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COCO GOT ON ALL FOURS on the mattress and immediately let out a yelp. The mattress was so cheap and thin that her weight caused one of the springs to clang up against the bones in her knee. She had stretch marks on her breasts and her thighs, having gone from being a girl to a woman too quickly at some point. She was wearing plain white underwear, but they had slipped into the crack of her ass and her butt cheeks were sticking out. They were enormous and round and wonderful. And when he stuck his face into them, he was filled with desire that he couldn’t contain. On all the big screens, in all the tiny cinemas, there were gangsters pulling their machine guns out of their holsters. They were holding their handguns stretched in the darkness in front of them. They were crossing fields with shotguns straight out, heading toward their victims. Everyone had to face the fact that fate was coming. It was going to outsmart you. It was unforgiving. Pierrot stood up. He unbuckled his belt. He pulled down his pants.
She turned her head around. “Yes! Do it! Do it! Do it!” she cried.
He went deep into Coco. A mortar seemed to erupt inside him. And when he rolled off, it was as though he had tumbled into a mass grave.
Afterward he sat on the edge of the bed, inhaling a cigarette, no longer a married man. She turned off the light next to the bed and closed the curtain. She was sure that the detective had gotten enough of a show and she would get paid properly. She lit a candle next to the bed.
“Let’s get high,” she said.
“Sure thing, baby,” Pierrot answered.
“We could do it after the stew. But we should probably do it before the stew. Right? Because stew takes a while. And a lot of the time you are just standing around, waiting for things to boil.”
She sat on the edge of the bed next to Pierrot. She opened up the drawer on the tiny spindly-legged night table. Inside was a small pewter baby spoon. On the handle was a round image of a baby. Its eyes were squeezed shut, and its mouth was open wide in a scream. She didn’t even bother putting any clothes on before she started preparing to cook up the dope.
There was a teapot on top of a bureau. She grabbed it and poured some water into the spoon. She shook a tiny bit of dope into the liquid, stirred it up with the tip of the needle and then heated it over a candle. She took a tie out of her pocket and wrapped it around Pierrot’s arm. She injected the heroin, and he waited for the old sensations to come.
As he and Coco lay next to each other on the bed, the onions rolled out of the bag and off the counter. They landed on the floor like asteroids falling to the earth.
64
THE HEART IS A TRUMPET SOLO
Rose couldn’t bring herself to leave her room. The chorus girl Colombe said she could replace the star. Even though she wasn’t as charismatic as Rose, they figured she would do. They tried to hire another pianist. A line of them arrived in the morning at the New Amsterdam Theater. Pierrot had never written down his score. The girls hummed and whistled their interpretations of Pierrot’s tune. It was always lacking when someone else played it. When ticket holders heard that the stars of the show would not be appearing in that night’s performance, they began to demand that their tickets be refunded. The remaining Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza dates were canceled. And the dates were given to a troupe of twelve-year-old ballerinas who had just emigrated from Poland and were called the Flying Mice.
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FABIO HAD THE MOON DELIVERED to Jimmy and his men. It was tied to the back of a delivery truck as all the neighborhood children stood on the sidewalk watching and laughing. It was driven out to a rendezvous point down a rural road half an hour outside the city. It was a spot where they usually whacked people. A deer stepped out onto the road, making wide, slow steps, as if it were sneaking up behind a friend.
After the moon was unloaded from the truck, the driver climbed back in the vehicle and drove off down the bumpy road. The gangsters walked around the moon, assessing the best way to open it.
“Is there a trick to this?” Jimmy asked Caspar.
“I don’t think they thought that far ahead.”
“Let’s shoot the fucking thing,” a gangster suggested.
Another gangster brought an ax out and started to strike it. The moon began to crack, as though it were an enormous egg. They waited to see. There was the feeling that just about anything could happen. A dinosaur might suddenly appear and unfurl its claws. White dust and plaster spilled everywhere when the shell cracked, but there it was: a trunk of heroin, freshly imported from the East into Montreal, meant for immediate distribution in the streets of New York City. The gangsters laughed at the absurdity of it all.