She isn’t white, I thought, but I did not say it, because you didn’t tell your assassin lover’s biggest secret to your cop boss.
“She doesn’t kill everyone he asks,” I said. “She’s part of this system—”
“Political gestures of mob justice,” Finn said, very carefully, in the way that stopped my throat, “are not the law, Dev.”
“I know that.”
“I’m glad you do. But while you’re eating ground rations with Victor’s old lady, I figure that you can help us with something. A new development.”
The clock behind Finn’s head read nearly 10 p.m. She’d be waiting for me. Not worried, no, but waiting. My hands started to shake again, harder.
“What development?” Whatever they were planning, I would make sure I had the cover to protect her.
“Potential stoolie,” Finn said. “Odd-jobber by the name of Trent Sullivan. He won’t come to headquarters, is wary of talking to any of our undercovers, says everyone knows they’re cops. But you’re too new for them to know, and now you’re with Victor’s fucking angel? Congratulations, kid, I think you got your break. Find him, talk to him, lay the groundwork, and we’ll set up the sting. Think you can do that?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll let you know how it’s going next week.”
“And if you get a hint of the kills your old lady has planned…”
“She never tells me the names.”
“Of course she doesn’t. So let me know what she doesn’t tell you.”
“She’s good, too, Finn.”
“You’ll do your best.”
I got up to leave. It was 10:15. The second hand was making me dizzy. The milk and chocolate syrup and fizzy water were churning to butter in my gut. I thought of her smile when she saw me walk through the door. I thought of what I was doing here.
“Kid … if you think you’re in over your head, we can still pull you out.”
I stared at him, so full of hungers that my eyes crunched when they blinked.
“This is mine.”
Finn put his hands up. Pale and fat, greasy from the fries. “Just asking.”
I barely had the money for a coffee at breakfast, but I paid for a cab to her place. She opened the door before I was halfway up the stairs. In her arms I finally stopped shaking.
4
A car turns up the drive, at last. My hands sting, they touch her even before she’s forced the car out of the mud.
She is thinking about me.
I haven’t closed the door that Alvin left open. Water runs from the welcome mat, across the slate tiles, and laps at Pea’s muddy garden boots. The rain has given way to a mist that obscures my view of the driveway. The swollen passing of the river below plugs my ears. I wait for her on the porch, barefoot and bareheaded. Wondering if she will tell me what business she had with Bobby Junior. If I have the right to ask.
Her footsteps crunch in the gravel and mud of the driveway. Then pause, then resume. The mist gives her up. Dew beads her hair and she carries muddy shoes in one hand. Exhaustion emphasizes those lines she hates around her eyes, the ones that deepen when she smiles.
“I think I can save the tomatoes,” she says.
“You spent all that time in Hudson?”
I didn’t mean to say that. But shame is stayed by something like desire. Pea traces my jawline with a muddy hand. And if I were who I want to be, I could kiss her now, before any more words expose us. I could grab hold of her and pull her so close our ribs settle in each other’s spaces and hurt as we breathe. But she watches me with distant pity, as though through a window.
“I ran into Bobby Bell—he used to come around the Pelican a few years ago, some rich kid begging kicks from Victor. I never knew you’d grown up together.”
“He’s a few years older. We never talked much.”
His gang used to make a game of trapping me places where I couldn’t get away. They liked using my ability against me. They had their sport, they regularly beat me until I learned to defend myself. Until my skill outpaced their cruel intelligence. It only took one demonstration, carefully planned, pitilessly executed. One night in a clearing by the river. They left me alone and my mother congratulated me on rising above the situation.
“Dev,” Pea says, almost a whisper. “Did something happen?”
“I missed you.”
“Did you?”
Could she doubt it? I look more closely and see: yes. She is here, she has planted her garden, she waits for me. But she still wonders.
“Alvin dropped by for a visit,” I say.
Her eyes jerk back to my face. “The boy from Craver’s store? What did he want?”
