Thomas Perry - Blood Money

4

Jane awoke, already aware of the sound. It was a man walking along the corridor. She heard him stop at her door, and she identified the disturbance that had brought her out of her sleep. The man had been trying to walk quietly. She rolled off the bed, picked up the heavy ashtray from the nightstand, stepped close to the door, and waited in the darkness.

She heard something go into the lock, then saw the door open until the chain caught it. A bent coat hanger snaked inside, hooked onto the last link of the chain, slid it to the end of its track, and removed it. The door opened a few more inches, and Jane saw him through the crack at the hinges.

“Hello, Bernie,” she said quietly.

“Oh, there you are,” said Bernie. “Can I come in?”

“It’s a little late to ask for an invitation.”

The old man stepped inside and closed the door, then flipped the light on, and quickly averted his eyes. “Sorry,” he said.

Jane remembered, picked up the jeans and white blouse she had left at the foot of the bed, and slipped them on. “How did you learn to open a hotel door?”

He shrugged. “Oh, it’s just an old trick from when I was young. I was so broke I couldn’t afford hotels in those days, so once in a while I needed to use one without paying.”

She shook her head. “Bernie, when they’re unoccupied, the chain isn’t fastened.”

“That’s a different trick. I thought you meant the lock. Motels like this don’t give a shit about what happens to their customers. The doors are hollow and easy to kick down, so they put cheap locks on them to save the expense of replacing them.”

Jane decided that she didn’t really care why the old man had once broken into occupied hotel rooms: armed robbery, probably, but that had been long ago. “What do you want, Bernie?”

“Just friendly concern. I went out for a walk, and I happened to notice the light in the window. I thought I’d see why you were up.”

“If there was a light, it wasn’t in my window,” she said. “Let’s get beyond the preliminary lies and get to the big ones. You want me to take you to some safe haven.”

“That would be nice,” he agreed. “But I guess I’ll have to figure out how to close out my own life.”

“That’s how you’re seeing this?”

“How can it be anything else?” he asked. Then he said thoughtfully, “Did you hear how I got killed?”

Jane nodded. “I watched the television news before I went to bed. They said that a seventy-year-old woman died when you did. How did that happen?”

“She was the one who shot me.” He looked sad. “I guess the excitement was too much for her heart. She died on the way to the hospital.”

“You were supposed to be killed by an old woman?”

Bernie sighed. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me.” He looked at her, and the pain in his eyes seemed genuine. “I loved her. Francesca Giannini.” The eyes looked colder now, as though they were judging Jane. “People saw her near the end, and they probably saw this old lady with hard, sharp black eyes like a hawk, and wrinkled skin. They wouldn’t have been able to imagine what she was like in the old days.”

Jane could tell that Bernie was testing her: whether she was smart enough to know that she would be old too. She sat at the foot of the bed beside him.

Bernie said, “I met her at the Fontainebleau in Miami. She was twenty, I was twenty-two. In those days, mob sit-downs were different. They used to meet in places like that. It’s hard to believe now, but they’d bring their wives, kids, dogs. Her father was Dominic Giannini. He brought her along, like it was a vacation. Looking back on it now, I think he probably did it because he was afraid to leave her home alone. Not that she was in danger or something—he had Detroit sewed up tight. He just knew that if he left her home, what he told her not to do was only talk.”

Jane nodded. “I guess things like that don’t change much.”

“You have to understand what the problem was,” said Bernie. “She was beautiful.” Jane could see his eyes glaze over, and then he gave a little shake, as though coming back to the present was painful.

Jane was astonished. “You’re not just remembering, are you? You’re seeing it.”

Bernie touched Jane’s arm gently, as though he were a parent soothing and reassuring her. “That’s part of it, too, you know. You don’t just get to bring back what will make you happy. Once you’ve seen something, you’re stuck with it. If I think about it, I can see her now. She isn’t any different from the way she looked then. Where every long black hair was, every pore of that smooth white skin, whatever was reflected in those huge brown eyes at different times; even things I didn’t notice at that moment—things in the room. There was a lace cover on the counter behind me, and the corner was folded up, just like this.” He folded the edge of Jane’s sheet to demonstrate. “There was a sand fly that was on its way to the window to get out.”

Jane’s throat was dry. She cleared it, and said, “It must be hard.”

“Not in the same way as it used to be,” said Bernie. “I told you we were at the Fontainebleau. The big guys were in a meeting in a suite upstairs with their consiglieres . Their caporegima were mostly in the bar by the pool keeping an eye on each other. There were a few soldiers, mostly older guys sitting in the hallways on those French chairs with the squiggly gold edges that nobody ever sits on, pretending to read newspapers. I saw her in the dining room. She looked right at me, not peeking and looking down, or any of that. She came to me and took me by the hand. We went for a long walk, and talked. All of a sudden she stopped, turned around, and started leading me back. I said, ‘Do we have to go back now?’ She said, ‘I thought you’d like to see my room.’ ”

“You don’t need to tell me this.”

“Yes,” he insisted. “I do. She locked the door and started taking off her clothes. It wasn’t like she had any experience at it, just determination. This was something she was going to do. She got down to the skin in about five seconds—sort of a ‘There. That’s done’ look on her face. Then she looked up at me for a minute. I’m still standing there with my mouth open. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Tell me what to do.’ Do you understand?”

Jane remembered. The event that you were warned about as most to be feared slowly became an obsession, until virginity was like carrying a handful of hot coals. “I think I do.”

He nodded, and gazed at the rug for a moment. “That was how it happened. It wasn’t one of those things where she just lays there with her eyes shut tight and tolerates it while you work your will on her. She wanted to do everything a man and a woman ever did together. She just didn’t know how.”

In spite of her resistance, Jane could feel it in her own memory. Of course that must always have been a part of it since time began—she remembered the fumbling and clumsiness because she hadn’t been exactly positive about how things were supposed to happen, and had been so afraid that she might be awkward. She remembered the longing to have everything be beautiful and seamless, but it was impossible because she had been watching herself with a critical, unforgiving eye.

“I didn’t know anything either,” said Bernie. “In those days, at that age you were just a kid. But we learned, like everybody does. We sneaked off six more times. Every time the bosses would disappear into the suite upstairs, she would find me.”

“What happened afterward?”

He sighed, and there was a rattly sound in his throat. “She said she was going to work it out with her father, and we would get married. I was a kid, and an outsider. I didn’t know what a job that was going to be. See, I didn’t really fit in. I was only there because I was working for the Augustinos in Pittsburgh.”