“Listen here,” Levon said. “I can’t accept this gift.”
“Maybe we can give it to a museum,” Jimmy said. “It needs to be somewhere other than in the hands of its previous owner.”
Levon waited for Jimmy to continue.
“I got it from Fat Tony Nemo. He bought it at a flea market,” Jimmy said.
“You know Nemo?” Levon said.
“He poured the concrete for a couple of my buildings.”
“I forgot. He does that when he’s not killing people,” Levon said.
“Tony was out of the rackets twenty years ago,” Jimmy said.
“Is that right, Dave?” Levon said. “This guy who used to break arms and legs with a baseball bat found salvation?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied, regretting the choices I had made to help Clete.
“Could you tell your driver to go a little faster?” Rowena said to Jimmy. “I’m about to faint.”
“No Down Under histrionics tonight,” Levon said.
“Oh, balls,” she said.
“I need to write you a check for this,” Levon said to Jimmy.
“Show me the secret to your novels instead.”
“Beg your pardon?” Levon said.
“I’m envious. They’re marvelous books. Your prose is magical. I want to know how you do it.”
Then Rowena said something I didn’t expect, considering the undisguised arousal Jimmy obviously caused in her: “We all have our private cubbyholes, love. Don’t be fucking with them.”
The chauffeur was a peroxided, crew-cut, steroid-pumped weight lifter with a concave-shaped face whose eyes looked like lumps of lead in the rearview mirror. I wanted to get in the front with him.
* * *
CLEMENTINE’S WAS ON Main Street in a building that once was a saloon and pool hall and betting parlor, with wood floors and a stamped tin ceiling and a long bar and cuspidors and a potbelly stove, in a time when saloon owners one night a week covered pool tables with oilcloths and served free robin gumbo. Now it was a fine restaurant, with a large formally attired staff and sometimes a famous movie actor or musician among the guests.
Unfortunately, none of this was of any comfort to me. The atmosphere at our table was poisonous, the tension unbearable, primarily because there was no way to both acknowledge and resolve the problem, which was raw hatred between Jimmy and Levon and, I suspect, a flicker or two of the green-eyed monster in Levon.
“You understood about my writing a check, didn’t you?” Levon said.
“If you want,” Jimmy said.
“There’s no ‘if’ to it.”
Jimmy smiled. “I think I gave him two thousand for it. Why don’t you give that amount in my name to a charity?”
“Why don’t I just leave it on the table for the waiter?” Levon said.
Rowena was on her third glass of burgundy. “My grandfather was at Gallipoli. A neighbor tried to give him a souvenir bayonet to cut his hundredth birthday cake. Grandfather told him where to park it.”
“Lower the volume, Rowena,” Levon said.
“Fuck if I will,” she replied.