The Boy Who Granted Dreams

  Bill hid behind a bush. While he was catching his breath he looked around. If only he had one more hit of coke. They wouldn’t catch him then. He’d be invincible. He reached into his pocket and felt something. He pulled out his hand. A little bit of white powder on his fingertips. One of the vials must have opened in there. He pulled off his jacket, shook the pocket over the palm of his hand. Not much, but enough. He laughed. Then he put his palm under his nose and inhaled as hard as he could. He had a bitter taste in his mouth. He sniffed the fabric. Laughed again. Bit his lip, hard. He could feel the blood. But not the pain. “Shit, I’m still invincible,” he told himself.

  He peered out of the bush. Some men in dark suits were talking and smoking over on the lawn. Joking with a waitress. Yeah, he knew who they were. Bodyguards for some dickless senator. Some piece of shit. One of them had his jacket off. Bill could see the pistol in his holster. Nobody else could pull this off. But he could. He was invincible. He had a twenty-foot lead on them, poor assholes. He slid across the ground, over the grit of the driveway, hidden by the blocked cars. He came to the door of the senator’s car, the last one in line. He opened the door silently. He slipped inside, crouching low. All he had to do was turn on the ignition and shift into reverse. Those poor bastards would never reach him in time.

  He pulled himself upright, with his hand on the ignition key. He stopped.

  Ruth was coming down the driveway. She was looking in his direction.

  Only in that moment did Bill realize he’d never called her a whore that night. He’d never even thought of her as a whore, never, from the first moment he’d seen her. He didn’t know why he’d thought of that now. All he knew was that something felt strange. And then he felt a kind of prickling in his chest. That something became an emotion.

  Ruth was still walking along the drive. She was closer now. She had on an emerald green dress. Like the ring Bill had ripped off along with her finger. Like her eyes. Walking and smiling. Glowing. The most beautiful woman Bill had ever seen.

  The little girl he’d lost his head over.

  His fingers hesitated, still holding the ignition key.

  Bill felt the emotion flood into every part of his body. Time stopped. And suddenly he wasn’t scared any longer. He could have gotten out of the car and walked over to Ruth. She was so close, now. He could start over again from the beginning.

  The emotion told him so.

  You’re beautiful, Ruth, he thought.

  With that all-consuming emotion in his heart, he turned the key.

  He didn’t hear the noise. Only an unnatural silence. And then the heat, devouring him alive.

  When the car exploded, Ruth was flung to the ground by the blast of air. The roar of the bomb and the screech of rending metal almost deafened her.

  As Clarence was helping her up, Ruth saw the bodyguards running forward with guns drawn. The attendants were running and shouting. People rushed out of the villa to see what was happening. They ran and shouted too. And after a few seconds, the sirens of the police cars parked on Sunset Boulevard began to wail.

  “Where’s the senator?” yelled a cop.

  “The senator’s alive!’ shouted one of the bodyguards.

  “Get him a car!” the police captain cried.

  The other two bodyguards rushed toward the villa, shoving the curious aside. They took the senator and his wife and escorted them to the gate. They made them get into the police car, and then sped off with sirens howling.

  Shattered glass was everywhere. The car doors had been ripped off their hinges. The metalwork was creaking, twisting. The heat was unbearable.

  “That was the third try,” said someone behind Ruth.

  “Time to take him off your guest list,” said someone else.

  Somebody else laughed.

  People in evening clothes were crowding the driveway. The photographers were shooting. Flashbulbs lit up the night like maddened fireflies. The air was full of sickening vapors: gasoline and oil, melted iron, leather.

  Then the fire died out. By itself. Suddenly. As if someone had poured an enormous invisible bucket of water over it. There were just a few little flames here and there. And the sound of something popping and crackling.

  Like coals in the fireplace, thought Ruth.

  She took a step toward the contorted car.

  Bill’s carbonized body was still holding onto the steering wheel. His charred head drooped backwards.

  “Careful, Miss,” a policeman warned her.

  “I needed to see him,” Ruth murmured.

  “Did you know him?” asked the policeman.

