropolitan Opera and even the Harry and Sue Brandberg Poetry Fund. Fortunately the couple's private bargain was their secret; had it been known, the lewd nicknames attached to their benefactions would probably have been legion.

In fact, Harry's demise, at age 77, had come as Sue performed another of her dollars-for-the-arts fellations on him, though newspaper accounts noted only that he had died "peacefully at home" of a heart attack.

Sue came into her own after Harry's death. With a fortune—her own fortune now—to supervise, she commanded a small regiment of lawyers and accountants and investment advisers. Not to mention the persistent grant proposers, development officers and smooth leaders of not-for-profits, all now more smarmy than ever.

The widow Brandberg enjoyed the attention; it suited the tem
perament and instincts of a former (if minor) beauty pageant queen. Being lady bountiful to her favorite charities pleased her immensely. Most aspects of her existence were a constant reminder that she really had left the reservation.

But there was a hollow center. She had no really close friends, at least friends who did not want something from her. Thus it was that she had bought a dog from a small community of monks in upper Westchester who raised purebred Staffordshire bull terriers. They were not considered city dogs, but she liked their looks, and none had been more appealing than the puppy she called Wambli, with a "cute" white stripe running down his chest. In private amusement she had chosen the name, the Lakota Sioux word for "eagle," though she only shrugged and smiled when others asked her what "Wambli" meant.

After the dog equivalent of a Harvard education—obedience school for learning "appropriate behaviors," pet-facilitated therapy for herself (she had never owned an animal) and several sessions of canine psychology for Wambli—she had set him up, intact, in the 62nd Street town house.

Wambli had partially filled the void. But there was one other notable blank spot. Sex. She had always physically enjoyed it and, with her exotic looks, never had trouble finding it. But after her years of obligatory ruttings with dirty-minded Harry, she desired something more exuberant and vigorous, preferably with a lover who was young and handsome. And insatiable.

The adventurers looking to be kept turned her off; they tried too hard at pleasing her. Then, of course, there was the stable of "walkers" she maintained—trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind and irreverent. And not the least interested in heterosexual sex.