Although they had planned to go back on Friday, Drackman felt that the discovery of the armored truck required an adjustment in their timetable. He was a great believer in bold action and in the predictive power of Tarot cards. He was also a great believer in Hitler and Stalin, but they were dead and could give him no advice. Following the counsel of the Tarot, he had already sent the new-look Fiona Cassidy back to spy on us. Now he opened the deck again and shuffled the seventy-eight cards and laid five of them on the kitchen table in the form of a cross. After revealing them one at a time, he brooded a while before saying, “What it’s telling me is not to pull back, not to delay, to move ahead even faster.”
As Drackman would later tell the police, the best thing about having a big pile of cash and not giving a damn about the law is that you can get anything you want, and you can get it fast. As a man of means, he hadn’t needed what he and his crew stole from Colt-Thompson. But if you were going to be a player in the Cause, if you were on the revolutionary road, you should bring down the corrupt system with the system’s money, not with your own. After Fiona called him on Saturday to report that our house remained under surveillance, Drackman had made contact with like-minded individuals of long acquaintance, in a city other than ours. For a price, they agreed to supply a Ford van of the same year, model, and color as the stakeout vans on our street, credible license plates, and a registration card in the name of one of his false identities. The supplier intended to deliver it Thursday afternoon.
Drackman’s intention had been to meet with Fiona on Friday, compare notes, and go into the Bledsoe place that night. But trusting his intuition and the Tarot cards, he said, “We drive back tomorrow instead, and we go into that house tomorrow night.”
When the weather map on the TV news at that moment predicted heavy rains throughout the region beginning Thursday afternoon, Drackman knew that he must be right to move more quickly. A rainy night would provide perfect cover for the job.
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When my mother came downstairs shortly after eleven o’clock Thursday morning, I was parked in my wheelchair at the kitchen table, reading one of my grandpa’s books, a memoir of Tin Pan Alley, which was a nickname for a neighborhood in New York City, a stretch of 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where music publishers and songwriters had flourished from 1886 until rock ’n’ roll changed that world in the late 1950s. I figured that a first step in becoming a songwriter should be to read about successful ones, the guys who made Tin Pan Alley famous: W. C. Handy, Harry Warren, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jimmy Van Heusen, Lerner and Loewe.…
Mrs. Lorenzo worked at the cutting board, near the sink, slicing potatoes thin for home fries to accompany the omelets that would be Mom’s breakfast and my lunch.
When my mother entered the room, I thought she was fast becoming like Grandpa Teddy, like Grandma Anita had been: a Presence. You just had to look at her, not merely because she was beautiful, but also because something about the way she carried herself, something about her quiet confidence and dazzling smile and sparkling eyes made you say to yourself, Now hold on a minute here, this isn’t just passing scenery, this is SOMEBODY.
Her first night at Diamond Dust had gone exceptionally well, which surprised her, though it surely didn’t surprise me. She liked everyone she worked with, and they seemed to like her. Some of the patrons talked through the instrumental numbers, of course, but few talked when she sang, and in general the customers came there because they loved swing music and jazz and the blues; therefore, they had respect for musicians. If some of them were gawkers drawn by the fact that her ex-husband was wanted for a sensational crime, she couldn’t tell them apart from those who came for the music, food, and booze.
By the time that lunch was on the table and the three of us had finished eating, the storm began with a flash of lightning and a long crash of thunder. To keep out the rain, Mom and Mrs. Lorenzo hurried around, closing the windows that had been opened for ventilation.
Wearing a voluminous yellow slicker that he shed on the porch, Malcolm visited in the afternoon, just after Mrs. Lorenzo finished flexing my leg joints. He was having a butter-side-down day, unable to get his mind off Amalia. I knew how he felt, as I had bad patches of my own, days of melancholy, also hours of more piercing despair, especially when I woke at night and thought of her and couldn’t get back to sleep.
He didn’t want to talk. He said he just needed to be somewhere that didn’t reek of cigarette smoke and wasn’t a garage. We sat in the living room, and I read aloud to him about Tin Pan Alley, about how Harry Warren and Al Dubin, a lyricist, came to write “Lullaby of Broadway” and also all those great songs in the movie 42nd Street. At one point, for a while, he turned his back to me, and I pretended I didn’t hear the small, sad, stifled sounds he made.
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