Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“Oh, yeah? Seeing the folks?”

“No, an old boyfriend. Rocco Lopata.”

“Uh-huh. Is this like something I should be worrying about?”

“Nah, it’s just that every so often I have to get it on in a grease pit with a short, hairy, overweight body-shop manager. I’ll be in and out of there in twenty minutes.”

“Hey, no problem, I’m an eighties guy. You’ll wash up after?”

“Of course. Oh, also, I had a charming conversation with your daughter on the subject of how the Chens are taking this shooting thing. I happened to mention I had been by there, and she went ballistic on me. Apparently, I totally destroyed her life, and none of her friends will ever talk to her again.”

“What? By offering to help?”

“Yes, and don’t ask me to explain it because half of it was in Chinese. What I sort of gathered was that by appearing there I implied that I wished them to incur even more obligation to me than they already owed, which is sort of an insult, if you can figure that out. Also, she’d already heard through some grapevine that I was wearing a yellow shirt, which made it worse, yellow being an inauspicious color in time of trouble. Anyway, I was elaborately cursed out and had the phone slammed in my ear. I called back right away, and Posie said she’d stormed out.”

“Wait a second-Lucy? She used language to you?”

“Oh, not in English, she’s not that crazy, but I got the tone through whatever she was speaking-Cantonese or Tibetan, for all I know. Butch, we’ve got to do something about that kid.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Karp said grumpily, thinking, as he did often these days, why can’t she for God’s sakes get along with the kid-Lucy’s perfectly okay with me . The family drama was something of a closed book to Karp, who still thought that mere kindness and honesty would suffice to untangle that tale.

Marlene worked to keep the snap from her voice. “Yeah, well, I was thinking more along the lines of a Catholic military school in Alabama, but give it a try.”

“I guess that wasn’t the moment to bring up Sacred Heart again,” Karp said.

Marlene laughed bitterly. “Oh, right. The last time I did she bit my head off. I explain the advantages, I tell her she’s not going to be happy in public school ninth grade, and I get, I’m not going to leave my friends and that’s final, Mother .”

“It’s her life,” said Karp.

“It’s not her life,” cried Marlene, and then sighed and in a tone of false brightness she asked, “And how was your day, darling?”

“Great. I just shit-canned a case out of Felony that took a year and a half to construct, and probably drove some kid ADA to drink or worse.”

“Was it fun?”

“Made my week. I’m going to have to ream Jimmy Sullivan’s ass again. The thing never should’ve gotten this far in the first place. But look, why I called, whatever the Chens say, I’m going to find the ADA on this Chinatown thing and get the full story. I assume you’re looking into it, too.”

“I have Jim on it-he hasn’t got back to me yet,” said Marlene, after which static intervened and she clicked the thing off.

Atlantic Avenue Paint amp; Body was located on that thoroughfare just after it crosses Woodlawn Avenue, in the Ozone Park neighborhood in the borough of Queens, and consisted of the usual one-story concrete-block loft, with an asphalt apron in front packed with vehicles. It was painted bright blue, with the name of the firm picked out in fancy shadowed white lettering. Marlene had grown up six blocks away and would never have considered taking her trade anywhere but Lopata’s, as the place was called locally. Although at this point both her paint and her body were fine.

Marlene sat in her car for a while, feeling the sun through the windshield, warm but not unpleasantly so, listening to the rumble of the dog’s breathing from the back and the sounds of metal bashing from inside Lopata’s, and letting the old neighborhood soak in. Contra the famous saying, Marlene, unlike New Yorkers from Iowa, say, could go home again and did so fairly often. Her family and their neighbors thought she was crazy but not a danger to anyone but herself, and the mild celebrity she enjoyed did not hurt. Lately, her mother had started asking why Marlene did not appear on the talk shows, since she “knew more than all of those idiots they got on there put together.” Also, although she would have denied it, the stability of this neighborhood was a comfort. Ozone Park had been inhabited by Italians and other Catholics of the old immigration when Marlene was born, and it was inhabited by them and their children still. Ordinarily, Marlene rather enjoyed dwelling in one of the districts of the city most boiling with ethnic weirdness, but sometimes not, as now; in the wake of the Chen unpleasantness she had paisan hunger, and had semiconsciously contrived a business excuse for a journey here to assuage it.

Through the dusty window of the garage she could see a burly man in a filthy pinstriped mechanic’s coverall speaking on the phone. His gestures as he spoke were eloquently violent, and she could imagine the tenor of his language. Remembered, more than imagined, and that went for the gestures, too. Rocky Lopata as a high school junior had been a lean, cocky, mildly criminal kid with a duck-tail haircut and a black motorcycle jacket, the heartthrob of the whole girls’ eighth grade at St. Joseph’s parochial school. He hung with the kind of bad girls who wore their collars up in back and hung Chesterfields from their scarlet mouths, and it was a known thing that Terry Riccio had gone all the way with him. It was therefore a wonder to the school when little Marlene, of the straight A’s and perfect behavior record, laid a heavy flirt on him at the Holy Martyrs basketball game (to which he, of course, responded, she being at the time as beautiful as the dawn) and even more of a wonder when Terry came after her with claws out after the game and Marlene knocked her sprawling with three punches. This, naturally, won the heart of Rocky, and there followed three months of educational evenings in the back of Rocky’s chopped Plymouth out by the airport, the planes roaring overhead, while Marlene learned what she wanted to know about the physical aspects of love. Rocky never got her to go all the way, but he wasn’t complaining, considering what he was getting, and thinking himself in love until the day when she skillfully dumped him. It was his first heartbreak, and Marlene’s first as a breaker, though far, far from her last.

Rocky finished his call, slammed down the phone, felt eyes on him, cocked his hand to shade a peering look through the window, and then walked out to her car. He grinned as he came closer.

“I thought to myself, that can’t be Marlene Ciampi in a orange Volvo ,” he said, “but I was wrong. All right, she had the VW, she’s a old hippie, I can live with that, but a Volvo ?”

Marlene grinned back and got out of the car. “They’re very reliable,” she said primly.

“Oh, yeah, and safe . Hey, I got a cherry ’78 Trans I could put you in. Silver flake lacquer?”

“Rocky, give me a break. I’m an old lady with a big dog.”

“So get a poodle. You belong in serious wheels, Marlene.” He looked her boldly up and down. “Meanwhile, you’re still the hottest thing in the borough.”

“Thank you. You probably clean up pretty good yourself. How’s Terry?”

After that they spent a pleasant fifteen minutes catching up on the old gang, many of whom had stayed close to home.

“So, what’re you, visiting the folks?” Rocky asked when that had run its course.