Tango Bitches from Hell: Angelina, Accountant for the Mob

  

               Angelina Peggilasso was an accountant for a couple of shady characters operating an import/export business from the 4^th floor of a building on 20^th St. near 10^th Avenue in Manhattan.  With a masters degree from Wharton School of Business she could work anywhere but she chose to work here. Seventeen years of accounting for various non-profits and the Catholic Church succeeded in changing her views on what kind of employer she wished to work for. After five years with Paragon Shipping Inc. she had come to expect that there would be days when she would have to experience bad things and today was one of them.

               She was ready for it.

               Her whole weekend was free and she planned to spend it dancing as much tango as she possibly could fit in to her schedule. Her youngest son, Eddie Jr., was getting married in a month and she had finally finished making all the arrangements for the wedding. Six months of planning, wheeling and dealing with different caterers, florists, DJs, etc. had taken a toll on her health and she needed to see Boris.

               Today Tommy Pantoni was being brought in to talk to the bosses: Louie No-neck and Joey the Noodge. It was she that discovered Tommy was cooking the books in order to finance a new girlfriend, a Russian stripper with expensive tastes. She didn’t like what was going to happen to Mr. Pantoni but she felt the Lovatto brothers, Louie and Joey, were justified in asking their associate to pony up some collateral to ensure repayment of the funds he stole as well as fork over a substantial penalty.

               The way she saw it, her employers were merely business men trying to control a large commercial enterprise engaged the avoidance of tariffs and taxes. They were middlemen in a huge chain of supply and demand who made a living through efficient management of resources. From what she could discern of the men she worked for, they were good family men with a solid work ethic who came in to the office everyday and attended to business matters the entire time they were at their desks before going home to their wives and children…unlike her no good deceased husband.

               Angelina knew everything depended, ultimately, on her. It was she that found legitimate ways to classify assets in creative yet innocuous ways that would not trigger the auditing software used by the IRS. It was she that went to the individual managers and educated them on how to use the cash registers and inventory equipment. She was the person who advocated for moderation and advised against erratic expansion and contraction of inventory which would invite unnecessary attention. The business needed her and this gave her one more reason to live....and to dance, as well.

               At fifty-two years of age, she had come to believe that women ruled the world. This was not a concept she had gained from her formal education. Things were different now for her. In her new worldview, men were extremely involved in the process of keeping things going but the final say was a woman’s. Sooner or later, the man who thinks he’s running things has to go to sleep at which time his fate rests in the hands of the lady who is watching over him.

               So it was for Paragon Shipping Inc. So it was for the Catholic Church. So it was for her husband.

               She remembered the night Eddie Sr. went to sleep for the last time. He’d just gotten back from the racetrack after losing all their money, money she needed to raise the three sons he had spawned. He was drunk and felt he should beat the crap out of her since they didn’t have a dog. He didn’t wake up the next day, it seemed he somehow managed to suffocate himself with a pillow. The poor man didn’t even get a proper burial. 

               She went back to school and began raising the boys on her own.

               She’d discovered tango about the same time she met Boris for the first time; Eddie Sr. had been in the urn for over fifteen years and the boys were now in college. She was doing okay financially and had finally gotten some expensive dental work done which required her to have her mouth wired shut for a period of three days. She took a short sabatical from work and decided this would be a good time to drop by her son’s new apartment and clean it for him.

               The building in which her boy lived was identical to the one next to it and she mistakenly entered the wrong one. Apartment ‘C’ on the fourteenth floor of this building was inhabited by a middle-aged Russian man she would always call Boris even though she knew his real name was different thanks to one of Louie No-neck’s wise guys named Pete Brovonovich. Pete followed him for a month and gave her a full report on who he was and what he did.

               As she left the office she could hear Tommy being escorted up the stairwell by a couple of guys working for Joey Lovatto. They were apologizing to their charge for what they may have to do to him later.

               She waited at the top of the landing for him to come into view and he recognized her instantly, a look of fear in his eyes.

               “Mrs. P.” he pleaded, “you gotta help. This is all a mistake.”
               She replied, stonefaced, “Tommy, Tommy, be a man. Take what’s coming to you. It was me that found you out and I think you deserve what you get. Shame on you,” she continued, shaking her finger at him, “cheating on your wife with THAT girl! Shame on you for cheating your employers.  And shame on you for cheating ME because the money you hid is the money I get paid with and I got three boys to take care of. How DARE you do that to me.”

               She did not recognize the two goons behind Tommy who quickly ushered their hostage through the office door.

               As she waited for the elevator to arrive she could hear the beginnings of the ‘trial’ proceedings. There was a loud bang, like a baseball bat connecting with a ball for a homerun.

               “Mother-fucker, you broke my fucking leg!”

               “That’s not all we’re going to break if you don’t give us some collateral to make amends.”

