The cold room

THIRTY-TWO

‘ Didn’t work, right?’ I began.

‘What?’

‘The bit with my associate. She was supposed to soften you up.’

‘No, it didn’t work. But she was very good.’

‘Wasn’t she?’

‘She was.’ In lieu of applause, he raised a languid finger to his swollen lower lip.

‘That’s why I like usin’ her. She’s such a piece of work. Still, she was in over her head, which was what I told her in the first place. I said, “This kid’s been smacked around by a woman who makes you look like Mother Theresa. You won’t lay a glove on him.”?’

‘Then why did you go through with it?’

‘Hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides, I knew you’d appreciate the gesture.’

I stood at that point, then picked up the nearly weightless plastic table and carried it to the wall. As I set it down, I suddenly grabbed my left side and dropped to one knee, my eyes squeezing shut as I gasped in pain.

Adele opened the door and looked inside, but I shook my head and waved her away.

‘I’m alright.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’ I waited for her to leave, then struggled to my feet and offered Ronald an apologetic smile. ‘Ya gotta cut me some slack, Ronnie. I got shot yesterday.’

‘Shot?’

‘By Aslan Khalid. You wanna check it out?’

Ronald’s quizzical smile expanded at the mention of Aslan’s name. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I would.’

I took off the vest and laid it in his lap. ‘See here? This gouge? That’s where the bullet hit me’ I pointed to a tear in the vest where the fabric was blackened. ‘The doctors tell me that if I hadn’t been wearing my vest, I wouldn’t be talking to you now. You or anybody else.’

Very slowly, very softly, Ronald slid the fingertips of his right hand over the hole in the vest, tracing its edges first, then easing his pinky into the opening. Prurient is the first word that came to my mind as I watched. Perverted was the next. Ronald Portola was a sick puppy and he didn’t care who knew it.

Clutching my side, I re-positioned myself behind him, then waited patiently until he dropped the vest to the floor.

‘Can we talk about Mynka?’ I whispered in his ear.

‘Toad?’

‘Think twice, Ronnie. That mirror over there, it’s a window for anybody standing on the other side. Getting your face slapped once might be a thrill, but I guarantee it’s an activity that wears thin pretty fast.’

Ronnie put his hand on his heart. He was staring at the mirror now, clearly fascinated. ‘My sincere apologies,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I didn’t keep track of their given names. Which one was Mynka?’

‘Mynka was the one who got murdered in your kitchen.’

I put my right hand on his shoulder, my fingers reaching around just far enough to sense, very faintly, the pulse at his throat. Ronald’s heart was racing.

‘I was just wondering if you’d like to hear a story, Ronald, a kind of travelogue that begins with Mynka Chechowski’s body, then follows a trail to Margaret Portola and her children. It’s a very entertaining story.’

‘Certainly.’ He sounded relieved, almost grateful. I’d turned up the pressure, then eased back. Maybe everything would be all right. I began with the forensic details, the pink lividity, the foreign dentistry, and especially the evisceration. Then I told him about the witness who’d happened on the scene a moment before Mynka’s body was to be consigned to the sea, and about the advertisement in Gazeta Warszawa that broke the case open, and about my consultation with Aslan Khalid in the Eagle Street warehouse. Finally, I described Barsakov in the chair behind Aslan’s desk with half his head blown away and the flag of Chechnya pinned to the wall behind him.

‘Swear to God, Ronnie, when I looked into the wolf’s eyes, it was like he did it. I’m talkin’ about the wolf. It was like the wolf came down off the flag and drilled his fangs into Konstantine’s skull.’

Ronald and I were both staring at the mirror on the other side of the room when I finished the tale. I was watching him, watching him closely, but Ronald was gazing directly into his own eyes.

‘It’s your turn, now,’ I finally said, my voice a whisper, ‘to tell me a story.’

‘About what?’

‘Start with the cold room. Tell me what it was like.’

