Timothy's Game (2 page)

Angelo stares at him. “No shit?” he says. “How did you find that out?”

“I like to know who we’re dealing with. You never know when it might come in handy.”

“A young twist?”

“Oh, sure. And a looker. He makes it with her three or four times a week. Sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night.”

“The old fart,” Vic Angelo says admiringly. “I never would have guessed. I wonder if his wife knows.”

“I’ll bet that smartass daughter of his knows,” Corsini says. “I can’t figure her. You never know what she’s thinking.”

Manhattan comes across the bridge, the harsh and cluttered city where civility is a foreign language and the brittle natives speak in screams. Sally Steiner loves it; it is her turf. All the rough and raucous people she buffets—hostility is a way of life. Speak softly and you are dead.

She dropped out of Barnard after two years. Those women—she had nothing in common with them; they had never been wounded. They were all Bendel and Bermuda. What did they know about their grimy, ruttish city and the desperate, charged life about them? They floated as Sally strode—and counted herself fortunate.

Her brother lives in Hell’s Kitchen on a mean and ramshackle street awaiting the wrecker’s ball. Eddie works on the top floor of a five-story walk-up. The original red brick façade is now festooned with whiskers of peeling gray paint, and the stone stoop is cracked and sprouting.

His apartment is spacious enough, but ill proportioned, and furnished with cast-offs and gutter salvage. But the ceilings are high; there is a skylight. Room enough for easel, taboret, paints, palettes, brushes. And white walls for his unsold paintings: a crash of color.

He has his mother’s beauty and his father’s body: a swan’s head atop a pit bull. When he embraces Sally, she smells turps and a whiff of garlic on his scraggly blond mustache.

“Spaghetti again?” she asks. “A’la olio?”

“Again,” he says with his quirky smile.

“I can’t complain; we had fettucini. Ma sends her love. Pa doesn’t send his.”

Eddie nods. “How is the old man?”

“Terrible. Smoking and drinking up a storm. I don’t know why he’s paying that fancy Park Avenue doc. He never does what he’s told.”

“He’s still got the girl in Brooklyn?”

“Oh, sure. I can’t blame him for that. Can you?”

“Yes,” Eddie Steiner says, “I can blame him.”

They sit side by side on a dilapidated couch, one broken leg propped on a telephone directory. Eddie pours them glasses of a harsh chianti.

“How you doing, kiddo?” Sally asks him.

“I’m doing okay,” he says. “A gallery down in the East Village wants to give me a show.”

“Hey! That’s great!”

He shakes his head. “Not yet. I’m not ready. I’m still working.”

Sally looks around at the paintings on the walls, the half-blank canvas on the easel.

“Your stuff is getting brighter, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you noticed that, did you? Yeah,” he says, laughing, “I’m coming out of my blue mood. And I’m getting away from the abstract bullshit. More representational. How do you like that head over there? The little one on top.”

“Jesus,” Sally says, “who the hell is
she?”

“A bag lady. I dragged her up here to pose. I did some fast pencil sketches, gave her a couple of bucks, and then did the oil. I like it.”

“I do, too, Eddie.”

“Then take it; it’s yours.”

“Nah, I couldn’t do that. Sell it. Prove to pa you’re a genius.”

“Who the hell cares what he thinks. I talked to ma a couple of days ago. She sounded as cheerful as ever.”

“Yeah, she never complains. Where’s Paul?”

“Bartending at a joint on Eighth Avenue. It’s just a part-time thing, but it brings in some loot. Including that wine you’re drinking.”

“Paul’s a sweetheart,” Sally says.

Her brother smiles. “I think so, too,” he says. “Hey, listen, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“Ask away.”

“I want to do a painting of you. A nude. Will you pose for me?”

“A nude? What the hell for? You’ve seen me in a bathing suit. You know the kind of body I’ve got. My God, Eddie, I’m a dumpster.”

“You’ve got a very strong body,” he tells her. “Good musculature. Great legs.”

“And no tits.”

“I’m not doing a centerfold. I see you sitting on a heavy stool, bending forward. Very determined, very aggressive. Against a thick red swirly background laid on with a palette knife. And you looming out. What do you say?”

“Let me think about it—okay? You’ve never seen me naked before.”

“Sure I have,” he says cheerfully. “You were five and I was seven. You were taking a shower, and I peeked through the keyhole.”

