Thinner

Chapter Fifteen. Two Phone Conversations

Billy spent the rest of the afternoon stewing his way back and forth through the air-conditioned house, catching glimpses of his new self in mirrors and polished surfaces.

How we see ourselves depends a lot more on our conception of our physical bulk than we usually think.

He found nothing comforting in this idea at all.

My sense of what I'm worth depends on how much of the world I displace as I walk around? Christ, that's a demeaning thought. That guy Mr T. could pick up an Einstein and lug him around all day under one arm like a … a schoolbook or something. So does that make Mr T. somehow better, more important?

A haunting echo of T. S. Eliot chimed in his head like a faraway bell on Sunday morning: That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all. And it wasn't. The idea of size as a function of grace, or intelligence, or as a proof of God's love, had gone out around the time that the obesely waddling William Howard Taft had turned the presidency over to the epicene – almost gaunt – Woodrow Wilson.

How we see reality depends a lot more on our conception of our physical bulk than we usually think.

Yes – reality. That was a lot closer to the heart of the matter. When you saw yourself being erased pound by pound, like a complicated equation being erased from a blackboard line by line and computation by computation, it did something to your sense of reality. Your own personal reality, reality in general.

He had been fat – not bulky, not a few pounds over weight, but downright pig-fat. Then he had been stout, then just about normal (if there really was such a thing the Three Stooges from the Glassman Clinic seemed to think there was, anyway), then thin. But now thinness was beginning to slip into a new state: scrawniness. What came after that? Emaciation, he supposed. And after that, something that still lingered just beyond the bounds of his imagination.

He was not seriously worried about being hauled away to the funny farm; such procedures took time. But the final conversation with Houston showed him clearly just how far things had gone, and how impossible it was that anyone was going to believe him – then or ever. He wanted to call Kirk Penschley – the urge was nearly insurmountable, even though he knew Kirk would call him when and if any of the three investigative agencies the firm employed had turned up something.

He called a New York number instead, paging to the back of his address book to find it. Richard Ginelli's name had bobbed uneasily up and down in his mind since the very beginning of this thing – now it was time to call him.

Just in case.

'Three Brothers,' the voice on the other end said. 'Specials tonight include veal marsala and our own version of fettuccine Alfredo.'

'My name is William Halleck, and I would like to speak to Mr Ginelli, if he's available.'

After a moment of considering silence, the voice said: 'Halleck.'

'Yes.'

The phone clunked down. Faintly Billy could hear pots and pans crashing and bashing together. Someone was swearing in Italian. Someone else was laughing. Like everything else in his life these days, it all seemed very far away.

At last the phone was picked up.

'William!' It occurred to Billy again that Ginelli Was the only person in the world who called him that. 'How are you doing, paisan?'

'I've lost some weight.'

'Well, that's good,' Ginelli said. 'You were too big, William, I gotta say that, too big. How much you lose?'

'Twenty pounds.'

'Hey! Congratulations! And your heart thanks you, too. Hard to lose weight, isn't it? Don't tell me, I know. Fucking calories stick right on there. Micks like you, they hang over the front of your belt. Dagos like me, you discover one day you're ripping out the seat of your pants every time you bend over to tie your shoes.'

'It actually wasn't hard at all.'

'Well, you come on in to the Brothers, William. I'm gonna fix you my own special. Chicken Neapolitan. It'll put all that weight back on in one meal.'

'I might just take you up on that,' Billy said, smiling a little. He could see himself in the mirror on his study wall, and there seemed to be too many teeth in his smile. Too many teeth, too close to the front of his mouth. He stopped smiling.

'Yeah, well, I really mean it. I miss you. It's been too long. And life's short, paisan. I mean, life is short, am I right?'

'Yeah, I guess it is.'

Ginelli's voice dropped a notch. 'I heard you had some trouble out there in Connecticut,' he said. He made Connecticut sound as if it was someplace in Greenland, Billy thought. 'I was sorry to hear it.'