“He says Bobby Junior wants to kill him. For some secret he knows.”
“Did you touch him?”
“Wouldn’t let me.”
“Then he’s hiding something. And that kid is dangerous.”
“I was thinking of helping him.”
“Were you, now?”
“I can take care of myself, Pea.”
“Can you, Dev?” She laughs. “Can you anymore?”
The white rush of the river fills my throat. I meet her angry eyes while something inside me snaps again and again. I catch a glimmer of her fear. What astonishing, awful power. I can scare this dangerous woman, this angel and no one’s knife. It is enough.
My kiss demands. It seeks aggressive, mindless domination. And she submits for a second or two. Then she bites my lip, hard. I flinch, but she doesn’t let go. Blood fills our mouths. Her arms pull me so close my breastbone aches with each frantic pulse. I run my hands through her hair, I cradle her against the sensation of my own pain. The too-sweet taste of my own blood. In my fingertips, she sings of love and relief.
I lift her, she struggles, her shoes strike the wet wood of the porch. She climbs me like a wall, wraps her legs around my waist, squeezes until I am only a memory of a breath, one that she sucks from my lips as I gasp.
I push up her skirt and force my hand in that space that presses, damp, against my stomach. Her scissor grip relaxes while her hands yank my hair convulsively. My scalp burns. My gasps are a sharp relief. She moves against my hand. A pop and a shiver and then she is climbing me again, biting my ear, my neck, my collarbone, not quite hard enough to draw blood. But I want blood.
A pair of staggering steps. We fetch up against the porch balcony. I set her down. Her lips are swollen and red, like her eyes. She says nothing, just looks up at me. Waiting, again.
Because I pull away every time. Because I feel the blood that she has spilled, and the blood that I have spilled for her. I don’t know if my desire is truly for her anymore or just for all of our endings.
“What can I do, Dev?” A knife in her hand. I didn’t see her pull it. But then, I never do.
“Do you want me to hurt, is that it? Do you still blame me?”
The knife hovers above her left wrist, casual, deadly. If I do nothing, she will cut herself just to make me move. She will give me her blood, which she has somehow divined is exactly what I desire. My love is overmatched. She will make it easy for me.
Lightning strikes the river and throws its light between us. Her hands are delicate. Thinner than I remember, veins and muscle and bone latticed beneath what she calls high-yellow skin. A scar rings her left wrist like a bracelet; a keloid star dimples the skin between her right thumb and forefinger. I have seen, once, the last decade of scars beneath the coastline of her clothes. I hate to look at them. The body records its pain. I don’t need the reminder. But she has been unmistakably marked by my years of silence.
I put my hands over hers. She moves the knife just enough, so it kisses the first layer of my skin without breaking it. Her eyes are wide and dark and wet. We wait.
I lean in to kiss her. My tongue stings where she bit it, it swells uncomfortably. I press it against her teeth and blood breaks through again, a warm demonstration. I hear an echo of Victor (I will haunt you), but in this moment he’s just a gnat in m
y ear.
“Oh,” Pea says, and sucks on the corner of my mouth. “Oh. Fuck, Dev.”
The knife pricks the tip of my pinky. She lifts my hand, watches my face as she smears that trickle of blood across her lips. It goes on dark as earth.
Mortal, mortal, like that kid goat I killed when I first understood that death would come for me one day. Mortal like my father, whose ashes we shipped to my aunts in Bombay days after he had first let me try a turn in the Chrysler. Mortal like Victor, whose blood washed away as easily as Pea promised.
Everything dies, and love only makes the blood spill faster.
I yank up her skirt, she grapples for my erection, pops the tongue from my belt in her haste. I thrust outside—she’s as slippery as half-cooked okra. One hand—hers?—passes it inside. I don’t look at her, I just hold on. We are two mortals, whatever the rest of the world calls us. Two creatures of bones and skin and bellows and blood. Two creatures full of love, watching it drip between our fingers.
* * *
“Look, the cucumbers are ripe. How old is that smoked salt in the pantry?”
