Peril

by Thomas H. Cook

  SARA

  The bus cruised along Sunset Highway, through the clustered towns of Long Island. Within an hour she would be in New York. She had planned her future just that far, made no plans beyond her arrival, lined up no job, booked no hotel, nothing. At thirty-eight, she would return to the city exactly as she had first come to it twenty years before, with a single suitcase, no prospects, fleeing Long Island as she’d once fled the South, caught again in the same grim vise.

  “Looks like we’re going to get a little rain.”

  Sara glanced toward the woman who sat next to her.

  “I checked the weather station before I left this morning,” the woman added. “There’s little spots of rain all up the East Coast.” She opened a brown paper bag and took out a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil. “I don’t eat in bus stops,” she explained. “Too expensive.”

  Sara said nothing. She wanted silence and distance, wanted only to get away from Tony and his father and from her own devouring rage.

  Stop! she told herself fiercely. Put it out of your mind, everything before right now.

  “Where you headed?” the woman beside her asked.

  “North,” Sara said, her voice oddly stiff and inflectionless, as if it came from stone.

  The woman took the sandwich out of the foil. It was egg and bacon. She took a large bite and chewed with her mouth open. “Me too. Change for Boston when I get to the city. I got a daughter in Boston. I’m staying with her for a few days.”

  Sara listened as the woman prattled on and on, a low drone in Sara’s mind as she detailed the route her daughter Lynn had taken through life, where she’d gone to school, the two guys she’d married, the jobs she’d had. The dragonback of Manhattan was visible before the tale wound to its end.

  “I think Lynn’s pretty settled now,” the woman concluded.

  Settled.

  Sara saw a field of summer corn, felt a sweetly sickening breath in her face. She should have known at that instant that nothing would ever be settled after that because from then on, even when alone, she would hear nothing but the heavy tread of something from behind, and then the frantic scampering of prey.

  ABE

  He jiggled the key until it opened. It hadn’t turned smoothly in years. Like everything else, Abe thought, cranky and erratic, determined to thwart the smooth flow of things.

  He switched on the light, closed the door, locked it. The clock over the bar read eleven-fifteen. Jake would arrive at noon, and the daily routine would begin in earnest, setting up the bar, checking the supplies, cleaning, polishing, paying bills. Jorge would show up twenty minutes later, mop the place, break down the boxes, gather up the garbage, all the drudge work of keeping the joint relatively clean. Susanne Albert, the college girl who’d worked in the place for only a couple of months, would come in an hour before opening, do the few things Jake hadn’t finished, then sit in the back booth, reading some book about Hindu philosophy. And last, Lucille, the bar’s only entertainment, a sixty-one-year-old former Broadway chorus singer who’d been at the bar for as long as Abe could remember, the singer he’d first accompanied all those many years ago, and who he’d kept on even after he’d bought the place.

  That was it, then, Abe thought, the family.

  It was a far cry from what he’d intended, but it was no doubt better than tapping out “Feelings” in some seedy lounge on the Jersey shore. He was forty-eight, old enough to know that the jazz pianist’s life he’d once envisioned for himself would not have suited him very well. In fact, when he thought of it now, it was as little more than a Blue Note fantasy, like becoming a writer or an actor. Mavis had always said that he wasn’t very adventurous, that all he really wanted was the anchor of a steady, predictable life. Toward the end she’d been plenty frank about it, When you get right down to it, Abe, you’re a stick-in-the-mud.

  He walked behind the bar, took the canvas cash bag he’d brought from the bank around the corner, and began to fill the register. He’d just opened the quarters into the drawer when the phone rang.

  “McPherson’s,” he said.

  “Abe. Lucille.”

  “You sound shitty.”

  “It’s the mood, you know?”

  “You need anything?”

  “No. I’m just gonna sleep through it.”

  “Well, if you do . . .”

  “I know, Abe.”

  He heard the click of the phone as Lucille hung up. Okay, he thought, his longtime chanteuse was in a mood and so wouldn’t be showing up for her set. But it was a Tuesday, the slowest night of the week, so with Susanne working the tables and Jake the bar, and Jorge busing and himself at the keyboard, the bar would make it through all right.

  He glanced at the old piano at the rear of the bar and remembered the first time Mavis had leaned against it, dark-eyed and looking more experienced than she should have, this woman he’d later married and who’d promised to stay with him always but had run off with a guy who’d later made it big, and whose smiling face Abe continually confronted in record stores and concert billboards. He knew what Mavis’ flight had stolen from him: self-confidence, for one thing, along with the money she’d emptied from their accounts. All of that he could have gotten back one way or another, but what he’d never regained was the lightness of life, the sense of humor that had once so lifted him and made the good times roll and, more than his playing, brought buoyancy and joy to the people around him. That had gone with Mavis, and now seemed as irretrievable as the wedding ring she’d stripped from her finger and hocked at Forty-sixth and Eighth when Hell’s Kitchen still smoldered on the west side of the city.

  Jake came through the door and seemed to read his face. “Trouble?” he asked.

  “Just Lucille,” he lied.

  TONY

  Tony tossed the house keys to Eddie Sullivan. “She never locks the place, but just in case.”

