The Lonely Hearts Hotel(101)

And then, with several swipes of the pencil and various arrows and lines, she explained how he could easily take over the heroin trade that was coming into New York through Montreal. The tip of the pencil moved across the page like a bullet in slow-motion. She drew Xs along the docks where the heroin came in.

“You know which of his guys will turn, no problem?”

Rose nodded. She had watched their expressions at the Roxy for years and knew without a doubt which ones despised McMahon. She also knew they were all upset about the last major bust. She put a circle around the hotels that she wanted: the ones that he had purchased for McMahon in exchange for the heroin.

Jimmy liked the idea of any sort of power grab or a coup d’état. And he especially liked the sound of this one. He had never had a woman make a plan for him. He had always worked with men. They had designs that sometimes worked and that sometimes didn’t work at all. The strategies he chose were the ones he was curious about. And the ones he was curious about were the ones that had a spark of newness about them. These were always the most powerful plans. Nobody knew quite what to do when faced with the very electric power of new things.

? ? ?

ROSE WAS IN A GOOD MOOD when she rejoined Pierrot, who was smoking a cigarette on the street outside the Romeo Hotel.

“And so?” Pierrot said. “You worked out your business?”

“Yes!” Rose exclaimed.

Although Rose was light-footed and smiling, Pierrot felt concerned as he walked back to the hotel. At the beginning of the venture, he and Rose had collaborated on all aspects of the show. Then, as things became more hectic, they had divided up tasks, but now they seemed to have completely separated their jobs, to the point that they were no longer working together at all. She wanted to focus entirely on the drug trade. He could tell that she didn’t really care about the reviews as much as the other performers did. She had immediately set her sights higher than the show and was interested in negotiating with gangsters, not tour managers.

He had never been jealous about Rose having been with other men. He thought what they had together was so much better than what she had had with other men that he wouldn’t even deign to compare the unions. But she had been in the room planning a future with another man. He had known since even before he had met him that Jimmy Bonaventura was a threat.

On the window ledge was a robin that looked like a fat man who had been shot in the chest by his business partner.





60


    CONEY ISLAND BABY



Jimmy had to take Rose to meet the rest of the commission. On a Saturday afternoon they drove together to a restaurant that was built under the tracks in Brighton Beach. The elevated train roared over them and suddenly they were all characters in a silent film, mouthing their words. Although the ground under their feet shook, nobody walking by seemed to mind. They weren’t worried about everything crumbling down around them.

The restaurant was a small, unassuming place. You wouldn’t imagine that it was the type of place where a contingency of gangsters would meet. It was built out of red bricks and had red-and-white-striped curtains over its windows. The name Luigi was painted on the glass with sparkly gold paint, and there was a blackboard on the sidewalk out front with the names of all the types of pasta written in cursive.

A man came and took their coats. And while doing this, he very quickly and subtly patted them down for weapons. Rose found herself rather liking the way the strange man’s hands felt on her body. They made her feel dangerous.

The walls inside were covered in white tiles. There were large, circular wooden tables. The waiter threw the red tablecloth up into the air as if he were a matador gracefully challenging a bull. Jimmy and Rose sat at the big table by themselves.

The other heads shuffled in shortly afterward. One man was enormous. He ate beautifully. He twirled the spaghetti around his fork perfectly. He puckered up his mouth as though he were about to give a kiss and then dabbed it with a napkin. There was a squat man. His face was round and his features all seemed to be squashed up together within a very small area. Another man kept making jokes that weren’t funny. Another had a receding hairline that made him look intelligent and like some sort of scholar, but when he spoke, he had a thick Bronx accent and used the word fuck at least twice in every sentence.

A man in a pin-striped suit arrived, apologizing that he was late because he had just come from a funeral. The way he said it, Rose wondered whether that meant he had been at a funeral parlor seeing off a beloved aunt, or out on the side of the highway burying someone in a shallow grave.

They were all rather frightening and intimidating. But Rose liked that this was the sort of company she was now keeping. She knew that she could not even for an instant reveal any form of self-doubt, or any hesitation, or be in any way threatened by the men who were sitting around the table. In other words, she was not to show any signs that she was a girl. They made small talk among themselves, and Rose joined in as if it were perfectly normal for her to be there. The gangsters didn’t really understand Canadians—everything they did seemed to be ass-backward. Perhaps the women ran the show up there. There was no way the gangsters were going to turn down Rose’s plan. They nodded that McMahon would go. It had to be soon too because he was pestering Jimmy about bumping off Rose.

The noodles on her plate looked like a ball of yarn thoroughly messed up by a cat. She couldn’t eat a bite because she was so nervous. She smiled.