it said that the Bearer was entitled to have a room and all meals, plus unlimited free tennis and two rounds of golf.
“What is this?”
“It’s what they call a comp,” Paulo explained. “This place is owned by a friend of Mr. S.’s. Let’s say, for example, they buy a case of soap to wash the dishes. Or two cases, something worth a couple of hundred bucks. Instead of paying them cash, the lodge people give them one of these. Retail, it’s worth more than the two hundred. Cost-wise maybe a hundred. So the guy who came up with the soap gets more than the soap is worth, and the lodge people get the soap for less than the guy wanted. Capisce?”
“I seen a comp coupon before, Paulo,” Joe said. “What I was asking was, is this cop gonna be a tennis player? Or a golf player?”
“He gets to take the girl to a hotel,” Paulo said. “He don’t give a fuck about golf.”
Joe still looked confused, and Paulo took pity on him.
“There’s a story going around, I personally don’t know if it’s true or not, that in some of these lodge places in the Poconos you can gamble in the back room.”
Joe now nodded his understanding.
“You tell this guy you shoot a little craps at this place from time to time, and they sent you the comp coupon, and you can’t use it, so he can have it.”
“Right.”
“Don’t fuck this up, Joe. Mr. S. is personally interested in this.”
“You tell Mr. S. not to worry.”
“He’s not worrying. I’m not worrying. You should be the one that’s worrying.”
Antoinette Marie Wolinski Schermer had moved back in with her parents when Eddie, that sonofabitch, had moved out on her and Brian, which was all she could do, suspecting correctly that getting child support out of Eddie was going to be like pulling teeth.
That hadn’t worked out. Her mother, especially, and her father were Catholic and didn’t believe in divorce no matter what a sonofabitch you were married to, no matter if he slapped you around whenever he had two beers in him. What they expected her to do was go to work, save her money, and wait around the house for the time when she could straighten things out with Eddie.
No going out, in other words.
She had met Ricco Baltazari in the Reading Terminal Market on Market Street. She had gone there for lunch, and so had he. She decided later, when she found out that he owned Ristorante Alfredo, which was before she found out that he was connected with the Mob, that he had probably got bored with the fancy food in his restaurant and wanted a hot Italian sausage with onions and peppers, which was what she was having when she saw him looking at her.
She had noticed him too, saw that he was a really good-looking guy, that he was dressed real nice, and that when he paid for his sausage and pepper and onions, he had a wad of fifties and hundreds as thick as his thumb.
It probably had something to do, too, with what people said about opposites attracting. She was blonde (she only had to touch it up to keep it light, not dye it, the way most blondes had to) and fair-skinned, and he was sort of dark olive-skinned with really black hair.
The first time she noticed him, she wondered what it would be like doing it with him, never suspecting that she would find out that same night.
The first night, he picked her up outside work in his Cadillac and they went first to a real nice restaurant in Jersey, outside Cherry Hill, where everybody seemed to know him, and the manager or whatever sent a bottle of champagne to the table. Ricco told her right out that he was married, but didn’t get along with his old lady, but couldn’t divorce her because his mother was old and a Catholic, and you know how Catholics feel about divorce.
After dinner, they went to a motel, not one of the el cheapos that lined Admiral Wilson Boulevard, but to the Cherry Hill Inn, which was real nice, and had in the bathroom the first whatchamacallit that Antoinette had ever seen. She had to ask Ricco what it was for.
The truth of the matter was that when he was driving her back to her parents’ house she thought that she had blown it, that she had been too easy to pick up, that she had gone