“You have your bones in the ground. Alvin is alive.”
He is astonished. “Davey, there will come a day when all the living will be the dead, and when all the dead will become the living in the glory of our Lord. There is no logical reason on this earth to value one over the other. I am the only hope for salvation of two hundred and forty-eight souls. What is one little Negro boy to that?”
A brief silence. Then Mae slaps him. The Bible falls to the floor, a thud and spray of tissue-thin paper. He groans like an animal left for hours in a trap.
“Dev,” says Mae behind gritted teeth. “Be kind enough to leave us?”
“Davey—”
I put a hand on his shoulder. I feel as much of a threat to him as I would to a corpse. “She won’t hurt you,” I say.
“Don’t wait,” she says, over her shoulder. Her hands rest on the bed, right beside Craver’s weeping jowls. “This might take a while. Better to get Phyllis home.”
I look back sharply. “Is she—”
“Go, Dev.”
Craver looks like a man about to drop from a hanging tree. I don’t even think of saving him.
* * *
Pea is leaning against the driver’s-side door when I get back to the car. She trembles, hands rigid against her sides, eyes darting. She looks sick, or haunted. She seems unaware of my presence. My heart squeezes out a few explosive beats. We have been happy, we have been true, we have been, at last, right, these last few weeks. And I had thought we might have just a little longer.
But here, she’s hurting. Nothing else I can do. I take her in my arms, hold her rigid against me until she seems to recognize my skin or my smell and lets me hold her up. She murmurs something.
“What? Pea, Sweet Pea, what—”
“Don’t hit him,” she says, just loud enough for me to hear. “He’s … in front of the car? I think? Be careful. Don’t hit him.”
I’d ask her what she means but she starts to tremble again. For an awful moment I think she’s fainted. But then she opens her eyes wide and takes two steps back. She’s hot to the touch.
“Are you sick?”
She looks afraid, and then angry with herself. “Don’t know, Dev. Just got a feeling. Why don’t you drive us home?”
I drive us home. She sleeps most of the way, her head at an uncomfortable angle against the windshield. I move her to my shoulder. She doesn’t even murmur. But at some predetermined moment, close to the house, she pulls herself upright, gasps, and says: “The brakes, Dev.”
A figure darts across the road a moment later. I wouldn’t have seen him if not for Pea’s warning.
Which she had given one second before the figure—the boy—actually came into view. I swerve, squeal to a stop, turn to stare at her.
“Pea—”
She just shakes her head. Alvin has stopped too, like a deer in the road, but relaxes when he recognizes us.
“You came from Hudson?” he asks when I roll down the window. “You saw Craver? He tell you why he set me up like that?”
“I left him with your mother,” I say, “but I don’t know what she’ll be able to do. He seemed determined to blame you. I think you should get the hell out of town, Alvin.”
The boy shakes his head. His hair is damp despite the clear, brisk day. It sprays a pair of drops on my arm. “Can’t leave my folks,” he says. “This ain’t their fault.”
“They should leave too,” I say. “Before the bank forces them out.”
He sticks his jaw out. “I’m going to Craver, if he’s talking he might as well talk to me. Tell me to my face why he lied like that. I didn’t do shit to nobody. I don’t deserve this.”
“You did plenty of shit to plenty of somebodies, kid,” Pea says, with a smile at once ironic and fond. “But no, you don’t deserve this. Dev’s right. Leave town. Find our friend Walter in the city and you might just make it.”
“I don’t want to make it! I want it to be right. What good are these hands, if I can’t even make this one thing right?”
Pea turns away abruptly. Alvin looks at me. “I don’t want to end up like your angel.”
I sit up. Angry, yes, but also a little sick. “What do you mean?”
“Glorious,” he says, “but damned.”
“And what the devil would you know of—”
“I’ve got to get myself right first,” he says to Phyllis, who only watches him through lidded eyes. “Then I’ll know what to do. How to be worthy of them.”
