The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (25 page)

The hate in her eyes was a raging inferno; the sight of it made him shake with desire. The moist heat of his own blood cascading down his chest was the most glorious sensation he'd ever known. He stirred and swelled and died erect.

She pushed the barbarian's body to the floor and felt through the tangled blankets for the key. He'd had it in his hand and she picked it from the bed, glad she would not have to search his clothing, to touch him again. She went to the sink and, one last time, washed the reek of the barbarian from her skin. Pulling the blue blanket from the bed, wrapping it around herself like a robe, she walked calmly through the door and up the stairs. The barbarian had been destroyed. Now she could return to her father's kingdom.

“Whoa!” The coroner's man stopped at the door. “Someone made a mess outta him, huh?”

“We were about to close in, too,” the detective said glumly. “Wish we'd been faster.”

“Why? Someone sorry he's dead?”

“The opposite. Dead's too good. Look at this place.”

The coroner's man did, taking in the wall-hung chains, the leather whip, the high, barred window. “What's the story?”

“Bastard was buying girls.”

“Buying?”

The detective shrugged. “Illegals, from overseas. Sold by Mom and Dad to feed the rest of the family. We took up a trafficker a few days ago, that's who gave him up. Girls thought they'd hit the jackpot, that they were coming here as mail-order brides.”

“Jesus.”

“There was any justice,” the detective said, “this bastard would be spending the rest of a long, long life with bastards bigger, meaner, and with nothing to lose.”

“So who got to him?”

“No idea.” The detective heard a patrolman call him from above. He said, “You don't need me, right?”

The coroner's man snapped on his gloves. “Nope. Go ahead.”

The patrolman met the detective at the top of the stairs. By his ashen face the detective understood they'd found their killer. He knew what had happened even before the patrolman led him to the bruised and naked body hanging by a blanket noose from a branch of the blossoming cherry tree.

Her father's garden was as beautiful as in her memory. Her sisters laughed and ran to her, the youngest carrying a robe of cobalt silk. She wrapped herself in it and, together, to the strains of silk-string music, they walked through the brilliant sunlight to the cool shadowed walkway that led to the gates of the palace.

Ben & Andrea & Evelyn & Ben

JONATHAN SANTLOFER

Friday

B
EN DRAPES HIS
sport jacket across his lap. His shirt is sticking to him, the train hot and airless, cigarette smoke, including his own, making it hard to breathe. He's switched trains at Jamaica and the older train, which is cramped and has no air conditioning, sits on the tracks for ten minutes, Ben thinking about his walk to AndiAnn where he will spend his day with the dress designer and pattern makers, cutters and sewers, his job to make sure everything is on schedule and ready to be shipped to retailers while Morty deals with the buyers; Morty, who wears three-hundred-dollar suits and a gold pinky ring and calls the buyers
darling
and everyone else
bastard
and lives in the Forest Hills apartment he used to share with Andrea's dead mother, which is three times the size of the split-level he bought for his favorite daughter. Ben liked their Greenwich Village walk-up even with the dining room serving as a room for their kid, but how could he refuse Andrea the “better life” her father offered even if it meant commuting an hour each way and living in a house he only gets to use on weekends?

He runs a hand through his thick, dark hair, just starting to gray at the temples. There is a woman sitting across from him, his age, maybe a year or two younger, thirty-one or -two, knees almost touching his, hair up in a French knot, stockings on her legs. He pictures clips and snaps as he watches her drag red-lacquered fingernails along her collarbone then play with a gold crucifix between the V of her breasts, a wedding ring on her finger. She lifts her eyes from her newspaper—headline:
ANDREA DORIA SINKS OFF NANTUCKET
—and they exchange a look. He crushes his cigarette into the tiny ashtray and when the train hurtles underground and everything goes black he leans forward, slides his hand up her leg and into her panties and hears her gasp over the sound of rattling train tracks and she opens her legs a bit wider. When the lights flash on, the woman drops the newspaper into her lap and Ben slips his hand out and as the train pulls into the station they exchange one last look before she gets up, adjusts her skirt, and disappears into the crowd.

Outside, Ben can't remember how he got here. He brings his hand to his nose, presses fingertips against nostrils, proof of what just happened. He moves with the throng of commuters up Seventh Avenue, the air hot and thick.

The Neiman Marcus buyer, a hard fortysomething blonde from Dallas, is in the showroom when he gets there, Morty saying, “Darling this, darling that—” He nods at Ben, who is fifteen minutes late, and Ben doesn't bother to say the train sat at the Jamaica station with engine trouble and no air conditioning because Morty won't care.

