Page 16 of A Mind of Her Own
They were both disappointed when his weekend off got canceled on Friday.
The paper had been tipped off about a big meeting between the Lucchese, Gambino, and Genovese families over the massively lucrative illegal alcohol sales in New York.
Tommy was going to cover it, but got sick, and Oliver was assigned to it instead.
So Alex and Oliver had to postpone their dinner at Delmonico’s to celebrate his book contract.
They put it off to the following week.
The meeting was scheduled downtown in the meatpacking district at a warehouse that the Luccheses owned, and all three big Mafia bosses were going to be there to parcel out the districts.
If the meeting went well, it was going to be profitable for all three families.
If it didn’t, it would be a bloodbath that could start a war.
Oliver didn’t discuss it with Alex, not wanting to worry her, but she could tell that he was distracted and tense when he left for work on Saturday after he met her for lunch.
He had hardly listened to a word she said, and he had told her on Friday that he was meeting with some informants who had information for him.
She could understand why he wanted to quit.
All his time was spent reporting on dead bodies and dealing with the lowest criminal element in the world.
And the police were almost as corrupt as the mob, and were hand in glove with them.
There were constant scandals about cops on the take. It was the seamy side of life, while she wrote about society weddings in glowing terms. Sometimes she and Oliver laughed about the extreme opposites they dealt with in their jobs.
Alex had errands to do on Saturday, and used the time to do menial chores she didn’t have time to take care of during the week.
When Oliver was working, she could do the things that bored him, like buy stockings she needed for work, go to the dry cleaner, return library books, and get her hair done.
It was a blessing sometimes when he was busy.
Although this time she had an uneasy feeling about what he was doing.
He had been so distracted and preoccupied that she had a feeling it was something big.
He hadn’t said a word about it to her.
He never did when it came to stories about the mob families—he kept them to himself.
He didn’t want her to worry.
He had told her that his assignment would go late that night and he wouldn’t see her, which wasn’t unusual, but something didn’t feel right and kept gnawing at her.
She finally realized what it was as she lay in her bed that night trying to read.
It occurred to her that he had looked scared, which was something he never did.
Oliver was never physically afraid.
It worried her at times, because given some of the assignments he went on, he should have been.
He was fearless, and he occasionally misjudged it, like the night he had taken her on assignment with him, and shouldn’t have, and a last shooter had come out of the warehouse with guns blazing and they were nearly shot.
She had a feeling that he was on that kind of assignment that night, but there was no way to know, or to reach him.
She tried calling him at work from a public phone booth, since she didn’t have a phone, but the reporter who answered said he wasn’t there and he was working in the field.
She didn’t know the reporter, and he didn’t seem to know anything about Oliver’s whereabouts. It was obviously a secret operation of some kind. She tried to put her fears out of her mind, and finally went to sleep.
He had told her he would pick her up for lunch the next day if he was free, but he didn’t show.
She waited around until three o’clock, and tried calling the office again.
The reporter who answered fobbed her off, and she decided to do something she’d never done before, go alone to his apartment.
Maybe he’d been up all night and was asleep.
She had his keys, for an emergency, and decided to use them.
She took a cab to his apartment, let herself in the outer door of the building, and raced up the stairs.
She called out when she walked in, not wanting to startle him.
He wasn’t there.
She looked around, and he hadn’t slept in his bed.
It was possible that he was somewhere on a concealed mission, hoping for a break, sleeping in a car while they waited.
Anything was possible.
Or at the other end of the spectrum, he could be injured or dead, although that was unlikely.
But she felt panic rising in her throat.
She hadn’t eaten all day, and she waited a little longer. She was starving and decided to go down the street and get something to eat while she waited for him. There were two lemons and a beer in his fridge. She wasn’t going to leave until he came home.
She put on her coat and walked to the deli, bought a turkey sandwich, and walked past a newsstand on the way back.
Her eyes stopped on the front page of the afternoon edition of the World.
The headline read “Carnage on Tenth Avenue.”
It had happened in the meatpacking district again, which was where the mob families were trafficking a lot of the alcohol they were selling.
Alex walked straight to the newsstand, picked up a copy of the paper, and looked at the details.
It said accurately that three of the most important mob families had had a summit meeting in the early hours of the morning on Saturday to redistribute the territories of illegal alcohol sales, and the meeting had erupted in violence.
