Rick Boyer - The Penny Ferry

On the blue case, in stylized lower-case letters in silver, was the word Orsini. He handed it to me and I snapped it open. Inside was a blue-and-gold lighter.

"Very handsome," I said. "How much?"

"Three twenty-five. It was their second~cheapest one. But still nice. He just filled it for me."

"What does it run on, plutonium?"

"Butane. Nice, eh? See, the nortes aren't the only ones who can have these. I don't buy that much for myself, you know."

We headed home. For his dues Joe bought a sack of pears and some Brie in Fresh Pond, and we were home by four. But after the car rolled to a stop and I gathered our purchases to carry inside, I noticed Joe hadn't moved. He was still behind the wheel, regarding the lighter that he flipped around in his big hands. I thought he must really love it. Then he got out slowly, as if burdened by a great weight. He sighed as he walked up the flagstones, carrying the new lighter in front of him in both hands the way a priest carries the host.

"Dammit, Doc. Why the hell did I ever buy this thing?"

"Oh I don't know," mused Mary as she fingered the lighter. "It looks really nice, Joey. And don't worry so much what those nortes do or don't do. We all know they're not really Italians. They're Austrians in drag."

We had asked Mary to pass judgment on Joe's big purchase. We were sitting around the dinner table after a huge feast.

"The tortellini was a nice surprise," I said, placing my hand under the table and on her thigh, which I commenced to stroke.

"That's a ball, Charlie," she said with a sigh.

"Huh?"

"Low and outside," she said, patting my hand.

"That's tawdry, dear. Must you always be so tawdry?"

"Yep."

Joe took the lighter back. It had clearly become an object of guilt, an albatross around his neck. Poor guy. Mary had the solution. She went upstairs and got my fancy black watch and fastened it onto Joe's wrist. Then she took the lighter from him and gave it to me. Pretend you've given each other presents, she said.

"Great," said Joe, regarding the fancy timepiece. "Only trouble is I don't need a watch."

"And I don't need a cigarette lighter."

"Well it's the thought that counts," said Mary. "Now Charlie, make the cappucino."

After dessert we put on a Mahler symphony and sat in the living room speculating on the Robinson/Fabrianni/dead-guy-in-the-chimney connection. There still didn't appear to be any, which made it all the more puzzling.

"Why are you guys so sure the poor man in the chimney was working for the Fabriannis?" asked Mary, who was busy flipping through a magazine.

"Well, the main thing is the fact that he looked Italian- not Italian-American but real Italian, you know," said her brother, scowling and fingering his new watch, which seemed to confuse and disgust him. "And also the fact that Johnny Robinson was carrying a gold cup for the Fabriannis earlier. But mainly, he wore a watch just like the one Lucia Fabrianni was wearing. It's called a Bulgari, and it's made in Italy."

"You guys are full of it," said Mary, looking at her nails.

"Now what makes you say that?" I asked.

"The man's watch. Two reasons. One: here's a Bulgari watch right here."

She flipped the magazine around and showed us a full-page color ad with the name boldly spelled out. I noticed it was spelled with a Roman style u that was shaped like a v. The magazine washer favorite: Attenzione, the magazine for Italian-Americans, or anybody who likes anything Italian. I liked the magazine a lot.

"Charlie and Joe, these Bulgari watches are the new thing. No more Rolex or Patek Philippe. It's all Bulgari now; the stores on Newbury Street are selling them like crazy. So reason number one, again: everybody's getting Bulgari watches now; the guy in the chimney could be an American."

"No way," said her brother.

"Two: you're saying the guys killed Johnny to get the gold cup, or something else valuable? Then why didn't they take the watch? They could sell it easily for a couple hundred bucks. So one, two: you guys are full of it."

She returned to her magazine and her nails. We didn't exactly know what to say. Leave a woman to screw everything all up. just before Joe left to return to his Beacon Hill bachelor apartment he and I went over the whole thing again, just the two of us. We decided Johnny Robinson's death was a Mob revenge killing after all. So I said good-bye fully expecting to begin making a new bridge for Tom Costello's mouth the next afternoon… and not expecting to see Joe until next weekend. But something unexpected changed all of that. It was a voice. A voice from beyond the grave.

Johnny Robinson's voice. Talking to me.

I regarded the bloody object that rested on the sterile paper. Clumps of clotted tissue clung to its lower extremities like limpets on a wave-washed rock. Although the patient sitting in my chair would certainly enjoy newfound relief now that the impacted third molar was removed from his lower jaw, I could not help feeling a wee bit like Torquemada every time I clamped my HuFriedy cowhorn forceps securely around an offending tooth and I began to rock it loose from its socket. You do this after you partially lift the tooth with a tool called an elevator; after the forceps are in place you rock the tooth back and forth and then extract it. Sometimes there is a muted crunch of bone or crackle as a root fractures under the strain. But always there is the sickening wet sucking sound of the gum tissue, a sound like that produced when you sink up to your knee in a muddy bog and then pull your leg out. To mute these noises I always have my patient wear earphones playing classical music- on the loud side. My current patient was listening to E. Power Biggs playing Bach's Toccata in E minor. He felt nothing… yet.

The lower portion of Ronald Belknap's tooth was bent at a thirty-degree angle. This dogleg had developed over the years as the tooth tried to push its way up through the gum- in the manner God and nature intended all good teeth to do- and join its fellow teeth in the job of grinding up food. But the tooth could not push its way to the surface because the jawbone was too small and there wasn't room. Our tiny mandible, like our appendix, is a curse of human evolution, So the tooth pushed against the twelve-year molar in front not it at an angle. And as it pushed against the molar, it began to bend. Finally all this pushing and bending leads to inflammation, pressure, and infection. Sometimes you need to section impacted teeth before you remove them, but in Belknap's case I didn't.

"Ohhhhh Jameseeeez," he moaned, looking at the huge tooth that lay soaking the white paper with blood. "No wonder that sucker hurt!"

"Yes," I said, "and unfortunately, when the local wears off you're going to get some more pain. Notice, Ron, I'm not calling it discomfort, as so many of my colleagues do. I'm calling it pain because that's what it will be. Do you drink?"

"Sure."

So I gave him a blue card with instructions. For minors, or people who don't drink, I give a white card with a different set of instructions and a prescription for Tylox. But never do I mix instructions, or cards, because booze on top of a pain-killing drug can make some people drop where they stand after one snort. It's very dangerous.

"Hey Doc. This just says to go home and get bombed."

"Uh-huh. There's a good drink recipe on the back. Stay home tomorrow and watch the tube. You'll be in some pain for the next twenty hours because I had to remove a wee bit of infected jawbone. That's going to smart. Next day return to work and a take aspirin. Keep the packing in your mouth until dinnertime and don't rinse. Good-bye."

"What about payment?"

"One pain at a time. Susan will bill you."