Lena.
Michael fantasized a voluptuous dark-haired woman of indeterminate Mediterranean origin. Lena. And the swan? Oh? No kidding? In college, before he’d met Sarah, his taste had run to poetry and to dark-haired women... well, even though he’d known better, he’d still thought of them as girls, actually. He was now thirty-six, this was back during the seventies; Betty Friedan had published her Feminine Mystique a decade earlier, and Erica Jong had just begun telling the world about her ten thousand and one orgasms.
Michael was twenty-one when he met the first blonde he’d ever dated, the last girl — or even woman — he’d ever date again because that blonde happened to be a nineteen-year-old junior named Sarah Fitch whom he married a year later, after he’d graduated with his B.S. degree, and while she was still in her senior year. His parents helped him through law school — it was a matter of pride that he’d later repaid them every cent — until Sarah herself graduated with a B.A. and got a license to teach English, which she’d done here and there all over New York while he trudged uptown to Columbia. She still taught at the Greer Academy, where she’d settled in some eight years ago, after getting her master’s from NYU. He was always surprised when a woman obviously in her late twenties stopped “Mrs. Welles” on the street and told her how much she’d enjoyed being in her class. Well, Sarah was thirty-four now. She’d started teaching when she was twenty-three; those sixteen-year-olds back then were now in their late twenties.
Lena.
Maybe it wasn’t a woman’s name at all. No woman behind the throne here, no woman whose advice was earnestly sought. Maybe it was a man’s family name, maybe the Lena with whom Palumbo had to talk it over was a Johnny Lena or a Joey Lena or a Foonzie Lena. If so, had his name ever cropped up in the hundreds of conversations between the Brothers Faviola at all hours of the day and night? Many of these conversations were in crude code. The mob was ever alert to the marvels of electronic surveillance. When they weren’t talking what sounded totally innocuous to anyone listening but which obviously had great import to the chatterers themselves, they were turning on record players or water taps or showers or television sets to obscure whatever they were saying in plain English laced with a few bastardized Italian expressions like boff-on-gool and stroon-zeh and mah-nedge and jih-drool and mool-een-yahn. The U.S. Attorney had nailed Faviola on four murders because he’d been stupid enough to believe the place he was calling from was inordinately safe: his mother’s house in Oyster Bay. Who would have thought those sfasciumi could have got into Stella Faviola’s fortresslike, fenced-in, gray stone mansion on the North Shore, there to install their insidious listening devices?
Lena.
Earlier this evening, Michael had kicked up FAVIOLA, RUDY on the computer, and then he’d typed in LENA and hit the SEARCH key, and lo and behold there was not a single LENA, uppercase or lower, to be found. As a lark, he’d typed in LEDA and hit the same search key, and got nothing there, either, small surprise. This meant that in none of Rudy’s conversations with his brother had the name Lena, or for that matter Leda, been uttered — at least not on the tapes that had already been computerized.
Michael was praying there’d be something on the computer. He did not relish wading through thousands of pages of typed transcript, reading the remainder of the conversations word for word.
He decided to go straight for the jugular, do a wider search of the entire file, which was broken down into month-by-month folders starting in September of 1991, when the federal surveillance had begun in earnest. He called up each folder in turn, scanning them for the name Lena. Nothing for September or October of ’91. Zilch for November. Lots of Christmas talk in December, and a few near misses when the computer gave him first polenta, and then lenona, both of which contained the letters l-e-n-a in succession — close but no cigar. He went back to the drawing board, clicked the little box for Exact Match, and typed in the name with a capital L followed by the letters e, n, and a in lowercase. Lena. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.
Nothing for January of 1992.
Nothing in February, either.
The computerized stuff ended with the conversations taped in March.
There was no Lena mentioned in that month, either.
With a mountain of transcripts looming before him, Michael went back to the little box he’d earlier clicked for an exact match, and canceled the command. He started again with the folder for January of ’92, searching for the letters l, e, n, and a in any combination in either upper or lower case.
In January, he got Anthony talking to someone about a new calendar for the year, obviously a code. Calendar. Later that month, he got him asking about a dry-cleaning delivery, probably another code, the letters coming up in the sequence l-e-a-n this time. Still later in the month, Anthony inquired about the price of a Macintosh Ilsi from a store called Computerland. In March, the last folder in the computer file, there was only a single l-e-n-a combination, in the name Leonard, whoever the hell he might have been. Michael still didn’t want to tackle those forbidding transcripts. In the possibility that he or Georgie had heard the name wrong, he widened the search so that the computer would call up anything even closely resembling the name Lena. If, for example, a transcribing typist had misspelled Lena as Lexna or even Leyna or Lina or Lema, chances are the computer would yank out the word unless it was really too preposterously distant.
He hit the SEARCH key.
In the folder for December of last year, Anthony had told his dear Rudy that he still hadn’t bought Leno anything for Christmas.
Leno.
Not Lena.
Leno with an o.
There were no other mentions of the name Leno in any of the conversations already computerized. Michael would have to hit the transcripts, after all.
Sighing heavily, he shut down for the night and looked at his watch. Quarter past eight — my, how the time does fly when you’re having a good time. He was ravenously hungry.
Heather had chosen the spot, a hotel restaurant with a poolside piano bar and a terrific view of the harbor. When they walked in, Heather in pink, Sarah in white, the piano player was doing a medley of Cole Porter tunes. He nodded in their direction and immediately segued into “I Get a Kick out of You,” which seemed a bit obvious to Sarah but which her sister seemed to appreciate nonetheless. They were shown to a table on the terrace, overlooking a wide curve of harbor with twinkling dockside lights and bobbing boats and beyond the dark water a cluster of softer yellow lights in the rolling hills. The night was soft. There was the sweet scent of frangipani on the air.
“I want something tall and dark and very strong,” Heather said to the waiter, and smiled and added, “To drink, that is,” compounding the felony. At his suggestion, she ordered a concoction called “Pirate’s Flagon,” which he said had seven different kinds of rum in it. Sarah ordered a Beefeater martini, on the rocks, couple of olives, what the hell. After two of those, she felt like calling Michael straight from the restaurant, tell him she’d taken off her lacy white panties in the ladies’ room and was now standing in white, high-heeled, ankle-strapped sandals at the wall phone, naked under her white pleated dress, what did he intend doing about it, huh? Instead, she ordered the fish special of the day, a red snapper papillote. Heather was looking a bit glassy-eyed after her seven kinds of rum times two. She ordered the curried goat and avocado in Antilles sauce. The waiter suggested a dry white wine — French, of course, what else? — and they were halfway through the bottle when the two men they’d seen on the beach earlier today walked in.