Charlie Opera Read online

  Cuccia opened the Playboy magazine he had bought at an airport newsstand. He flipped toward the middle of the magazine to the centerfold. He held the book up to let the picture drop open.

  “Where do you suppose she lives?” he asked Thomas.

  Thomas turned away from the nude picture. He looked up at the male flight attendant serving cocktails.

  “Naked broads make you nervous?” Cuccia asked. He folded the centerfold back inside the magazine and turned it upside down on the folding tray. “There,” he said. “Take deep breaths.”

  Thomas leaned into Cuccia again. “Like I said, I heard you talk about heroin. I didn’t hear your uncle talk about it. I heard him talk about Russians.”

  “The old man is careful. If I pushed it, he would have known something. Relax. The closer he gets to the money, the more he’ll talk.”

  “What about the rest of your conversation? You were on that boat for three hours. You brought back less than two minutes of dialogue.”

  Cuccia touched the edge of his chin. “Six fucking weeks I gotta have this thing in my mouth like this,” he said. “He’s got a guy debugs the boat every so often. I wasn’t taking unnecessary risks. It’s my ass, not yours.”

  Thomas opened the New York Times he had brought with him. He pointed to a headline in the Metro section. It read: MOB INDICTMENTS IN BROOKLYN. “We’re in a race against time,” he said. “You’re in a race against time.”

  Cuccia was still touching around his jaw with his fingertips. “There’s nothing I can do until the man wants to move. So why not relax about it, already. Have yourself a drink.”

  The flight attendant leaned across Thomas to set a miniature bottle of Absolut vodka and a can of Canada Dry tonic water on a napkin.

  “What’s in Vegas?” Thomas asked after the flight attendant returned to the galley.

  “Pussy,” Cuccia said.

  “How you gonna eat it with a broken jaw?”

  “Who said I was gonna eat it?”

  Thomas smirked. “I thought you guys were big on eating pussy. At least that’s what I read in all the books you guys write after you make your deals.”

  “That’s just to make the books sell,” Cuccia said. “Me, I prefer going through the back door any day. Ask your wife, she’ll tell you.”

  Thomas lost the smirk on his face. He leaned across his seat to whisper into Cuccia&rsqo;s ear. “Just don’t get yourself in too much trouble while we’re in Las Vegas, Nicky. Or your deal will go down the same shitter your mother flushed when you were born.”

  Cuccia forced a chuckle. “Tell me the truth,” he said. “You stay up all night and work that one out? ‘Down the same shitter your mother flushed.’ You guys kill me.”

  Thomas sat back in his chair. He grabbed the headphones in the seat pocket in front of him and placed them on his head.

  Cuccia continued forcing himself to laugh. “What a jerk-off,” he said somewhere in the laugh.

  Chapter 2

  Cecilia Bartoli nailed Una voce poca fa as Charlie Pellecchia swayed back and forth. He watched from his hotel room as crowds of people waited for the Pirate Show in front of the Treasure Island Hotel-Casino across Las Vegas Boulevard. Charlie adjusted the volume on his headphones as the Rossini aria boomed into his ears. He felt the pure high of the violins as he closed his eyes.

  A thick plastic hairbrush thrown from across the room smacked Charlie in the middle of his back. The sting of the hairbrush startled him. He dropped the portable CD player from his hands. The headphones remained attached to the unit and were pulled off his head.

  Charlie turned to his wife as he reached behind him to rub at the red mark the hairbrush had left on his back.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I’ve been calling to you for five minutes!” Lisa Pellecchia yelled. “From the shower. In the bathroom. Five minutes!”

  “I was listening to something,” Charlie said. He was still trying to reach the painful spot on his back. “That hurt, damn it.”

  Lisa’s face tightened. She looked about to burst with more rage. She shook her head instead and returned to the bathroom.

  Charlie picked the CD player and headphones off the floor. He set them down on the small round table alongside the carton of cigarettes he had brought from New York. He turned to one side to look at his back in the mirror. He saw a red welt.

  “Shit,” he said.

  He tried to reach the red mark on his back one more time. In the process, he noticed the roll of flab that had formed around his waist. He stood up straight again, turned to one side, and looked at his profile in the mirror.

  He had gained weight. He guessed his weight was 230 pounds, maybe 240. At 5-foot-10, he figured he was at least 30 pounds overweight.

  He struck a muscle pose. He was still well defined for his age. He had maintained a barrel chest and big arms. He flexed both his biceps in the mirror and quickly dropped his arms when he heard his wife in the bathroom. When he thought he was safe again, he looked into the mirror and whispered, “Figaro, Figaro... Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Fi-ga-ro.”

  It was the second time since they’d come to Las Vegas that his wife had thrown something at Charlie. Earlier in the morning Lisa threw a pillow at him for whistling the overture to Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. She was watching the Today Show on NBC, after her first cup of coffee. Charlie had just come back from a long walk and was listening to the Mozart opera through his headphones.

  Lisa hated opera.

  Charlie was starting to think maybe his wife hated him, too.

