The Lonely Hearts Hotel(89)
“Pierrot, look at this for a second.”
“Hmmm.”
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LATER, ONE OF the less-talented clowns, Fabio, walked past Rose while she was crunching numbers. Although he was fifty-seven, rather obese and had drooping gray cheeks, he performed an act wherein he pretended to be a toddler.
“Oh, I’ve always loved numbers,” Fabio said. “They behave so prettily, don’t you find?”
Rose immediately made him wipe off his face paint and work as her accountant.
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THAT EVENING Rose hurriedly undressed and climbed into bed. She rarely had an hour to herself in the evenings, but this night she needed it. She switched on the lamp next to her bed. The lampshade was yellow with pink blossoms painted on it, and the lightbulb was the wattage of an early day in May. She pulled a book out from a paper bag and began reading it eagerly. It was a pulp novel with a character based on Jimmy Bonaventura and his exploits. Rose was curious and had bought herself a copy at the drugstore. It was horrendously written, but it was a page-turner.
Jimmy Bonaventura had no idea who his father was. His mother was a maid who had been seduced. When she got pregnant, she thought that the baby was her ticket to the high life. Instead, Jimmy’s mother became a prostitute. Jimmy had grown up in a tiny brothel. He used to sleep in bed with her after the clients went home. He used to sometimes hide under the bed while she was making love. He was so used to seeing her sitting on the laps of different men that he didn’t think anything of it.
When his mother jumped out the window of the brothel, Jimmy was sent to the boys’ home, where he met his right-hand man, Caspar. All the other boys were repelled by Caspar because his forehead was too big and jutted out. There was no haircut known to any barber that could hide that forehead. They thought he was mentally deficient. Jimmy thought this was a rather ridiculous assumption, because he could see right off the bat that Caspar was a genius. He could count cards. He could memorize phone books. He calculated odds for Jimmy.
When Caspar and Jimmy were fifteen, they turned a little ice cream parlor into a bookies’ den. And that was their first official headquarters. They wiped off all the names of ice cream flavors in chalk on the blackboard above the cash register. In their place they wrote the names of the racehorses. Which actually could have been the names of ice cream flavors and specialty sundaes: Rocky Road, Chunky Monkey, Slippery Banana, Marshmallow Darling, Cotton-Candy Heart.
They met a girl who was taking bets on skipping-rope tournaments. These were popular because boys liked to watch the girls’ skirts bop up into the air. She offered to turn tricks in the back room of the shop. The mafia came after them soon after that. Jimmy felt that if he could defend his ice cream shop, he could take over the entire city. He killed twenty-six men before the mafia backed off, and then it was all over.
A young, overly imaginative journalist had coined the name the Ice Cream Mafia. The author of the book suggested the name was inappropriate, as it seemed childish and sweet, when this was a group of most violent thugs. Rose closed the paperback, put it on the night table and felt happy thoughts.
She rather liked that she would be dealing with such a character. It occurred to her that she liked the mechanisms underground. Other than the fact that she had to communicate with McMahon again, she was pleased to be dipping her toes into those dark waters.
Her reflections were interrupted when she saw Pierrot standing at the foot of the bed, watching her. “What?” she asked.
“You read that whole book in two hours. You were enraptured. Just enraptured.”
“You know I like books.”
“I rather think it has something to do with the subject matter.”
“We are meeting him in a week.”
“I think it’s incredibly risky to have any dealings with Jimmy Bonaventura. He’s a psychopath, a murderer, a drug dealer and a pimp, with a flair for torture and a notoriously short fuse.”
“And he’s handsome.”
She started to laugh. Pierrot crawled onto the bed, moving toward her slowly on all fours. Rose squealed with laughter, and Pierrot pounced on her. The combination of danger and money was making her giddy.
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JIMMY BONAVENTURA WAS SITTING in his kitchen, reading the newspaper, when he saw an advertisement for the show from Montreal, which would be arriving in several weeks. There was a picture of a clown standing under an umbrella in a snowstorm. Jimmy cut it out and put it on his fridge. But upon second thought he crumpled it up and tossed it into the garbage. He hadn’t been pleased when McMahon told him about the plan.
A few days later he heard an advertisement for the show on the radio. The radio was on in the kitchen, and Jimmy was sitting in the bathtub, with the bathroom door open. He was anxious for the show to arrive. He was worried about the streets going dry. He needed to get those drugs out to the junkies—before they began to find other ways, or got new addictions, or some other dealer moved into town.
“Hurry up and get your goddamn choo-choo train here,” he yelled like an impatient child. Then he held up his foot to scrub between his toes with a bar of soap. His attractive head leaned against the edge of the bathtub for balance.
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IN THEIR HOTEL ROOM, Rose and Pierrot sat on either side of the kitchen table. There was a mouse on the counter, looking at different crumbs like a woman selecting fruit at a market, but they couldn’t be bothered to pay it any mind. Rose took out the piece of paper and stub of a pencil that she kept in her pocket. And in a simple diagram no more or less complicated than a spider’s web, they constructed the order of the acts in the Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza.