“Still acting on my new attorney’s advice, I continued to live with Carolyn, for all that it became pure hell after she became aware that I had paid off all her charge accounts and then closed them and I was no longer depositing to the joint checking account, and I threatened to close it too if she overdrew it again. I gave her a thousand dollars each month, paid weekly in company checks, drawn on an Ademian Enterprises account in a Fredericksburg bank.
“I also found and hired on a private detective, none other than my old friend Mr. Seraphino Mineo, Sara the Snake. Herr Kobra, and God knows how many other noms de guerre. By then he was operating a security business, though how a man with his mob connections had been cleared for a private detective’s license was and still is a mystery to me … maybe the CIA helped him as he’d helped them, years before, in Europe.”
In a plain, painfully neat single-room office over a luggage-repair business on Main Street in Richmond, Sam Vanga (Rupen had nearly laughed himself sick at the in-joke: in Italian, vanga was a word for shovel or spade), referring to a spiral notebook from time to time, said, “Mr. Ademian, your wife is flat no good, but I guess you know that a’ready, or you wouldn’t of hired me, huh? I’m just glad I can fin’ly do somethin’ to help you, ’cause you sure as hell pulled my balls out of a deep crack back you remember when, and I ain’t never forgot it, neither. But back to your wife. She ain’t just got one stud, she’s got at least three, maybe four. One of them’s a nigger, too. The main one though, the one she’s with the most, anyhow, is a writer what lives up in …” He riffled through the pages of the notebook briefly, then continued, “… up in Fairfax County, Virginia. It’s real boondocks where his house is, right on the river. The road down to it won’t take no real car; I had to rent a Land Rover to get in there. He’s got a Jeep pickup and he comes and meets her in this little hick town called Dranesville.
“He ain’t a bad-looking feller, forty years old. divorced, lives with two. three cats in a trilevel house, mostly keeps to hisself, but the folks in Dranesville I talked to who’d met him said he was a reg’lar feller who paid his bills and didn’ seem to be a drunk or doper or nothin’. But he don’t socialize much and some the folks was wondering if he wasn’t queer, till he started picking up your wife there in town and taking her out to his place for sometimes as much as a week at a time, they say.
“But like I say, Mr. Ademian, he’s just one of ’em. and prob’ly the best of the bunch at that; most her taste in studs is a pure taste for shit. All three the others lives right here in Richmond.” Again, he riffled pages until he found the one he wanted.
“Arnie Mohr, he’s a Jewboy. He ain’t a doper, and that’s about the only good thing I can say about the fucker. He’s wunna the ringleaders of a Commie-front outfit called Southern Students Strike Against War and Poverty and two, three other outfits just like it. You want that one hit, just say the word, I’d really like doing it to him . . . real slow and hard. He tells ever’body he’s twenty-seven, but I got good, firm info he’s thirty-five and he’s been throwed out of colleges all over the place. Your wife, she ain’t his only cooze and meal ticket, neither, see. he’s got a whole string of women with more money then sense, plus a little fairy that lives with him. too.
“The other white boy she’s banging here in town is a feller useta be her teacher at the city college. He teaches soshology or somethin’ like that and he’s married, but his wife’s crippled, can’t get out of the bed without help, and he and your wife bang right in the room next to her, but here again, she ain’t the only broad he’s screwing, some of ’em are still his students, too. I got some bona fide info on him, too. from some folks I useta do jobs for, years back.” He winked broadly.
“This fucker’s tied up with the Commies too, useta be one, maybe still is. He’s forty-five, was in the army in World War II but didn’ never go overseas. When they tried to call him back in for Korea, he suddenly turned up with a punctured eardrum. He’s alia time tryin’ to raise money for all kinds of hell-raising groups … but the word is that don’t much of what he cMeets ever get where he said it was going to.
“Now the nigger, he’s a doper—grass, hash, acid, coke, horse, morph, mushrooms, he does it all and some I prob’ly ain’t never heard of besides, plus booze—and when he can get hisself a gig, he plays guitar and sings and they say he ain’t half bad. They say he and your wife useta be a big thing, but she don’t see him much anymore sincet you cut off the bread she was laying on him so’s he could buy dope and all.
“Here’re the pictures, Mr. Ademian, but just of her and the Jewboy and her and the college teacher; like I say, she ain’t seem’ Eugene Gentry, the nigger doper, much anymore, and that feller out in the boondocks, he keeps his drapes drawed up tight whenever she’s in the sack with him, and even when he’s alone there, too. But that’s a good way to live, ’cause ain’t no good burglar going to bust into no winder he can’t see what’s waitin’ for him through, I can tell you that for a fact.
“Now, if you want them all hit, Mr. Ademian, I’ll do it for you. The Jewboy and the teacher I’ll do for free, ’cause I don’t like fucking Commies, see, the damned Commies hurt a lotta my family when they took over Cuba, see. The other two, I’ll take out for a rock-bottom price, but only for you, Mr. Ademian, I’ll—”
Rupen had shaken his head. “Thank you sincerely. Sera . . . Sam, but I don’t want any of them killed, I just want out of an unfortunate mistake of a marriage, as cleanly as possible, cheaply as possible, and quickly as possible. Your report and testimony and these pictures will, I’m sure, get me that which I’m seeking from the courts: justice.”
“This willing murderer you hired,” said the Archbishop, “never gave you the name of the other man your wife was committing adultery with, then, Rupen?”
“Yes, I’m certain that he did, that it was also in the written report that I received from him and took to my attorney along with the photographs, but I simply cannot recall what that name was. Maybe I need to take some lessons from your Irish or Scotch memory experts?” Rupen shook his head ruefully.
“Nonetheless, you now think that that nameless adulterer and home-wrecker who so wronged you was Bass Foster.” said the old man bluntly.
“Well, Hal.” said Rupen, “a lot of the things I do remember about that man do seem to dovetail in to things you know about His Grace of Norfolk, you know. Writer, living by a river in northern Virginia—what would you think in my place, especially, if you had found this”—he flicked a fingernail against the edge of the old gold coin—”in effects supposedly the possessions of that person?”
Harold of York sighed and shrugged. He really had no answer.
In far-off Italy, the warring raged and the land bled and men, women, and children died horribly. After an epic defense, besieged Perugia finally fell to the Moors and their mercenaries ran wild and uncontrollable through its streets—looting, raping, torturing, maiming, killing, burning, and otherwise destroying. When at length even the Moors had had enough, they tried to check the orgy of death and destruction and ended having to wage pitched battles to do so, losing more troops thusly than they had lost in the actual intaking.
Florence, besieged for the third time since Pope Abdul’s death, held firm as she had on both previous occasions, taking severe and steady toll of the Spaniards and their Macedonian mercenaries in sally and in defense of their city walls.
The city of Rome, policed by completely impartial Pontians hired from Omar of Turkey, lay relatively peaceful, aside from a recent rash of assassinations which had taken clerical and lay lives from all of the four major factions and not a few of the minor ones as well. But there was no open fighting of any sort; the coldly merciless men of Pontos saw to that.