'How did you hear that?' Billy said, frankly startled. There had been a squib about the accident in the Fairview Reporter -decorous, no names mentioned – and that was all. Nothing in the New York papers.

'I keep my ear to the ground,' Ginelli replied. Because keeping your ear to the ground is really what it's all about, Billy thought, and shivered.

'I have some problems with that,' Billy said now, picking his words carefully. 'They are of an … extralegal nature. The woman -you know about the woman?'

'Yeah. I heard she was a Gyp.'

'A Gypsy, yes. She had a husband. He has … made some trouble for me.'

'What's his name?'

'Lemke, I believe. I'm going to try to handle this myself, but I wondered … if I can't . . .'

'Sure, sure, sure. You give me a call. Maybe I can do something, maybe I can't. Maybe I'll decide I don't want to. I mean, friends are always friends and business is always business, do you know what I mean?'

'Yes, I do.'

'Sometimes friends and business mix, but sometimes they don't, am I right?'

'Yes.'

'Is this guy trying to hit on you?'

Billy hesitated. 'I'd just as soon not say too much right now, Richard. It's pretty peculiar. But, yeah, he's hitting on me. He's hitting on me pretty hard.'

'Well, shit, William, we ought to talk now!'

The concern in Ginelli's voice was clear and immediate. Billy felt tears prick warmly at his eyelids and pushed the heel of his hand roughly up one cheek.

'I appreciate that – I really do. But I want to try to handle it myself, first. I'm not even entirely sure what I'd want you to do.'

'If you want to call, William, I'm around. Okay?'

'Okay. And thanks.' He hesitated. 'Tell me something, Richard – are you superstitious?'

'Me? You ask an old wop like me if I'm superstitious? Growing up in a family where my mother and grandmother and all my aunts went around hail-Marying and praying to every saint you ever heard of and another bunch you didn't ever hear of and covering up the mirrors when someone died and poking the sign of the evil eye at crows and black cats that crossed their path? Me? You ask me a question like that?'

'Yeah,' Billy said, smiling a little in spite of himself. 'I ask you a question like that.'

Richard Ginelli's voice came back, flat, hard, and totally devoid of humor. 'I believe in only two things, William. Guns and money, that's what I believe in. And you can quote me. Superstitious? Not me, paisan. You are thinking of some other dago.'

'That's good,' Billy said, and his own smile widened. It was the first real smile to sit on his face in almost a month, and it felt good – it felt damned good.

That evening, just after Heidi had come in, Penschley called.

'Your Gypsies have led us a merry chase,' he said. 'You've piled up damn near ten thousand dollars in charges already, Bill. Time to drop it?'

'Tell me what you've got first,' Billy said. His hands were sweating.

Penschley began to speak in his dry elder-statesman voice.

The Gypsy band had first gone to Greeno, a Connecticut city about thirty miles north of Milford. A week after they had been rousted from Greeno, they turned up in Pawtucket, near Providence, Rhode Island. After Pawtucket, Attleboro, Massachusetts. In Attleboro, one of them had been arrested for disturbing the peace and then had jumped his piddling bail.

'What seems to have happened is this,' Penschley said. 'There was a town fellow, sort of a bully, who lost ten bucks playing quarters on the wheel of chance. Told the operator it was rigged and that he would get even. Two days later he spotted the Gypsy coming out of a Nite Owl store. There were words between them, and then there was a fight in the parking lot. There were a couple of witnesses from out of town who say the town fellow provoked the fight. There were a couple more from in town who claim the Gypsy started it. Anyway, it was the Gypsy who got arrested. When he jumped bail, the local cops were delighted. Saved them the cost of a court case and got the Gypsies out of town.'

'That's usually how it works, isn't it?' Billy asked. His face was suddenly hot and burning. lie was somehow quite sure that the man who had been arrested in Attleboro was the same young man who had been juggling the bowling pins on the Fairview town common.

