Tongues of Fire Page 12

  Finally he said: “Have you ever thought of modeling? I think there’s a lot of money in that, too.”

  The woman laughed bitterly, but did not reply. Mr. Cohee laughed as well. She jerked her head toward him, the brass eyes suddenly hooded and seeing very clearly. “What are you laughing about, you bastard?”

  Mr. Cohee leaned across Rehv and slapped Angel across the face, very hard. “You fucker,” she said. Rehv felt her saliva spray on his face.

  “The other cheek, Angel?” Mr. Cohee said very calmly.

  “Stop it,” Rehv said. He must have said it very loudly, because Leon sprinted to the door where Mr. Cohee sat and yanked it open.

  “Something wrong, Mr. Cohee?” Leon’s little eyes peered at them from their deep craters.

  “Nothing at all, Leon. Close the door. It’s freezing.”

  “Keep that fucking murderer away from me,” Angel said, raising her voice.

  Leon leaned far into the car, tilting up his chin, and held his face very close to hers. “Touch me,” he whispered. “Go on. Just touch me.”

  She glared at him, but she didn’t move a muscle.

  “It’s cold in here, Leon,” Mr. Cohee said. And colder after he said it. Leon withdrew and closed the door. He left behind an odor that made Rehv think of iron filings.

  He looked at Mr. Cohee. “I’ve got nothing more to say.”

  “And? She’ll do? Or not?”

  “I don’t think we should discuss that in her presence.”

  “Why not, Dr. Vere? She’s not applying for a seat on the stock exchange.”

  “Then it’s no.” He wanted to say something polite to her, like “I’m sorry,” but he could not think of anything that wouldn’t sound ridiculous.

  “Split, Angel,” Mr. Cohee said.

  “I want some money.”

  “You’re lucky you still have a face.”

  Angel got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked quickly away. Leon called after her, words that Rehv could not quite distinguish, but she didn’t turn.

  Mr. Cohee turned to him; the curious eyes searched his face. “Why not?” he asked.

  “She just wasn’t right. I can’t really explain it,” Rehv said. But he could very easily: If she wasn’t smart enough to handle Mr. Cohee, she wasn’t nearly smart enough.

  Leon got into the car. Mr. Cohee looked thoughtfully at the back of his shaved head. “Where to, Mr. Cohee?”

  Mr. Cohee didn’t answer him. Instead he looked at Rehv and said: “Have you got another one of those envelopes?”

  “No.”

  “What about what was in the envelope? Any more of those?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Cohee smiled. “Better give me one. With a car like this it’s nice if everyone chips in on the gas.” Leon didn’t laugh: He was no longer in a laughing mood, Rehv thought. He gave Mr. Cohee another one-hundred-dollar bill. Mr. Cohee slipped it inside his jacket pocket and tapped Leon very lightly on the shoulder. “Paulette.”

  “Paulette?” Leon said, with a little whine in his voice. “She’s too dark.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s got no class.”

  “I don’t think Dr. Vere cares very much about that. Do you, Dr. Vere?”

  “No.”

  “Paulette,” Mr. Cohee said again. Leon started the motor and pulled away.

  Outside the night went by. Taxis took over the streets, their drivers hunched forward, watching for shadows waiting on the curb. Rehv began to feel tired. He knew from the whine in Leon’s voice that he was tired too. Mr. Cohee did not seem tired at all. He refilled their glasses and gazed into the flickering light of the little television.

  Leon stopped the car in front of an old brick apartment building on the East Side. It was the kind of building where doctors and lawyers had lived long ago, and might still if they were very old. Mr. Cohee opened the door. “Wait here,” he said to Leon. To Rehv he said, “Come with me.”

  They opened the outer door to the building and went inside. Mr. Cohee ran his index finger over the row of black buttons and pressed one. After a few moments he pressed it again.

  “She’s probably asleep,” Rehv said.

  Mr. Cohee didn’t reply. He pressed the buzzer once more and kept his finger on it for what seemed like a full minute. From the square mesh of the speaker came a female voice that sounded deep and harsh and angry: “What is it?”