Ronald tilted his chin up, his eyes shifting slightly to meet mine. Did he want to play this game?

‘Did you ever tell anyone, Ronnie, anyone at all? A friend, a teacher, a therapist?’

‘I had no friends as a child. I hated my tutors. Margaret would never allow me to see a therapist.’

‘Then it was a family secret.’

‘Yes, a secret.’

‘Well, I’ve been there, Ronnie, in the cold room. I already know.’

‘The trick is to make yourself little. I used to imagine that I was a ball of cheese, all folded on itself, with a thick, waxy skin for a blanket.’ Ronald’s tongue appeared between his lips and he sucked in a deep breath as his shoulders relaxed. ‘But the cold room was only for special occasions. Usually, Margaret was more hands-on. Besides, you can get used to anything if you have to.’

‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Ronnie. I was in the cold room with the door closed for five minutes and I nearly panicked.’

‘Panic? Yes, of course, at first. But panic only excited Margaret. Begging, too. No, you had to make yourself infinitely small, so tiny there was no self for the cold to penetrate. Jerk never understood that.’

‘Jerk?’

‘My brother.’

‘Can you say his name?’

‘Jerk.’

‘And what didn’t he understand?’

Ronald’s hands began to wash over each other. He was breathing through his mouth now. ‘Do you know why the cold room is there in the first place? Were you clever enough to find out?’

‘Actually, that was one of the things I was going to ask you.’ I was encouraged by Ronald’s attitude. He was now volunteering information. ‘Why have a refrigerator that big in a private home?’

‘The cold room is there because in the nineteen twenties, the house was a speakeasy, with an upstairs brothel, owned by Dutch Schultz. In nineteen twenty-eight, two gangsters were killed in the cellar, Blintzy Reznick and Little Moe Cohen. Margaret has newspaper clippings documenting the whole episode. According to the Herald Tribune, Little Moe and Blintzy were refrigerated for three days after the actual murders. I think that’s where Margaret got the idea. Otherwise, who would even think about putting a child in a.?.?.’

‘In a refrigerator?’

Ronald’s laugh was soft and dry. ‘Jerk was a fighter,’ he added, ‘and what did it get him? I was a ball of cheese, and look at me now.’

‘What about your father. Why didn’t he protect you?’

Once he got started, Ronald couldn’t stop, and bit by bit, I assembled a portrait of the Portola household. The only child of a prominent, Brazilian family, Guillermo Portola had used up three wives, along with innumerable mistresses, in an effort to produce an heir. His marriage to the secretary he’d occasionally boffed was motivated solely by the need to legitimize that heir. According to Ronald, aside from impregnating Margaret a second time, Guillermo had very little to do with his wife and children. His life was lived in a suite at the Pierre Hotel, where he passed his nights with the high-end call girls he preferred to his psycho spouse. Nevertheless, Guillermo supported his family in style, which left Margaret to do as she pleased, the absolute master of the house.

And what a master she was, given both to sudden rages and calculated cruelty. Her children were initially cared for by nannies, then privately tutored through high school. Subject to Margaret’s temper, the nannies and tutors came and went, leaving in their wake a montage of faces and names that Ronald chose not to remember. As they, the nannies and the tutors, chose not to remember, or even recognize, the obvious bruises on the frail bodies of the children.

‘What about friends?’ I asked.

‘I went to birthday parties sometimes, and sometime a luckless child would be sentenced to pass an afternoon in my company. Needless to say, they rarely came back. I belonged to clubs, too. A chess club on the East Side and a gem club at the Metropolitan Museum. I have friends now, a collection of oddities who share my interests, but my early years were passed in solitude.’

Ronald paused, gave his head a tiny shake, then abruptly changed the subject. ‘For Margaret,’ he said, partitioning the syllables of his mother’s name as if sounding out a word in a foreign language, ‘Father’s stroke was a stroke of luck.’

