3
Nashe understood that he was no longer behaving like himself. He could hear the words coming out of his mouth, but even as he spoke them, he felt they were expressing someone else’s thoughts, as if he were no more than an actor performing on the stage of some imaginary theater, repeating lines that had been written for him in advance. He had never felt this way before, and the wonder of it was how little it disturbed him, how easily he slipped into playing his part. The money was the only thing that mattered, and if this foul-mouthed kid could get it for him, then Nashe was willing to risk everything to see that it happened. It was a crazy scheme, perhaps, but the risk was a motivation in itself, a leap of blind faith that would prove he was finally ready for anything that might happen to him.
At that point, Pozzi was simply a means to an end, the hole in the wall that would get him from one side to the other. He was an opportunity in the shape of a human being, a card-playing specter whose one purpose in the world was to help Nashe win back his freedom. Once that job was finished, they would go their separate ways. Nashe was going to use him, but that did not mean he found Pozzi entirely objectionable. In spite of his wise-ass posturing, there was something fascinating about this kid, and it was hard not to grant him a sort of grudging respect. At least he had the courage of his convictions, and that was more than could be said of most people. Pozzi had taken the plunge into himself; he was improvising his life as he went along, trusting in pure wit to keep his head above water, and even after the thrashing he had just been given, he did not seem demoralized or defeated. The kid was rough around the edges, at times even obnoxious, but he exuded a confidence that Nashe found reassuring. It was still too early to know if Pozzi could be believed, of course, but considering how little time there had been for him to invent a story, considering the farfetched plausibility of the whole situation, it seemed doubtful that he was anything other than what he claimed to be. Or so Nashe assumed. One way or the other, it wouldn’t take long for him to find out.
The important thing was to appear calm, to rein in his excitement and convince Pozzi that he knew what he was doing. It wasn’t exactly that he wanted to impress him, but he instinctively felt that he had to keep the upper hand, to match the kid’s bravura with a quiet, unflinching confidence of his own. He would play the old man to Pozzi’s upstart, using the advantage he had in size and age to give off an aura of hard-earned wisdom, a steadiness that would counterbalance the kid’s nervous, impulsive manner. By the time they came to the northern reaches of the Bronx, Nashe had already settled on a plan of action. It would mean paying out a little more than he would have liked, perhaps, but in the long run he figured it would be money well spent.
The trick was not to say anything until Pozzi started asking questions, and then, when he did ask them, to be ready with good answers. That was the surest way to control the situation: to keep the kid slightly off balance, to create the illusion that he was always one step ahead of him. Without saying a word, Nashe steered the car onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, and when Pozzi finally asked him where they were going (as they drove past Ninety-sixth Street), Nashe said: “You’re all worn out, Jack. You need some food and sleep, and I could go for a little lunch myself. We’ll check into the Plaza and take it from there.”
“You mean the Plaza Hotel?” Pozzi said.
“That’s right, the Plaza Hotel. I always stay there when I’m in New York. Any objections?”
“No objections. I was just wondering, that’s all. Sounds like a good idea to me.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“Yeah, I like it. I like to do things in style. It’s good for the soul.”
They parked the car in an underground lot on East Fifty-eighth Street, removed Nashe’s bags from the trunk, and then walked around the corner to the hotel. Nashe asked for two single rooms with a connecting bath, and as he signed the register at the desk, he watched Pozzi out of the corner of his eye, noting the small, satisfied smirk on the kid’s face. That look pleased him, for it seemed to indicate that Pozzi was sufficiently awed by his good fortune to appreciate what Nashe was doing for him. It all boiled down to a question of staging. Just two hours before, Pozzi’s life had been in ruins, and now he was standing inside a palace, trying not to gawk at the opulence that surrounded him. Had the contrast been less striking, it would not have produced the desired effect, but as it was, Nashe had only to look at the kid’s twitching mouth to know that he had made his point.