He looks down, so earnest that I could shake him.
“Come by when you want, Alvin,” Pea says. Her forehead is shiny with sweat, but the hand I hold is cold. “I’ll make a plate for you.”
He shakes his head. “Thank you, Miss Phyllis. Angel. But from now on…”
Pea smiles. “Cast me away from you, then, sweet boy. I hope it does you some good. I hope you can do what I never could.”
* * *
Two days later she really does faint. She slides to the floor in the kitchen and bruises her hip. “Pea,” I say, “why don’t we go to a doctor?”
“It’s nothing, I’m fine.”
“But—”
“I’ll be more careful. Trust me, Dev. You don’t need to worry.”
Her smile is a warning. But sometimes I am brave enough for her.
“If you know what’s wrong, then tell me.”
“You don’t—this is my business, Dev.”
“Don’t I get to worry?”
“Sure you do. Hell, I could give you lessons. But you don’t get to bother me with it.”
“Pea, I love—”
“What was that phone call about a month ago? What did Walter take care of for you?”
She waits. And sometimes I am not nearly brave enough.
“Well, then,” she says after a minute fat with silence. But then she adds, “I never told you that Alvin had been coming around, either.”
We look at each other and then rest our heads together, gently.
“I knew about that anyway.”
“I knew that you knew, baby, isn’t that the strangest? I never even had to tell you.”
13
Trent Sullivan had up and dusted. That’s what Finn was saying, anyway. I was worried enough to hunt him down. I went to the Pelican when Pea wasn’t there—she was starting to wonder about my interest in her world. She didn’t suspect the truth. No, she worried that I wanted in. I tried to imagine my shape beneath her fingertips.
A junior private eye, not doing as well as he’d like. Feet on the right side of the law and a gaze straying down the horizon. We had been breathing with the other’s lungs, sleeping in the other’s skin, soaking sheets in the other’s sweat for two months. I loved her the way Sita loved Rama. A god’s love. A saint’s love. But we were mortals, with hearts of wax and joints of ash. We had touched the other’s smallest, hidden self, but we could only see them blurred, through murky water. I thought I saw her more clearly than she saw me.
But not enough, in the end. Not nearly.
Red Man sat down beside me at the bar. He had put his hand on my shoulder. He told the barman to make me a drink.
“Dry martini, Mitch,” he said. “Fine by you, Dev?”
I nodded. It felt natural. Relaxed. He didn’t threaten me. Not that I could feel. My throat still felt as tight as a bent straw.
“You know my name,” I said.
“Course I do, Dev. Our best girl is dizzy for you. It’s only natural for us to take an interest.”
I nodded again. I should have anticipated this. He had never so much as glanced at me and I was a rookie fool for thinking that meant he wasn’t looking.
“And what’s yours?” My strained, far-off voice again.
I was thinking of that gentle shot in the basement. I was thinking of how he had breathed, after. He had closed his eyes.
“What’s my what, Dev?”
“Name?”
Now he laughed. Short, genuinely surprised. “You know it.”
> “I know what they call you.” Mitch gave me that drink and backed off like he’d pulled a grenade pin. I forced a large swallow past the bend in my throat. “I was wondering if you call yourself something different.”
The man by my side removed his hand from my shoulder. He looked at me with no expression at all.
Thirty seconds of the thin clarinet from the stage, shouted orders at the bar, giggling girls and arch-voiced women. I thought they might be the last sounds I ever heard.
“Walter,” he said. “My name’s Walter Finch. And I think our Phyllis LeBlanc might have known what she was doing when she brought you home, Devajyoti Patil.”
“I love her,” I said, like some John in a two-penny paperback. But it didn’t feel like a stupid thing to say.
“She’s a beautiful killer—she has that effect on people.”
“She’s not a killer. She’s a woman who—I want to take her away from here.”
He laughed. “You do.”
“The way she lives—it’s destroying her.”