The in-house model pivots for the Neiman Marcus buyer. Ben knows she will do this two dozen times in two dozen outfits. She disappears behind a screen to change but Ben does not hang around even though the showroom is deliciously frigid, the air conditioner cranked up to high.

In the back, Ben guesses it's close to ninety. He nods at the young women bent over sewing machines making samples, two older ones hand sewing sequins and beads. He arranges his jacket onto his chair, his desk tucked into the back corner where a fan whirls hot dirty air in through an alley window. He loosens his tie, makes a call to order fabric—the new polyesters that are becoming
the
thing—then goes to see Max, the patternmaker, who has stripped down to his sweat-stained tee, and from there to see Artie, the fag dress designer, who Ben likes because he's nasty and funny and hates Morty almost as much as he does. He spends longer than necessary discussing hemlines and cruise wear, about which he cares nothing, because Artie has the only air-conditioned office.

At lunchtime he eats a tuna on rye at his desk and Andrea calls to say she has invited the neighbors for a barbecue.

“Why?” he asks.

“Why not?” she says.

Ben can think of a dozen reasons but says nothing and it's not just the fact that he has been sweating all morning and would prefer not to sweat over a barbecue.

“I bought steaks,” she says.

Ben hangs up and then, like a movie on an endless loop, makes more calls, confers with Max and Artie, checks the beadwork on a cocktail dress, and is back on the train sniffing at his fingertips, the smell of the woman with the French knot and gold crucifix still there, or is it the tuna he had for lunch?

Ben slathers A-1 onto the steaks. He's had no time to change or shower, his shirt sticking to him, a corny apron that Stevie by way of Andrea got him for Father's Day tied around his waist:
DAD, KING OF THE GRILL
.

“Is that one of the new gas kind?” Jerry asks.

“Gift from my father-in-law,” says Ben. He looks at the grill, the outdoor furniture, the house—everything a gift from Morty. He sniffs at his fingers but all he can smell is the A-1 sauce.

“I'm sick of accounting,” says Jerry, who spends the next ten minutes complaining about his job.

Ben nods to show he's listening, but behind his aviators he stares at his neighbor's wife, Evelyn, who is wearing short shorts and a blouse tied under her breasts. She is just a few feet away on a plastic lounge chair talking to Andrea, a whiskey sour sweating in her hand, Andrea beside her in a white Peter Pan–collar blouse from AndiAnn with matching Capri pants, loose rather than formfitting. Ironic, he thinks, that the boss's daughter is such a bad advertisement for her father's clothing line.

“I like your hair,” Andrea says to Evelyn.

“I couldn't take it long anymore, not in summer, in this heat.” Evelyn runs a hand through her short black curls. “Jerry hates it, says it makes me look like a man.”

Andrea plays with her ponytail, takes in Evelyn's breasts swelling at the top of her blouse, her curvy hips. “I think it's very … Italian, very … Gina Lollobrigida.”

“I'm thinking about quitting,” says Jerry, shrugging his shoulders, a high school football hero ten years later, short-sleeved plaid shirt showing off muscled arms gone soft, snub-nosed face starting to bloat, crew cut trained with Butch wax. He finishes the beer, his third. “I wanted to be a ranger.”

“A what?” Ben pokes at the steaks with tongs.

“A forest ranger, you know, in a national park, like in Colorado or Oregon. I even took the test.”

Ben thinks about the dark-haired I. Magnin buyer from Portland, Oregon, who stays at the Pennsylvania Hotel only a block away from AndiAnn when she comes to town twice a year and how he fucks her during his lunch hour and how she screams so loud he tells her to keep it down or his father-in-law might hear and she laughs then screams louder. “Did you pass?” he asks.

“Yeah, I passed. But there's no money in it and Evelyn says no way she's living out in the middle of nowhere.”

“I never said that,” says Evelyn.

“What do you call
this
?” says Ben.

“You don't like it here?” Jerry asks.

“It's fine,” says Ben.

“Better than living in the city with all those animals,” says Jerry.

“I like the city,” says Ben, thinking they should have stayed in the Village or bought a house in Hewlett or Levittown, where there are other Jews.

“Where are you from?” Jerry asks.

“Brooklyn,” says Ben.

“Never been,” says Jerry.

“I'm from Forest Hills,” says Andrea. “Where are you from, Evelyn?”

“Outside of Boston, Somerville.”

