Fielding looked up. He paused. ‘Antonio Pisello,’ he said, ‘Tony Cazzo — from Staten Island. He was shot in the heart five years ago. Know what saved him?’ he asked, and jabbed his own ribs with a long straight thumb. ‘Credit cards — kept in a deck, with a band. Used to be a bad boy, but now he’s pretty well totally legit.’
‘And the girl?’
‘Willa Glueck. Smart lady. A grand-a-night hooker, semi-retired.
For ten years she worked the streets — you know, giving head and hand at a dollar a dick. Then five years at the top, the very top. No one knows how she made the switch. It just doesn’t happen. Look at her, the eyes, the mouth — superb. No evidence. I can’t figure it. I hate it when I can’t figure things.’
Indeed, lamentably under-informed, Fielding Goodney. He smiled in innocent self-reproach, then swung sternly and made the reverse V-sign at the watchful waiter. Two more Red Snappers were on their way. We ordered. Fielding held the crimson menu (silken, tasselled and beautified, reminding me and my fingers of Selina and her secrets) in slender brown hands, the wrists cuffed in pale blue and the gold links taut on their chains. Over dinner Fielding explained to me about the lucrative contingencies of pornography, the pandemonium of Forty-Second Street, the Boylesk dealerships on Seventh Avenue with their prodigies of chickens and chains, the Malibu circuit with the crews splashing through the set at dusk for the last degrees of heft and twang and purchase from the beached male lead on the motel floor, the soft proliferations of soft core in worldwide cable and network and its careful codes of airbrush and dick-wipe, the stupendous aberrations of Germany and Japan, the perversion-targeting in video mail-order, the mob snuff-movie operation conceived in Mexico City and dying in the Five Boroughs.
And I asked him, ‘These movies — they exist?’
‘Sure. But not many, not for long and not any more.’ Fielding (I noticed) cut his veal in the normal way, but then passed his fork to the right hand to prong the meat. ‘Come on, Slick, be realistic. If there was money there, it had to be tried… The girls were vagrants.’
‘Ever seen one?’
‘You understand what you’re asking me? You’re asking me if I’m an accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. Not me, Slick. This was organized crime, superorganized. No other way. Snuff movies— now this is evidence.’
And then his manner, the force field he gave off, it changed, not for long. He became pointed, intimate. He said, ‘Clinching, no? Evidence that it corrupts, pornography, wouldn’t you say?’ He relaxed, and so did his manner. ‘Too hot, Slick. No one could use them. A distribution problem.’
We went on to discuss our distribution problem, which, according to my pal Fielding, was absolutely non-existent. We would simply lease out the finished product: that way, said Fielding, we preserved our artistic freedom while making much, much more money. I thought only the big boys could pull off a gimmick like this, but the kid had it all worked out. His contacts were extraordinary, and not just in movies either. As he talked, and as I hunkered down to a long train of grappa and espresso, I felt the clasp and nuzzle of real money. Money, my bodyguard.
‘You know, Slick,’ he said,’— sometimes business looks to me like a big dumb dog howling to be played with. Want to know my hunch for the next growth area in the addiction line? Want to make a million? Shall I let you in?’
‘Do it,’ I said.
‘Cuddles,’ said Fielding Goodney. ‘Cuddling up. Two people lying down and generating warmth and safety. Now how do we market this. A how-to book? A video? Nightshirts? A cuddle studio, with cuddle hostesses? Think about it, Slick. There are millions and millions of dollars out there somewhere in cuddles.’
Fielding caught the unspectacular tab, leaving a twenty on the plate. His hired Autocrat was waiting on the street. At one point Fielding turned to me and said, with midtown flashing against his face, ‘Oh, I misled you, Slick, earlier on there. It’s murder two not murder one. New York, murder one is just for cops, prison officers, shit like that. Forgive me.’ I slipped out near Times Square. I heard Fielding give the driver an address on feminine Park Avenue.