  In the afternoon, he took his second long walk of the day. He walked north along Las Vegas Boulevard and noticed a busy construction site a few blocks off the Strip. He walked farther north passed the Desert Inn, the Riviera, and the Sahara. He finally stopped walking when he reached the Stratosphere wondered how Las Vegas looked from the top of the Stratosphere.

  Charlie had been a window cleaner for fifteen years in New York City before starting his own business in the same industry. He worked house rigs on fifty-story buildings. He had worked portable rigs on ten- and twelve-story buildings. He also had worked belts and ladders and an occasional boatswain chair. Heights were never a concern to him. He had always been fascinated with tall buildings.

  He had recently sold the window cleaning business he started more than ten years ago. Charlie was retired now, but he wasn’t sure what he would do with himself.

  He wondered how the glass at the top of the Stratosphere was cleaned when he looked up at it from the street. In the lobby he wondered how many men it took to clean the transom glass.

  On his way back to his hotel he stopped at the Mirage, where he bought a stuffed animal, a small white tiger, for his wife. He was feeling guilty about ignoring her earlier in the morning. Charlie hadn’t turned up the volume on the opera intentionally, but he could understand why his wife thought he had. Lately they weren’t getting along. Opera was one of many distractions Charlie used to escape their problems. He thought Lisa might be jealous of his distractions.

  He hoped his wife would like the tiger. She had always liked receiving a surprise bouquet of flowers in the past. As he crossed Las Vegas Boulevard, a strange thought suddenly entered his mind.

  Charlie wondered if his wife was having an affair.

  “I almost killed him before,” Lisa Pellecchia told her lover.

  She cradled the telephone against her right shoulder as she lowered the volume on the television. She turned on the bed so she could hear the door if it opened.

  “Stay calm,” John Denton said on the other end of the line. “You know what you have to do. It’ll be over soon enough.”

  Lisa shook her head as she leaned her back against the headboard.

  “I feel terrible,” she said. “I can’t believe I hit him like that. I threw something else at him earlier. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”

  “It will be all right. Just stay calm.”

  “I wish you were
here.”

  “Me, too.”

  Lisa felt herself tearing. “I better hang up. He should be back any minute.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Lisa kissed Denton through the telephone. “Good night,” she said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said.

  When she hung up, Lisa took several deep breaths. It was a method of controlling her emotions she had learned the year before in therapy. She tried to focus on what she needed to do as she controlled her breathing.

  Her nerves had been on edge all day. She was anxious to end her marriage. She needed to confess the extramarital relationship she was having with the same man for the second time in two years.

  As her breathing finally returned to normal, Lisa reached for a tissue. The door opened as she held the tissue up to her nose. When she looked up, Charlie was standing at the foot of the bed with a stuffed animal. It was a white tiger. Lisa burst out crying.

  “The last time you told me,” Charlie said. “That was fair. I think you should tell me now if there is something going on.”

  They were sitting alongside each other in the sports book area. Betting at the sports book had already ended for the day a few hours earlier. Charlie had refused to talk in their room. He had told his wife that he felt caged in upstairs. He looked arund the expanse of the betting parlor as he waited for her response.

  “There’s nothing going on,” Lisa lied. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  Charlie sipped at his third gin and tonic. They had been sitting there for half an hour. Lisa had started with white wine. Now she was drinking Diet Coke.

  “Well, then, what is it?” he asked. “Do you just hate me? Do you want to kill me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “What gives with the brush this afternoon? You damn near took my head off, Lisa.”

  “I apologized for that.”

  “Jeez, well then, I guess I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

  “You know what I mean. I was wrong. I’m sorry. There, I said it again.”

  “What the hell brought it on? And what about the dam bursting when I walked in the room? I bought you a present, for Christ sakes.”

  Lisa turned away from him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been edgy. I think we have problems we can’t solve right now.” She looked around herself. “Not here, anyway. Not in Las Vegas.”

  “Oh, well, what the hell, then. Next time use a tire iron. We’ll solve our problems in an emergency room.”

  “I’m through saying I’m sorry, Charlie.”

  “Right. Of course you are.”

  He was frustrated. It was obvious Lisa was holding something back. He knew he was drunk, but he wanted her to tell him the truth. He finished his third gin and tonic. He set the glass on a ledge alongside his chair and craned his neck to look for a waitress.

  “I thought Las Vegas would be good for us,” he said.

  “So you could walk,” Lisa said, with a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

  Charlie ignored her.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I thought we’d have things to occupy us,” he said. “I like to walk. You used to like to walk. Now you like to shop. There’s plenty of both to go around. I thought we wouldn’t be on top of each other here. I made a mistake.”

  Lisa huffed.

  He thought about the affair she had been involved in two years earlier. She had met another lawyer on the West Coast during a corporate case they were involved in together. They met secretly for more than three months before she finally confessed to Charlie.

  “Have you talked to John lately?” he asked.

  “Let’s not go there, okay?”

  He downed his drink. “I guess that’s an answer.”

