The Cold Room (32 page)

‘Toad?’

‘Think twice, Ronnie. That mirror over there, it’s a window for anybody standing on the other side. Getting your face slapped once might be a thrill, but I guarantee it’s an activity that wears thin pretty fast.’

Ronnie put his hand on his heart. He was staring at the mirror now, clearly fascinated. ‘My sincere apologies,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I didn’t keep track of their given names. Which one was Mynka?’

‘Mynka was the one who got murdered in your kitchen.’

I put my right hand on his shoulder, my fingers reaching around just far enough to sense, very faintly, the pulse at his throat. Ronald’s heart was racing.

‘I was just wondering if you’d like to hear a story, Ronald, a kind of travelogue that begins with Mynka Chechowski’s body, then follows a trail to Margaret Portola and her children. It’s a very entertaining story.’

‘Certainly.’ He sounded relieved, almost grateful. I’d turned up the pressure, then eased back. Maybe everything would be all right. I began with the forensic details, the pink lividity, the foreign dentistry, and especially the evisceration. Then I told him about the witness who’d happened on the scene a moment before Mynka’s body was to be consigned to the sea, and about the advertisement in
Gazeta Warszawa
that broke the case open, and about my consultation with Aslan Khalid in the Eagle Street warehouse. Finally, I described Barsakov in the chair behind Aslan’s desk with half his head blown away and the flag of Chechnya pinned to the wall behind him.

‘Swear to God, Ronnie, when I looked into the wolf’s eyes, it was like he did it. I’m talkin’ about the wolf. It was like the wolf came down off the flag and drilled his fangs into Konstantine’s skull.’

Ronald and I were both staring at the mirror on the other side of the room when I finished the tale. I was watching him, watching him closely, but Ronald was gazing directly into his own eyes.

‘It’s your turn, now,’ I finally said, my voice a whisper, ‘to tell me a story.’

‘About what?’

‘Start with the cold room. Tell me what it was like.’

Ronald tilted his chin up, his eyes shifting slightly to meet mine. Did he want to play this game?

‘Did you ever tell anyone, Ronnie, anyone at all? A friend, a teacher, a therapist?’

‘I had no friends as a child. I hated my tutors. Margaret would never allow me to see a therapist.’

‘Then it was a family secret.’

‘Yes, a secret.’

‘Well, I’ve been there, Ronnie, in the cold room. I already know.’

‘The trick is to make yourself little. I used to imagine that I was a ball of cheese, all folded on itself, with a thick, waxy skin for a blanket.’ Ronald’s tongue appeared between his lips and he sucked in a deep breath as his shoulders relaxed. ‘But the cold room was only for special occasions. Usually, Margaret was more hands-on. Besides, you can get used to anything if you have to.’

‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Ronnie. I was in the cold room with the door closed for five minutes and I nearly panicked.’

‘Panic? Yes, of course, at first. But panic only excited Margaret. Begging, too. No, you had to make yourself infinitely small, so tiny there was no self for the cold to penetrate. Jerk never understood that.’

‘Jerk?’

‘My brother.’

‘Can you say his name?’

‘Jerk.’

‘And what didn’t he understand?’

Ronald’s hands began to wash over each other. He was breathing through his mouth now. ‘Do you know why the cold room is there in the first place? Were you clever enough to find out?’

‘Actually, that was one of the things I was going to ask you.’ I was encouraged by Ronald’s attitude. He was now volunteering information. ‘Why have a refrigerator that big in a private home?’

‘The cold room is there because in the nineteen twenties, the house was a speakeasy, with an upstairs brothel, owned by Dutch Schultz. In nineteen twenty-eight, two gangsters were killed in the cellar, Blintzy Reznick and Little Moe Cohen. Margaret has newspaper clippings documenting the whole episode. According to the
Herald Tribune
, Little Moe and Blintzy were refrigerated for three days after the actual murders. I think that’s where Margaret got the idea. Otherwise, who would even think about putting a child in a . . .’

‘In a refrigerator?’

Ronald’s laugh was soft and dry. ‘Jerk was a fighter,’ he added, ‘and what did it get him? I was a ball of cheese, and look at me now.’

‘What about your father. Why didn’t he protect you?’

