Supernatural Noir

The blond is the first to notice Sylvia. She looks up with a bright, wide-eyed smile, which quickly vanishes. The girl recognizes the threat and immediately scowls, knowing she will have to defend her territory from another predator. Sylvia is unfazed.

When Rossini’s eyes fall on Sylvia, a noticeable amount of the intoxication clears from them. He’s wanted Sylvia for years, but she has shot him down at every turn. Rossini is a thief; he jacked locks and cracked safes for Louis, making a fraction of a fraction of the money the things he stole were worth. She’d never needed him before.

“Hello, Mickey,” she says.

Rossini straightens himself in the booth, removing his palm from the bottle job’s thigh. He leans back in the booth and says, “Sylvia, it’s good to see you.”

“Is this your wife?” the blond asks. She is sulking because Rossini’s expression tells her that she has already been subtracted from this equation.

“No,” he says.

“Then who the fuck is she?” the blond wants to know.

“She’s a friend. Don’t worry about it.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, playing demure. She locks eyes with Rossini and dips her chin bashfully, knowing the effect it will have on the man. “I’ll let you back to your evening.”

“Wait. Wait.” He nudges the blond and says, “Why don’t you go powder your nose. I need to have a word with Sylvia here.”

“Mickey,” the girl whines.

“It’s business,” he tells her. “Be a sweetheart and give us a couple of minutes, okay?”

He gives her a sloppy peck on the lips and produces a fifty-dollar bill and hands it to the young woman, who quickly drops the note into her purse. She scoots her butt across the booth, and as she stands, she fixes a glare on Sylvia, who pretends to ignore the girl’s attitude, but decides in that second to put a serious fuck you in the little cunt’s night.

These amateur bitches, Sylvia thinks. They didn’t understand the game, and that’s why it ate them alive, leaving them shaking their tits in low-rent knocker shops by the docks to feed the bastard brats of sailors and warehouse men, waiting for some disease to slowly snuff their candles. Over the years, Sylvia had seen a hundred similar pieces of trash blown into the gutter, and she didn’t pity a single one of them.

“I really didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, sliding into the booth next to Rossini. “It’s just that since . . . well, you know . . . I’ve been a little lost.”

“I know,” Rossini says, placing his hand on Sylvia’s knee in a salacious move he masks as mere comfort. “It’s gotta be tough. How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” she says. Already she has managed to work tears into her eyes. She sniffs lightly and retrieves a napkin from the table to dab her cheeks.

“Oh now, Sylvia,” says Rossini, scooting closer to her. He puts his arm around her shoulders and slides his hand higher on her thigh, re-creating the pose he’d assumed with the bottle job before Sylvia’s arrival. In a handful of moments, Sylvia has replaced the blond in the booth, in Rossini’s thoughts, and in the thief’s plans for the night.

Rossini is typical, a man led by his ego and his cock who believes himself the cure-all for a woman’s pain. His need to rescue her is an evolutionary blindfold, and though she finds his predictability unsatisfying, it serves her purpose.

——

Sylvia is twenty years old. For two years she has enjoyed an affair with Joe Tocci, a handsome and sophisticated man who will soon be named boss of his own crew. He is her lover and her employer, sending her on trips across the city, muling drugs and cash. Sylvia takes pride in her work, feeling she is paying her dues and earning respect within the rackets, unlike the other women who satisfy themselves in the roles of whore, wife, or victim.

One night she returns to the apartment Tocci has rented for her to find Joe and six of his friends three sheets to the completely fucked up, and before she can set down her handbag, a scrawny prick with buckteeth and the bumpy skin of a gourd by the name of Toady turns to Joe and says, “Mind if I take a ride?”

To her amusement, Joe replies, “I’d kinda like to see that.”

Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.

Before she knows what is happening, the men approach her. They grab her arms painfully and hoist her from the floor. Then she is pi

Sylvia rarely thinks of this night. She tells herself the memories were scraped away with the brat one of those cocksuckers had put inside of her.

——

Morning light streams through thin curtains, bathing Sylvia’s face. She wipes her eyes and hears footsteps. Rossini enters the bedroom holding two mugs of coffee. He is naked and though he’s bulky, his added pounds are solid and intimidating, and she likes the way his body looks.

He hands her one of the mugs and sits on the edge of the bed beside her.

“So tell me what you’re doing here,” he says, taking her off guard.

She holds the mug in both hands, like a little girl sipping cocoa, and offers Rossini an i

“Look, Syl,” Rossini says once his amusement is under control, “you think I’m a dumb wop fucker, but I’m not that dumb. I saw the way you twisted Louis around your finger. You drove him out of his fucking mind. I never saw anything like it. So while I can play along with some horseshit to get a roll, and maybe even believe you were lonely and needed a bit of hard to make it through the night, the fact you’re still here tells me you want more than my cock.”

“Maybe I like you,” Sylvia says over the lip of her coffee mug.

“And maybe I’ll sprout tits and be the happiest girl in the whole USA,” he says, still exhibiting great amusement at the game. “What do you think? You think I’m going to sprout tits?”

“Fine,” she says. She places her mug on the nightstand and leans back on the headboard. “I want you to help me with a job.”

“That’s more like it,” Rossini says. He drinks from his mug and looks out the window.

“Are you angry?”

“Relieved,” he says. “I like to know where I stand. What’s the job?”

She hesitates because Louis and Mickey had been close. She doesn’t know if the thief retains loyalty to his dead boss, but she ca

“I want to hit Louis’s house,” she says.

——

The night after the funeral Mary Towne, Louis’s widow, called me to say she was in Miami with her two sons. I was sitting on the sofa with my arm around my wife, and we were watching an animated film about dogs, and when the phone rang I thought it might have been our daughter, who called frequently from her college dorm. To hear Mary Towne’s shrill voice instead of my daughter’s irritated the hell out of me.