Omerta - Mario Puzo [62]
She held him tightly. “You’ve been gone over a year, you know. I tried so hard to be faithful. But that’s a long time.”
Suddenly Astorre’s mind was clear, icy. Here again was betrayal. But there was something more. Why had she wanted him to come so quickly? “OK,” he said, “why am I here?”
“You have to help me,” Rosie said, and led him into the bedroom.
There was something in the bed. Astorre threw back the sheet to find a middle-aged man lying on his back, completely naked, yet with a dignified look. This was partly due to the small silver goatee or perhaps more to the delicate carvings of his face. His body was spare and thin, with a great mat of fur across his chest; oddest of all, he wore gold-rimmed spectacles over his open eyes. Though his head was large for his body, he was a handsome man. He was about as dead a man as Astorre had ever seen, despite the fact that there were no wounds. The spectacles were crooked, and Astorre reached to straighten them.
Rosie whispered, “We were making love and he went into this horrible spasm. He must have had a heart attack.”
“When did this happen?” Astorre asked. He was in minor shock.
“Last night,” Rosie said.
“Why didn’t you just call the emergency medical team?” Astorre said. “It’s not your fault.”
“He’s married and maybe it is my fault. We used amyl nitrate. He had trouble climaxing.” She said it without any embarrassment.
Astorre was genuinely astonished by her self-possession. Looking at the corpse, he had the strange feeling that he should dress the man and remove his spectacles. He was too old to be naked, at least fifty—it didn’t seem right. He said to Rosie without malice but with the incredulity of the young, “What did you see in this guy?”
“He was my history professor,” Rosie said. “Really very sweet, very kind. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. This was only the second time. I was so lonely.” She paused for a moment and then, looking directly into his eyes, said, “You’ve got to help me.”
“Does anyone know he was seeing you?” Astorre asked.
“No.”
“I still think we should call the police.”
“No,” Rosie said. “If you’re afraid, I’ll take care of it myself.”
“Get dressed,” Astorre said with a stern look. He pulled the sheet back over the dead man.
An hour later they were at Mr. Pryor’s house; he answered the door himself. Without a word, he took them to the den and listened to their story. He was very sympathetic to Rosie and patted her hand in consolation, at which point Rosie burst into tears. Mr. Pryor took off his cap and actually clucked with sympathy.
“Give me the keys to your apartment,” he said to Rosie. “Stay the night here. Tomorrow you can return to your home and everything will be in order. Your friend will have disappeared. You will then stay here a week before you go back to America.”
Mr. Pryor showed them to their bedroom as if he assumed that nothing had happened to spoil their love affair. And then he took leave of them to take care of business.
Astorre always remembered that night. He lay on the bed with Rosie, comforting her, wiping her tears. “It was only the second time,” she whispered to him. “It didn’t mean anything, and we were such close friends. I missed you. I admired him for his mind, and then one night it just happened. He couldn’t climax, and I hate to say this about him, but he couldn’t even keep an erection. So he asked to use the nitrate.”
She seemed so vulnerable, so hurt, so broken by her tragedy that all Astorre could do was comfort her. But one thing stuck in his mind. She had stayed in her home with a dead body for over twenty-four hours until he arrived. That was a mystery, and if there was one mystery, there could be others. But he wiped away her tears and kissed her cheeks to comfort her.
“Will you ever see me again?” she asked him, digging her face into his shoulder, making him feel the softness of her body.
“Of course I will,” Astorre said. But in his heart he wasn’t so sure.
The next morning Mr. Pryor reappeared and told Rosie she could return