  I was already free, she thought.

  “Miss, did you know him?” the cop asked her again.

  Ruth looked at him. Her face had no expression at all. “No,” she said. Then she turned her back on Bill.

  68

  Manhattan, 1928

  When Christmas wrote “THE END” at the bottom of the last page of his play, he felt drained. And alone. Bewildered.

  The writing had absorbed him completely. It was as if he’d been lost, forgetting his real life. He’d flung himself at the keyboard impetuously, living what he wrote, as if he’d been there, along with his characters. Friendship, the struggle to be something, or even simply to survive; life on the Lower East Side. And love. The dream. The world as it ought to be. Perfect even in grief, or in tragedy. And a sense that it meant something. This was what he’d been trying to do. To show that sense of life. To make it less casual. That’s what perfection was: not success, not money, not the fulfillment of a dream or of some ambition, but meaning. So even the bad guys in his plot had found a meaning, their meaning. The sense that every life was fitted into every other life, like threads all connected to each other to create the design of a spider’s web. A design that was real, not abstract. Without sentimentalism. With irony. With feeling.

  “Now what?” he muttered, looking the words “THE END” at the bottom of page 217.

  Then he looked up. The bench was there, he could see it. That didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that he and Ruth weren’t sitting on that bench. In his play, that wouldn’t happen. Not like that. In his play all that love wouldn’t have been wasted.

  He added the page with “THE END” to the pile of other pages. Then he put the play in an envelope on which he’d already written a name and an address, and he’d asked Neil, his doorman at Central Park West, to deliver it.

  And it happened. More quickly than he could have imagined. Not even two weeks later, Eugene Fontaine, the old impresario who listened faithfully to Diamond Dogs, invited him to his Broadway offices.

  “I’ve been in the business for forty years, and I can tell when a play is going to work,” said Eugene Fontaine, laying a wrinkled hand on the script’s cover. He looked at Christmas. “It’s got gangsters. It’s got a love story … and it’s got New York City.”

  “Is it good?” asked Christmas, feeling stupid.

  “It’s wonderful.”

  “Really?”

  “Hold on tight to your seat, Christmas Luminita. It’s about to start shaking. You’re going to think a hurricane’s blowing through here,” the producer told him. “Give me the time to launch it. America isn’t going to be talking about anything else.”

  Now it was two weeks before opening night. There wasn’t a newspaper in the country that hadn’t written about it. Everyone wanted to interview him. “Vanity Fair” wanted him to be on the cover. Mr. Mayer had sent him a telegram from Los Angeles, saying: YOU SHOULD PAY ME A PERCENTAGE STOP IM THE ONE WHO MADE YOU START WRITING STOP BREAK A LEG STOP WHEN YOU NOTICE THEATER SMELLS MOLDY AND YOU WANT TO BREATHE CALIFORNIA AIR IM WAITING FOR YOU WITH OPEN ARMS STOP L.B.

  He could feel the waiting, like something palpable. Electric. The show hadn’t even opened yet, but everyone was already talking about it.

  Christmas got up and leaned out the window. He looked across at the empty bench, dark amid the snow that was covering Central Park. The stree
ts were white too. People were walking quickly, being careful not to slip. Men and women were carrying beribboned packages.

  Christmas went into the bedroom and looked at the brown suit his mother had bought him two years before. A poor man’s suit. Poor but dignified. The suit that had lifted him out of the street. The hero of his play had a brown suit, too; poor but dignified. Christmas had never gotten rid of it. Every once in a while he took it out, looked at it, stroke the worn collar and cuffs, and thanked his mother. He set it aside and took out the dark blue wool suit Santo had given him. To wear to the theater with Maria. The first time. His hero also had a warm blue wool suit from Macy’s. And like him, he had a true friend. Christmas hung the blue suit next to the brown one. Now he took a tailor-made black suit off its hanger and put it on over the white shirt and narrow black tie. Then he opened a cupboard and took out two wrapped packages. A big one for his mother and a tiny one for Sal. He telephoned downstairs and asked Neil to call him a taxi. He put on his black cashmere overcoat and went downstairs.