“You louse!” she cries, punching his arm. “Well, I’ve added a few pounds since then.”

“And a few brains,” he says, leaning forward to kiss her cheek. “So
good
to see you, sweetie. But you seem down. Problems?”

“Well, you know, with ma and pa. And you.”

“Me?” he says, amused. “I’m no problem.”

“And me,” she goes on. “I’m a problem. I’m not doing what I want to be doing.”

“Which is? Making money?”

“Sure,” she says, challenging him. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” he says, sighing. “The bottom line.”

“You better believe it, buster. I see these guys raking in the bucks. … Like those banditos pa went to pay off tonight. I’ve got more brains than they’ve got, but they’re living off our sweat. What kind of crap is that?”

“Life is unfair,” he says, smiling and pouring them more wine.

“If you let it be unfair. Not me. I’m going to be out there grabbing like all the rest—if I ever get the chance.”

He looks at his paintings hanging on the walls. “There’s more than just greed, Sally.”

“Says who? What? Tell me what.”

“Satisfaction with your work. Love. Joy. Sex.”

“Sex?” she says. “Sex is dead. Money is the sex of our time.”

He doesn’t reply. They sit silently, comfortable with each other.

“You’re a meatball,” she says finally.

“I know,” he says. “But a contented meatball. Are you contented, Sal?”

“Contented?” she says. “When you’re contented, you’re dead. Once you stop climbing, you slide right back down into the grave.”

“Oh, wow,” he says. “That’s heavy.”

She drains her wine, rises, digs into her shoulder bag. She comes up with bills, smacks them into his palm.

“Here’s a couple of hundred,” she says. “Go buy yourself some paint and spaghetti. And a haircut.”

“Sally, I can’t—”

“Screw it,” she says roughly. “It’s not my dough. I’ll take it out of petty cash at the office. Pa will never know the difference.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Before she leaves, he embraces her again.

“You’ll think about posing for me?”

“I will. I really will.”

“I love you, Sal.”

“And I love you. Stay well and say hello to Paul for me. I’ll be in touch.”

She gets back to Smithtown a little before midnight. Goes up to her mother’s bedroom and opens the door cautiously. The night-light is on, and Becky is snoring grandly. Sally goes back downstairs to the office-den. The books for the accountant and tax attorney and IRS are kept in the office safe of Steiner Waste Control on Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan. The
real
books are kept here, in a small safe disguised as a cocktail table.

She spends a half-hour crunching numbers, using a pocket calculator that has no memory. Profits are up over the corresponding week of the previous year. But not enough. The tax paid to the bentnoses for the right to collect garbage is a constant drain. Go sue city hall.

Next she flips through the current issue of
Barron’s
to see how their equities are doing. A small uptick. Jake lets his daughter do all the investing. “I can’t be bothered with that shit.” He doesn’t know an option from a future, but he can read the bottom line. Every month. Then it’s a grudging “Not bad” or a furious “You trying to bankrupt me?”

Sally pushes the papers away on the big, leather-topped desk scarred with burns from her father’s cigars. She sits brooding, biting at the hard skin around her thumbnail.

They’re doing okay—but nothing sensational. Most people would consider the Steiners rich, but they’re not
rich
rich—which is all that counts. It’s not for lack of trying; the want is there. But what Sally calls the Big Chance just hasn’t come along. She can buy a thousand shares of this and a thousand shares of that, and maybe make a few bucks. Terrific.

But she’s also bought some dogs and, on paper, the Steiner portfolio is earning about ten percent annually. Hurrah. She’d be doing better if she socked all their cash away in tax exempts. But where’s the fun there? She doesn’t go to the racetracks or to Vegas; stocks are her wheel of fortune. She knows that playing the market is a crapshoot, but once tried, never denied.

Later, naked in bed, hands locked behind her head, she tries to concentrate on the Big Chance and how it might be finagled. But all she can think about is Eddie asking her to pose in the nude.

That’s the nicest thing that’s happened to her in years.

Judy Bering, the receptionist-secretary, opens the door of Sally’s office and sticks her head in.

“There’s a guy out here,” she says. “Claims he was hired and told to report for work this morning.”

“Yeah,” Sally says, “pa told me he’d show up. What’s his name?”

“Anthony Ricci.”

“Sure,” Sally says. “What else? What’s he like?”

Judy rolls her eyes heavenward. “A Popsicle,” she says.

