‘‘I’m not moving, dodo, but hurry, I’m fried alive and I’ve been sick in here.’’ Her voice ended in a gulp that sounded close to tears.
Boom-Boom looked frantically around the grounds. He’d seen guys break into cars plenty of times-also into trunks. He needed something like a chisel and a hammer to break the lock, or- In the massive amount of junk tossed by the rioters, he found a tire iron.
He ran back to the Wildcat and managed to pry open the trunk. His cousin was clinging to the spare tire. Her feet were damp from the lagoon water seeping into the trunk from the backseat, and the shirt he’d torn earlier in the day was covered with blood and mud and her own vomit. She was shaking from head to filthy toe; it was all Boom-Boom could do to help her crawl out.
V
It was dark by the time the cousins and their fathers found each other. When Victoria saw Tony, she burst into tears.
‘‘Pepaiola, mia cara, cuore mio,’’ Tony crooned, the only Italian he’d picked up from Gabriella-my little pepperpot, he called his daughter. ‘‘What’s to cry about now, huh?’’
‘‘Uncle Tomas said he would kill you because he lost his job,’’ she sobbed. ‘‘I wanted to warn you, but this man, this friend of Uncle Tomas’s, he picked me up and put me in the trunk. I was scared, Papa, I’m sorry, but I was scared, I didn’t want you to die and I couldn’t tell you, and I didn’t want me to die, either.’’
‘‘No, sweetheart, and neither of us is dead, so it all worked out. Let’s get you home so your mama can stop crying her eyes out and give you a bath.’’
‘‘What man, Vicki?’’ Bobby asked-the only person who ever used a nickname that Gabriella hated.
‘‘The man with Uncle Tomas. I saw them when they-Daddy, they gave money to the cop at the intersection and he let them into the park. I took his picture-oh! my camera, he broke the strap and threw my camera away, my special camera you gave me, Papa, I’m sorry, I didn’t look after it like you made me promise.’’
Victoria started to cry harder, but Bobby told her to dry her eyes and pay attention. ‘‘We need you to help us, Vicki. We need to see if your camera is still here, if no one stole it. So you be a big girl and stop crying and show your uncle Bobby where you were when this man picked you up.’’
‘‘It’s dark,’’ Tony protested. ‘‘She’s all in, Bobby.’’
Victoria frowned in the dark. ‘‘It was where you come into the golf course. One of the hills where the holes are on the Seventy-first Street side of the park. I know, there was a statue near me, I don’t know whose.’’
With this much information, Bobby set up searchlights near the statue of the Lithuanian aviators, Darius and Girenas, although none of the cops believed they’d find one small Brownie camera in the detritus left in the park.
When Boom-Boom whispered to his cousin the news that Tomas was dead and the cops needed to find the man who’d been with him, Victoria miraculously found some reserve of energy from childhood’s inexhaustible reservoir. She tried to remember in her body how slowly she’d moved, where she’d twisted and turned on the walking paths, and finally cut across the grass to the golf course. Boom-Boom stayed with her; within another five minutes, they found the Brownie.
Bobby took custody of it, promising on his honor as a policeman that he’d give the camera back the instant the pictures were developed, and the cousins finally got into their fathers’ separate cars. At home, they received varying receptions from their mothers: both women frantic, both doting on their only children, each showing it with tears, and then a slap for being foolhardy and disobedient. But Gabriella instantly repented of the slap and took her daughter into the bathroom to shampoo her rough mass of curls herself.
‘‘Carissima, when will you learn to think first, to act next after thinking? This Tomas, this brother of Marie’s, he was a-mafioso-un ladro-he stole from Metzger’s Meats and sold on his own, sold the meat to restaurants in Wisconsin. He blamed the janitor, who is a Negro man, for losing his job, because the janitor reported seeing him. But your papa is telling me, Tomas also cheated his capo in the mafia, and this was a man also named Antoni. It is not such a rare name, Victoria. If you asked me, I would tell you this thing, that your papa is in danger from the calca in the park, but not from this brother of Marie, and then you do not get the most biggest frightening of your life. And also, then you are not giving me the same gigantic frightening.’’
And of course, as it turned out, when Bobby got the pictures developed, the man who abducted Victoria, who flung her into the trunk of the Wildcat, which he got several spirited youths to push into the lagoon, was the Tony who worked in Don Pasquale’s organization. Tomas had been stealing meat from Metzger’s and selling it in Wisconsin for the mob, but he’d taken more than his share of the profits. Don Pasquale sent Tony in his red Hawaiian shirt to Marquette Park to kill Tomas under cover of the riots. The don wasn’t happy with Tony for letting a little girl with a camera get the best of him: he refused to post bail for his henchman.
‘‘So you see, carissima, è molto importante, ask, ask, think, think, before you leap on your bicycle and turn my hair white,’’ Gabriella finished. ‘‘Promise me, cuore mio, promise me this is the last time, that from now on you are turning over a fresh page, you will become more careful, more prudente! Promettimelo, Victoria!’’
‘‘Si, Mamma: te lo prometto,’’ Victoria said.
You May Already Be a Winner by Margaret Maron
‘‘They’ve done what? Oh, Carlie, honey!’’ The white-haired man reached past the coffee cup in front of him and clasped his niece’s hand in dismay. ‘‘My sister’s not even cold yet and your sisters are already stripping her house?’’
Small-boned and fair-haired, with blue eyes that were red-rimmed from crying, Carlie Baxter swallowed past her tears and nodded. ‘‘Her silver, her good jewelry. The two rosewood parlor chairs. Even Great-grandmother’s dollhouse.’’
‘‘That old thing? Why? They don’t have daughters and you were the only one who ever played with it.’’
‘‘Marsha watches Antiques Roadshow, and a similar one was valued at two thousand dollars,’’ Carlie said bitterly. ‘‘When I came back to the house this morning, I thought someone had broken in. I almost called the police until Mary told me that she and Marsha had taken them for safekeeping now that the neighborhood’s gone down so much.’’
‘‘Well, there is that,’’ Uncle Carlton conceded. ‘‘I tried to get Genevieve to sell this place ten years ago when the McNairy house was broken up into apartments and property values first started sliding, but she was so sure the neighborhood would come back to its former glory.’’
‘‘She enjoyed most of the changes, though,’’ Carlie said with a ghost of a smile. ‘‘She liked the little shops that came in, the bodega on the corner, children playing on the sidewalks again, even the signs in Spanish and Arabic.’’
‘‘All the same,’’ her uncle said, ‘‘I doubt if you’ll get half the money she could have gotten ten years ago.’’
‘‘Me?’’ Carlie asked, startled by his comment.
‘‘You.’’ The old man shook his head sadly. ‘‘I had no business still being her attorney and I blame myself for not making Genevieve update her will, but I never expected to outlive my baby sister.’’