Robert Knightly - The cold room

‘Then why did you go through with it?’

‘Hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides, I knew you’d appreciate the gesture.’

I stood at that point, then picked up the nearly weightless plastic table and carried it to the wall. As I set it down, I suddenly grabbed my left side and dropped to one knee, my eyes squeezing shut as I gasped in pain.

Adele opened the door and looked inside, but I shook my head and waved her away.

‘I’m alright.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’ I waited for her to leave, then struggled to my feet and offered Ronald an apologetic smile. ‘Ya gotta cut me some slack, Ronnie. I got shot yesterday.’

‘Shot?’

‘By Aslan Khalid. You wanna check it out?’

Ronald’s quizzical smile expanded at the mention of Aslan’s name. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I would.’

I took off the vest and laid it in his lap. ‘See here? This gouge? That’s where the bullet hit me’ I pointed to a tear in the vest where the fabric was blackened. ‘The doctors tell me that if I hadn’t been wearing my vest, I wouldn’t be talking to you now. You or anybody else.’

Very slowly, very softly, Ronald slid the fingertips of his right hand over the hole in the vest, tracing its edges first, then easing his pinky into the opening. Prurient is the first word that came to my mind as I watched. Perverted was the next. Ronald Portola was a sick puppy and he didn’t care who knew it.

Clutching my side, I re-positioned myself behind him, then waited patiently until he dropped the vest to the floor.

‘Can we talk about Mynka?’ I whispered in his ear.

‘Toad?’

‘Think twice, Ronnie. That mirror over there, it’s a window for anybody standing on the other side. Getting your face slapped once might be a thrill, but I guarantee it’s an activity that wears thin pretty fast.’

Ronnie put his hand on his heart. He was staring at the mirror now, clearly fascinated. ‘My sincere apologies,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I didn’t keep track of their given names. Which one was Mynka?’

‘Mynka was the one who got murdered in your kitchen.’

I put my right hand on his shoulder, my fingers reaching around just far enough to sense, very faintly, the pulse at his throat. Ronald’s heart was racing.

‘I was just wondering if you’d like to hear a story, Ronald, a kind of travelogue that begins with Mynka Chechowski’s body, then follows a trail to Margaret Portola and her children. It’s a very entertaining story.’

‘Certainly.’ He sounded relieved, almost grateful. I’d turned up the pressure, then eased back. Maybe everything would be all right. I began with the forensic details, the pink lividity, the foreign dentistry, and especially the evisceration. Then I told him about the witness who’d happened on the scene a moment before Mynka’s body was to be consigned to the sea, and about the advertisement in Gazeta Warszawa that broke the case open, and about my consultation with Aslan Khalid in the Eagle Street warehouse. Finally, I described Barsakov in the chair behind Aslan’s desk with half his head blown away and the flag of Chechnya pinned to the wall behind him.

‘Swear to God, Ronnie, when I looked into the wolf’s eyes, it was like he did it. I’m talkin’ about the wolf. It was like the wolf came down off the flag and drilled his fangs into Konstantine’s skull.’

Ronald and I were both staring at the mirror on the other side of the room when I finished the tale. I was watching him, watching him closely, but Ronald was gazing directly into his own eyes.

‘It’s your turn, now,’ I finally said, my voice a whisper, ‘to tell me a story.’

‘About what?’

‘Start with the cold room. Tell me what it was like.’

Ronald tilted his chin up, his eyes shifting slightly to meet mine. Did he want to play this game?

‘Did you ever tell anyone, Ronnie, anyone at all? A friend, a teacher, a therapist?’

‘I had no friends as a child. I hated my tutors. Margaret would never allow me to see a therapist.’

‘Then it was a family secret.’

‘Yes, a secret.’

‘Well, I’ve been there, Ronnie, in the cold room. I already know.’

‘The trick is to make yourself little. I used to imagine that I was a ball of cheese, all folded on itself, with a thick, waxy skin for a blanket.’ Ronald’s tongue appeared between his lips and he sucked in a deep breath as his shoulders relaxed. ‘But the cold room was only for special occasions. Usually, Margaret was more hands-on. Besides, you can get used to anything if you have to.’

‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Ronnie. I was in the cold room with the door closed for five minutes and I nearly panicked.’

‘Panic? Yes, of course, at first. But panic only excited Margaret. Begging, too. No, you had to make yourself infinitely small, so tiny there was no self for the cold to penetrate. Jerk never understood that.’

‘Jerk?’

‘My brother.’

‘Can you say his name?’

‘Jerk.’

‘And what didn’t he understand?’

Ronald’s hands began to wash over each other. He was breathing through his mouth now. ‘Do you know why the cold room is there in the first place? Were you clever enough to find out?’

‘Actually, that was one of the things I was going to ask you.’ I was encouraged by Ronald’s attitude. He was now volunteering information. ‘Why have a refrigerator that big in a private home?’

‘The cold room is there because in the nineteen twenties, the house was a speakeasy, with an upstairs brothel, owned by Dutch Schultz. In nineteen twenty-eight, two gangsters were killed in the cellar, Blintzy Reznick and Little Moe Cohen. Margaret has newspaper clippings documenting the whole episode. According to the Herald Tribune, Little Moe and Blintzy were refrigerated for three days after the actual murders. I think that’s where Margaret got the idea. Otherwise, who would even think about putting a child in a.?.?.’

‘In a refrigerator?’

Ronald’s laugh was soft and dry. ‘Jerk was a fighter,’ he added, ‘and what did it get him? I was a ball of cheese, and look at me now.’

‘What about your father. Why didn’t he protect you?’

Once he got started, Ronald couldn’t stop, and bit by bit, I assembled a portrait of the Portola household. The only child of a prominent, Brazilian family, Guillermo Portola had used up three wives, along with innumerable mistresses, in an effort to produce an heir. His marriage to the secretary he’d occasionally boffed was motivated solely by the need to legitimize that heir. According to Ronald, aside from impregnating Margaret a second time, Guillermo had very little to do with his wife and children. His life was lived in a suite at the Pierre Hotel, where he passed his nights with the high-end call girls he preferred to his psycho spouse. Nevertheless, Guillermo supported his family in style, which left Margaret to do as she pleased, the absolute master of the house.

And what a master she was, given both to sudden rages and calculated cruelty. Her children were initially cared for by nannies, then privately tutored through high school. Subject to Margaret’s temper, the nannies and tutors came and went, leaving in their wake a montage of faces and names that Ronald chose not to remember. As they, the nannies and the tutors, chose not to remember, or even recognize, the obvious bruises on the frail bodies of the children.

‘What about friends?’ I asked.

‘I went to birthday parties sometimes, and sometime a luckless child would be sentenced to pass an afternoon in my company. Needless to say, they rarely came back. I belonged to clubs, too. A chess club on the East Side and a gem club at the Metropolitan Museum. I have friends now, a collection of oddities who share my interests, but my early years were passed in solitude.’