  Sullivan pocketed the keys. “Okay, Tony.”

  “If the car’s not in the driveway, give me a ring. But if it is, go to the door, see if she’s inside. If there’s some other car there, take down the license number and bring it back to me. But don’t do anything else.”

  Sullivan nodded heavily. “Everything’s okay, Tony.” His smile was sympathetic. “Sara wouldn’t never . . . you know.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s seemed a little, I don’t know, a little tense the last few days,” Tony said. He walked Eddie out to the rusty old heap he’d been driving for as long as he could remember. “You ever gonna trade this fucking thing in?” he asked.

  Sullivan shrugged. “It still runs okay. It’s like an old girlfriend now.” He grinned sheepishly, a thirty-five-year-old man still so shy and boyish, even the faintest allusion to women brought a blush to his face. “You know, I’m used to her.”

  Tony surveyed the sloping bumper and rusty undercarriage. It looked pitiful, and it made whoever drove it look pitiful. “I’m gonna give you a raise, Eddie. So you can put something down on a new car.”

  Sullivan’s smile widened. “Thanks.” He placed his beefy hand on Tony’s shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay. Sara, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said, then watched as Sullivan hauled himself into his car and drove away. He knew Eddie wasn’t the brightest star in the heavens, but he was honest and reliable, and he could keep his mouth shut. A man with woman trouble could trust a guy like Eddie, a guy who lived alone, had never had a girlfriend, and might still be a virgin. Eddie took communion every Sunday at Our Lady of Fatima, and Tony guessed that he’d probably still be an altar boy if they let men his age do that sort of thing. Just the guy to check on a wife who’d been acting strange lately, Tony thought, a wife who hadn’t answered the phone for hours. A piercing dread hit him, the terrible possibility that Sara had left him. He saw the red Explorer drift out of the driveway, Sara at the wheel, with that cold look in her eye.

  His cousin Joey stepped out of the warehouse.

  “What are you looking at?” Tony blurted vehemently.
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br />   “Nothing,” Joey said, then retreated back into the warehouse.

  Tony glanced out over the marina, a hundred boats precariously afloat. They seemed frail and unsteady, easily torn apart by high waves and raging winds, and for a moment he felt curiously like them, small and insubstantial before a dark, approaching storm.

  STARK

  He sipped a martini and watched the traffic move haltingly along Fifty-ninth Street. The Oak Bar was one of his favorite haunts. He liked the dark wood and whispery conversations, the well-dressed men and women who sat together at the polished tables. He wanted the men to be arms dealers and the women to be spies, the bar itself suffused with a supercharged intrigue, something out of Cold War Vienna, the icy cat-and-mouse world of The Third Man, where the only safety lay in secrecy and self-containment. In reality, the Oak Bar had nothing of this atmosphere. It was filled with out-of-towners and conventioneers. But Stark preferred to imagine it otherwise, a bar that shimmered distantly, enclosed in an elegant worldliness, cool, sophisticated, where his heart could rest unperturbed, like an olive at the bottom of a glass.

  The woman who slid into the table next to his a few minutes later was in her mid-forties, but some good work had taken off a decade. She wore a dark blue skirt and white satin blouse that was partially covered by a silk scarf, black with small red roses. A gold dragon with large ruby eyes was pinned just above her right breast, wings spread, mouth open, fangs at the ready. He knew that she’d chosen it to signal that beneath the conservative clothes a voluptuous serpent twined. She ordered a brandy Alexander, swirled it with her little finger, sucked at a long, polished nail.

  “I’m Evelyn,” she said finally.

  He nodded.

  “And you are?”

  “Whomever you like.”

  He’d responded in this way many times before, and so had learned that the woman in question either laughed and asked another question, or with a disgruntled shrug turned back to her drink and her quest, the distant hope that the next guy she approached would have no such obvious quirk.

  The one called Evelyn laughed and swirled her drink. “Okay, let me think. Suppose I name you Frank.”

  He offered his hand. “Frank,” he said. “A pleasure.”

  She laughed again as she took his hand. There was a slight pink stain on her straight white teeth, and this imperfection lightly touched the small, unhardened part of him. In objects, he looked for perfection, but in people, the chipped and the cracked, the all-but-invisible fray at the hem.

  “And what do you do . . . Frank?”

  “Whatever you say,” he told her.

  A carefully tweezed eyebrow drew into a lovely arch. “Really, you won’t tell me what you do?”

  “It’s better if you make it up.”

  She looked at him distantly, as if unsure if he was what she really wanted, whether what she saw in him offered merely the allure of danger or the real thing.

  “Okay, I’ll play along,” she said. “Let’s say you’re some kind of secret agent.”

  He leaned forward and looked at her gravely. His whisper was charged with conspiracy. “Our country is in danger, and I desperately need your help.”

  She laughed. “I’ll bet you sell insurance. I’ll bet your name’s Harry and you’re from Spokane.”

  “I’ll be Harry if you want.”

  “No.” She took a sip of the brandy Alexander. “No, I like your story better. Our country is in danger and you desperately need”—she hesitated, then released her final word like a small, wounded bird—“me.”