“Now, that’s just the human condition.” He looked at my glass, the olive crouching in the shallows at the bottom. “Let me show you something.”
He got off the stool. He walked out of the bar. I followed him. I thought he might kill me, but Finn had told me I was about to lose the case. I thought he would kill me, but if he didn’t there was a chance I could leave with her. Pea, with the bloody knives and bloody hands. Pea, with the heart like a steel trap.
(“Why do you love me?” I had asked her.
“You believe that I can be better than I am.”)
He drove us to Midtown, to a gambling parlor fronted by a mediocre Italian restaurant on West 43rd Street. The operation was headed by one Lefty Manusco, a well-connected subordinate of Lucky Luciano known for his connections to prostitution. The cops on this beat never could seem to get enough to shut him down. I pretended not to recognize it.
The back room was crowded with men and women elegantly dressed, politely pissing streams of money down Cosa Nostra’s pockets. A fair number of these women were prostitutes. Expensive ones. You could pick them out because they never bet money and they drank with professional determination.
“Let’s play craps,” Walter said. I wasn’t sure I knew how to play craps. I didn’t say so. I recognized a man at the table. He was sliding his chips across the felt like hockey pucks. Laughing with his hand on a prostitute’s ass. She didn’t bother to laugh back. He didn’t look up when we sat down. Then the whispers started and he did, but he only recognized Walter.
We worked in different precincts, but Finn had pointed him out to me as a fellow undercover—Benjamin Erenhart, a veteran of the narcotics beat. Friends in high places. Finn had made sure to tell me that, in case our paths had crossed.
“Who’s your buddy, Red Man?” Erenhart said, as he slid the last of his dwindling pile of chips to the stickman. I didn’t know how much he had started with. But for a man on a cop’s salary, he looked pretty sanguine at the prospect of losing three hundred dollars more.
“The angel’s new boyfriend,” said Walter, his voice flat. I felt the sudden stares of everyone at the table like the warm tongue of a large dog. But I matched Walter’s nonchalance. For better or worse, my relationship with Pea protected me better than any Luger ever could. And Walter had made his point: I had put myself in this world. Now he would see to it that I couldn’t get out of it easily.
Erenhart’s lips drew back from his teeth, like he had knocked back a bitter spirit. “Is he, now? And you aren’t afraid she will knife you in your sleep, boy?”
Lefty Manusco’s back room was not integrated to anyone but Walter, and friends of Walter. Still, Erenhart should have been more careful. “She’s an angel of justice. There are plenty guiltier than me for her to take care of first.”
The cop drew back. The working girl on his lap got quickly to her feet, tottered in her high heels, and stilled at a look from a man in a gray pinstripe suit, sitting by the bar.
“Is that right?” Erenhart said. His face was flushed. He was smiling. Then he laughed. “Better you than me, bud,” he said, shaking his head. When he ran out of chips a few minutes later, that man by the bar came over and told the boxman to lend him another thousand. Walter amiably lost a hundred while I watched. He seemed to think that was enough. We left a little after midnight.
“That man,” he said quietly. “Is a cop. Plainclothesman. He’s at least twenty grand in the hole with Manusco. That’s not counting the women. He killed one of them last year. They said it was an accident. Hell, I half believe them, but that’s only because Erenhart ain’t ever gentle.”
“A cop?” I felt as exposed as sunburned skin under sandpaper.
Walter Finch gave me a long look. “That’s what I said. The law in this town,” he said, “it isn’t what it used to be. Good for us, I guess.”
“Good for us.”
Vice squad never had been able to get a charge to stick to Manusco. Finn had known, of course. That’s why he’d said what he had. I’d just been too green to listen.
A week later, Pea came home smelling of French-milled soap and old pennies. She had been crying. We fucked each other for hours, until everything hurt.
“Did you know?” Finn asked me, over another bad midnight dinner of egg creams and steak fries.
“Not until she already did it.”
He lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the fries. “Off the record,” he said. “Erenhart was a bastard. He had it coming. You ever meet him?”
“No.”
“Better for you. Not that I hold with executions. But some of those bad eggs on the force … even Valentine didn’t have much to say about it … well, your lady serves a purpose.”
“I want to get her out of this. Take her upstate. I can work undercover without her.”
Finn laughed. I heard the edge, but he didn’t take it all the way out. Trent Sullivan had crawled from his mouse hole the day before. We were nearly ready to take him and his woman into protection. And as soon as we arrested Victor, I could leave with Pea. Walter hadn’t said no, and neither had Finn. The only other person who needed to agree was Pea herself. It seemed to me like an afterthought.
I was—this is not an excuse—very young.
14
The night before the groundbreaking of the new resort, Alvin finds me in the parlor, drinking whiskey alone and staring into the fire. Pea is upstairs, sleeping. Waiting for me, yet still keeping her distance. I feel very alone, more than I have any right to, in this house with her just upstairs. But then Alvin taps on the French windows and it is with relief that I open them.
“She’s not here, right?” he asks, looking around before he pulls himself over the sill.
“Sleeping,” I say. “You’re letting in the cold.”
He gives me a hard look and then latches the windows behind him.
I taste another mouthful of whiskey. “Would you like some?” I ask. He doesn’t seem as young as the last time we saw one another on the road. Rougher. Stronger, like he doesn’t have time to care where he’s cracking.
Alvin nods. “I need to ask you something.”
I gesture to the couch, but he sits on the floor. Possibly to be closer to the fire, possibly because he’s considerate of the state of his blue jean overalls.
I pass him a tumbler with a thumb of whiskey. He takes it with his left hand and holds out his right. I stare at it. Touch him, now, after all this? But I am tipsy, flushed with heat and hunched with cold, and my secrets do not seem like such a bad trade anymore.
I take his hand. It is a brief meeting. Two strands of uncanny luck sniff one another like unfamiliar dogs and separate. Junior Bell wants to kill him, but he didn’t need my hands to know that. I peer at him through amber fluid, waiting for what of mine he will drag into the firelight.
“You should have left her that first time,” he says, at last. “You wanted to use your gift for good. You knew what she was. Why didn’t you leav
e her?”
“But I did.”
He frowns and shakes his head. He looks down at his feet. “That ain’t leaving. You watched her. You stayed in that devil’s business. What did you think would happen? A righteous man has got to keep righteous company.”
I just laugh.
“The rest of it … Don’t know what you were so scared of. Think such a little thing will stop her from loving you? A woman like your angel? She was born in blood.”
“As are we all,” I say softly.
He falls silent. Finishes his whiskey. I pour us both more. I feel purged, my insides mercifully silent.
I watch him gather his courage. “Dev,” he says, “she’s got something in her that’s going bad. She’s sinned and sinned with them and now they’re turning against her. They’ll get you, too, if you stay.”
“Your hands don’t tell you that.”
“You’d be surprised what they tell me. Leave her, Dev. Save yourself.”
“Is that your question?”
He puts his head down again and presses his palms against his temples. Whatever burns him, I don’t believe he really cares about Pea and my resigned compromises.
His voice, when it comes, is high and anguished. “Why not? Why not? If you save yourself, at least one of you survives.”
I am surprised, at last.
Unthinking, I put a hand on his trembling shoulder. “Alvin,” I say, “and what will I do with that survival, when I have betrayed her? What good will my hands do, when my heart has turned on me?”
After a few more minutes, his sobbing subsides. He wipes his nose on his sleeve. Takes a few shaky breaths.
“Go to the groundbreaking tomorrow. Both of you. If you see me, help me. If you see my ma—”
“Help her?”
His nostrils flare. “Stop her.”
And now I’m starting to understand. “What is she planning?”
“I’m not sure. Just … come.”
“Thank you for warning us, Alvin.”
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