The theory was touched on in the newspaper article that there had been foul play before the meeting and it had been an ambush.
Seven of the twenty-nine “family”
members at the meeting had been shot and killed at the scene, five had been severely wounded, three more had died in ambulances on the way to the hospital, four bystanders had been critically injured, and two policemen were dead.
In all, twelve people were dead, and nine critically injured.
It was the worst clash of its kind between warring Mafia families that had been seen in many, many years.
Alex knew instantly as she read it that Oliver was there.
He had to be, it was why he had seemed so nervous, and she was terrified that he was one of the critically injured bystanders.
She just hoped he wasn’t dead.
They hadn’t released the names of the victims.
She ran to a pay phone and called the Crime desk, and asked again if they knew Oliver’s whereabouts.
The voice on the phone asked someone next to them and the answer was negative. “This is Oliver Foster’s girlfriend,”
she said without hesitation.
“Do you know where they took the injured victims from the massacre yesterday?”
The reporter on the phone asked the one next to him, and responded, “Lenox Hill Hospital.” She called the operator then, and asked to be connected to the hospital.
Someone answered after several long rings, and she asked if Oliver Foster had been admitted.
The wait was interminable again, and they connected her to the E.R.
and she asked the same question.
The nurse went to check the patient roster and came back on the line with an ice-cold voice.
“I’m sorry I cannot give you that information,”
and there was a click in Alex’s ear and the line went dead.
She suspected that the warring families were liable to come back and finish the job on the victims, and the hospital was trying to avoid it.
There was no other choice but to go there.
If she hadn’t called the newspaper, she’d have been waiting all day.
She hailed a cab and gave the driver the address.
“Are you okay?”
he asked her, with a glance in the rearview mirror.
She was young and pretty, and she didn’t look sick.
She wasn’t likely to cause a problem in his cab.
He didn’t want any trouble.
He had read about the Mafia war too.
When they got to the hospital, she gave him a twenty-dollar bill, five times the amount on the meter, and leapt out to find Oliver somewhere in the bowels of the hospital.
She had a terrible feeling that he was there and needed her.
She ran from one department to the next while they gave her the runaround, and insisted he wasn’t there, and then she saw a lineup of familiar faces in a surgical waiting room.
They were all from the Crime room, and she approached them discreetly, lowering her voice to barely more than a whisper.
“Do any of you know if Oliver Foster is on the list of injured victims?”
Two shook their heads and the others denied it.
“Please tell me the truth,”
she said, begging them.
“I’m Alex Bouvier, from Society, I work there.”
She looked young and innocent and distraught, and one of the young reporters spoke up.
“He’s here,”
the younger man said.
He pointed to the nursing desk.
“Ask her, she’ll tell you where he is.”
Alex went to the desk then to speak to the nurse.
Clearly something had happened.
That much wasn’t a secret.
The rest was, including the names of the victims.
She asked for Oliver again, and the nurse hesitated and consulted her patient list.
There were strict rules being applied to the wounded, and Alex noticed then that there were police and hospital security lining the halls.
Clearly, they were afraid of reprisals, and the murder of innocent victims who had nothing to do with it.
The nurse asked Alex for her relationship to the patient, and she combed her mind for a minute to find the right lie to convince the nurse to let her see him.
She considered sister, but didn’t think it was strong enough, mother wasn’t credible, wife was ridiculous, and she looked too old to be his daughter. She finally went with daughter and hoped the nurse believed her. The nurse looked at her closely and doubted it, but she didn’t say a word and pointed to the right cubicle. Alex looked so distraught she didn’t want to deny her access, on the off chance that what she said was true.
Alex squeezed in between two mint-colored curtains hung from a rod above the bed, and she wouldn’t have recognized Oliver if the nurse hadn’t directed her.
He had been intubated and was unconscious.
He had a huge bandage on his chest, and another one on his upper thigh, and a young doctor was checking his pulse.
“How is he?”
The young resident turned around when she spoke, startled.
He hadn’t heard her come in, and they were on high alert for a potential shootout in the hospital, which would terrorize the other patients and visitors.
“He’s hanging on.
Did they clear you at the desk? Only the next of kin are being admitted.”
“I’m his daughter.”
She prayed that no one would ask to see proof, or her ID with a different name.
