The cab journey downtown was an anguish of effort, of clogged and doddering crisis. When I first came to New York even a traffic jam was interesting. Nowadays, though, I can take or leave a traffic jam in New York. I wish I could work out how to use the subway. I’ve tried. No matter how hard I concentrate I always end up clambering out of a manhole in Duke Ellington Boulevard with a dustbin-lid on my head. You cannot get around New York and that’s the end of it… I looked at my watch. I sat sweating and swearing on the sticky back seat. It’s heating up here already, yes it’s stoking up here nicely for the scorch-riots of August. Of the many directives gummed to the glass partition, one took the trouble to thank me for not smoking, I hate that, I mean, it’s a bit previous, isn’t it, don’t you think? I haven’t not smoked yet. As it turned out, I never did not smoke in the end. I Jit a cigarette and kept them coming. The frizzy-rugged beaner at the wheel shouted something and threw himself around for a while, but I kept on not not smoking quietly in the back, and nothing happened.
Local rumour maintains that Little Italy is one of the cleanest and safest enclaves in Manhattan. Any junkie or Bowery red-eye comes limping down the street, then five sombre fatboys with baseball-bats and axe-handles stride out of the nearest trattoria. Well, Little Italy just felt like more Village to me. The zeds of the fire-escapes looked as though they were used in earnest twice a week—they were grimed to a cinder. In these clogged defiles they could never wash off all the truck-belch and car-fart bubbling upwards in vapours of oil and acid and engine coolant. What is the spangled Caduta doing in a dump like this? She’s got a suite at the Cicero, tabbed by Fielding Goodney, with a hairdresser, a bodyguard, and a seventy-three-year-old boyfriend … I ran back and forth across the street until I found the dirty door.
‘Now, Mr Self, “John”: our movie!’ said Caduta Massi. ‘I see from the outline that the lady is from … Bradford. I do not find this convincing at all.’
‘Well the outline you saw, Caduta — that was the English version. Now we’ve switched to New York we can —’
‘I prefer Florence. Or Verona.’
‘Sure. Okay. Take your pick.’
‘And what is the title of the movie?’
‘Good Money,’ I said. Actually, we weren’t sure yet. Fielding liked Good Money. I liked Bad Money. Fielding suggested calling it Good Money in the States and Bad Money in Europe, but I couldn’t see the percentage in that.
‘Good,’ said Caduta. Tell me, John. This Theresa. How old is she?’
‘Uh … thirtyish?’ Yeah, thirty-nine. I gazed at Caduta warily.
‘Excuse me, but I understand she has a son of twenty.’
‘That’s true. I suppose she’s a little older than that.’
‘I myself am forty-one,’ said Caduta.
‘No kidding,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s perfect.’
‘So could you tell me? Why should a woman of this age be taking her clothes off and demanding sex all the time?’
I sat with a cup of coffee on my lap, still half-asphyxiated by what I took to be Neapolitan warmth. The place was crawling with kids — bundles, toddlers, nippers, loping adolescents. There were at least three dad-figures, wearing vests and overalls, in the kitchen next door, hunched over bottles of unlabelled wine and steaming pasta in arterial sauce. They even had a couple of black-clad bagladies sitting silently on straight chairs by the door. I couldn’t see any mums about the place. Apart from that, though, the whole crew might have just come in from Ellis Island … Caduta herself was clearly the queen-bee here. She kept clapping her hands and unleashing her imperious Italian. Like a department-store Santa she shuffled the kids on her lap: the kids, they did their shift, then climbed off. Every now and then a dad would swagger in and talk to her with reverence but also with a certain courtly gaiety. The one-tooth-apiece bagladies murmured and nodded and crossed themselves. Caduta frequently addressed me in Italian too, which didn’t make things any clearer.