Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

She thumbed through the stack of glossies. A set of Gerald Fein in happier days: here was one of him entering a nightclub (El Morocco) with a blond woman on his arm, a beefy guy on the other side, smiling. The woman was Celia Fein, the wife, a looker, circa 1955; the guy was Charlie Tuna. Fein hung out with very bad people, and he also took his wife to nightclubs. The lady on Charlie Tuna’s arm was not his wife. Other nightclub shots, Fein at a long banquette table, laughing with the scum of the earth, dancing with the wife, talking earnestly with Sal Bollano. Where was Panofsky? Not a night-clubber? Maybe he didn’t like to get his picture taken. Next, some domestic shots, Fein and Celia, with little Vivian, not so little in this one, pretty like her mother, blond and delicate. It was a series of shots taken at some civic affair, all of them dressed in late-fifties high style, Fein himself in a double-breasted suit and topcoat, Celia in a fur coat, Vivian in a white fur jacket and matching hat. About fourteen, Marlene estimated, smiling shyly at the lens, while her daddy radiated love and bonhomie around him. Marlene studied the man’s smiling face. Energy, was the first impression, boiling spirit, barely contained behind the smile, the glinting eyes, the jutting jaw. One of the generation impressed by the fabled insouciance of FDR, Fein had adopted the lifted chin, the upward-pointing smoking apparatus, in Fein’s case a panatela rather than a cigarette holder, and he was able to bring it off too, because he was smoothly handsome in that tailored, buffed, 1940s way: wavy dark hair, large pale eyes, a noble nose, terrific even white teeth, a solid chin with a Clark Gable dimple in the center of it. Good-sized man, too, athletic, broad-shouldered. Must have been a terror with the ladies, Marlene thought, but it turns out he takes his wife to El Morocco with the bad boys. Flip to the next one. Same civic event: Dad and Vivian watching something, a theatrical act maybe, part of a well-dressed audience, but Dad isn’t watching the act, he’s watching Vivian, with oceans of love in his eyes. Marlene didn’t think that could be faked, not in a candid shot like this. The guy loved his family, no question. So why did he do it? He killed himself for the insurance? Make a note, check the policy value.

Another set, this one of the funeral, a big one, a mob affair, all the big guys sent flowers, both Bollanos, Big and Little Sallies carrying the coffin, and was that Abe Lapidus standing there, a stricken expression making his sad face sadder? Yes, it was, and who was that short, pear-shaped man, struggling to hold up the end of the casket? Marlene rooted around and found a hand lens. Yeah, unmistakable, although she had only ever seen the man garbed in black, on the bench: Herschel Panofsky, now H. R. Paine, His Honor. The ugly little fucker, as he was often called down at the courthouse, often by the current crop of Mob lawyers, and he was, his head too large for his ass-heavy soft body, a bulging forehead fringed by sparse, crisp curls, armpit-style hair (another nickname, The Armpit), a little parakeet beak of a nose, a sloppy mouth, not much chin. No Gableoid dimple there. Another shot: the ugly little fucker comforting the grieving widow and the daughter graveside, the daughter not being all that comforted, Marlene thought, a look of actual repugnance there through the tears, which just went to show, a picture worth a thousand words-she would have to ask Vivian about that when next they saw one another, maybe this very evening.

Then a thinner sheaf, these in color, the worst ones, and who knows how Sym had wormed them out of the official files, probably the same way she had procured drugs, whining and money, but here they were, what happened when a body fell nearly a thousand feet and reached terminal velocity before striking asphalt. He’d landed facedown, although it was hard to tell from the photograph; no, there was a black patch that had been the back of a well-tailored lawyer’s pinstripe, relatively untouched by the wide pool of horrors that surrounded it. Marlene made herself look, even wielded the hand lens, identifying the bits. Fein had gone out without any identification that morning-that could be a significant detail-which was why it had taken the cops some twenty-four hours to discover who the jumper had been. He’d left no note. Marlene put the lens down and gasped in some air. She’d spotted the dimpled chin, curiously blood-free, attached to a long, twisted piece of disassembled face. Well, enough of that! She put all the photographs away in their folders. She could make no connection between the robust, dashing man in the earlier photographs and the offal on Fifth Avenue. Sure, in literature they had them, Gatsby and Richard Cory, the shiny front with nothing behind it, but she doubted that Gerald Fein had been such a man. On what evidence? That look at the daughter, maybe? Panofsky was wrong; the law hadn’t been his whole life. Gerald Fein had a family.

Sym stuck her head in. “Phone for you. Some woman named Chau. Wants to know where Lucy’s at.”

“I’ll take it in back.” Marlene got up, stretched, yawned, and went back to her desk, located behind a bookcase full of potted plants in the rear of the big room.

Dr. Chau introduced herself and informed Marlene that Lucy had not shown for their noon lunch date; nor had she arrived at one-thirty for her regular lab session. She had never missed one before.

“Maybe she just forgot,” said Marlene, not believing this at all. “I mean, she’s a genius, but she’s twelve.”

Chau seemed satisfied with this, and Marlene got rid of her as soon as she could, pressed the disconnect, and immediately dialed Tran’s pager. She waited. The torment lasted ten minutes, and then Tran was on the phone.

“Is Lucy with you?”

A rather long pause. “I presume she is not at the laboratory, then.”

“No, they just called. Tran, you don’t think. .? I mean, those men who bothered them before. .”

“I very much doubt it, Marie-Helene. However, I will find her.”

“Where? Where is she?”

“Do not become upset, my friend. There is no one who wishes to hurt Lucy at present. She is an impulsive child and may have gone off somewhere. I will inspect her usual haunts.” In English he added, “No sweat it.”

“Don’t sweat it, you mean. ‘No sweat’ means a trivial problem.”

“This is also apt,” said Tran in French. “I will call. Until later.”

It had to be Leung, Tran thought, one of those phone calls from Li’s Restaurant had set up a lift, and they would have had to be good to have netted Lucy in daylight, in the city. The other day Leung had used his own boys, Chinese, and they had been foiled easily. He would not do that again. He would use. . who? Local people, certainly-you wouldn’t import a group from Hong Kong to lift a little girl; they might get lost or make some stupid error out of mere. . what was the word? Disorientation? Disoccidentation? There was no such word in any language, attesting to the cultural hegemony of the West. They would be Asian, probably; Tran couldn’t see a tong man hiring long-noses for such a job. That narrowed the field. Kidnap-capable gangs were not exactly common, even in Chinatown. Tran knew several, and he decided to start with the one he used himself, when he had need of such services.

The business offices of the Hoi Do an-truong were located above a Vietnamese grocery on Lafayette, just off Canal, in the heart of the area that Vietnamese gangs had recently claimed for their own. Vietnamese gangs are not squeamish in their choice of names, unlike the Chinese, who prefer flowery vagueness with a “harmonious” or “benevolent” tossed in. One Viet gang of the period was called Born to Kill; Hoi Do an-truong means “the society of those with severed entrails,” aka “The Sorrow League.” In Vietnamese folklore that name refers to an association of men and women of talent doomed to a life of woe by cruel fate.