“He took a bullet,”
the doctor explained in a soft voice.
“Two, in fact—one was a direct hit, the other ricocheted and exited.
The hit nicked his lung, the ricochet went through his upper thigh and exited.”
Both wound sites sounded painful.
“Your dad’s a reporter?”
She nodded and at least that was true.
“You probably shouldn’t be in here, but I’ll let you stay for a little while.
He just came out of recovery, after the surgery.
We’ll bring him back to consciousness tomorrow if his vitals are strong.
He’s doing better now.
They saved him in the ambulance before we got him.”
It was upsetting the way they talked about him, like a thing or an object.
Alex was praying he’d survive, by some miracle.
None of it sounded good to her.
He looked terrible.
“What’s the prognosis?”
“If he makes it through tonight, he should make it.
If they don’t shoot him again.
We’re on high alert for that.”
He left then and a nurse took his place and checked Oliver’s dressings and vital signs.
Alex was deathly pale, and took up as little space as she could, until a nurse asked her to step outside.
She was going to check the bandage on his thigh.
Alex went outside and slid into a chair in the waiting area.
She didn’t go back in for an hour.
She felt too weak to stand up again and thought she might faint, and then she asked at the desk how he was doing.
“He’s stable,”
was all they told her.
Half an hour later she went back in.
Nothing had changed, and she sat down in a small straight-backed chair in the room and didn’t move all night.
The nurses seemed to have forgotten her when they came to do their checks.
It was all very brisk and mechanical.
They checked him all night, and in the morning a doctor stepped in and noticed Alex and asked her to step outside.
When she went back in after he’d left, the breathing tube was gone, which she thought was a good sign.
There had been constant activity in the ward all night.
Oliver was fighting for his life.
She sat down in the chair again, and a young nurse asked her if she needed anything. Alex thanked her and shook her head. She went to get a cup of coffee from a pot the nurses had brewing in their staff room. She took a drink of water from the fountain, and continued her vigil. What seemed like hours later, Tommy stuck his head in Oliver’s cubicle and saw her. He looked surprised. He walked over and whispered to her.
“How is he?”
“I don’t know.
He’s been unconscious since I got here yesterday.”
Tommy nodded and left after a few minutes, and Alex met him in the hallway two hours later.
He looked exhausted.
“Any news?”
Tommy asked her.
“No change.”
“They killed one of our guys, the photographer.
The whole thing was awful.
You look terrible.
Have you eaten?”
he said bluntly, and she shook her head.
He brought her a sandwich from the cafeteria a little while later, and she thanked him and ate it, and felt better.
A nurse and a doctor were with Oliver when she went back to him.
An alarm was sounding on one of the monitors and they were watching him closely.
She spent the second night on the chair in his cubicle, and in the morning, he moaned and moved a little, and then he opened his eyes and saw Alex.
His voice was a croak when he whispered to her.
“Why are you here?”
“Because I love you,”
she whispered back.
He smiled and closed his eyes and squeezed her hand, and went back to sleep.
When the nurse returned, Alex told her.
She smiled at Alex.
“He’s better.
His vital signs are stronger.”
Alex went home to shower and change then.
It was Tuesday.
She slept for an hour and went back, and Oliver opened his eyes again and saw her when she walked in and stood next to him.
“How do you feel?”
she asked him.
“Tired.
You should go home,”
he whispered and drifted back to sleep.
He hovered between life and death for a week, and then he was more alert, and they moved him to a less acute area of the emergency unit.
The papers were full of the mob shooting, and Tommy visited him several times.
Alex was beginning to breathe again, when they moved him.
It had been a terrifying ten days.
Another member of one of the families had been assassinated in his home as revenge.
“Your dad’s feeling better,”
one of the nurses said, smiling at Alex encouragingly, and Oliver looked at Alex with a question when the nurse left the room.
“What did she say?”
He looked puzzled.
“I told her you were my father so they let me in.
Only next of kin could see you, so I lied,”
she said, and he grimaced.
“I guess I deserve that, with someone your age.
You look exhausted.”
He squeezed her hand.
“Thanks, you too.”
She smiled at him.
It was good to hear him talk and stay awake for more than five minutes.
It took another week for him to sit up in bed.
Alex slept at home in her own bed that night, and woke up nine hours later and rushed back to the hospital.