  “You’re drunk,” Lisa said. “I won’t talk to you while you’re drinking.”

  “Then I’ll make it easier for you,” Charlie said. He spotted a waitress near a row of slot machines to his right. He called to her.

  “I’m not going to watch this all night,” Lisa said. “You getting drunk.” She stood up from her chair.

  Charlie looked his wife up and down. She was still a beautiful woman. She had recently turned forty years old, but there was no way of guessing her age. At 5-foot-4, 108 pounds, she was both lean and muscular. A month ago she had changed her hair color from auburn back to her original color, brunette. She was wearing her hair short again, instead of the long cut Charlie preferred. In the tight black slacks she was wearing, Charlie saw Lisa for the knockout his wife truly was.

  Of course she is having an affairhe was thinking.

  “Waitress!” he yelled.

  A chubby woman in a much too tight waitress outfit stopped to write his order.

  “I think you’ve had enough,” Lisa said.

  Charlie lit a cigarette. “I think maybe we both have,” he told his wife.

  Chapter 3

  Early the next morning, Charlie woke up in a ditch behind a construction site. A big man wearing a construction helmet was holding a towel spotted with blood.

  “You all right?” the big man asked.

  Charlie had trouble sitting up. His body was sore. His hands felt bruised.

  “Where am I?”

  “The Palermo,” the big man said. He was waving somebody over to them. “Bring it over here!”

  Charlie strained to see through the glare of the sun. Flashing lights made him dizzy.

  “You’re cut pretty bad there, mister,” another man said. “Looks like you were mugged.”

  Charlie immediately checked for his wallet. The fingers of his right hand hurt from trying to jam them inside his front pants pocket.

  “I think one of those fingers is broke,” the big man said. “Maybe another one. Looks like you still have your wallet, though.”

  At Valley Hospital, Charlie learned the damage. He had a slight concussion. Two of the fingers on his left hand were severely bruised. His nose was fractured. Eight stitches were required to sew a cut along his hairline behind his right ear. He had a severely bruised rib on his right side and bruises to his chest, shoulders, and back. When he saw himself in the small mirror on the back of a door, Charlie saw that both his eyes had turned black and his upper lip was swollen. A small gauze bandage covered the stitches behind his right ear. The knuckles on both his hands also were bruised.

  An emergency room doctor was asking him questions.

  “Do you want to fill out a police report?”

  Charlie shook his head. “No.”

  “Do you know who did this to you?”

  “No.”

  “Is there someone here with you I should contact?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. There’s no one.”

  “What about back home? Is there someone we should contact back in New York?”

  Charlie shook his head again. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He was still trying to piece together what had happened the night before. He had spent a lot of time at one of the casino bars playing dollar slot poker while he drank gin and tonics. He remembered that he was pretty drunk. He had won a small jackpot.

  Four aces, he remembered. He had hit a four-aces bonus polka machine for five hundred dollars.

  He remembered making friends and singing with people at the bar. He remembered some guy and his girlfriend. They wore cowboy hats. They sang something country-western.

  Charlie also had made friends with the barmaid, Samantha Nicole, or something like Nicole. She was a pretty redhead with freckles and a bright smile. He couldn’t remember where the barmaid had said she was originally from, but she also had spoken with an accent.

  He wasn’t sure what time he had left the bar, but he knew it was pretty late. He had wanted to get some air before heading back upstairs to his room. He knew Lisa was still pissed at him for being drunk. He also remembered never g
oing back to the room. He remembered drinking again instead.

  When he finally asino bar, Charlie had walked across Las Vegas Boulevard to watch the Pirate Show up close at the Treasure Island Hotel. He was standing in the middle of a huge crowd of spectators. A man had befriended him there, a short, bald man.

  The two of them had stood there watching the show, making small talk. The short man was from Chicago, out to Las Vegas on business, he had said. He was with the construction company building the new hotel, the Palermo. Charlie told the short man how he had watched some of the cranes working through the night from his room at Harrah’s.

  “We have them working twenty-four hours a day out here,” the short man had said. “Or they’d never be built in time. The money they spend on these things, it’s important they can open their doors to pay for themselves.”

  Charlie had become fascinated with what the short man knew about the casino construction business. How many people it took to build one, how many dollars it cost for the electric, plumbing, carpets, glass, neon. Then Charlie told the short man about the window cleaning business he had recently sold. He was curious about how much money window cleaners were making in Las Vegas. He had asked how much a window cleaning contract for a place as big as the Palermo was worth.

  The short man said he would find out and took Charlie to the Palermo model. It was closed, but the short man had keys with him. They did a walk-through together, the short man quoting facts about the costs of the room as he pointed at light fixtures and furniture. Charlie remembered shaking his head in amazement.

  Then the short man walked Charlie out back behind the model. It was dark there. The last thing Charlie remembered was another man standing in front of him with a pipe. The man had said something Charlie couldn’t remember. Then Charlie felt the air being knocked from his solar plexus. He felt kicks and punches. Everything went black.