  Neil was waiting for him, holding the door of the taxi open for him.

  “Happy New Year, Neil,” said Christmas as he climbed into the car.

  “And a Happy New Year to you, Mr. Luminita,” and the doorman closed the door.

  “Monroe Street,” said Christmas in the taxi.

  The driver turned back, with his elbow on the backrest. He looked at him, studying the elegant clothes. “Monroe Street?” he asked, perplexed. “Ya know where that is, mister?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “It’s the Lower East Side.”

  “There are worse places,” said Christmas.

  The driver made a face and set off.

  Christmas watched him in the rear-view mirror and smiled. Then, when they turned into Monroe Street, he said, “Right next to that Cadillac.” He got out and paid.

  A group of four small boys were strolling purposefully around the luxurious car. They were skinny, with complexions that tended toward gray. They had their caps pulled down over their ears and were shivering in their thin clothes, but they couldn’t bring themselves to go home, fascinated by that car that nobody in the neighborhood could possibly afford.

  “For tonight just leave it in one piece,” he told the boys, smiling.

  The kids looked at him suspiciously. This guy wasn’t dressed like anybody else in the neighborhood. They didn’t know who he was. But he didn’t look like a gangster. He must be some sucker from Upper Manhattan; that was a safe bet. An easy mark.

  “Are ya lost, mister?” said one of the boys, shorter than the others but with a quick intelligent look about him. He slipped a hand into his pocket.

  “No,” said Christmas.

  “Izzat your car?” asked the kid, pointing to the Cadillac.

  “No,” said Christmas.

  The boy took his hand out of his pocket. He was holding a rickety harmless switchblade with a broken tip. “So then mind ya own business,” he said arrogantly.

  Christmas lifted his hands, in sign of surrender.

  “On accounta this is our parta da street,” the kid explained.

  “What do you call yourselves?” asked Christmas, keeping his hands in the air.

  The kid looked at the other three, with a bewildered look on his face. His friends didn’t come to his aid. They boy went back to staring at Christmas. “We … uh … we’re …” he mumbled. He looked to the right and to the left, as if searching for something. Then his face lit up. “Yeah, mister. We’re the Diamond Dogs,” he said inflating his narrow chest.

  Christmas smiled. ”Years ago there used to be a gang down here that had that same name.”

  The boy shrugged his shoulders. “So they musta heard about us and took off runnin’,” he said. “Cuz now that name belongs ta us.”

  Christmas nodded. “Can I put my hands down?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but don’t try nothin’ tricky,” said the kid, waving his knife in the air.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t want to get sliced up,” said Christmas. “But I have to go in there,” and he pointed to the entrance of his old house. “May I?”

  The kid turned to his pals. “Do we let him go in?”

  One of the three had to giggle and put his hand over his mouth.

  “Ya said da right thing, sucker,” said the boy with the knife. “Today ya in luck. You can go in. Da Diamond Dogs is gonna let ya off easy dis time.”

  “I’ll say,” said Christmas, and he went in the doorway. He started to climb the stairs, happy.

  “Hey,” said the kid from behind him, catching up to him on the mezzanine landing. “Da Diamond Dogs you used ta know — what kinda stuff did they do?” he asked him. “Was they famous?”

  “Famous enough. But they used their heads, not guns or knives.”

  The boy looked at him curiously. “And who was their capo?”

  “A guy with a negro name.”

  “Huh,” said the kid. “My name’s Albert, by my pals call me Zip.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Zip.” Christmas stuck out his hand.

  The boy didn’t move. “Whaddya say — is Zip a good name for the leader of Diamond Dogs?”

  Christmas thought about it. “Yeah, Zip’s a great name,” he said at last.

  Zip smiled and shook his hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Me?” Christmas shrugged. “I’ve got a stupid name. Never mind.” He looked at the boy. “Where do you live?” he asked him.

  “Cros’ da street,” said Zip.