They were given rooms on the seventh floor (“Lucky seven,” as Pozzi remarked in the elevator), and once the bellboy had been tipped and they were settled in, Nashe dialed room service and ordered lunch. Two steaks, two salads, two baked potatoes, two bottles of Beck’s. Meanwhile, Pozzi was marching into the bathroom to take a shower, closing the door behind him but not bothering to lock it. Nashe took that as another good sign. He listened for a moment or two as the water sizzled against the tub, then changed into a clean white shirt and dug out the money he had transferred from the glove compartment to one of his suitcases (fourteen thousand dollars wrapped in a small plastic shopping bag). Without saying anything to Pozzi, he slipped out of the room, took the elevator down to the ground floor, and deposited thirteen thousand dollars in the hotel safe. Before going back up, he made a little detour and stopped in at the newsstand to buy a deck of cards.
Pozzi was sitting in his own room when Nashe returned. The two bathroom doors were open, and Nashe could see the kid sprawled out in an armchair, his body wrapped in two or three white towels. The Saturday-afternoon kung fu movie was playing on the television, and when Nashe poked his head in to say hello, Pozzi pointed to the set and said that maybe he should start taking lessons from Bruce Lee. “The little dude’s no bigger than I am,” he said, “but look at the way he handles those fuckers. If I knew how to do that stuff, last night never would have happened.”
“Are you feeling any better?” Nashe asked.
“My body’s all sore, but I don’t think anything’s broken.”
“I guess you’ll live, then.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I might not be able to play the violin anymore, but it looks like I’m going to live.”
“The food will be here any minute. You can put on a pair of my pants if you like. After we eat, I’ll take you out to buy some new clothes.”
“That’s probably a good idea. I was just thinking it might not be so hot to push this Roman senator act too far.”
Nashe tossed Pozzi a pair of blue jeans to go with the Red Sox T-shirt, and once again the kid seemed to shrink down to the size of a little boy. In order not to trip over himself, he rolled up the bottoms of the pants to his ankles. “You’ve sure got a handsome wardrobe,” he said as he walked into Nashe’s room, holding up the jeans by the waist. “What are you, the Boston cowboy or something?”
“I was going to let you borrow my tux, but then I figured I’d better wait and see what your table manners are like. I wouldn’t want it to get ruined just because you can’t keep ketchup from dribbling out of your mouth.”
The food was wheeled in on a rattling cart, and the two of them sat down to lunch. Pozzi worked on his steak with relish, but after several minutes of steady chewing and swallowing, he put down his knife and fork as if he had suddenly lost interest. He leaned back in his chair and looked around the room. “It’s funny how you start to remember things,” he said in a subdued voice. “I’ve been in this hotel before, you know, but I haven’t thought about it for a long time. Not for years.”
“You must have been pretty young if it happened so long ago,” Nashe said.
“Yeah, I was just a kid. My father brought me here one weekend in the fall. I must have been eleven, maybe twelve.”
“Just the two of you? What about your mother?”
“They were divorced. They split up when I was a baby.”
“And you lived with her?”
“Yeah, we lived in Irvington, New Jersey. That’s where I grew up. A sad, crummy l
ittle town.”
“Did you see much of your father?”
“I barely even knew who he was.”
“And then he showed up one day and took you to the Plaza.”