               The elevator arrived. She got in and thought she probably had helped the situation. The sooner Mr. Pantoni realized the only alternative was full cooperation the fewer bones of his that would have to be broken. The whole situation seemed a little bizarre to her but she thought back to her years working for the Church, hiding assets so they wouldn’t be seized by prosecuting attorneys as compensation for the poor young boys who’d been raped repeatedly, countless times and for years. Tommy was a bad man and a bad husband. He deserved what he got from the profession he’d chosen willingly.

               Her thoughts turned back to her first encounter with Boris. She had knocked on his door by mistake, dressed ready to clean: a red polka-dotted handkerchief to keep her curly, long black hair from falling on the objects she was cleaning; a drab blue skirt that nearly came down to her ankles and a thick blue stonewashed denim shirt. She held a bucket in her right hand that had a mop handle protruding from it.

               A tall, heavyset man with a thick black mustache, dressed in a t-shirt and black trousers, opened the door. He looked as if he was expecting her and he ushered her in with a newspaper that he held in his free hand.

               She realized immediately what she had done but decided to see how far this strange man would let her carry on the charade. Assuming he had mistaken her for the maid, she proceeded to sanitize his bathroom which she thought was not too filthy for a man living by himself. Thoroughly enjoying this clandestine examination of a man’s house done right beneath his watchful eyes got her aroused.

               As she moved between rooms, she noticed he watched her with a great deal of interest and soon surmised that it was something more than casual. She also noticed that she liked him looking at her with hunger in his eyes.

               After she vacuumed the living room as he watched TV, she rolled up the electric cord on his vacuum cleaner and held out her hand for payment. Reaching into his pocket he produced a wallet, took out a fifty dollar bill and handed it to her. As she headed for the door he spoke some words in Russian and spanked her hard on the behind. She turned to give him a stern glance, held his gaze for a moment then headed out the door with her mop and bucket in hand.

               She recalled how she felt that day leaving his apartment for the first time nearly ten years ago. It had been a long time since a man had looked at her like that and it felt good. Every part of her body, especially her behind, tingled with delightful spasms. Her body convulsed with orgasms repeatedly on the elevator ride down to street level and she didn’t have the strength to go to her original destination.

               She’d been going back to Boris’s almost every Wednesday evening ever since. It didn’t take him long to summon the courage to flirt with her more and more, until soon he was nearly chasing her from room to room with lustful advances. After three months they were engaging in full blown intercourse without ever having a conversation using more than two words: ‘da’ and ‘nyet’.

               They didn’t always have sex when she cleaned for him but he always looked at her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world and she loved that. She was not a thin woman and her sexual prospects had been nonexistent until Boris…and tango.  

               She loved tango. What she didn’t get from Boris she got from this amazing dance imported from the heart and soul of South America. Her life had been so hard until she had begun to dance. She hadn’t realized how badly she needed to do something for herself. Up to this point it seemed to her as if her whole life had been nothing but hardship, nothing but books and babies and bad men. Each day was filled with Herculean tasks that she somehow had been able to complete: daycare, exams, PTA meetings, graduations.

               Learning tango was the exact opposite of everything she had been doing for the previous twenty years of her life.  Each class she attended, every milonga (those places where tango was performed) she visited, only added to the enjoyment she was beginning to experience in life at forty-two years of age. She realized she had once more become infatuated with the concept of men. They were no longer walking, talking pigs swinging baseball bats and hurling profanities; they were now all like little boys striving to be understood, to be embraced, to be mothered and she had all the right tools.

               It was tango that helped her to understand that men were not in control of their own destinies. At the milongas she could see how easily the men were manipulated, especially by the immigrant women from eastern Europe and most of all by the Russians.

               Boris made her feel attractive in appearance. Through her education in tango she was able to believe that she was truly beautiful on the inside. In tango there was a connection that helped her see inside her partner, to experience his reaction to what she had to offer, not just physically but mentally, emotionally and spiritually, through movement with him and in their interpretation of the music together.

               It was tango that helped her believe in herself and to see herself as a woman of the world, not just an American woman or a girl from New Jersey. Tango showed her she was unique upon the face of the Earth and that never again in the history of the planet would there be another one like her.

               It was due to tango that she finally got the courage to turn in that fraudulent charity she had worked for to the IRS and handed over vital documents of the Catholic Church to the District Attorney’s office that helped build a case against pedophile priests.

               She stepped out of the elevator at the ground level of the building housing the international headquarters of Paragon Shipping Inc. with a spring in her step, headed for Boris’s apartment to clean and to get a little loving from a passionate man. Then she was off to dance tango with many strange and exotic men in the large metropolis of New York City. As she walked down the busy city street she felt good and looked forward to the rest of the weekend…and to the rest of her life!    

             
 Note: For an in-depth look into the mind of the Kayak Hombre, read his book, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/River-Tango-perri-iezzoni/dp/1453865527/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369366756&sr=1-1&keywords=River+tango