  SARA

  She stood at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street, holding tightly to the suitcase. She’d known from the beginning that the moment would come when she would freeze. She’d come to New York with no idea of what to do or where to go. And so there’d have to be a moment when you couldn’t figure out what you were going to do next. That was when you were most vulnerable, most gullible, most willing to take whatever hand reached out to you. Which was what she’d done with Tony, and later hated herself for doing, and would never do again.

  A voice inside her head gave the instruction, Just keep moving!

  She lifted her hand and hailed a cab.

  “Where to?” the driver asked as she settled into the backseat.

  “Brooklyn Heights,” she said for no reason other than that she’d sometimes strolled at night on the wide promenade, the radiant gleam of the Manhattan skyline, the great bridge shimmering above the dividing river.

  On the Brooklyn Bridge, she glanced out over the harbor, the distant green of Lady Liberty, her torch hefted high. She tried to imagine herself as an immigrant, new to the country, carrying nothing but a single suitcase and some hopeful vision of the future. She labored to find something hopeful too, but her past reached for her like a bony hand thrust up from the ground, and she felt only the dreadful opposite of nostalgia, memory itself a haunted house.

  “Anyplace in particular you want to be dropped off?” the driver asked as he turned off the ramp that led to Brooklyn Heights.

  “Just near the river.”

  The cab came to a halt on Columbia Heights Street. Sara paid the driver and got out and stood, suitcase in hand, facing the river until she recalled a small hotel whose dark little cabaret room she’d once worked.

  It was called the Jefferson, and the cabaret room was now just a bar off the lobby. Still, it was a place she knew and so she decided to check in for the night. The man behind the desk asked if she had a reservation. She told him that she hadn’t.

  “Very well,” he said a little sadly, as if in recognition that a hotel where a person could just walk in off the street and get a room was a second-rate hotel, and so he must be second-rate too. “The room’s on the fifth floor.” He gave her the key and tapped a brass bell.

  A bellhop appeared. He grabbed her suitcase. “This way.”

  The bellhop wore a little round cap with a strap beneath the chin, the kind she remembered on bellhops in movies from the forties, and suddenly she felt the sweet, romantic glow of those old films turn sour in her mind. Their promise of a big happy ending was no more than a cruel joke, a Hollywood fantasy in which the ones who hurt you got what they deserved.

  EDDIE

  As he pulled up to the curb in front of Tony’s house, Eddie was relieved to see that Sara’s red Explorer was the only vehicle in the driveway. He had not wanted to find some strange car parked there. He knew what that might mean, that there was a guy in Tony’s house, in bed with Tony’s wife. He didn’t want to think about this because he liked Sara. She’d always been nice to him and he didn’t want to imagine that she was doing the wrong thing now, something he didn’t want to tell Tony, though he knew he’d have to.

  He got out of the car, walked to the front door, and knocked lightly.

  No answer.

  He knocked again.

  Still no answer.

  He peered through the narrow window in the door. Beyond it, he could see the living room, but it didn’t look like a room anyone really lived in. It looked like a picture in one of those magazines his mother used to buy at the corner drugstore, rich people’s homes, always with gleaming floors and fresh flowers, and this feeling that no one really lived there.

  He inserted the key but didn’t turn it. It was someone else’s house, and he felt a biting reluctance to go inside. More, it was a woman’s house, a woman alone, if she were there at all. What if he came upon her when she was . . . doing something women do. He knew Tony had given him permission to go inside, even ordered him to do it. Still, he couldn’t. Even if Tony’s wife weren’t there, he might see her things lying around, her panties, a bra, and if you saw those things, the intimate apparel of another man’s wife, didn’t that mean that you knew too much about her, because only Tony should see such things, touch them. He shook his head. No, he would not go inside the house.

  And so he stepped off the porch and walked to the back of the house, moving along the wooden fenc
e that enclosed the backyard. The pool was covered, the pool furniture stored in the cabana. The diving board stretched out over the vacant cement cavern.

  Eddie stood on the recently mowed lawn and decided that this was an unhappy place. He didn’t know how he sensed such things, and he understood that no one would pay any attention to what he thought, and yet he knew absolutely that this house was unhappy and that if Tony’s wife had left it, there was a good reason for it. He would never say anything like this to Tony, of course, because no matter how it came out, Tony would hear it as an accusation. A guy always took it that way. He might rage about what a bitch his wife was, but in his heart he’d feel that in some important way he hadn’t measured up.

  He turned back toward the car, now resolved that he had nothing to bring back to Tony, nothing to tell him save that Sara’s car was in the driveway but that she hadn’t answered the door. Tony wouldn’t like it that he hadn’t gone inside the house, but what could be done about that? Nothing, Eddie thought, until he noticed a woman at the mailbox across the street and wondered if maybe she could help him out.

  DELLA

  He was a big guy and she was sure Tony had sent him. As he came toward her, she noticed his hands, how huge they were, and the shoulders, enormous. So maybe it wasn’t Tony who’d sent him, she thought, maybe the guy had been sent by Tony’s father, one of Old Man Labriola’s goons.