  “It’s me,” Mr. Cohee said. The inner door buzzed. Mr. Cohee pulled it open before the buzzing stopped.

  He led Rehv to an old elevator with two doors—the outer solid and the inner a folding brass grille. They rode to the sixth floor and got out.

  Rehv and Mr. Cohee followed a worn brown carpet to the end of a hall. They stopped in front of number 606. Mr. Cohee knocked. Immediately the door opened wide. A very tall woman stood in the doorway, an inch, perhaps two inches taller than Rehv. She wore blue plastic curlers in her hair and a blue flannel nightgown, which was slightly too tight and revealed the strength of her body. She was much broader than Angel, and darker, too dark, Rehv thought. She had large eyes, larger and darker than Mr. Cohee’s, and they weren’t friendly.

  “What do you want?” she said. Her voice sounded the same as it had through the speaker, only bigger.

  Mr. Cohee nodded toward Rehv. “What do you think?”

  The woman looked down at him over Mr. Cohee’s shoulder. “He can’t afford me,” she said. “All those Jewish refugees are stone cold broke.”

  Rehv stepped closer to her, pushing Mr. Cohee slightly to the side. “What makes you think I’m an Israeli refugee?”

  “I got eyes, man,” she said, tapping the crest of her cheekbone.

  He knew she was the one.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I want a baby,” Isaac Rehv said.

  They sat in Paulette’s living room: Paulette on an orange corduroy couch that looked new, Mr. Cohee in a patched and faded stuffed chair that had once been either brown or yellow but now had a shiny surface of no particular color, and Rehv on a folding card table chair he had pulled to the center of the gray unpolished hardwood floor. Beneath the window on the far side of the room a tiny old woman was sitting in a wheelchair, a blanket over her knees. Her skin was very dark and deeply creased; her hair the color of old ivory. Her watery eyes were fixed on a very large television screen, where some pirates were fighting with cutlasses. There were no books in the room, no magazines, no newspapers, and nothing hung on the walls except a big oil painting of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., wearing dark suits and standing on clouds.

  Mr. Cohee looked at Rehv, frowning. “A baby?” he said. “That would take me two or three days. More than that if you want a white one.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Paulette told him. “He’s talking about a nine-months baby.”

  “That’s right,” Rehv said.

  “Sure,” Paulette said, leaning forward a little to look at Rehv more closely; her strong shoulders strained the fabric of her nightgown—it was split slightly along the seam, revealing an oval of chestnut-colored skin. “You want me to have a baby. Your baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “You see?” she said to Mr. Cohee.

  “He’s crazy,” Mr. Cohee said with annoyance. He turned to Rehv: “You’re crazy.” Annoyance grew into anger, and Rehv caught some of it.

  “I’ll pay. Business. Remember?” He heard a little chuckle in the back of Paulette’s throat.

  “Leon outside?” she asked Mr. Cohee. He nodded. She chuckled again.

  “Talk,” Mr. Cohee said.

  “First I want to ask Paulette a few questions.” She narrowed her eyes, assuming the problem-solving face of a schoolgirl called on by the teacher even though she has not raised her hand. Rehv was surprised to see an expression like that on such an intelligent face. He tried to imagine her as a schoolgirl, sitting at a desk in an orderly row, and couldn’t.

  “How did you do in school?” h
e heard himself say. It was not one of the questions he had meant to ask.

  Paulette laughed. She threw back her head and laughed some more. Her breasts jumped up and down. Her nostrils flared like tiny laughing mouths. The plastic curlers clicked together.

  “Hush,” said the old woman in the wheelchair in a thin irritated voice. “I can’t hear a word they’re saying.” She spoke without looking at them. She did not take her eyes off the screen for a second.

  Gradually Paulette’s laughter subsided, flaring up once or twice the way a badly tuned motor does after the ignition has been turned off. “Men have asked me a lot of funny things,” she said, in a tone that was much less harsh; perhaps laughing cleansed her voice, Rehv thought.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Rehv said. “But I do need to know if you’ve ever been pregnant.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “Five,” she answered immediately.

  “Any children?”

  “I don’t have children. I have abortions.”

  “That’s not true, child,” the old woman called from the other side of the room.