  “Can you see the street from the window of your house?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Because you could do me a big favor, Zip,” said Christmas with a serious expression. “If you go home instead of freezing out in the street, maybe you could keep an eye on that Cadillac that’s outside. If I know that the head of Diamond Dogs in looking after it, I’ll feel a lot safer.” He reached a hand into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills, a gesture that reminded him of Rothstein. He unfurled a ten-dollar bill. “How about it? Think you can do that?”

  Zip’s eyes got huge. He took the bill and turned it over. “Okay,” he said, trying to keep his voice under control. “I’ll see what we can do.”

  “Thanks, pal,” said Christmas.

  But Zip wasn’t listening any more. He was running down the stairs. Christmas looked after him for an instant, smiling. With a slight nostalgia in his heart, he came up to the door of his old house and knocked.

  “Ya took ya sweet time gettin’ here, pisser,” Sal said, opening the door. “Come on in so’s I can show ya what a house is spose ta look like. I mean a high class house, not like dat shitty apartment with nothin’ in it you got.”

  Christmas came in and hugged his mother.

  Cetta pressed his face between her hands, kissed it, stroked it. “You look worn out, baby.”

  “How the fuck did ya not end up a finoosh wit’ a mother like dat?” said Sal. “Let him alone, Cetta.”

  Cetta laughed, took her son’s overcoat and admired his suit. “Bello, bello. Now we come to table, is all ready.”

  “No, first thing I’m gonna show him da house,” said Sal. “I spent a whole lotta money on dis place. Don’t I even get ta show it to him?” He took Christmas by the arm and led him through the apartment, giving him a detailed account of what he’d spent on masonry, plumbing, electricity, and furnishings. When they came to the bedroom, he didn’t open the door. “In here is where your mother and me sleep,” Sal mumbled in a low voice, embarrassed.

  Christmas turned to Cetta and smiled.

  “Okay, so now you can tell me how you like da house,” said Sal at the end of the tour.

  “It’s really beautiful,” said Christmas.

  “Beautiful?” Sal roared. “You don’t understand nothin’ about houses, pisser. This here’s a royal palace. A fuckin royal palace.”

  “I think you’re right Sal,” laughed Christmas. They went into the living room.

  The table was s
et for three. They ate pasta with meatballs and roasted peppers, sausages in tomato sauce, eggplant stuffed with pork and black olives. And to finish, spiced salami, and goat cheese, everything washed down with a dense ruby red Italian wine. Then Sal went to the icebox and took out a cardboard box and a bottle. “Cassata siciliana. Somethin’ special,” he said. “An’ sweet spumante, not dat sour champagne crap.”

  When all three had lifted their glasses in a toast, Sal said, looking embarrassed, “I ast your mother t’ marry me.”

  “What did you tell him, Mamma?” Christmas smiled.

  “What da fuck ya think she told me?” said Sal, brandishing his glass and splashing spumante onto the tablecloth.

  Cetta dipped her fingertip in the spilled spumante and touched first Christmas’ ear, then Sal’s. “For good luck,” she said.

  “I’m happy for you,” said Christmas. “When?”

  “We gotta see,” grumbled Sal. “A weddin’ costs a lotta dough, see; an’ I already spent enough on da house.”

  “To the two of you,” said Christmas.

  “To you play,” said Cetta. “Not long, now …”

  Christmas smiled. “Two weeks.”

  “Yeah, da play,” Sal nodded.

  “And Nonno Vito an’ Nonna Tonia,” said Cetta. She stroked Sal’s hand. “They know, they proud of you.”

  “An’ to Mikey,” Sal said quickly.

  “… Mikey.” Cetta had a grave expression.

  They drank the sweet sparkling wine and ate the cassata. Christmas gave the big package to his mother. She opened it excitedly.

  “It’s for your bed,” said Christmas, as his mother unfolded a large coverlet, embroidered with a C and an S.

  Cetta hugged him and gave him a kiss.

  Sal clapped him on the back. “Thanks,” he said.

  “It’s a present for Mamma, you don’t have to thank me,” said Christmas. Fingering the tiny package in his pants pocket, he went over to the window and raised it.