Before Anthony could make his apologies or do something else, don Bellarosa himself appeared at the door and said something to Anthony in Italian, then stepped outside and led me away by the arm.
Bellarosa was wearing his standard uniform of blazer, turtleneck, and slacks. The colors this time were brown, white, and beige, respectively. I saw, too, as we walked, that he had acquired a pair of good Docksides, and on his left wrist was a black Porsche watch, very sporty at about two thousand bucks. The man was almost getting it, but I didn’t know how to bring up the subject of his nylon stretch socks.
As we walked up Grace Lane, toward Fox Point, Bellarosa said, “That’s not a man you want to piss off.”
“That’s a man who had better not piss me off again.”
“Yeah?”
“Listen to me. If you invite me to your property, I want your flunkies to treat me with respect.”
He laughed. “Yeah? You into the respect thing now? You Italian, or what?”
I stopped walking. “Mr. Bellarosa, you tell your goons, including your imbecile driver, Lenny, and the half-wits and sluts in that gatehouse, and anyone else you have working for you, that don Bellarosa respects Mr. John Sutter.”
He looked at me for about half a minute, then nodded. “Okay. But you don’t keep me waiting again. Okay?”
“I’ll do my best.”
We continued our walk up Grace Lane, and I wondered how many people saw us from their ivory towers. Bellarosa said, “Hey, your kid came over the other day. He tell you?”
“Yes. He said you showed him around the estate. That was very good of you.”
“No problem. Nice kid. We had a nice talk. Smart like his old man. Right? Up-front like his old man, too. Asked me where I got all the money to build up the estate.”
“I certainly didn’t teach him to ask questions like that. I hope you told him it was none of his business.”
“Nah. I told him I worked hard and did smart things.”
I made a mental note to talk to Edward about the wages of sin and about crime doesn’t pay. Frank Bellarosa’s advice to his children was probably less complex and summed up in three words: Don’t get caught.
We reached the end of Grace Lane, which is a wide turnaround in the center of which rises a jagged rock about eight feet high. There is a legend that says that Captain Kidd, who is known to have buried his treasure on Long Island’s North Shore, used this rock as the starting point for his treasure map. I mentioned this to Bellarosa and he asked, “Is that why this place is called the Gold Coast?”
“No, Frank. That’s because it’s wealthy.”
“Oh, yeah. Anybody find the treasure?”
“No, but I’ll sell you the map.”
“Yeah? I’ll give you my deed to the Brooklyn Bridge for it.”
I think my wit was rubbing off on him.
We walked up to the entrance to Fox Point, whose gatehouse was a miniature castle. The entire front wall of the estate was obscured by overgrown trees and bushes, and none of the estate grounds were visible from Grace Lane. I produced a key and opened the padlock on the wrought-iron gates, asking Bellarosa, “How did you get in here?”
“It was opened when I got here. Some people were on the beach. Do I get one of those keys?”
“I suppose you do. I’ll have one made for you.’’ Normally, anyone who opens the padlock does not bother to lock it behind them, which was how Bellarosa had gotten in. But there was something about this man that made me rethink every simple and mundane action of my life. I had visions of his goons following us, or somebody else’s goons following us, or even Mancuso showing up. In truth, you could scale the wall easily enough, but nevertheless, after we passed through the gates, I closed them again, reached through the bars and snapped the padlock shut. I said to Bellarosa, “Are you armed?”
“Does the Pope wear a cross?”
“I imagine he does.’’ We began walking down the old drive, which had once been paved with tons of crushed seashells, but over the years, dirt, grass, and weeds have nearly obliterated them. The trees that lined the drive, mostly mimosa and tulip trees, were so overgrown that they formed a tunnel not six feet wide and barely high enough to walk through without ducking.
The drive curved and sloped down toward the shoreline, and I could see daylight at the end of the trees. We broke out into a delightful stretch of waterfront that ran about a mile along the Sound from Fox Point on the east to a small, nameless sand spit on the west. The thick vegetation ended where we were standing, and on the lower ground was a thin strip of windblown trees, then bulrushes and high grasses, and finally the rocky beach itself.
Bellarosa said, “This is a very nice place.”
“Thank you,’’ I said, leaving him with the impression I had something to do with it.
We continued downhill along the drive, which was lined now with only an occasional salt-stunted pine or cedar. The drive led us to the ruin of the great house of Fox Point. The house, built in the early 1920s, was unusual for its day, a sort of contemporary structure of glass and mahogany with flat roofs, open decks, and pipe railings, resembling, perhaps, a luxury liner, and nearly as large. The house had been gutted by fire about twenty years ago, but no one had actually lived in it since the 1950s. Sand dunes had drifted in and around the long rambling ruin, and I was always struck by the thought that it looked like the collapsed skeleton of some fantastic sea creature that had washed ashore and died. But I do remember seeing the house before it burned, though only from a long distance when I was boating on the Sound. I had often thought I would like to live in it and watch the sea from its high decks.
Bellarosa studied the ruins for a while, then we walked on toward the beach. Fox Point had been, even by Gold Coast standards, a fabulous estate. But over the years the waterside terraces, the bathhouses, boathouses, and piers have been destroyed by storms and erosion. Only two intact structures now remained on the entire estate: the gazebo and the pleasure palace. The gazebo sat precariously on an eroded shelf of grassland, ready to float away in the next nor’easter.
Bellarosa pointed to the gazebo and said, “I don’t have one of those.”
“Take that one before the sea does.”
He studied the octagonal structure from a distance. “I can take it?”
“No one cares. Except the Gazebo Society, and they’re all nuts.”
“Oh, yeah. Your wife paints those things.”