'Yes, pretty much,' Penschley agreed. 'The Gypsies know the scoop; once the fellow is gone, the local cops are happy. There's no APB, no manhunt. It's like getting a fleck of dirt in your eye. That fleck of dirt is all one can think about. Then the eye waters and washes it out. And once its gone and the pain stops, one doesn't care where that fleck of dirt went, does one?'

'A fleck of dirt,' Billy said. 'Is that what he was?'

'To the Attleboro police, that's exactly what he was. Do you want the rest of this now, Bill, or shall we moralize on the plight of various minority groups for a bit first?'

'Give me the rest, please.'

'The Gypsies stopped again in Lincoln, Mass. They lasted just about three days before getting the boot.'

'The same group every time? You're sure?'

'Yes. Always the same vehicles. There's a list here., with registrations – mostly Texas and Delaware tags. You want the list?'

'Eventually. Not now. Go on.'

There wasn't much more. The Gypsies had shown up in Revere, just north of Boston, had stayed ten days, and moved on of their own accord. Four days in Portsmouth, New Hampshire … and then they had simply dropped out of sight.

'We can pick up their scent again, if you want,' Penschley said. 'We're less than a week behind now. There are three first-class investigators from Barton Detective Services on this, and they think the Gypsies are almost certainly somewhere in Maine by now. They've paralleled 1-95 all the way up the coast from Connecticut – hell, all the way up the coast from at least the Carolinas, from what the Greeley men were able to find of their back-trail. It's almost like a circus tour. They'll probably work the southern Maine tourist areas like Ogunquit and Kennebunkport, work their way up to Boothbay Harbor, and finish in Bar Harbor. Then, when the tourist season starts to run out, they'll head back down to Florida or the Texas gulf coast for the winter.'

'Is there an old man with them?' Billy asked. He was gripping the phone very tightly. 'About eighty? With a horrible nose condition – sore, cancer, something like that?'

A sound of riffling papers that seemed to go on forever. Then:

'Taduz Lemke,' Penschley said calmly. 'The father of the woman you struck with your car. Yes, he's with them.'

'Father?' Halleck barked. 'That's impossible, Kirk! The woman was old, around seventy, seventy-five

'Taduz Lemke is a hundred and six.'

For several moments Billy found it impossible to speak at all. His lips moved, but that was all. He looked like a man kissing a ghost. Then he managed to repeat: 'That's impossible.'

'An age we all could certainly envy,' Kirk Penschley said, 'but not at all impossible. There are records on all of these people, you know – they're not wandering around eastern Europe in caravans anymore, although I imagine some of the older ones, like this fellow Lemke, wish they were. I've got pix for you … Social Security numbers . . . fingerprints, if you want them. Lemke has variously claimed his age to be a hundred and six, a hundred and eight, and a hundred and twenty. I choose to believe a hundred and six, because it jibes with the Social Security information that Barton operatives were able to obtain. Susanna Lemke was his daughter, all right, no doubt at all about that. And, for whatever it's worth, he's listed as “president of the Taduz Company” on the various gaming permits they've had to obtain … which means he's the head of the tribe, or the band, or whatever they call themselves.'

His daughter? Lemke's daughter? In Billy's mind it seemed to change everything. Suppose someone had struck Linda? Suppose it had been Linda run down in the street like a mongrel dog?

'. . . it down?'

'Huh?' He tried to bring his mind back to Kirk Penschley.

'I said, are you sure you don't want us to close this down? It's costing you, Bill.'

'Please ask them to push on a little further,' Billy said. 'I'll call you in four days – no, three – and find out if you've located them.'

'You don't need to do that,' Penschley said, 'If – when the Barton people locate them, you'll be the first to know.`

'I won't be here,' Halleck said slowly.

'Oh?' Penschley's voice was carefully noncommittal. 'Where do you expect to be?'

'Traveling,' Halleck said, and hung up shortly afterward. He sat perfectly still, his mind a confused whirl, his fingers – his very thin fingers – drumming uneasily on the edge of his desk.