The Misfortune Cookie ed-6 Read online

  Stella Butera was a fair employer, and since she wanted servers who had performance skills, she accepted that our acting careers were more important to us than waiting tables. Prior to becoming a semi-regular staffer at Bella Stella a couple of years ago, I had been fired from several demeaning, poorly paid jobs by managers who were unwilling to accommodate my occasional scheduling requests so I could go to an audition, or who were enraged when I wanted to spend two days acting in a guest role on a television show more than I wanted to work the underpaid shifts they refused to let me have off. Stella, by contrast, was accommodating about that sort of thing. She also understood that actors come and go from day jobs, depending on whether or not we’ve got acting work. So I was able to rotate in and out of the staff at Stella’s pretty comfortably.

  Most of the time, that was. By the time the limited run had ended for The Vampyre, an Off-Broadway play I was working in through late November, Stella’s staff was so packed with musical theater majors coming home from college for the holidays that she had very little work for me in December. And one or two shifts per week wasn’t going to cover my rent—especially not in Manhattan. I live in a rent-controlled apartment that’s rapidly surrendering to entropy and located in the seedier part of the West Thirties; but in New York, that just means it’s very expensive rather than catastrophically ruinous.

  So, facing the cold and harsh reality of my living expenses, I had taken a job in December playing Santa’s Jewish elf at Fenster & Co., a famous old department store in Midtown. Depending on your point of view, this was either a blessing or a curse, since it meant I was around to foil a deviously demented and deadly scheme to destroy the store, the Fenster family, and (incidentally) much of New York City.

  Despite my role in saving the volatile Fenster family (and a large swath of Manhattan’s retail industry) from annihilation, I felt certain the Fensters would never want me back in their employ, even if they still had a retail empire next Christmas—which was by no means certain, now that one of their own family members had been exposed as a key culprit in the series of high-profile heists which had wrecked the season of love, joy, and shopping this year. And, in fact, I was perfectly comfortable with no longer being wanted at Fenster & Co. (whereas no longer being wanted by the arresting officer in that mess was making me a little crazy these days), since I was still undecided about which experience had been more horrifying: working the sales floor of Fenster’s as an elf during the holidays, or confronting a voracious solstice demon rising from a hell dimension there.

  In any case, elf season was now over—much like my train wreck of a love life—and no one really hires new staff between Christmas and New Year’s, never mind holding auditions. (In fact, with the business so dead at this time of year, my agent was in Wisconsin until early January, reluctantly visiting his family and probably drinking a little human blood. But that’s another story.) However, on the day I realized that my food supply had dwindled down to one box of bargain-brand pasta and some nonfat yogurt, I finally caught a break.

  Stella called me to say that a couple of the college kids who’d signed up for tonight’s lucrative New Year’s Eve shift had just informed her, at three o’clock this afternoon, that they’d decided to go to a party out on Long Island instead. They also asked her to mail them their final paychecks for the holiday season. Stella told me she was thinking of having the checks personally delivered by a Gambello enforcer who’d explain the meaning of responsibility to them.

  I, on the other hand, wanted to send a thank you card to those brats. I was very pleased to get called in for tonight’s shift. Wiseguys tip well, and tourists in town for New Year’s Eve usually do, too. By the time I finished the shift, I’d have a nice wad of cash in my pocket, which was a profound relief to me. Although I had scraped together enough to pay my January rent, I had no money left over for food or utilities. And within the next few days, the extra holiday staff would be going back to school, so Stella should have plenty of shifts available for me after this. At least I’d be able to eat this month—and start saving for next month’s rent.

  Working at the restaurant tonight would also get me out of my apartment, and it was high time for that. I’d been wallowing for several days, and I had no plans for tonight, having been too grumpy and depressed to make any. So I welcomed the obligation, as a singing server, to focus on something other than my empty bank account and my humiliation (as well as my raging hurt) over being dumped right after sex.

