“For a woman, yes.”
She gently leaned across his desk and took a piece of paper off a stack and a pencil from the jar. She felt confident. There was something magical about a piece of paper and a pencil. It was with them that all the new things of the world happened. She began to map out on the paper a diagram of downtown Montreal and its crime organization and holdings. She began to draw all the different nightclubs; all the little theaters; all the narrow backstreets; all the boulangeries, with their tiny pastries in the window; and the hospital, with all the newborns in the cribs. She made everything into a little grid, as seen from up above. The whole city was like a seamstress’s box, with everything divided up into its proper compartments.
It was as though she were laying out her entire city and childhood for Jimmy. When she drew the hotels, he could see her standing in her stockings over a little blue sink, brushing her teeth. When she drew the café, he saw her eating chocolate pudding and reading an Honoré de Balzac novel in it. When she drew the church, he heard all the different confessions she had whispered into the ears of priests over the years. She was not at all afraid of this Montreal that she could fold up and fit into her pocket.
And then, with several swipes of the pencil and various arrows and lines, she explained how he could easily take over the heroin trade that was coming into New York through Montreal. The tip of the pencil moved across the page like a bullet in slow-motion. She drew Xs along the docks where the heroin came in.
“You know which of his guys will turn, no problem?”
Rose nodded. She had watched their expressions at the Roxy for years and knew without a doubt which ones despised McMahon. She also knew they were all upset about the last major bust. She put a circle around the hotels that she wanted: the ones that he had purchased for McMahon in exchange for the heroin.
Jimmy liked the idea of any sort of power grab or a coup d’état. And he especially liked the sound of this one. He had never had a woman make a plan for him. He had always worked with men. They had designs that sometimes worked and that sometimes didn’t work at all. The strategies he chose were the ones he was curious about. And the ones he was curious about were the ones that had a spark of newness about them. These were always the most powerful plans. Nobody knew quite what to do when faced with the very electric power of new things.
? ? ?
ROSE WAS IN A GOOD MOOD when she rejoined Pierrot, who was smoking a cigarette on the street outside the Romeo Hotel.
“And so?” Pierrot said. “You worked out your business?”
“Yes!” Rose exclaimed.
Although Rose was light-footed and smiling, Pierrot felt concerned as he walked back to the hotel. At the beginning of the venture, he and Rose had collaborated on all aspects of the show. Then, as things became more hectic, they had divided up tasks, but now they seemed to have completely separated their jobs, to the point that they were no longer working together at all. She wanted to focus entirely on the drug trade. He could tell that she didn’t really care about the reviews as much as the other performers did. She had immediately set her sights higher than the show and was interested in negotiating with gangsters, not tour managers.
He had never been jealous about Rose having been with other men. He thought what they had together was so much better than what she had had with other men that he wouldn’t even deign to compare the unions. But she had been in the room planning a future with another man. He had known since even before he had met him that Jimmy Bonaventura was a threat.
On the window ledge was a robin that looked like a fat man who had been shot in the chest by his business partner.
60
CONEY ISLAND BABY
Jimmy had to take Rose to meet the rest of the commission. On a Saturday afternoon they drove together to a restaurant that was built under the tracks in Brighton Beach. The elevated train roared over them and suddenly they were all characters in a silent film, mouthing their words. Although the ground under their feet shook, nobody walking by seemed to mind. They weren’t worried about everything crumbling down around them.
The restaurant was a small, unassuming place. You wouldn’t imagine that it was the type of place where a contingency of gangsters would meet. It was built out of red bricks and had red-and-white-striped curtains over its windows. The name Luigi was painted on the glass with sparkly gold paint, and there was a blackboard on the sidewalk out front with the names of all the types of pasta written in cursive.