“
Slum
-erville,” says Jerry.

“Jerry's from Yonkers,
so
fancy,” says Evelyn.

“Jerry's from
Yaaan-kaaas,
” says Andrea, aping her.

“Oh, that's perfect,” says Jerry, smirking. “She really nailed you, huh, Ev?”

“Sorry,” says Andrea. “I've always been good at accents and voices.”

“Hey, Ben,” says Jerry. “I go to a shooting range out in Haupauge. Want to come sometime?”

“You have a gun?” Andrea asks.

“Two,” says Jerry. “What about you, Ben?”

“Do I have a gun?”

“No, your job? What do you do?”

“Oh.
Schmatas,
” says Ben.

“What's
that
?” asks Jerry.

“You know, women's wear—dresses, blouses, slacks.”

“You must be surrounded by fags,” says Jerry.

“
Jerry
,” says Evelyn.

“It's a living,” says Ben, eyes on Evelyn's crotch, trying to figure out if she's wearing panties.

“A
good
living,” says Andrea. “Ben has a terrific job. He should thank his lucky stars, production manager for Daddy's company, AndiAnn. It's named for me and my sister, but I haven't been called Andi since I was ten.”

“You must get a lot of free clothes,” says Evelyn.

“Yes,” Andrea taps her blouse and pants. “You should come up to AndiAnn with me sometime.”

“Evelyn's already got way too many—what was that word, Ben?” Jerry asks.

“
Schmatas
.”

“
Schmatas,”
says Jerry, and laughs.

“So, Ben, you wanted to be an architect?” Evelyn asks.

“Where'd you hear that?” asks Ben.

“From your wife,” says Evelyn.

Ben glares at Andrea.

Andrea leans closer to Evelyn. “Are you wearing Tabu?”

“Ambush,” says Evelyn.

“I used to wear Tabu but I became allergic.” Andrea fiddles with the transistor radio, stops at Gogi Grant, “The Wayward Wind,” and sings along.

“You have a nice voice,” says Evelyn.

“I'm just a good mimic,” says Andrea.

Jerry follows Ben to the picnic table, chugging another beer.

“Rare, medium, and charred,” says Ben, setting the dish of meat onto the table; blood sloshes over the side.

“Careful!” says Andrea.

“You should thank your
lucky stars
I didn't get any blood on
you,
” says Ben.

Andrea takes a deep breath, arranging containers of potato salad and coleslaw on the table. “These are better than I can make so why pretend I made them, right?”

“Where did you get them?” asks Evelyn.

“Mandel's, over in Plainview?”

“The Jewish place?” Jerry asks.

“The deli,” says Andrea. She forces a smile, goes into the house, comes out with a pitcher of lemonade, hard icy chunks still floating in the water.

Ben opens more beers, hands one to Jerry.

“What about me?” Evelyn asks.

“You want a beer?” Ben asks.

“In a glass. With lots of ice.”

“With
ice
?” Jerry makes a face.

“What's it to you?” says Evelyn.

Andrea pours dressing over iceberg lettuce. “Is Thousand Island okay with everyone?”

“My office is testing that new oral polio vaccine,” says Jerry.

“It's not a vaccine if it's oral,” says Evelyn.

The sky is slate gray, no stars, no moon.

Andrea serves dessert, ambrosia. “From Mand—the deli,” she says.

“But better than you could make?” asks Ben.

“I have a Sara Lee in the freezer that I meant to bring over,” says Evelyn. “You know, that new cheesecake? Shall I get it?”

“None for me,” says Ben.

Everyone ignores the marshmallow fruit salad. Evelyn lights up a Cigarillo.

“Can I have one?” Andrea asks.

“Since when do you smoke?” Ben asks.

“Since now.” Andrea plucks one of the small cigars out of the box, places it carefully between her lips; Evelyn lights it for her.

“You don't have to inhale,” says Evelyn. “You can just use it as a prop.”

“Is that what you do?” Andrea asks.

“No,” says Evelyn. “I inhale.”

Andrea drags on the Cigarillo, strains not to cough.

“You're crazy,” says Ben.

… sixteen hundred and sixty people were rescued and survived, but forty-six people died as a consequence of the collision off Nantucket …

“Please turn that off,” says Andrea. She pictures people jumping off a ship that bears her name, drowning in black water. She snatches the transistor, finds another station, the Platters, sings along: “Oh-oh-oh—yes, I'm the great pre-te-en-der—”

Evelyn smacks her leg. “I'm getting bitten.”