She did not sound like she was making it up.
"Bobby discounts it 'cause of the volume," she said. "Figure...”
... you can buy a vial of crack for five bucks, but you've got to go hustling customers and that takes time and energy. Bobby sells it to Nate for four bucks a vial, but he does a hundred vials in a single shot and goes home with four bills without having to run all over town. Nate makes a buck on each vial he sells, so on the initial investmem of the four, he Comes away with an additional hundred, which is a twenty-five percent return on the dollar, much better than you can do on Wall Street.
On this particular Sunday in question, which happens to be Easter Sunday, Nate goes uptown three big ones in his pocket plus another twenties, intending to buy his usual hundred crack from his usual dealer, Mr. Robert Vi Corrente, in case you didn't know his full name.
something happens that changes the en complexion of the deal. What happens is that hands over the money, and is reaching for the bag with the vials of crack in it, same way business each and every time "An' by the way, this wun't on the front broad daylight, with all them silly wop girls an' watchin'. This is in the hallway.”
where Nate is reaching for the plastic when Bobby tells him to disappear, vanish, get nigger, words to that effect. Nate knows what it once, of course, but he pretends ignorance and Bobby spells it out for him. What it is (Oh, man, got to be kiddin' me, Nate goes) is that last when Nate made his usual buy, he paid for the with funny money (No, man, you makin' a man, I mean it) and so this Sunday, Bobby is the four bills, but he ain't giving Nate no dope he's telling Nate instead to go shove his bt his ass, he doesn't like doing business somebody who pays for merchandise with printed in the cellar.
Hey, no, man, come on, man, Nate is going, he knows Bobby's got him dead to rights, and figures this is the end of this relationship here, to look for a supplier somewhere else. But you buy dope without cash, and Bobby has the four in his pocket already, and the only thing faintly resembling convertible cash around here is the plastic bag full of crack. A hundred vials of it. So, since the relationship is over and done with, anyway, and since Nate is a very fast runner with a good sense of rhythm... "He grabs for the bag," Carella said.
"Is jus' whut he done," Seronia said... and starts running like hell, planning to get off I. Eleventh Street and stay off it till things cool down.
Bobby Corrente wants to find him, let him come onto black turf, where everybody got rhythm, man, and where your life ain't worth a nickel if you start up with a brother. Which is just about when Bobby hits him on the back of the head with a baseball bat.
The blow sends Nate flying forward, he almost loses his grip on the bag of crack, but he keeps running, knowing he ain't gonna make it back home now, knowing he's bleeding too bad to make it back home, but not wanting to quit now, not with these hundred vials of crack in his hands. And all of a sudden he spots the church up ahead.
He tries the door, and it's unlocked. He runs into the church, and locks the door behind him, twists this big brass key that's sticking out of the heavy lock, and he hears the wops outside, charging up the steps, and he figures first thing he has to do is stash the dope because the dope is what this is all about, the reason he has a broken head is the dope. And they're pounding on the door with their bats, throwing themselves against the door, and they've even got something they're using battering ram, Nate doesn't know. All he that the door's going to give, and he's got to hi dope.
And then he hears somebody arguing in the church, and he knows his time is he's got to hide that dope before whoever's comes out and finds him, or before that door in, which it does about three seconds after he the hundred vials.
"Where?" Carella said.
"I got no idea," Seronia said.
"But in the church someplace.”
"In the church someplace," she said. "D y'think that's funny? Nate turnin' the church stash pad?”
“Yes, very funny," Carella said. "What's the J of the story?”
"The rest is like he tole you. The pries' comes yellin' an' hollerin' an' somebody calls the cops then ever'body goes home an' the pries' takes to the hospital where they wrap his head in End of story.”
Not quite, Carella thought.
"You mine if I go now?" Seronia said. "I livin' to make.”
IX
Frank Oriella was a man in his early sixties, 'd been born into the Catholic Church when ;ses were still said in Latin, fish was eaten every and it was mandatory to go to confession taking holy communion.
Nowadays, he was :lered by the ecumenical changes that had place since he'd become a priest. He had only week, for example, attended a funeral service in church in Calm's Point, where presumably to the deceased on his way to Heaven the astor had played a guitar and had sung what Sounded like a pop song. This was in a Catholic l! This was not some little church down south a tin roof. This was a big, substantial Catholic church! With a priest who played the guitar and sang! Father Oriella still shook his head in wonder at the memory.
That Tuesday afternoon, when Carella and Hawes arrived at the church, he was shaking his head and trying to put together a new office in the s had once been occupied by Father Michael. a small church in a poor neighborhood. The here at St. Catherine's was more a cottage than house.
Fashioned of stone that echoed the fl the adjoining garden, it consisted of two small kitchen, and an even smaller office, the church terminology for which was long hall connected the rectory to the church, sacristy.
Uptown Father Michael had enjoyed of a rather more opulent house.
His secretary of thirty years, a woman Marcella Palumbo, to whom he spoke English and in Italian, was busily unpac cardboard cartons of files which Father transferred to the open drawers of green cabinets.
Both Oriella and Marcella had white and they were both wearing black.
Looking much like citified penguins, they bobbed about the small office, the priest complaining was inhuman to transfer a man from a parish served for more than forty years, his clucking her tongue in sympathy while she box after box of files. It occurred to Carella files they were unloading pertained to previous parish and would be of little worth But perhaps he'd carted them along for reasons.
"I can understand the bishop's thinking," he this does not make his decision any more for me.”
His accent was not basso profundo buffone; he not sound like a recent immigrant. Rather, the "ons and cadences of his speech made it sound :areful, studied, somewhat formal. In contrast, spoke with a thick Neapolitan accent that her presence on these shores for the past years.
"The bishop surmises," Oriella said, "that after a such as this one, it will take an older, more erienced priest to pull the parish together again.
mine to question. But have they given any consideration to the shambles my old parish will There are people at St. John the Martyr been worshipping there since I first became apriest. That was forty-two years ago. Some of these people are eighty, ninety years old. How will they react to such a change? To a new priest?”
“Vergogna, vergogna," Marcella said, shaking her head and tackling yet another carton.
"It might have been wiser," Oriella said, "to send the newly appointed priest here, instead of to St. John's. This parish has already weathered a shock.
Now there will be two shocks to overcome, one here and another one there.”
“Sure, what do they know?" Marcella said.
It sounded like "Shoo, wottaday nose?”
"Marcella Bella here," he said, pleased when she Waved away his playfully flattering nickname, "started working for me when the subways clean and it wasn't worth your life to travel after ten o'clock. I had a difficult time conv her to accompany me here. She lives in Riw just a few blocks from St. John's. The difficult one for a woman getting on in the neighborhood, with all due respect for w people do, is not the best in the world, is it?”