  “Shut up,” Paulette said. Harshness reentered her voice like a cactus that thrives in a desert of bad feeling.

  “What does she mean?” Rehv asked.

  Paulette lowered her eyelids, whether to shut him out or to threaten him he didn’t know. “Nothing. She’s a stupid old meddler.”

  Rehv glanced at the woman in the wheelchair. She hunched forward, narrowing the gap between her eyes and the television. “She had a baby, sir,” the old woman said. “A little baby girl.”

  “Don’t call him sir,” Mr. Cohee said suddenly, very angry.

  “Why not?” Her weak tired voice sounded angry too. “She should have another baby. Be the best thing in the world.”

  Mr. Cohee glared at her but said nothing.

  “When did you have the baby?” Rehv asked Paulette. She folded her arms across her chest and kept her mouth shut.

  “June the fourth nineteen hundred and seventy-two,” the old woman answered.

  “I’d like to see her,” Rehv said, fearing as he did that the child might have been taken to live somewhere else by its father.

  “Then you’ll have to be able to see through six foot of solid ground,” the old woman said. “She got run over, right here on this street.”

  “I’m very sorry.” The room grew quiet, except for a man on television who was threatening to burn every settlement on the Spanish Main unless he got his way. Rehv thought about Lena. He was vaguely aware of the two dark faces watching him, and tried to push her away, but she would not go. Her presence made it much harder to say what he had to say; he came very close to not saying it at all. But finally, as if to keep them inside was as impossible as holding one’s breath forever, the words came out: “Was she a healthy child?”

  The color seemed to drain from Paulette’s face, like chocolate ice on a stick when someone sucks it. “Jesus.” She spoke the word so softly he could barely hear it.

  “She was a perfect baby in every way,” the old woman said.

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” Paulette shouted.

  “Perfect,” the old woman muttered defiantly, hunching closer to the screen.

  Rehv looked at Paulette, trying to will a little friendliness into her angry eyes. “I have nothing more to ask,” he said gently. “I’m sorry, but I had to know.” Her eyes stayed the same.

  “I have a question,” Mr. Cohee said. “A money question.”

  “I’m offering Paulette fifteen thousand dollars, payable the day the child is born. It must be a boy.” He felt a little surge of nausea inside himself and took a deep breath to force it back down. “Because of that Paulette will have to be tested as soon as possible after she becomes pregnant. If it’s a girl it will have to be aborted and we’ll try again.”

  None of that bothered Paulette or Mr. Cohee. “I want more than that,” she said.

  “You forgot to mention how much you were paying me,” Mr. Cohee said. “If we go ahead with this Paulette will probably miss a month of work. Sometimes they miss two.”

  “Paulette won’t be working at all. We can’t risk having the baby infected with a venereal disease.”

  “You’re a dreamer,” Mr. Cohee said. “Tell him how much you give me every week, Paulette.”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  “Can you multiply, Dr. Vere?”

  Rehv ignored him. “On the day the baby is born I will give you one pound of cocaine.”

  Mr. Cohee pulled himself closer to the edge of his chair. “What kind of cocaine?”

  He had no idea. “Colombian,” he said, remembering an article in the newspaper. “Very pure.”

  “How pure?”

  “Ninety percent,” he said, trying to recall the text of the article.

  “Have you got a sample?”

  Rehv took a small plastic bag from his pocket and unrolled it. In one corner was a teaspoonful of white powder. He rose, walked over to Mr. Cohee, and handed him the bag.

  “Wait here,” Mr. Cohee said. He stood up and went out of the room by the front door. Rehv sat down and looked at John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Paulette twisted the curlers in her hair and flexed her long, muscular feet. The pirates hauled their cannon through the jungle.

  After a while Mr. Cohee returned. “Leon says it’s not ninety percent. But it’s good enough.”

  “Then we have a deal?” Rehv asked, wondering whether it was one hundred percent pure.

  “If you give me coke now, yes, we have a deal.”

  “No. One-third tomorrow. The rest when I said.”

  Mr. Cohee stared at him for a moment, looking for something he didn’t find. He sighed. “I’ll have to trust you.”

