Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [71]
“Don’t worry,” Christy said quickly, “Eric was just as scared and worried and in shock as I was. He’s totally trustworthy on this—he’s fine. He filled up the hole again, and spread the weeds and leaves over it. You’d have to look really close at it, standing right there, to even know it’s been disturbed.”
“I want to show you something,” Isaac said. He got up and went to the attic, where he kept the papers and souvenirs of his three years reporting and teaching in Russia. When he returned, he showed Christy the larger matryoshka doll he’d brought back from Russia—a gift from one of his students there, the daughter of a prominent St. Petersburg businessman.
“Doesn’t the whole doll-inside-a-doll thing stand for the, uh, endless similarity of the human spirit?” asked Christy, repeating something she thought she’d once heard.
“It does,” Isaac replied. “Katya, my student, told me all about them when she gave it to me. Apparently, Russian mafia sometimes bury one of them with a body.”
“What does it mean?”
“According to Katya,” Isaac said, looking impassively at Christy, “it means there are more bodies nearby.”
They peered at each other. Isaac shook his head. He started to say something, but Christy spoke first.
“It never happened. Eric and I never saw anything. So don’t worry.”
Isaac nodded.
“Isaac Lalli,” he said, in a self-mocking tone, “sole master and resident of the 400 block of St. Irenaeus Square.”
Christy gave him a look of solidarity. She came over to the couch, sat beside him, and leaned against him as she hadn’t for years.
“It’s an amazing yard, beautiful just the way it is,” she said.
SEEING NOTHING
BY DIANE AYRES
Bella Vista
I don’t know what shocked me most: the way my foulmouthed neighbor screamed and cursed his hoary mother to the grave—when she already appeared to have gone and returned from it—or the way she screamed back. Especially when she was holding the meat cleaver, standing at the kitchen table whacking the wings and legs off a chicken, always with a cigarette stuck to her lower lip.
I actually heard a mob hit one evening while working in my home office, which I found less disturbing than the sound of that woman—somebody’s grandmother—shrieking the F-word at the top of her two-packs-a-day-for-fifty-year lungs. Hardcore.
The side of our house overlooked the back of their house, where they fought in the kitchen in front of a picture window with blinds they never closed, yellowed by tobacco smoke and splattered grease. When windows were open in this corner of old row homes, voices blasted from below, amplified, between brick and stucco, directly into the window beside my desk as I was trying to work.
My husband and I lived on a side street off a side street, off a side street, which brought to mind a feudal town in Tuscany with passages through a maze too narrow to drive. On a map, our neighborhood, lovely Bella Vista, looks like the border between gentrified Center City and the old-time neighborhoods of South Philly. But at the street level, it felt like a funky residential oasis between noisy, once-hip South Street, where nobody told the kids from Lancaster that Sid Vicious and his haircut were dead, and the inimitable Italian Market, where Rocky Balboa once ran, oozing sweat and punching meat to a really loud and rousing song. And, mostly, Bella Vista life was quiet, except for the Freudian nightmare next door.
I wasn’t one to spy on my neighbors. I only glimpsed them down there, at an extremely sharp diagonal, inadvertently, when I got up to adjust the window, depending on the season and the volume of their noxious spew. When I spotted them, my instinct was to avert my eyes because I found them hideous—like some incarnation of the monster Grendel and his mother, in their lair down below. But I was no Beowulf to slay them, or even to ask them, nicely, to use their indoor voices. I was unnerved by the prospect that they would even spot me up here.
Grendel was a walking case study of vitamin D deprivation, termite-white in a dingy white sleeveless undershirt, sprouting black body