  One other guy had done this to me. Back in college. That kind of treatment is mortifying when you’re nineteen, and it had taken me a long time to get over it. But that jerk did the same thing to other girls, too, as I later learned. Whereas Lopez had never seemed like that kind of guy to me. Whatever else I may have thought of him from time to time (rigid, cranky, critical, cynical, arrogant, and, believe me, I could go on and on), I’d always thought he was a good man, and a sincere one. And I was . . . fond of him. Or had been. Until I realized he wasn’t going to call. So this was even more mortifying than my previous experience had been with this kind of insensitive, inexcusable, dipshit behavior.

  It was also painful because our—let’s call it “friendship”—had been complicated from the start. When that guy in college had dumped me right after getting me into bed, I had wondered obsessively if he hadn’t liked my body or had found me sexually boring. But Lopez’s uninhibited enthusiasm that night, and the following morning as he was getting ready to leave for work, ensured I had no insecurities about his views on that score . . . so I was obsessing over a lot of other possibilities. Did he think I was too flaky? Too much trouble? Not someone he really wanted to get serious with, after all, despite some of the things he’d recently said to me about this?

  Or was he just such a guy that it didn’t occur to him I might expect to hear from him—and to see him again—after he’d spent the night in my bed? What sort of person doesn’t call after that? For a week?

  Yes, I really needed to get out of the apartment and focus on something else.

  So it was a relief, in more ways than one, to be serving food and drink to notorious criminals at Bella Stella as midnight approached on New Year’s Eve. In fact, pretending to be in a festive mood was making me feel better. I’m a professional, after all, so I had my game face on from the moment I started my shift. I gave good service, I was friendly to visitors and cheerfully firm with the wiseguys (who could be a little grabby), and I threw my heart into every song I sang for the crowd.

  There are various schools of impassioned thought in my craft about whether it’s better to work from the inside out or the outside in. Method acting versus technical acting. Do you produce real tears onstage because you dredge up your inner emotions eight shows per week, or because you reproduce the facial expressions and respiratory patterns that physiologically precede crying? I’m not a passionate proponent of one school over the other, because I’ve always found that if I work from both outside and inside, the two processes meet somewhere in the middle and produce a result that’s convincing and sincere. And sometimes one side works faster than the other. When I played Miss Jane Aubrey in The Vampyre, for example, working on the accent, posture, and body language of a genteel Englishwoman in the early nineteenth century helped me understand some of Jane’s more obtuse choices in that play (such as her submissive thralldom to the notorious Lord Ruthven, the vampire who marries her and then eats her—and not in a nice way).

  So pretending to be in a good mood that night at Bella Stella helped me focus on thoughts and feelings that supported this pretense, and I started actually having a good time and enjoying myself.

  True, the façade was fragile enough that if anyone asked me to sing a ballad, let alone a torch song, there was a real risk I wouldn’t get through it without choking up. But since it was New Year’s Eve and everyone was in party mode, all the requests I got were for upbeat numbers: Fly Me To the Moon, Mack the Knife (boy, do gangsters love that song), Beyond the Sea, That’s Amore,
and, of course, New York, New York.

  Jimmy “Legs” Brabancaccio, a Gambello soldier who actually had quite a good voice, rose from his dinner table to wow the crowd with his rendition of My Way. Then, at the insistence of our customers, a waiter named Ned sang Mack the Knife (I mean, they really love that song). Then Ronnie Romano, also from the Gambello crew, sang a traditional Italian ditty that was unfamiliar to me, but that our accordionist knew. Ronnie had a reedy, off-key voice, but he sang with heart.

  Ronnie and Jimmy Legs were sitting at a table in my station, at their insistence. I was sort of a favorite with the Gambello crime family, since my friend Max and I had inadvertently wound up helping them out a couple of times. Victor Gambello, the Shy Don, had made it clear in public that he considered us friends of the family. He had also tried to help us when Max and I were recently held prisoner for about eighteen hours by Fenster & Co. (Call it a misunderstanding. We’d had a slight arson mishap while confronting Evil.)