“No, she has lunch in them.”
“Right. I’ll have Dominic look at it.”
I gazed out over the Sound. It was a bright blue day, and the water sparkled, and colored sails slid back and forth on the horizon, and in the distance the Connecticut coast was clear. It was a nice day to be alive, so far.
Bellarosa turned away from the gazebo and looked farther down the shore toward a building that sat well back from the beach on a piece of solid land protected by a stone bulkhead. He pointed. “What’s that? I saw that the other day.”
“That’s the pleasure palace.”
“You mean like for fun?”
“Yes. For fun.’’ In fact, the wealthiest and most hedonistic of the Gold Coast residents constructed these huge pleasure palaces, away from their mansions, the sole purpose of which was fun. Fox Point’s pleasure palace was constructed of steel and masonry, and during the Second World War the Coast Guard found the building convenient for storing ammunition. But as solid as it looks, or may have looked to German U-boats, from the air you can see that most of the roof is made of blue glass. Actually, on occasions that I’ve flown over the Gold Coast in a small plane, I could spot this and other surviving pleasure palaces because they all have these shimmering blue roofs.
Bellarosa asked, “What kind of fun?”
“Sex, gambling, drinking, tennis. You name it.”
“Show me it.”
“All right.”
We walked the hundred yards to the huge structure, and I led him inside through a broken glass door.
The athletic wings of the pleasure palace resembled a modern health club, but there were touches of art nouveau elegance in the mosaic tile floors and iron-filigreed windows. Considering that it hadn’t been used since about 1929, it wasn’t in bad shape.
In one wing of the building, there was a regulation-size clay tennis court covered by a thirty-foot-high blue-glass roof. The roof leaked, and the clay had crumbled long ago, and it sprouted some sort of odd plant life that apparently liked clay and blue light. There was no net on the court, so Bellarosa, who had shown some confusion in the past regarding interior design, asked me, “What’s this place?”
“The drawing room.”
“No shit?”
We walked through the larger adjoining wing, which was a full gymnasium, into the next section of the building, which held an Olympic-size swimming pool, also covered with blue glass. Adjacent to the gym and pool were steam rooms, showers, rubdown rooms, and a solarium. The west wing, more luxurious, contained overnight guest accommodations, including a kitchen and servants’ quarters.
Bellarosa said very little as I gave him the tour, but at one point he remarked, “These people lived like Roman emperors.”
“They gave it their best shot.”
We found the east wing, which was a cavernous ballroom where Susan and I had once gone to a Roaring Twenties party. “
Madonn’
!’’ said Frank. “Yes,’’ I agreed. I remembered that there was a cocktail lounge near the ballroom, actually a speakeasy, as this place was built during Prohibition, but I couldn’t find it. Walking through this building under the ghostly blue-glass roofs, even I, who have lived among Gold Coast ruins all my life, was awed by the size and opulence of this pleasure palace. We had retraced our steps and were back at the mosaic pool now. I said to Bellarosa, “We have to hold a Roman orgy here. You bring the beer.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Jesus, these people must’ve had lots of friends.”
“People with lots of money have lots of friends.”
“Hey, is this place for sale?”
I knew that was coming. This was the kind of guy who had to know the price of everything and wanted to buy everything he couldn’t steal. I replied, “Yes, it is. Are you going to buy all of Grace Lane?”
He laughed again. “I like my privacy. I like land.”
“Go to Kansas. This is a million dollars an acre on the water.”
“Jesus. Who the hell can afford that?”
Well, Mafia dons. I said, “The Iranians.”
“Who?”
“The Iranians are negotiating with the family who own this estate. People named Morrison who live in Paris now. They are filthy rich, but don’t want to restore the place. Actually, they’re not even American citizens anymore. They are expatriates.”
He mulled that over, figuring as many angles as he could, I’m sure, from that skimpy information. We found the broken door and walked out into the sunlight. Bellarosa asked, “What the hell do Iranians want with this place?”
“Well, there are a lot a rich Iranian immigrants here on Long Island now, and they want to buy this estate and convert the pleasure palace into a mosque. Maybe the blue roof turned them on.”
“A mosque? Like an Arab church?”
“A Muslim mosque. The Iranians are Muslims, but not Arabs.”
“Ah, they’re all sand niggers.”
Why do I bother to explain things to this man?
He jabbed his finger toward me. “You people gonna allow that?”
“Whom do you mean by ‘you people’?”
“You know who I mean. You people. You gonna allow that?”
“I refer you to the First Amendment to the Constitution—written, incidentally, by my people—as it regards freedom of religion.”
“Yeah, but Jesus Christ, did you ever hear those people pray? We had a bunch of Arabs used to meet in a storefront near where I lived. This one clown used to get on the roof every night and wail like a hyena. Jesus, am I gonna have that down the street again?”
“It’s a possibility.’’ We were walking, and I turned toward the gazebo.
I could see that my companion was unhappy. He grumbled, “The real estate lady never told me about this.”
“She didn’t tell me about you, either.”
He thought about that a moment, trying to determine, I suppose, if that was an ethnic slur, a personal insult, or a reference to the Mafia thing. He grumbled again, “Fucking Iranians . . .”
It was really time for me to give this man a lesson in civics, to remind him what America stood for, and to let him know I didn’t like racial epithets. But on further consideration, I realized that would be like trying to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig. So I said, “You buy it.”
He nodded. “How much? For the whole place?”
“Well, it’s not nearly as much land as Stanhope or Alhambra, but it’s waterfront, so I’d say about ten or twelve million for the acreage.”
“That’s a big number.”
“It gets bigger. If you get into a bidding war with the Iranians, they’ll run you up to fifteen or more.”