Once he got started, Ronald couldn’t stop, and bit by bit, I assembled a portrait of the Portola household. The only child of a prominent, Brazilian family, Guillermo Portola had used up three wives, along with innumerable mistresses, in an effort to produce an heir. His marriage to the secretary he’d occasionally boffed was motivated solely by the need to legitimize that heir. According to Ronald, aside from impregnating Margaret a second time, Guillermo had very little to do with his wife and children. His life was lived in a suite at the Pierre Hotel, where he passed his nights with the high-end call girls he preferred to his psycho spouse. Nevertheless, Guillermo supported his family in style, which left Margaret to do as she pleased, the absolute master of the house.

And what a master she was, given both to sudden rages and calculated cruelty. Her children were initially cared for by nannies, then privately tutored through high school. Subject to Margaret’s temper, the nannies and tutors came and went, leaving in their wake a montage of faces and names that Ronald chose not to remember. As they, the nannies and the tutors, chose not to remember, or even recognize, the obvious bruises on the frail bodies of the children.

‘What about friends?’ I asked.

‘I went to birthday parties sometimes, and sometime a luckless child would be sentenced to pass an afternoon in my company. Needless to say, they rarely came back. I belonged to clubs, too. A chess club on the East Side and a gem club at the Metropolitan Museum. I have friends now, a collection of oddities who share my interests, but my early years were passed in solitude.’

Ronald paused, gave his head a tiny shake, then abruptly changed the subject. ‘For Margaret,’ he said, partitioning the syllables of his mother’s name as if sounding out a word in a foreign language, ‘Father’s stroke was a stroke of luck.’

I wasn’t expecting much to come from the revelations that followed, though I listened attentively for any mention of the circumstances surrounding Guillermo’s death. But Ronald wasn’t going there. This was all about a will Guillermo had somehow created, despite being completely disabled, a man whose speech was limited to a series of unintelligible gurgles. That the will would eventually be challenged was inevitable; that Margaret would be up to the challenge was also inevitable. At the first hint of a lawsuit, she’d produced an impeccably credentialed attorney named Mason Livingston. A direct descendant of the Livingstons so prominent during the revolution, Mason swore, under oath, that he’d read the document aloud to Guillermo, clause by clause, and that Guillermo had indicated consent with a series of nods confirmed by eye-blinks. Three other witnesses, attorneys all, then leaped forward to confirm Mason’s account. The will was unbreakable.

‘And now she runs your life,’ I said. It was time to make the turn.

‘And now she runs my life.’

I leaned even closer, until my chest brushed Ronald’s back. ‘Remember what my partner said, about you being afraid to stand up to Margaret? I know it isn’t true. I know you stopped being afraid of your mother years ago. Like I know you would have left home years ago . . . except for the money. I’m talking about the forty million dollars, and the will, and the trust fund. Margaret knew exactly what she was doing when she made herself executor of a fund that ties you up until you reach the age of forty.’

‘How can a person,’ Ronald asked, ‘be so crazy and so crafty at the same time? Margaret’s fucking Mason Livingston, who administers the trust. If I displease her, Mason will invoke the will’s morality clause. I’ve got a record, which I’m sure you already know, a record that brands me a cocksucker and a pervert. My claim to any part of my father’s estate hangs by a thread.’

‘And Margaret’s standing right there with a pair of scissors?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that you have to take those scissors out of her hand.’

I stared for a moment at the sheen of perspiration on the back of Ronald’s neck, at tiny drops of moisture no bigger than grains of sand that clung to the black hairs fanning out from a natural parting. ‘What would you do, Ronald, if you got control of the estate? How would you live your life?’

Ronald answered without hesitation. ‘My favorite word is debauchery, followed closely by depravity. I want to drown myself in sensation. I want to use every drug there is to use. I want to have sex on three-masted yachts, and in filthy alleyways. I want to keep going until I’m dead.’

I rose to my feet at that point and gripped my side. No more whispering. Time for business. ‘I can’t kneel anymore,’ I told him. ‘My wound is killing me.’ I set a chair in front of him and sat down. ‘Now, the sex part you can keep to yourself, but tell me, is heroin your drug of choice?’