“Yeah, more or less. I saw him once before that, though. The first time was a strange business, I don’t think I’ve ever been so spooked by anything. I was eight years old then, and one day in the middle of the summer I’m sitting on the front steps of our house. My mother was off at work, and I’m sitting there by myself sucking on this orange Popsicle and looking across the street. Don’t ask me how I remember it was orange, I just do. It’s like I’m still holding the damn thing in my hand now. It was a hot day, and I’m sitting there with my orange Popsicle, thinking maybe I’ll get on my bike when I’m finished and go over to my friend Walt’s house and get him to turn on the hose in the backyard. The Popsicle is just starting to melt on my leg, and all of a sudden this big white Cadillac comes inching down the street. It was a hell of a car. All new and spanking clean with spiderweb hubcaps and whitewall tires. The guy behind the wheel looks like he’s lost. Slowing down in front of every house, craning his neck out the window to check the addresses. So I’m watching this with the dumb Popsicle dripping all over me, and then the car stops and the guy shuts off the motor. Right in front of my house. The guy gets out and starts coming up the walk—dressed in this flashy white suit and smiling this big, friendly smile. At first I thought it was Billy Martin, he looked just like him. You know, the baseball manager. And I think to myself: why is Billy Martin coming to see me? Does he want to sign me up as his new batboy or something? Jesus, the shit that goes flying through your head when you’re a kid. Well, he gets a little closer, and I see that it’s not Billy Martin after all. So now I’m really confused, and to be honest with you, a little bit scared. I ditch the Popsicle in the bushes, but before I can decide what else I’m going to do, the guy’s already in front of me. ‘Hey there, Jack,’ he says. ‘Long time no see.’ I don’t know what he’s talking about, but since he knows my name, I figure he’s a friend of my mother’s or something. So I tell him my mother’s at work, trying to be polite, but he says yeah, he knows that, he just talked with her over at the restaurant. That’s where my mother worked, she was a waitress back then. And so I say to him: ‘You mean you came here to see me?’ And he says: ‘You got it, kid. I figured it was about time we caught up on each other’s news. The last time I saw you, you were still in diapers.’ The whole conversation is making less and less sense to me now, and the only thing I can think of is that this guy must be my Uncle Vince, the one who ran off to California when my mother was still a kid. ‘You’re Uncle Vince, aren’t you?’ I say to him, but he just shakes his head and smiles. ‘Hold onto your hat, little guy,’ he says, or something like that, ‘but believe it or not, you’re looking at your father.’ The thing is, I don’t believe it for a second. ‘You can’t be my father,’ I say to him. ‘My father got killed in Vietnam.’ ‘Yeah, well,’ the guy says, ‘that’s what everyone thought. But I wasn’t really killed, see. I escaped. They had me there as a prisoner, but I dug my way out and escaped. It’s taken me a long time to get here.’ It’s starting to get a little more convincing now, but I still have my doubts. ‘Does that mean you’re going to live with us now?’ I say to him. ‘Not exactly,’ he says, ‘but that shouldn’t stop us from getting to know each other.’ That seems all wrong, and now I’m pretty sure that he’s trying to trick me. ‘You can’t be my father,’ I say again. ‘Fathers don’t go away. They live at home with their families.’ ‘Some fathers,’ the guy says, ‘but not all of them. Look. If you don’t believe me, I’ll prove it to you. Your name’s Pozzi, right? John Anthony Pozzi. And your father’s name has to be Pozzi, too. Right?’ I just nod my head at what he’s saying, and then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. ‘Look at this, kid,’ he says, and then he takes the driver’s license out of the wallet and hands it to me. ‘Read what it says on that piece of paper.’ And so I read it to him: ‘John Anthony Pozzi.’ And I’ll be damned if the whole story isn’t written there in black and white.”
Pozzi paused for a moment and took a sip of beer. “I don’t know,” he continued. “When I think about it now, it’s like it happened in a dream or something. I can remember parts of it, but the rest just blurs over in my mind, like maybe it never really happened. I remember that my old man took me out for a spin in his Caddy, but I don’t know how long it lasted, I can’t even remember what we talked about. But I remember the air conditioning in the car and the smell of the leather upholstery, I remember feeling annoyed that my hands were all sticky from the Popsicle I’d been eating. The main thing, I guess, was that I was still scared. Even though I’d seen the driver’s license, I started doubting it all over again. Something funny’s going on, I kept telling myself. This guy might say he’s my father, but that doesn’t mean he’s telling the truth. It could be a trick of some kind, a hoax. All this is going through my head as we drive around town, and then all of a sudden we’re back in front of my house. It’s like the whole thing took about half a second. My old man doesn’t even get out of the car. He just reaches into his pocket, pulls out a hundred-dollar bill, and slaps it into my hand. ‘Here, Jack,’ he says, ‘a little something so you’ll know I’m thinking about you.’ Shit. It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. I didn’t even know they made things like hundred-dollar bills. So I get out of the car with this C-note in my hand, and I remember thinking to myself, Yeah, I guess this means he’s my father, after all. But before I can think of anything to say, he’s squeezing my shoulder and saying good-bye to me. ‘See you around, kid,’ he says, or something like that, and then he starts up the car and drives off.”