I wasn’t expecting much to come from the revelations that followed, though I listened attentively for any mention of the circumstances surrounding Guillermo’s death. But Ronald wasn’t going there. This was all about a will Guillermo had somehow created, despite being completely disabled, a man whose speech was limited to a series of unintelligible gurgles. That the will would eventually be challenged was inevitable; that Margaret would be up to the challenge was also inevitable. At the first hint of a lawsuit, she’d produced an impeccably credentialed attorney named Mason Livingston. A direct descendant of the Livingstons so prominent during the revolution, Mason swore, under oath, that he’d read the document aloud to Guillermo, clause by clause, and that Guillermo had indicated consent with a series of nods confirmed by eye-blinks. Three other witnesses, attorneys all, then leaped forward to confirm Mason’s account. The will was unbreakable.

‘And now she runs your life,’ I said. It was time to make the turn.

‘And now she runs my life.’

I leaned even closer, until my chest brushed Ronald’s back. ‘Remember what my partner said, about you being afraid to stand up to Margaret? I know it isn’t true. I know you stopped being afraid of your mother years ago. Like I know you would have left home years ago.?.?. except for the money. I’m talking about the forty million dollars, and the will, and the trust fund. Margaret knew exactly what she was doing when she made herself executor of a fund that ties you up until you reach the age of forty.’

‘How can a person,’ Ronald asked, ‘be so crazy and so crafty at the same time? Margaret’s fucking Mason Livingston, who administers the trust. If I displease her, Mason will invoke the will’s morality clause. I’ve got a record, which I’m sure you already know, a record that brands me a cocksucker and a pervert. My claim to any part of my father’s estate hangs by a thread.’

‘And Margaret’s standing right there with a pair of scissors?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that you have to take those scissors out of her hand.’

I stared for a moment at the sheen of perspiration on the back of Ronald’s neck, at tiny drops of moisture no bigger than grains of sand that clung to the black hairs fanning out from a natural parting. ‘What would you do, Ronald, if you got control of the estate? How would you live your life?’

Ronald answered without hesitation. ‘My favorite word is debauchery, followed closely by depravity. I want to drown myself in sensation. I want to use every drug there is to use. I want to have sex on three-masted yachts, and in filthy alleyways. I want to keep going until I’m dead.’

I rose to my feet at that point and gripped my side. No more whispering. Time for business. ‘I can’t kneel anymore,’ I told him. ‘My wound is killing me.’ I set a chair in front of him and sat down. ‘Now, the sex part you can keep to yourself, but tell me, is heroin your drug of choice?’

‘It’s that obvious?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid it is, Ronnie, but we can forget about that. For now, anyway.’ I leaned back in the chair. ‘Ya know, there’s a way out for you. A way to make all those fantasies come true.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Mynka Chechowski died in your mother’s kitchen. The cause of death was a blow to the top of her skull with a blunt object, a blow universally associated with an enraged perpetrator. That perpetrator can’t be you, Ronald, because blind rages are beyond you. And it can’t be your brother, either, because he was the father of Mynka’s child and he loved her. That leaves Margaret holding the bag, and her elder son to put her in it.’

Ronald rocked back and forth, his eyes still closed. He was breathing through his nose again. ‘Dreams are the best things about dope,’ he told me. ‘Evil dreams that fly around your mind like cobwebs in a breeze. I believe I’ve dispatched Margaret in every way there is to dispatch a human being. In my dreams, I’ve skinned her alive.’

He bent forward to look into my eyes. ‘You’ve taken the time to know me. That’s an act of respect and I’m thankful. But I can’t give you what you want, as much as I’d like to. That’s because you’ve misread the tea leaves. Margaret didn’t kill Toad. Jerk killed Toad. Margaret wasn’t even there.’

I jumped to my feet, grabbed Ronald’s shirt and ripped him out of the chair. I wasn’t faking anything this time. Ronald had given the wrong answer and I didn’t care whether it was a true answer or not. For those few seconds, until Adele opened the door and I saw the look of utter distress twisting her features, I was out of control. Still shaking, I dropped Ronald into his chair and waved Adele off.