There was a police officer outside Oliver’s door when she got there.
“What happened? Why the palace guard?”
she asked Oliver.
“Apparently, the Luccheses want to know who set them up.
They want to make sure it wasn’t us.
They’re livid.
At everybody.”
“Yeah.
I’m livid too.
It’s shocking to go around shooting the press.
Not to mention killing them.
I hope you get combat pay for this.”
She was upset, and he shook his head.
“No, just sick leave.
I’m off for a month, more if I need it.
The doctor said I can go home in a couple of weeks.”
“Maybe you’d be safer there.”
She was worried about him.
“I’m okay, Alex, I promise.
I’m sorry I put you through this.”
“I’m sorry they put you through this.
They’re savages.
I hope you do quit after this, or transfer to a more civilized department.”
“They pay us better in Crime.”
“Now you know why.”
He’d been reading the paper when she walked in.
Tommy had brought it.
More of the victims had died, one of them a cop.
The three families were on a rampage, and the city was in an uproar.
One of the informants had been killed.
It was a gang war of major proportions.
“Will they come after you when you go home?”
“I don’t think so.
They know who their enemies are.
Usually, they like us.”
“It’s a hell of a way to treat people they like.”
“It was an accident.
They were shooting each other and I got in the way.”
Alex had taken an unpaid leave from work to be with him, and had missed a big deb ball she was supposed to cover.
Christmas had sailed past them while he was unconscious and Alex didn’t care.
She just wanted him to live and be all right.
But he was out of danger now.
A few days later they had him walk down the hall with a nurse on one side and Alex on the other, and the police officer assigned to protect him right behind him.
The other victims had police guards too.
And all of the members of the mob families had been removed to a hospital on Long Island that they owned.
No one had been charged yet because no one was talking, and probably never would.
No one would risk it. Alex looked at Oliver seriously when he got back to bed.
“You have to quit, Ollie, this is too dangerous,”
and it was her worst nightmare, losing him.
“I will quit.
Not yet.
The paper is paying all of my medical bills.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“It won’t happen again,”
he reassured her.
“It will.
Whatever the paper pays you, it’s not worth it.
I want to go home to Beardstown and take you with me.”
“We’ll do that.
Just not yet.”
A week later, almost at the end of January, they let him go home.
Alex had missed all the holiday events that were part of her job, but Sylvia knew why and wasn’t complaining.
She told Alex to take all the time she needed.
They were all grateful that Oliver was alive.
When they let him go home, Alex went with him to take care of him.
She was a wonderful nurse and even cooked for him.
She took care of him like a child.
He was watching her bustle around his bedroom one day, as she made the bed and fluffed his pillows for him and helped him into bed.
His wounds were healing well, but he had lost a lot of blood and was still weak.
“You’re amazing,”
he told her, and pulled her onto the bed next to him, and kissed her, and all the terror they had lived through was swept away on a wave of passion, as though they had to prove to themselves that they were still alive and death couldn’t claim him.
They had held back for so long, and could no longer control it.
The dam had broken and all their fears and love for each other were laid bare.
They were careful with his leg and they were both breathless when it was over.
Oliver lay there for a moment not moving, with his eyes closed, breathing heavily, and she panicked.
“Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”
There was blood on the bed because it was her first time, and he opened his eyes and looked at her with everything he felt for her.
“I love you so much it hurts,”
he whispered and kissed her.
She felt the same way.
She thought she would die if he did.
She couldn’t bear losing him too.
She lay in bed with him, her clothes on the floor with his pajamas, and he admired her perfectly sculpted body.
She knew she belonged to him at that moment.
They made love again that night and in the morning.
All their caution and restraint for so long, almost three years, was forgotten.
They needed each other desperately, like two starving people.
His near death had rattled both of them.
They went for a walk in his neighborhood that afternoon and he saw how frightened she was.
She was terrified the mobsters would come back and kill him, but it was a quiet Sunday afternoon, and no one approached them.
“The managing editor spoke to the families this week,”
he told her.
“They apologized for what happened to us.
They gave a very big bequest to the photographer’s widow.”
“And what about you?”
she asked him with a cynical look.
“They said they were sorry.
It was an accident.”
“They’re animals.
They all belong in prison.”
“That’s true.
But they own this city and Chicago, half the businesses, and most of the cops.