“Pea, they’re still white.”
They look bizarre, misshapen tumors nestled against dark-green vines.
“They’re called dragon’s eggs. That’s how they looked on the package.”
“And you bought them?”
“I met Mae Spalding in Craver’s store that day. The hell-child’s mom, poor thing—she told me she used to grow them. Don’t be prejudiced, Dev.”
I consider this. Her smile is just a twitch in the blues and browns of her sun-haloed silhouette.
“What’s that, Pea? Some hopelessly naïve American aphorism? Don’t judge a book by its cover?”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, how about.”
My fingers walk the waistline of her blue jeans, mine two weeks ago. “I wasn’t planning on knocking them, either.”
Pea doesn’t laugh like someone who could even imagine doing what we did two nights ago. But she did. We did. And this beautiful, sun-lit innocence is just as much a part of her as the knives, and who they’ve cut.
“The salt?” she says, and slices a cucumber from its vine. I like the way it looks in her palm. It reflects a smeared curve of her plum-red lips.
“Two, three years?” I bought it in a summer market, right after Tamara came to the Pelican. I don’t tell Pea that—I don’t like her to think of what Tamara meant to me. And it does me no good either.
Pea shrugs. “It’s just salt, right?” She cuts a stalk of the purple-green basil, fat and bowed with flowers. She’s like my grandmother in this small way, knowing each plant by its rhythms and its fruit. A sightless caress of my forehead and she walks back into the kitchen. I wait in the garden. A peaceful hum descends, the kind of trilling, buzzing susurrus that passes for silence in the countryside. Beetles root in the dirt. A ladybug eats a greenfly. Violence is peace. Even here.
“Dev, there’s someone on the line.” Her voice wakes me, not her hand on my shoulder. She regards me at her most unreadable.
“Who?”
“A man. It sounded official. I can wait outside.”
I get up very carefully. She reeks of basil, of sweet pollen and earth bitters. A maddened corkscrew just above her ear is knotted with a flower, blush pink.
“Pea…”
What does she think? What explanation can I give? I can only hide in the game, my second skin.
“Probably some city officer. They’re not supposed to call me, but—”
“I love you, Dev,” she says, her face averted. She might even know. My saint’s hands only touch the frigid air of her withdrawal. She curls against the wood slats of the garden chair and tosses the knife high. She catches it without looking, but her whole arm spasms as her fingers close around the hilt and she pitches herself forward to slam the blade into the wood. She stares at her hand. A sound escapes her. It might have been a laugh.
The receiver is lying face-up on the box. “Subtle as ever, Finn.”
“Calm down, kid, I didn’t say anything but your name. She at least knows that, right?”
“Very funny. And you’d have told Deborah you were dodging the draft?”
“Oh, sure, I told her everything.”
“No wonder she left you.”
“Don’t I know it.” We laugh, and I wait. “Kid, are you sure about this? You know I can’t pull these strings without some big favors coming due. I thought you wanted out.”
“I wasn’t expecting to spend my peaceful retirement in a bomb shelter.”
“Our work isn’t always much safer. But you know that. Hell, you’re living with her.”
“Christ, Finn.”
“I’m not bothering you about it. Just saying. These favors…”
“What do they want?”
“Red Man Finch.”
I take a sharp breath. “No.”
“He’s a killer.”
“We’re all killers.”
“And now even you, kid. How many years did you avoid pulling that gun of yours? And then you make Victor calamari with your girlfriend’s knife.” His laughter hits me. I start to shake. It’s not remembering so much as drowning. The hard wall of his skull and the soft slip of his brains. His bloody, still face. Life that had ended because I ended it. What I had let Pea do. Oh sweet Christ, the years that I had let Pea—
“Kid, you all right?”
The tide recedes. I cough and wipe my eyes. “What does vice want him for, anyhow?”
“Because we’re cops and it’s our job to take down criminals. Or have you spent so long undercover you think you’re a gangster now?”