“A funny way to meet your father,” Nashe said.
“You’re telling me.”
“But what about when you came here to the Plaza?”
“That didn’t happen until three or four years later.”
“And you didn’t see him in all that time?”
“Not once. It was like he just vanished again. I kept asking my mother about him, but she was pretty tight-lipped about it, she didn’t want to say much. Later on, I found out that he’d spent a few years in the can. That’s why they got divorced, she told me. He’d been up to no good.”
“What did he do?”
“Got himself involved in a boiler-room scam. You know, selling stocks in a dummy corporation. One of those high-class swindles.”
“He must have done all right after he got out. Well enough to drive a Cadillac anyway.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. I think he wound up in Florida selling real estate. Struck it rich in condo land.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“I’m not sure of anything. I haven’t heard from the guy in a long time. He could be dead now for all I know.”
“But he showed up again three or four years later.”
“Out of the blue, just like the first time. I’d given up on him by then. Four years is a long time to wait when you’re a kid. It feels like fucking forever.”
“And what did you do with the hundred dollars?”
“It’s funny you should ask that. At first I was going to spend it. You know, buy a fancy new baseball glove or something, but nothing ever seemed quite right, I could never bring myself to part with it. So I wound up saving it all those years. I kept it in a little box in my underwear drawer, and every night I would take it out and look at it—just to make sure it was really there.”
“And if it was there, that meant you had really seen your father.”
“I never thought of it that way. But yeah, that’s probably it. If I held on to the money, then maybe that meant my father would be coming back.”
“A little boy’s logic.”
“You’re so dumb when you’re a kid, it’s pathetic. I can’t believe I used to think like that.”
“We all did. It’s part of growing up.”
“Yeah, well, it was all pretty c
omplicated. I never showed the money to my mother, but every now and then I would take it out of the box and let my friend Walt hold it. It made me feel good, I don’t know why. Like if I saw him touching it, then I knew I wasn’t making it up. But the funny thing was, after about six months I got it into my head that the money was fake, that it was a counterfeit bill. It might have been something that Walt said, I can’t say for sure, but I do remember thinking that if the money was fake, then the guy who gave it to me couldn’t have been my father.”
“Around and around.”
“Yeah. Around and around and around. One day, Walt and I got to talking about it, and he said the only way we’d ever find out was if we took it to the bank. I didn’t want to let it out of my room, but since I figured it was counterfeit anyway, it probably didn’t matter. So off we go the bank, all scared that someone’s going to rob us, creeping along like we’re on some goddamn dangerous mission. The teller at the bank turned out to be a nice guy. Walt says to him, ‘My friend here wants to know if this is a real hundred-dollar bill,’ and the teller takes it and looks it over real careful. He even put the thing under a magnifying glass just to make sure.”
“And what did he say?”
“ ‘It’s real, boys,’ he says. ‘A genuine U.S. Treasury note.’ ”
“So the man who gave it to you was really your father.”
“Correct. But where does that leave me now? If this guy is really my father, then why doesn’t he come back and see me? At least he could write a letter or something. But instead of getting pissed off about it, I start making up stories to explain why he’s not in touch. I figure, shit, I figure he’s some kind of James Bond character, one of those secret agents working for the government and he can’t blow his cover by coming to see me. After all, by now I believe all that bullshit about escaping from a prison camp in Vietnam, and if he can do that, he must have been one hell of a fucking macho man, right? A stud and a half. Christ, I must have been a goddamn moron to think like that.”