1967

Dominique is looking at her watch. "Damint, Ruby"

The radio is on...the song playing is "There are Things" by Tammi Terrell

On the opposite side of the block on Kings Hwy...a jacks-playing station is set up on the stoop of one of the walk-ups...girls come around three streets deep from lott pl and participate in tournament fashion....Mrs Gounaris, the owner of the walk-up, seemed so befuddled and engrossed at the prospect of her daughter's overnight popularity...she seemed inclined to travel back to ancient Greece and consult Athen'as temple

It might as well have been 1954 and the Fontane Sisters' "Seventeen" was playing out the second-story window.

Dominique is dressed elegantly in a breezy blouse, paisley printed, a western pair of pants, and a headscarf.

"Are you still potting in there...heh?" It seemed like the yell of indignation was intended not for his bedroom window but for the entire block of the e 41 st. Potting this..potting that...if he stayed up late to watch Bridgette Bardot films it must have been on account of his post-marijuana haze. If by off chance he stayed late at the pizza place for purposes of discussing Mets wagers with Leo the owner than he was definitely making off down an alleyway and into an apt stairwell smoking it all.

Thoughts of Julio Rivas came to mind.

"That fuck; type of skeeve that can turn a car dent into a pot of gold"

The thought was interrupted when a car door slammed.

Ruby pulls a bottle of off-brand Chianti out of a brown paper bag and holds it up to as if a child had just discovered shipwrecked treasure on some remote beach.

"You pulled a rabbit out of your ass..big shit!" Dominique retorted.

He turns lily-white sporting off his strongest bensonhurst-sounding accent "Where the hell else can you get a bottle of Chianti for a dollar?"

"How about the Rothschild" Dominique asks him with the smoothest of hand gestures and a British-seeming accent. "Quick as you like"

"Ahhhh"

Though she was born an Aschkenazic Jew in the Lower East Side, her friends and acquaintances were convinced she was from Barnstaple in Devon. It worked, until the police trampled down doors looking for Rose Belanko. Mrs. Cantor in 1-H was such a yenta snitch that the whole south end of Brooklyn had to be clued in on Dominique's real name. All things consider she had wonderful material..."All these COPPA-meshugs trampling down the hallway, just to tell her her mother needed someone to sign her over to the hospital?" "FOR MUMPS". The name revelation was a day's discussion that went from the 41 st stoop to the corners of Canarsie....she's not a shicza, after all.

As if the clues weren't blaringly obvious.

"This is all I'm getting" Ruby said.

"I don't need your flimsy charity machine"

"I'd like to see you get that other crap"