  Despite Stella Butera’s connection to the family, I found it a little odd that wiseguys hung out regularly at the restaurant, since three Gambellos had been murdered here in recent years. First there was Handsome Joey Gambello, who was shot to death. Two or three years later, Frankie Mastiglione got fatally knifed here while he was only halfway through his dinner. Then just seven months ago, Chubby Charlie Chiccante was shot while I was waiting on his table. I was an eyewitness, which had led to my becoming more familiar with the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB) than I’d ever expected to be.

  Of course, all the shooting and stabbing probably made it a little odd that I hung out here, too. But between Stella’s management style and the good tips I earned, it was the best non-acting job I’d ever had, despite the mortality rate.

  “Hey, Esther! Another round!” Jimmy Legs shouted at me, trying to be heard above the cheerful din of the crowd and the soaring tones of Ned giving his all to Feeling Good.

  “Not for me,” said Lucky Battistuzzi.

  “Aw, come on, Lucky!” Ronnie urged.

  “Nah, you get to be my age,” said Lucky, “and you gotta pace yourself. Besides, the boss said he might want to see me later.”

  I knew that references to “the boss” meant Don Victor Gambello, who was in his eighties, chronically ill, and seldom left his Forest Hills house, out in Queens. He also seemed to be an insomniac, since it wasn’t unusual for him to summon Lucky in the middle of the night.

  “Tonight?” I said. “But Lucky, it’s New Year’s Eve.”

  The old hit man shrugged philosophically. “We don’t really get days off in Our Thing, kid.” He added, “Just like you, huh?”

  Due to the way that facing off against Evil encourages the most unlikely people to become bedfellows, so to speak, Alberto “Lucky Bastard” Battistuzzi, who’d gotten his nickname by surviving various attempts on his life, was someone I considered a trusted friend. Somewhere in his sixties, with short gray hair, an expressive, heavily lined face, and shrewd brown eyes, he wasn’t inclined to share any “professional” secrets with me, and I wasn’t rash enough to encourage him to do so. But I had seen enough to know that Lucky, a semi-retired Gambello capo, was someone on whom the Shy Don relied.

  “And I’m glad to be working New Year’s Eve,” I assured Lucky. “No income, no eating.”

  “So get your boyfriend to take you out for dinner,” Ronnie said darkly. “Cops get regular salaries, don’t they?”

  Ronnie had never approved of my dating a police officer—let alone one who was a detective in the OCCB.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “We have nothing to do with each other.”

  “How’s that?” Lucky looked puzzled. “When we was investigatin’ that polterheisty demon business at Fenster’s last week, I thought it kinda seemed like you and NYPD’s Boy Wonder were getting ready to start choosing china patterns.”

  “No, you imagined it,” I said tersely, feeling my stomach sink. “So that’s another round for Jimmy and Ronnie, but nothing for you?”

  “I’ll have a cup of coffee,” Lucky said. “What’s wrong with these young guys? The way the good detective looked at you, especially when he thought you was about to go down for the dirt nap, I thought for sure—”

  “Are you guys done with these dessert plates?” I asked loudly. “Why hasn’t the bus boy removed these yet? Ralph! This table needs clearing!”

  “Coming!”

  “If Esther’s not interested in that guy,” Ronnie said censoriously to Lucky, “that’s for the best, case closed, and you shouldn’t poke your nose in.”

  “Thank you, Ronnie,” I said.

  “A girl like Esther with a cop?” Ronnie shook his head. “It ain’t right. It was never right. It’s good that it’s over.”

  “It never got started,” I said firmly, as Ralph the bus boy started clearing their table. “We went on a few dates. That’s all. There was nothing else between us.”

  “Oh, if I were gulling-bull enough to believe that,” Lucky said, “you really think I woulda survived this long in my line of work?”

  I frowned. “I think you mean gullible.”

  Ralph, who was moving with more rapidity than grace, knocked over an empty wine glass while clearing the dishes.

  “Careful!” I grabbed it before it could roll off the table, then I wiped up the spot where a few remaining drops of red wine had spilled.