  “That won’t be hard for you,” Rehv said. “You’ve got Leon.”

  Mr. Cohee laughed and offered his hand. Rehv shook it, thinking of the way it had cracked across Angel’s cheek. It was a very hard hand. “Leave the coke here with Paulette,” he said. “I’ll pick it up tomorrow night.” He turned to go.

  “What about me?” Paulette said to him. “I can’t stop working for nine months. Who’s going to pay the rent?”

  “I’ll take care of your expenses,” Rehv said.

  Paulette and Mr. Cohee exchanged a glance. She shrugged. “Have a nice holiday,” he said to her as he went out.

  “Holiday,” Paulette repeated, as though it was a word from a foreign language. She rose and walked toward Rehv, with a look in her eye that made his chest feel tight. She stood very close to him and asked, “Why me?”

  Rehv tried to think of something that would make sense. “We’ll go well together,” he said.

  Paulette laughed her big laugh. He was very conscious of her size and strength: They seemed to give her an invisible power, like gravity. She stepped forward and put her arms around him.

  The Spanish Main went up in flames.

  But only for a moment: And in that moment he felt a flooding of desire in his penis that was so strong, so quick, that it sucked in all his energy and made his mind a haze; and he knew without thinking that he had reached the shore of a dangerous land, more dangerous than the Battle of Haifa, more dangerous than Abu Fahoum’s bodyguard in the night. And danger found him right away: In the haze he saw Naomi’s face as it was in orgasm. His penis, not quite fully hard, fell like a bird shot at the instant of takeoff.

  “Come on,” Paulette said, pulling him toward a dark corridor.

  “Not now,” he said, drawing back, feeling light-headed, almost faint.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Paulette said. “She’s used to it.”

  “It’s not that.” Rehv bit the inside of his cheek, hoping it would clear his head. “There’s no point until you’re off the pill.”

  “No?” He heard mockery in her tone. “But I don’t use the pill. I have a diaphragm.” She drew him into the corridor.

  “It
’s not that simple. We’re trying to produce a baby. We have to know where you are in your fertility cycle, for example.”

  “What?”

  “When was your last period?”

  “About a week ago.”

  “Then you’re probably not ovulating yet.”

  Paulette stopped tugging at him. “So you want to get me pregnant with just one fuck? You think that’s going to happen?”

  Rehv said nothing. He had really not thought about it. While he was thinking he felt her tongue touch his ear. She ran it all around the edges and then stuck it inside. “Come on,” she whispered.

  She led him to a bedroom at the end of the hall. In the bedroom were an unpainted plywood chest of drawers, all of them opened, a scattering of clothing on the floor, a lamp made from a bottle of gin, and an unmade double bed. Paulette went to the window and lowered the venetian blinds. “No free shows,” she said. She turned to Rehv: “Take off your clothes.”

  “Maybe we should turn off the light.”

  He heard the low chuckle, deep in her throat. “Why? Don’t you want to see what I got?” She pulled her flannel nightgown over her head, and Rehv saw: the long heavy muscles of her legs, the thick curly black pubic hair reaching almost to the round, deep navel, the long hard nipples of her breasts, the little circles of hair under her arms, her smile, her eyes, amused, and the blue curlers in her hair. Paulette lay on the bed. “Take off your clothes,” she said again.

  Rehv took off his clothes, feeling her dark eyes on him. “You have a very nice body,” she said. She spread her legs a little. Rehv approached the bed. Paulette reached out and took his penis and testicles in her big hand and tested the weight, like a shopper at a fruit stall. “This will be nice too, when it gets hard.”

  But it wouldn’t get hard.

  Rehv lay on his back. Paulette knelt over him. She licked his penis. She took it in her mouth. She took his testicles in her mouth, one at a time, together, with his penis. She licked her middle finger and forced it into his anus. She removed it, licked it again, and put it in farther. Rehv was aware of all this, but he felt nothing, as though his nerve endings no longer reached his brain. He watched her work. She was an experienced mechanic in a country where spare parts were scarce and only clever improvisation kept the faulty, damaged cars on the road. She did not seem surprised, upset, or disappointed.