The Lonely Hearts Hotel(109)

64


    THE HEART IS A TRUMPET SOLO



Rose couldn’t bring herself to leave her room. The chorus girl Colombe said she could replace the star. Even though she wasn’t as charismatic as Rose, they figured she would do. They tried to hire another pianist. A line of them arrived in the morning at the New Amsterdam Theater. Pierrot had never written down his score. The girls hummed and whistled their interpretations of Pierrot’s tune. It was always lacking when someone else played it. When ticket holders heard that the stars of the show would not be appearing in that night’s performance, they began to demand that their tickets be refunded. The remaining Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza dates were canceled. And the dates were given to a troupe of twelve-year-old ballerinas who had just emigrated from Poland and were called the Flying Mice.

? ? ?

FABIO HAD THE MOON DELIVERED to Jimmy and his men. It was tied to the back of a delivery truck as all the neighborhood children stood on the sidewalk watching and laughing. It was driven out to a rendezvous point down a rural road half an hour outside the city. It was a spot where they usually whacked people. A deer stepped out onto the road, making wide, slow steps, as if it were sneaking up behind a friend.

After the moon was unloaded from the truck, the driver climbed back in the vehicle and drove off down the bumpy road. The gangsters walked around the moon, assessing the best way to open it.

“Is there a trick to this?” Jimmy asked Caspar.

“I don’t think they thought that far ahead.”

“Let’s shoot the fucking thing,” a gangster suggested.

Another gangster brought an ax out and started to strike it. The moon began to crack, as though it were an enormous egg. They waited to see. There was the feeling that just about anything could happen. A dinosaur might suddenly appear and unfurl its claws. White dust and plaster spilled everywhere when the shell cracked, but there it was: a trunk of heroin, freshly imported from the East into Montreal, meant for immediate distribution in the streets of New York City. The gangsters laughed at the absurdity of it all.

They carried the shell of the moon to the nearby lake and pushed it in. It bobbled about in the water before sinking. It looked like a reflection of the real moon.

Jimmy went back to the hotel feeling miserable. Rose hadn’t come with the moon. He hadn’t seen her in days. In the evenings there were usually gangsters in Jimmy’s room. There was a huge ballroom downstairs, but people always liked to be wherever Jimmy was. They would crowd into his tiny room. There would be six or seven gangsters sitting on the side of the bed. There would be one sitting in the cushion of the armchair and one on the arm of the chair. There would be a gangster leaning up against the bureau and one checking himself out in the bathroom mirror. But in this case, he wanted to be all alone. His white carnation boutonniere looked like a crumpled-up love poem.

? ? ?

OVER AT THE HONEYMOON HOTEL, Fabio was sitting in his room, shirtless and hunched, like bread dough that had yet to be beaten into shape. The show had closed and the moon had been delivered. McMahon would be waiting for word of Rose’s execution. If McMahon didn’t hear that Rose was dead, and soon, he would be sending his men down to start a war. Or Jimmy might change his mind and kill her himself.

So for days Fabio had been trying to get Rose to pack up the troupe and head back on the train to Montreal.

But Rose never looked as though she had any intention of leaving. Every time he went to her room, he could see that her clothes were sprawled everywhere—over couches and chairs. She had a half-eaten cupcake on her boudoir table, as she hadn’t even bothered to let one of the maids come in to clean up the mess.

She didn’t appear to have bathed either. She sat in a dirty slip, her hair greasy and sticking up. She had been afflicted by guilt. She was going to give up the entire project just so that she could devote her life to sitting in a hotel room, feeling guilty about having chased Pierrot away.

That morning, just to be dutiful, Fabio had checked in on Rose. He had opened the door and saw that she was sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to him, looking toward the window.

“Any word from Pierrot?” he had asked.

Rose hadn’t had to turn to know it was Fabio who had poked his head into her room. She knew his cigar-scarred voice.

“Maybe he doesn’t know we’re leaving,” Rose had answered faintly. “He might not have heard that the show was canceled. I’m sure he went to the zoo.”

“Are you out of your mind? Nobody goes to the zoo for five days. I’ve had people go there looking for him. He isn’t there.”

“So?”

“Well, what do you believe happened to him? Do you imagine that he got eaten alive by a polar bear?”

“Get out of here!” Rose had screamed.

She’d stood up, spinning around, and picked up an ashtray and flung it at his head. He’d slammed the door just in time.

? ? ?

FABIO PUT ON A SHIRT when he heard a knock at the door. He hoped it was Rose, coming to apologize for her behavior. He opened it to instead discover a timid-looking maid with extraordinarily plump pink lips, dressed in a black uniform.

“I have an envelope that I’m supposed to deliver to Rose’s room.”

“Well, this isn’t Rose’s room, is it?”

“It’s because, sir, well, last time I went to Mrs. Rose’s room, she threw a cupcake right at my head, you see.”