Ricci comes in, an Adonis, carrying his cap and wearing a smile that lights up the dingy office.

“Good morning, miss,” he says. “I am Anthony Ricci, and I am to work here as a loader.”

“Yeah,” Sally says, “so I heard. My name is Sally Steiner. I’m the boss’s daughter. Sit down. Have a cigarette if you like. You got all your papers?”

“Oh, sure. Right here.”

He digs into his jacket pocket, slides the documents across Sally’s desk. She flips through them quickly.

“Everything looks okay,” she says. “You been over here six months?”

“Maybe seven,” he says. “I never want to go back.”

“You speak good English.”

“I thank you. I study hard.”

“Good for you,” Sally says. “You know what a loader does? He lifts heavy cans of garbage and dumps them into the back of a truck. You can handle that?”

Again that high-intensity smile. Ricci lifts his arms, flexes his biceps. “I can handle,” he says.

“Uh-huh,” Sally says. “We’ve had three hernias in the past year. They call you Tony, I suppose.”

“That’s right. Tony.”

“Well, Tony, the boss isn’t in right now. He’s out inspecting a new territory we just took over. He should be back soon, but meanwhile I’ll show you around. Come along with me.

As they’re going out the door, he flashes those brilliant choppers again and asks, “You married?”

“What’s it to you?” Sally says sharply.

She shows him around the dump: sheds, unloading docks, compactors, maintenance garage, shower and locker room. She leaves him with old gimpy Ed Fogleman who got a leg caught in a mulcher but won’t quit. Jake Steiner keeps him on as a kind of plant caretaker, and is happy to have him.

Sally goes back to her office, draws her third cup of black coffee of the day from the big perk in Judy Bering’s cubbyhole, and gets back to her paperwork.

She is vice president and truck dispatcher at Steiner Waste Control. She directs, controls, hires, fires, praises, berates, curses, and occasionally comforts a crew of tough men, drivers and loaders, who make a living from their strength and their sweat. They work hard (Sally sees to that), and they live hard.

But Sally does more than schedule garbage trucks. She’s the office manager. She leans over the shoulder of the bookkeeper. She solicits and reviews bids on new equipment. She negotiates contracts with old and new customers. She deals with the union and approves all the city, state, and federal bumf required, including environmental reports.

Big job. Stress. Tension. Dealing with a lot of hardnoses. But she thrives on it. Because she’s a woman making her way in this coarse men’s world of the bribed and the bribers, the petty crooks, the thugs on the take, and the smiling lads with their knives hidden up their sleeves. Sally Steiner loves it because it’s alive, with a gross vitality that keeps her alert and steaming.

At about 12:30, she runs across Eleventh Avenue and has a pastrami and Swiss on a seeded roll, with iced tea, at the Stardust Diner. She and Mabel, the waitress, exchange ribald comments about the crazy Greek chef who recently flipped a hamburger so high that it stuck to the tin ceiling.

She returns to the Steiner dump. A loaded truck is coming in, driven by Terry Mulloy, a redheaded, red-faced harp. Sitting beside him is his loader, a black named Leroy Hamilton who’s big enough to play noseguard for the Rams. Both these guys are beer hounds, and on a hot day you want to stand well upwind from them.

“Hey, Sally baby,” Terry calls, waving. “How’ya doing?”

“Surviving,” she says, walking up to the truck. “How you two putzes doing?”

“Great,” Leroy says. “We’re getting a better class of crap today. You know that restaurant on Thirty-eighth? I picked out enough steak scraps to feed my Doberman for a week.”

“Bull
shit!”
Sally says. “You two morons are going to have a barbecue tonight.”

They laugh. “Hey, baby,” Terry says, “when are you and me going to make it? A night on the town. Maybe a show. A great dinner. All you can eat.”

“No, thanks,” Sally says. “I got no use for shorthorns.”

She flips a hand and starts away. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” Terry Mulloy yells after her.

She goes back to her office, smiling. That guy will never give up. But it’s okay; she can handle him. And she enjoys the rude challenge.

She works on the next week’s schedule, assigning drivers and loaders to the Steiner fleet of trucks. For a couple of years now she’s been trying to convince her father to computerize the whole operation. But Jake continues to resist. It’s not that they can’t afford it; he just doesn’t want to turn control over to machines; he’s got to see those scraps of paper with numbers scrawled on them.