  “Oops! Sorry,” Ralph said anxiously. “Did it spill on you?” He almost tipped over another glass as he gestured at Jimmy.

  “Watch out,” I said, moving this other glass out of Ralph’s reach before he wound up knocking it into Lucky’s lap.

  “Sorry!” Ralph said again, agitated now. “Are you okay?”

  “We’re fine, kid,” Lucky said to the bus boy. “But do us a favor and back away slowly with your hands in plain sight.”

  Coming from a notorious Gambello hitter, the comment, though intended as a joke, obviously made Ralph nervous. I thought he probably didn’t have the temperament for working at Stella’s. Or the coordination to work in a crowded restaurant.

  Jimmy Legs confirmed that impression, after Ralph headed toward the kitchen with his load of dirty dishes, by saying, “That kid nearly scalded me last week when he was topping up my coffee. He’s a menace to society.”

  “They shouldn’t oughta let guys that dangerous circulate freely,” Ronnie said with a disapproving frown.

  Going straight back to the topic that I had hoped was finished now, Lucky squinted at me and said dubiously, “So you and Mr. NYPD really ain’t together?”

  I didn’t have to answer, since Ronnie jumped in: “Jesus, give it a rest, would you? The cop’s out of her life. She said so. Let’s not go diggin’ up that corpse.”

  I winced at the imagery.

  Jimmy Legs added, “Ronnie’s right, Lucky. If Esther broke the engagement—”

  “We were never engaged,” I said.

  “—then you should leave it alone. She can do a lot better than that guy.” Jimmy continued, “Good riddance to him. He don’t know how much he’s lost, letting go of a girl like her. Someday he’ll regret it. But there it is. Whaddya gonna do?”

  Oh, great, now I felt like crying again.

  “I’ll go get your drinks,” I said quickly. “We’re getting close to midnight. The bar is swamped, but I’ll try to make it quick.”

  When I returned to their table a few minutes later, Lucky had decided to accept the drab news about my love life. “I gotta admit I’m surprised,” he said, “but I guess it’s just as well you’re not dating the detective.”

  “This is what I been saying!” Ronnie clinked glasses with Jimmy.

  “Because, lemme tell you,” Lucky said with feeling, “that guy is giving me such a pain in my . . . you know where.” He didn’t like to use crude language in front of a lady.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, setting down his coffee.

  “The boss’ lawyer has been on the phone every day this week with the DA
’s office. And with OCCB, too, so he’s talked to your boyfriend a bunch of times.”

  Well, that’s probably making Lopez’s holidays merry, I thought with grim satisfaction. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “The boss is protestin’ their outrageous intrusions into his family’s perfectly legitimate business interests.”

  “I see.”

  “I swear, by now those mooks at OCCB probably know how many times the boss gets up at night to use the john.” Lucky shook his head. “Victor Gambello don’t need this kind of aggravation at his age.”

  I tactfully refrained from pointing out that the Shy Don could have avoided all this by choosing a different career.

  “You figure that’s why the boss might want to see you later?” Jimmy Legs asked Lucky. “More trouble with OCCB? And on New Year’s Eve, for the love of God!”

  “Probably,” Lucky said gloomily.

  “The nerve of those guys,” Ronnie fumed. “Ruining the boss’ holidays. There oughta be a law.”

  Jimmy grunted in agreement.

  Lucky said to me, “So it’s not like I’d be dancing at your wedding to Detective Lopez, kid.”

  “We weren’t engaged,” I said wearily. In fact, the closest Lopez and I had ever even gotten to a dinner date was when he bought me a chili dog in the park a couple of nights before Christmas.

  “Hey, Esther, we need another song!” Freddie the Hermit called from his table. He was here tonight with a date—and his companion wasn’t Mrs. Freddie. In any other setting, I’d have thought she was a hooker, based on her big hair and tiny clothing; but among wiseguys, very few of whom practiced monogamy, her look was fairly standard for girlfriends and mistresses.