This is their world right now.
Prohibition has put them where they’ve wanted to be for a long time, in the driver’s seat.”
“And they ran over you, Ollie.
You could have died.
I would have died, if you did.”
“I know, baby.
I’m meeting with the managing editor tomorrow.
I’m going to quit.”
She looked relieved when he said it, as though a thousand-pound weight had been taken off her back.
He looked handsome and healthy when he left for his meeting the next day.
She left when he did, to go to her apartment and take care of some things.
She had done nothing but care for him for the past six weeks.
She was still on unpaid leave from her job.
She wanted to put some order back in her life, and after he quit, they could figure out the future.
She had taken a big step, a giant leap of faith when she made love with him.
Her life and her future were on the line now.
She had cast her lot with his, with total faith in him.
And if she got pregnant, she knew they’d face it together. He had protected her after the first time, but she might have gotten pregnant and they both knew it. It was a huge step for her, for them both. She had no regrets, and he said he had none either. They belonged to each other.
She went back to his apartment late that afternoon.
He was drinking a scotch, which he said eased the pain when he had any.
But he had healed well.
She smiled as soon as she saw him.
“What did the editor say when you told him?”
she asked, and sat down on the couch next to him with a smile.
Oliver was silent for a moment and she looked at him, as though she didn’t understand.
Something was wrong.
He didn’t answer her.
He had had the scotch to give himself courage.
“You quit, right?”
“They made me head of Crime.
To compensate me for the accident.”
“That wasn’t an ‘accident,’ Ollie.
It was a gunfight between gangsters and they didn’t care if they killed you, and neither did the goddam paper.
It’s not your job to die for them, or is it? They gave you a big promotion so you’d be a good sport about being shot for them.
This isn’t the army, you’re not fighting for your country.
It’s a gang war, and you don’t matter to them.
You matter to me.
I love you.
They don’t.”
She was crying when she said it.
“It’s a huge promotion, Alex, and a lot of prestige with it.
I’ll never be out in the field like that again.
If I do it for a couple of years, and write the books, I’ll have something solid to offer you, to bring to the table when I marry you.”
“You can’t marry me if you’re dead,”
she said angrily.
She couldn’t take it anymore.
“And what if I got pregnant, if our baby had no father, or you get killed next year or the year after.
I can’t tell you what to do, that’s up to you.
This is just another excuse for you not to make a commitment.
You’d rather get shot than do that.
Well, I think what you’re doing is a hell of a lot scarier.
And all I can tell you is what I’m going to do.
I’m going home, to Beardstown, to my home, and the newspaper my grandfather was so proud of.
I’m going to work there every morning and try to learn the business.
And then I’m going to write for the rest of the day. I want to write a book, that’s my dream, and run the paper. If you want to come with me, we can run the paper together, whether you marry me or not. And you can write your books, and we can have a real live newspaper we’re proud of, together, and we can both write our books. And if we have a child or children one day, we can give them a good life. But I’m not going to stay here and write about parties I don’t care about, for a paper that doesn’t care about either of us, until you turn into some bitter, cynical old man who missed the boat on life. And you’ll be dead by then, if they kill you.
I’m not going to miss that boat, for you, or anyone else. I’m going home. If you want to come with me, great, that’s what I can offer you, a good life, a real life, to share what I have with you. If that’s not what you want, then good luck. I hope you don’t get shot again. Next time you might not be as lucky. Next time maybe they’ll shoot you in the back instead of the chest, like the rest of their victims they find in the river tied to a block of cement. I’m leaving tomorrow. See you on the train, or not. It’s up to you.”
He was so shocked by the force of what she’d said that he was speechless for a moment.
She stood, picked up her purse, and walked out of his apartment before he could stop her or even speak.
He felt paralyzed and didn’t know what to do.
The job they had offered him was nearly irresistible, at three times his current salary, except that he’d had to get shot and nearly die to get it.
He sat there staring into space in the silent apartment after she left.
He was thinking of what she’d said.
He knew she was right but he didn’t know if he was ready.
She was braver and stronger than he was and she wasn’t even twenty-two yet.
She was the strongest woman he’d ever known, and he loved her, but he didn’t know if he had the guts to do what she wanted.
If not, she had made herself clear.
She was leaving for Chicago and going home, with or without him.