Unlike my partner, Ronald seemed more bemused than afraid. He waited until Adele closed the door behind her, then began to speak.

‘Ridding myself of Margaret? Well, the gods are having too much fun to let me off that particular hook. But when you’re talking about tens of millions of dollars, losing a brother is no small thing. For a time, right after Jerk killed Toad, I thought Jerk would commit suicide. But he rallied.’

I re-positioned my chair in front of Ronald’s and sat down. Ronald nodded, then simply continued. He was off and running now. He wouldn’t stop until the tank was empty. This was a phenomenon I’d witnessed many times in the past, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been playing me all along.

‘Margaret approved of Jerk’s relationship with Toad-’

‘Use their real names, Ronald. That would be David and Mynka, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘David and Mynka? It could be the title of a romance novel. The second son of a fabulously wealthy South American aristocrat falls for the Polish maid his mother loves to abuse. Miraculously, the Polish maid responds to the second son’s overtures with a previously unrevealed passion. Desire wells, of course, and juices flow, until they can stand it no longer. Until the second son creeps up to the little maid’s attic room and is not rebuffed.

‘Mother eventually finds out, but, amazingly, she doesn’t object. In fact, she tells her older son, whom she knows to be a practicing homosexual, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”?’

Ronald stopped there, his eyes moving down and to the left as he retrieved a memory. I watched his tongue wash across his lips and his eyes harden, but his voice was almost without inflection when he resumed speaking.

‘The maid is impregnated by the second son a few months later, even though his mother supplies him with boxes of condoms, condoms in a wide variety of colors, textures and flavors. Predictably, the mother becomes enraged when the second son reveals his love’s delicate condition. Predictably, she berates her hapless son. Fade to black. Ho-hum.

‘Enter a new actor, a catalyst, a man to stir the pot, to ratchet up the tension. He is Aslan Khalid, the entrepreneur who supplied the little maid to the Portola family. Initially, Aslan is as outraged as Margaret, insisting that his property has been damaged and compensation is in order. But then, in the course of a single hour, he abruptly switches tactics. Maybe, he tells Margaret, the little maid should be allowed to give birth. The resulting child would carry David Portola’s DNA and be entitled, not only to his support, but to his lifestyle.

‘Much discussion naturally follows, a period of bargaining, of hard, hard bargaining, until both parties agree that abortion, followed by a liberal outflow of capital from the mother to the entrepreneur, is the only rational solution to their mutual problem.

‘From that day forward, the pressures on Mynka, when she flatly refuses to consider an abortion, are unrelenting. Her religious objections — so sorry, God wouldn’t approve — are instantly dismissed. She’s beaten and threats are made against her life. Not only by the procurer, but by the mother as well.

‘It’s as hard for David. He’s still a child, barely seventeen and home-schooled. Except for Riverside Park and the few clubs Margaret let him join, he knows nothing of the outside world.

‘Margaret assaults him by the hour, a two-pronged attack designed to sap his will. The first attack is entirely personal. She tells him the little maid is less than nothing, a toy to be discarded once the novelty wears off. He loves her only because he, too, is less than nothing, an utter failure whose manhood is a lost cause.

‘?“Why can’t you put it together, Jerk?” she demands to know. “That buck-toothed whore doesn’t love you. How could she when you are what you are? No, that bitch smelled money all the way from Poland. Just find a rich asshole, a punk kid who’s never seen a woman naked, and get him hot enough to screw you without a rubber. Face it, Jerk, you don’t even know if the kid’s yours.”

‘At the same time, she offers him a way out, a solution. If she wishes, she explains, she can have Mynka shipped to a country where doctors perform abortions without asking too many questions. With Aslan, it’s only a matter of money. And, of course, once shipped out, Mynka will never return.

‘?“Do you understand what I’m telling you, David? You’ll never see her again. It’ll be the same as if she died.