‘It’s that obvious?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid it is, Ronnie, but we can forget about that. For now, anyway.’ I leaned back in the chair. ‘Ya know, there’s a way out for you. A way to make all those fantasies come true.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Mynka Chechowski died in your mother’s kitchen. The cause of death was a blow to the top of her skull with a blunt object, a blow universally associated with an enraged perpetrator. That perpetrator can’t be you, Ronald, because blind rages are beyond you. And it can’t be your brother, either, because he was the father of Mynka’s child and he loved her. That leaves Margaret holding the bag, and her elder son to put her in it.’

Ronald rocked back and forth, his eyes still closed. He was breathing through his nose again. ‘Dreams are the best things about dope,’ he told me. ‘Evil dreams that fly around your mind like cobwebs in a breeze. I believe I’ve dispatched Margaret in every way there is to dispatch a human being. In my dreams, I’ve skinned her alive.’

He bent forward to look into my eyes. ‘You’ve taken the time to know me. That’s an act of respect and I’m thankful. But I can’t give you what you want, as much as I’d like to. That’s because you’ve misread the tea leaves. Margaret didn’t kill Toad. Jerk killed Toad. Margaret wasn’t even there.’

I jumped to my feet, grabbed Ronald’s shirt and ripped him out of the chair. I wasn’t faking anything this time. Ronald had given the wrong answer and I didn’t care whether it was a true answer or not. For those few seconds, until Adele opened the door and I saw the look of utter distress twisting her features, I was out of control. Still shaking, I dropped Ronald into his chair and waved Adele off.

Unlike my partner, Ronald seemed more bemused than afraid. He waited until Adele closed the door behind her, then began to speak.

‘Ridding myself of Margaret? Well, the gods are having too much fun to let me off that particular hook. But when you’re talking about tens of millions of dollars, losing a brother is no small thing. For a time, right after Jerk killed Toad, I thought Jerk would commit suicide. But he rallied.’

I re-positioned my chair in front of Ronald’s and sat down. Ronald nodded, then simply continued. He was off and running now. He wouldn’t stop until the tank was empty. This was a phenomenon I’d witnessed many times in the past, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been playing me all along.

‘Margaret approved of Jerk’s relationship with Toad—’

‘Use their real names, Ronald. That would be David and Mynka, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘David and Mynka? It could be the title of a romance novel. The second son of a fabulously wealthy South American aristocrat falls for the Polish maid his mother loves to abuse. Miraculously, the Polish maid responds to the second son’s overtures with a previously unrevealed passion. Desire wells, of course, and juices flow, until they can stand it no longer. Until the second son creeps up to the little maid’s attic room and is not rebuffed.

‘Mother eventually finds out, but, amazingly, she doesn’t object. In fact, she tells her older son, whom she knows to be a practicing homosexual, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” ’

Ronald stopped there, his eyes moving down and to the left as he retrieved a memory. I watched his tongue wash across his lips and his eyes harden, but his voice was almost without inflection when he resumed speaking.

‘The maid is impregnated by the second son a few months later, even though his mother supplies him with boxes of condoms, condoms in a wide variety of colors, textures and flavors. Predictably, the mother becomes enraged when the second son reveals his love’s delicate condition. Predictably, she berates her hapless son. Fade to black. Ho-hum.

‘Enter a new actor, a catalyst, a man to stir the pot, to ratchet up the tension. He is Aslan Khalid, the entrepreneur who supplied the little maid to the Portola family. Initially, Aslan is as outraged as Margaret, insisting that his property has been damaged and compensation is in order. But then, in the course of a single hour, he abruptly switches tactics. Maybe, he tells Margaret, the little maid should be allowed to give birth. The resulting child would carry David Portola’s DNA and be entitled, not only to his support, but to his lifestyle.

‘Much discussion naturally follows, a period of bargaining, of hard, hard bargaining, until both parties agree that abortion, followed by a liberal outflow of capital from the mother to the entrepreneur, is the only rational solution to their mutual problem.

‘From that day forward, the pressures on Mynka, when she flatly refuses to consider an abortion, are unrelenting. Her religious objections – so sorry, God wouldn’t approve – are instantly dismissed. She’s beaten and threats are made against her life. Not only by the procurer, but by the mother as well.

‘It’s as hard for David. He’s still a child, barely seventeen and home-schooled. Except for Riverside Park and the few clubs Margaret let him join, he knows nothing of the outside world.