By Wednesday even the police realized that Tony Quince had the city in his pocket. Patrolmen started nodding respectfully at me when I walked down the street. Zeigler and Kardaman wrote Baron and Porky off as jobs done by person or persons unknown. And the newspapers had fun with it. It was the biggest story since McKinley got his.
They called it a Mafia job, performed by syndicate hoodlums under the direction of the all-powerful Unione Siciliano. They made Baron an ancient henchman of Dutch Schultz, with connections with Touhy, and explained that he’d been assassinated by remnants of the old Capone mob. It was a brilliant job of theorizing and the only thing I could find wrong with it was that it had no basis in fact. But you can’t expect much more from newspapermen. Their sourcebook on crime is a mass of printed matter on the topic, all of it written by other newsmen. They make the myths and wind up believing them.
So I spent a week sitting around the apartment, sometimes with a bottle handy, sometimes without. I took Annie out for dinner twice and wound up in bed with her once — at my place, the Stennett.
It was brutal sex, murderous sex.
Because I was a murderer now. Not just a killer, a man who’d accidentally knocked his wife’s head in, a man who’d once been to war. I’d looked men in the eyes now, men who begged me for their lives, and I’d taken their lives instead. I’d felt my finger tighten on the trigger. I’d sent bullets into their bodies. And I made love now like I was sending bullets into Anne’s.
But Anne, who knew damn well what I’d done even though I hadn’t told her and she hadn’t asked, performed as if she were a killer too — between the stretches where she acted as if she were my victim.
Both roles had rubbed off on her, the killer’s and the victim’s. Because I was murderer and victim both. Anybody who kills is his own victim — each time you kill you destroy something of yourself.
And in the sex with Anne I was destroying some of my own sensitivity — Barshter’s or Crowley’s, it didn’t matter which.
I had never had sex like this before, sex that went on and on until Anne begged me to finish her off, bring her to climax for God’s sake.
But I wouldn’t bring her to climax. I stretched out the act to the point of the sadistic, so that Anne finally had to finish herself off. And I wouldn’t let her alone even after she did that — I kept on going, starting her off again on the ascent toward orgasm. She tried to wrench herself away from me but I wouldn’t have that. I pinioned her and stroked her until she was a twitching mass of sensation — and then I abruptly stopped and she had to finish herself again while I watched. And I did watch, my breath coming hard, well past my limits but not done, as if there was a hole inside me deeper than the hole we put Scarpino in, and I’d been shoveling as hard as I could but it just wouldn’t get filled.
Anne tormented me in retaliation, abruptly stopping when I was finally on the verge and laughing while I tried to bring myself to gratification. In a fury I hit her and she sank her teeth into the soft flesh near my armpit and closed her fist like a vise around my main male armament.
I slapped her face but she wouldn’t let go.
“Cool it,” I said.
“No,” Anne said.
“You’re a bitch,” I said.
“And what kind of name do they call you, Nat? Maybe you have no name at all. Maybe what I’m holding onto is anonymous — it could belong to anybody.” She squeezed mercilessly.
I slapped her again, harder, and this time she let go. I fell on her and she flexed her legs and she screamed and took me inside her.
Both of us rocked and plunged. We slammed at each other as if we were out for blood. We reeked with sweat and started sliding all over each other. It was a savage act, a killer’s act — but neither of us died. Only parts of us died. Parts of our humanity died.
What was left was the inhumanity. I plundered Anne’s breasts until she sobbed. I dug at her until there was blood, real blood, not something I saw in a nightmare. And she again used her teeth on me until I saw red and I chopped at her ruthlessly.
We acted like a couple of stone-age animals. Like a couple of dervishes whirling to sacrifice each other.
We were exhausted, finally, and we fell asleep. When I awoke, Anne was gone, back to her own place, I guessed. It was morning and I went out to breakfast. Without Anne it was a quiet time.
Which was good, because I didn’t feel much like noise. I’d had noise enough for a lifetime, the sort you hear and the sort you feel in every nerve ending. There had been Garstein in Philadelphia, then Johnny and Mustache and Porky and Scarpino and Baron. And the girl, the girl whose name I had never bothered to find out, the hard little blonde who had picked the wrong time to wake up and who had died for it. The girl who had been killed as an afterthought.
Seven of them, if you bothered keeping score. Three of them were mine — Garstein and Baron and Porky. The rest were Angie’s but I had watched them die.
It was more blood than I was used to — outside of a movie screen. And this was the sort that doesn’t vanish when the lights come up.
14
As I said, things had changed at the top, and I had an office now on the eighteenth floor of a downtown office building. I had a free-form desk, a few soft chairs, a Modigliani reproduction on the wall and a taut-hipped redhead who answered the phone when it rang and typed things now and then. The redhead was somebody’s sister and the job was a soft touch for her — she spent most of her time either talking to her girlfriends on the phone or polishing her nails. She didn’t even have to put out for the boss, although I’d thought about giving her a tumble. But she was somebody’s sister and it wasn’t good form to fool around with someone’s sister even if you outranked him. Besides, I had enough going between Annie and Brenda. I might try the redhead on sooner or later, the way you try on any stray female who looks as though she might be fairly good at it, like an occasional hooker from one of our downtown houses, an occasional stripper from one of our nightclubs — and all of them more than happy to do it for free, because I was Nat Crowley. But for now I had my fill, and so far I’d let the redhead alone. She didn’t exactly know what I did in my office, only that she was supposed to keep her mouth shut. Whenever somebody important came around I sent her out for coffee. That’s where she was now.
Tony said, “You could have more interests, Nat.”
“I’ve got enough.”
“If you say so. You could meet people, do more things, make more dough. This way you just sit around and handle bookkeeping. That’s a job for a goddamn accountant.”
It was more than that but I didn’t bother saying so. Tony knew it anyway. I had my office and I handled all the paperwork that had to be handled. I kept the two sets of books — one for us and another for the government — and I made sure that both sets balanced neatly. I made sure that the right amount of dough was coming in from our various income properties and that not too much was getting siphoned off into private pockets. I looked at the bills and wrote the checks. We had a lot of things going for us and there were a lot of bills to pay and a lot of records to check.
The income came from three sources. There was the legitimate stuff, which took care of a big portion of our revenue. We ran jukeboxes and vending machines and a lot of local trucking. We owned a few construction outfits and a batch of nightclubs and smaller taverns. The ownership may have started because we used muscle a long time ago but now the whole routine was puritanically straight.