‘?“But that doesn’t have to happen. Things can go back to the way they were. You can screw the little Polack from morning to night. In fact, you can even pretend that you’ll live happily ever after. All Mynka has to do is refrain from giving birth to a child bearing Portola genes, a child the family will be supporting for the next twenty fucking years.”

‘The saddest part is that David and Mynka can never return to “the way it was,” to those first hot days when their bodies and emotions were perfectly synchronized. David probably knows this, but knowing and accepting are two different things. And David is so young, so isolated. He wants to believe the past can be restored and who can blame him? Besides, the child in Mynka’s womb isn’t the issue. The fetus will be dealt with, one way or the other, of that he’s certain. The issue is whether David and Mynka will be forever parted.

‘Eventually, though he claims to love her still, David joins the merry chorus: abort, abort, abort. Do it, let it be over, let equilibrium be restored. He begins to wonder if Margaret isn’t right, if he isn’t being played for a fool. Surely, if Mynka loved him, she’d do this little thing rather than be parted from him forever.

‘Love, hope, resentment, suspicion, rage. David has always been volatile and now these emotions rocket through his brain almost from moment to moment, seizing him by turn. When he’s alone with his beloved, his heart melts. When Margaret is present, his blood boils. At all times, he’s afraid. He’s afraid that he’ll be left all alone, that he’ll again become a trapped and helpless child.

‘That particular Friday is one of the worst. Aslan will come to fetch the little maid on Saturday afternoon and Margaret wants the whole mess over and done with. Twice during the day, she slaps Mynka. Then the dinner is late, the soup tepid, the roast charred, the souffle too rich, the coffee burnt.

‘Finally, toward the very end of the meal, Margaret again becomes violent. David makes a half-hearted attempt to intervene, but finally backs away. Mynka is dragged to the cold room and forced inside. I’m watching, of course — watching is the only thing I’m really good at — and I find myself wondering if David will find the courage to at least open the door. He’s too strong for Margaret, even at seventeen. He can stop this if he wants to.

‘But then, I’m also strong enough to make my will felt, yet I sit and watch, all the while molding the events into a single, seamless anecdote I intend to share with my friends.

‘?“I’ll let her out when I’m ready,” Margaret tells David. “And you, Ronald, you make sure Jerk doesn’t open that door. If he does, I’ll beat the child out of that bitch myself.”

‘Jerk is beyond himself. As the seconds tick by, he begins to sob. He has to do something, but he doesn’t know what. He paces back and forth, toward the cold room, away from the cold room. He has to let her out. He can’t let her out. She has to abort her child. She won’t abort her child.

‘Ten minutes pass, then twenty. The emergency buzzer rings again and again. Help me, help me, help me.

‘When Jerk can stand it no longer, he yanks the door open and Toad comes forth on her hands and knees, shivering uncontrollably. Jerk begs her: “Please, please, please. You have to. You have to.”

‘I’m sitting at the kitchen table, watching, waiting. I know that Jerk has gone over the edge. I know because I’ve been to the edge so many times myself. The pressure is tearing Jerk apart and he has to relieve it. If not, he will explode, literally, into a million pieces. He hops around Toad as if the floor is hot. He groans and pounds his hand into the wall until his knuckles bleed. “You’ve got to,” he keeps repeating. “You’ve got to.”

‘Then it’s done. A cast-iron pot, an antique, sits against the wall only a few steps from where Toad kneels. Also cast iron, a ladle rests inside the pot. Jerk doesn’t hesitate once he’s made up his mind. There is no moment of indecision. He grabs the ladle, raises it up, brings it down.

‘Toad collapses without a word of reproach. Maybe she knows it’s coming, maybe she’s known all along. Jerk looks down at her for a moment, at the little river of blood that makes its way toward his feet. Then he drops the ladle, raises his head and howls at the ceiling. He doesn’t stop until Margaret comes downstairs, until she steps into the room and says, “Do you have any idea how much this is going to cost us?”?’