In those days after the Halloween shootings I spent much of my time in the Gardens, making myself available to the Goldens for whatever services might be required. With Suchitra’s agreement I spent several nights a week bedding down in Mr. U Lnu Fnu’s apartment. He had not rented out my old room and said he was glad of the company in an “awful time, awful time.” As for Suchitra in these last hours before the country voted, she was working something like twenty-hour shifts at the DAW editing facilities, cutting together footage which the Democrat presidential campaign wanted to use, in her capacity as a leading member of a Women in Media group which had volunteered its professional services to the team. She confessed to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and a little low in spirits, and maybe I should have understood that much of that had to do with me. But I was in the Gardens not only for altruistic but also for almost predatory reasons, because of my strong instinct that the story I had set out to tell was about to give me the denouement it presently lacked, and that if I lay in wait for it, hiding in the Gardens shrubbery like a hungry lion in the long grasses at the foot of an acacia tree on the African plain, my prey would come trotting by. It had not occurred to me, crowded by deaths as my narrative already was, that there might also be a murder story unfolding. It was Vito Tagliabue who first alerted me to the possibility that Nero Golden was not in fact, or not only, the victim of slowly advancing senile dementia; that the truth was that he was slowly being poisoned by his wife.
Life in the Gardens had always been somewhat reminiscent of Rear Window. Everyone looked out and across at everyone else, all of us brightly illuminated in our windows, which were like miniature movie screens within the larger screen, playing out our dramas for our neighbors’ pleasure; as if the actors in movies could watch other movies while those other movies also watched them. In Rear Window James Stewart lived not far away, at the fictional “125 West Ninth Street,” which would, in the real world, be 125 Christopher Street—that is, Ninth Street west of Sixth Avenue—but the Gardens would have worked just as well. It was my plan to introduce, in my filmed version, a few residents who would be deliberate hommages to the characters in Hitchcock’s great film, Miss Torso the extrovert dancer, Miss Lonelyhearts the older single woman, and so on. Maybe even a traveling jewelry salesman, cast as a Raymond Burr lookalike. It had not been any part of my plan to develop the storyline to include an attempted murder, but this is what stories will do to you, they take off in unexpected directions and you have to hang on by their coattails. And so it was that I was crossing the Gardens from Mr. U Lnu Fnu’s building to the Golden house when Vito Tagliabue stuck his handsome head, its hair slicked back and glistening, out of his back door and actually said, to my immense surprise, “Pssst!”
It stopped me in my tracks and my brow, I admit, furrowed. “Excuse me,” I said, to clarify things, “did you just now say ‘Pssst’?”
“Si,” he hissed, beckoning me to him. “Is it a problem?”
“No,” I answered, approaching. “It’s just that I never heard anyone say ‘pssst’ before.”
He pulled me into his kitchen and shut the garden door. “What do they say, then?” He had an agitated air. “It is not an American word?”
“Oh, I guess they might say, ‘Hey!’ or ‘Excuse me?’ or ‘Got a minute?’?”
“It’s not the same,” Vito Tagliabue pronounced.
“Anyway,” I said.
“Anyway,” he agreed.
“There was something you wanted?”
“Yes. Yes. It is important. But it is hard to say. I speak in total confidence of course. I am certain of your integrity, that you will not say you heard this from me.”
“What is it, Vito.”
“It is a hunch. You say hunch? Yes, a hunch.”
I gestured with my hands, continue, please.
“This Vasilisa. This wife of Signor Nero. She is a hard case. She is ruthless. Like all…” he paused. I thought he was going to speak from personal bitterness, like all wives, or all women. “…like all Russians.”
“What are you saying, Vito.”
“I am saying, she will kill him. She precisely at the moment is killing him. I see his face when he walks here. This is not his old-age decline. This is something else.”
His ex-wife Bianca Tagliabue had moved into the house of her new lover, Carlos Hurlingham, my “Mr. Arribista,” across the way. Every day the new lovers flaunted themselves in the Gardens, humiliating Vito, rubbing his nose in their love. If anyone had murder on his mind, I thought, it was probably Vito himself. However, I humored him a little longer.
“How is she doing this,” I asked.
He shrugged operatically. “I don’t know. I have not the details. I just see him looking sick. Sick in the wrong way. Maybe something with his medications. He has to take many medications. So, is easy. Yes, something with the medications, I am sure. Almost sure.”
“Why would she do this,” I pressed him. Again, a shrug and a wave of the arms. “It is obvious,” he said. “All the other heirs, they are gone now. Only her baby remains. And if by chance Nero also”—here he drew a finger across his throat—“then who inherits? In Latin it is the phrase, cui bono?—who benefits?—you see? It is perfectly clear.”