I grit my teeth. “I had hoped,” I say, “to be a civilian.”
“Too late for that, private. They know that old injun trusts you—”
“Finch suspects something.”
A pause followed by a soft, wet sound: Finn chewing on a pencil, or a cigar. “You saying you’re compromised, kid?”
Walter knows everything, and has for years. But my divided loyalties are not anything I plan to share with my former handler.
“Not compromised. But I don’t have the access they need.”
“Sure you could, with a bit of work.”
“There has to be something else.”
“Yeah, basic training.”
Pea waits for me in the garden. My hot-blooded killer, my reformed assassin. I once believed in justice too. But if such a thing exists, it doesn’t look like betraying Walter Finch. Luckily, he’d never be slow enough to let me.
I take a deep, steadying breath from the diaphragm. Seven in, seven out. I feel the channels of my power, my quiet hands. They play the numbers.
“They can get me out?”
“If you’re more valuable on the home front than overseas, yadda yadda.”
“Let me see what I can do.”
“I’m in Albany now, kid. Something like retirement. You’ve got to call Valentine if you want this deal.”
I’ve been in Commissioner Valentine’s good graces since my years undercover with Dutch Schultz and then planted in the lower rungs of Lucky Luciano’s outfit. My time there helped net Valentine and District Attorney Dewey one of the biggest victories of the century against organized crime. Now Dewey is due to resign at the end of this year and there are rumors that he has his sights on the governor’s seat in Albany. What better way to drum up good press than a new wave of high-profile indictments on his way out?
Unsticking myself from that corrupt spider’s web had been hard enough the first time. There were certain—questions—about my failure to bring in actionable evidence against Victor or his top lieutenants. They didn’t precisely lament Victor’s death, but Valentine is a rule-man if there ever was one. Calamari, as Finn so vulgarly put it, is not standard procedure in any police manual. If I go back this time, I’ll be in it for life. But the police would be, if nothing else, a wall between Pea and our old world. She couldn’t join me on Centre Street even if
she wanted to. Walter’s help, on the other hand—
“I just need some time. To see if it’s even possible.”
Finn sighs. “Your draft board is in my jurisdiction. I can call and tell them to defer for a month or two, for official police business. More than that and I’m risking my neck. So whatever side you’re gonna pick, kid, do it by then.”
“What sides are you referring to, Finn?”
He wheezes a little. “Oh, none at all, kiddo. Us police, we’re pure as driven snow.”
Neither of us laugh. As we bid terse farewells I imagine his grim smile, a mirror of my own.
Outside, Pea has sliced and arranged the cucumber on a plate, topped it with basil and salt.
“I’m going to town,” I tell her, but I sit down on the chair she has appropriated and wrap my arms around her waist. She leans into me and I wonder, again, if she’s lost weight.
“To check on that devil-child? Do you want me to come with you?”
“To talk to Bobby Junior. If I can help Alvin, I should.”
“You want to help that boy who nearly—”
She grips my wrists. Her breaths tickle my shoulder, where she rests her head.
“Will you try it?” she says, after a few minutes. “It’s nice with the basil.”
She feeds me. I crunch into the cucumber, sharp herbs and smoked brine. I am transported as much by her fixed gaze as the flavors popping on my tongue.
We kiss briefly. A summer kiss at the start of fall. A promise of a kiss, when the draft board or the NYPD will have my neck in a month or two. The Bells might give me a third way out, if I can ferret out the truth of what happened with them and Alvin. With that kind of leverage, they might be persuaded to use their connections to give my draft card an indefinite deferment. They might, but if they aren’t? What would she do, if the army shipped me off? Survive, surely.
“See you tonight,” I tell her. “I love you,” I tell her.
“No,” she says. “Don’t do that.”
“Love you?”
Her smile struggles against something else, something I can’t read. When it wins, it transforms her: Phyllis LeBlanc, the most beautiful thing you’ll see before you die.
Trouble the Saints Page 13
