Peril

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Hi,” the man said as he drew close.

  She closed the lid of the mailbox before replying. “Hello.”

  “My name’s Eddie,” the man said. “Eddie Sullivan.”

  The guy smiled, and Della thought it a warm, curiously innocent smile. But then, these guys all smiled that way, didn’t they? These made men who joked with you until the moment they wrapped the cord around your neck or put a bullet in your head. She’d seen guys like that in the movies, and she believed the movies were true.

  “I was wondering if you know the people across the way,” the man said. “Tony Labriola? Sara?”

  She felt her hands tighten around the stack of bills she’d just retrieved from the mailbox. “I know Sara.”

  The man smiled again. He had a gap between his teeth and looked harmless, but she steeled herself against believing that he really was. A guy like that, she told herself, a guy like that could break your neck in a second, then go have a big bowl of his mother’s Irish stew and forget the whole thing.

  “Tony’s been calling Sara all morning, but she don’t answer,” the man said. “He’s worried about her. Maybe she had an accident, something like that. He sent me over to see if she’s okay.”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Della said.

  “This morning, you mean?”

  “I haven’t seen her in a couple of days.” Della thought of her last sight of Sara. She’d looked the way women did whose husbands slapped them around, but Della couldn’t imagine Tony doing that and so had supposed it was something else that was eating Sara. Maybe the fact that she’d never had any kids. Women without kids looked that way sometimes, Della knew, all hollowed out.

  “Tony give me a key to the house,” the man told her. “But, you know, I didn’t want to . . . barge in, maybe scare somebody, you know?” He drew the keys from the pocket of a blue parka and offered them to her. “So, maybe you could take a look inside. Make sure there ain’t nothing wrong.”

  She didn’t know how to refuse, so she took the keys and walked with the man back across the street, unlocked Sara’s front door, and walked into the house.

  “Sara?” she called. “Sara, you here?”

  She turned and noticed that the man remained outside, and suddenly he seemed astonishingly shy to her, and good, the sort of man who turned away from the embarrassment of others. “I don’t think she’s home,” she told him.

  The man stepped to the door but did not come in. “Would you mind looking upstairs? She could be up there. Sleeping or . . . something.”

  She felt at ease with him now. There were certain men who made women feel that way, that they lived only to protect you, that it was their mission. Mike made her feel that way. “Okay,” she said.

  She made her way up the stairs. “Sara?” she called again. “Sara?”

  At the top of the stairs she could see into the master bedroom. Tony’s clothes lay on the floor beside the bed, and the bed itself was unmade.

  “She’s not here,” she told the man when she came back out of the house. “I looked all over.”

  He seemed saddened by this news but not surprised. “Okay, thanks,” he said.

  They walked back to the man’s car. She stood beside it as he got in. She felt no fear of him now, no dread. It surprised her that she wanted to know more about him, maybe ask him how despite being so big and looking so scary, he had achieved this grace.

  STARK

  She was experienced, as he expected, and preferred to be on top. She kept her blouse on but unbuttoned the sleeves and rolled them up to the elbow. Her breathing came in quick, rhythmic spurts, and on the downstroke, little pleasurable bursts of vulgarity broke from her. “Oh, shit,” she groaned, then took a deep breath. “Oh, fuck,” she gasped. She reared back, swept her hair from her eyes, and switched to a grinding motion. “Oh, Christ.” Her movements grew more rapid. “I’m going to get it,” she said with a quick laugh. “I’m going to get it, baby.”

  Then she did, and after that rolled off him and lay on her back and gazed at the ceiling.

  “Do you know what they call it in the South?” she asked. “When you get it, I mean. A nut. They call it getting your nut.” She shifted onto her side, rested her head in her hand, and stared at him. “Did it bother you . . . about keeping my blouse on?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve had some . . . problems, so . . .”

  He touched her lips with his finger. “It didn’t bother me.”

  She brushed back a strand of his silver hair. “You’re probably married. With a couple of kids.”

  He neither confirmed nor denied this.

  She remained silent for a time, then said, “I took the room just for the day. I do that once a month or so. To stay alive.”

  She was trying to explain something he’d heard before, that life was inadequate, a quick fuck at the Plaza just another survival tool. And why not? Nothing lasted. Nothing held. Life was just a long improvisation. You feinted left or right, and by that means dodged the blow.

  “So, what do you think . . . Frank,” she said. “Maybe we could save the country again sometime.”

  He shook his head.

  She looked at him piercingly, and he saw a wound open up inside her. “Just not interested, is that it?” she asked.

  Inevitably, the time had come to lie to her. “I’m leaving town.”

  Inevitably, she did not believe it. “Whatever you say, mystery man.” She shrugged indifferently, but there was a bitter glint in her eye. “Too bad.” She pulled herself from the bed and began to dress. He took the cue and did the same.

  A few minutes later they strolled out of the Plaza and made their way toward Fifth Avenue. The circular fountain sprayed its fine mist. Chauffeurs were gathered in small knots, smoking.

  “Pretty,” she said. There was a mist in her eyes. “So pretty.”

  They walked along the avenue. The silence between them lengthened and grew heavier with each step.

  At last she stopped and faced him. “May I ask you something? Do you do this . . . a lot?”

  The time had come to cut the cord, and he knew that any effort to do it slowly would only make things worse. “Every chance I get,” he said.

  “Does it matter . . . who?”

  “No.”

  “How very . . . romantic.” Her tone suddenly grew brittle. “I should have guessed as much. All you mystery men are shits.”

  He gave no response but only stepped over to the curb and hailed a cab while she watched him, fuming now, from a few feet away.

  When the cab pulled over he got in. “Four forty-five West Nineteenth,” he said.

  She bolted forward and rapped at the window, her eyes flaring vehemently. “Fuck you, mystery man.”

  The cab pulled away and he fixed his gaze on the rearview mirror, where he could see the driver’s eyes peering at him. They were dark and sunken and they reminded him of Marisol. Her voice returned to him in a ghostly whisper, Sabes que me matará. You know he’s going to kill me.

  He closed his eyes and let the black curtain fall. When he opened them again, the cab was turning onto Nineteenth Street, and it had begun to rain.

  ABE

  The old awning resisted him like a creature with a will of its own.

  “Come on now,” he blurted out impatiently.

  Abe gave the crank a furious jerk, and the awning creaked out a little, covering just enough of the sidewalk to allow pedestrians to take cover beneath it but not enough for the side flap to display the full name of the bar. Rain-soaked strangers would think they were scurrying into a tavern called “McPhe,” not one named for its first owner, Casey McPherson.

  “Lucille’s not coming in tonight,” Abe said when Jorge arrived a few minutes later.

  “In one of her moods,” Jake added.

  Jorge shrugged. “Yah, okay, thas goo.” He hurried into the back.

  “Thas goo,” Jake repeated with a laugh. “You could tell him you’d just eaten your own fingers an
d he’d say ‘Yah, okay, thas goo’.”

  Jake was nearly seventy, with sloping shoulders and a shrunken face. He seemed to slither more than walk. Behind his thin lips, it was easy to imagine a forked tongue. “As for Lucille, she should see a doctor. They got pills for it now. I seen them advertised on TV. You pop a pill and it’s blue skies all the way.”

  Abe had advised Lucille to take medication, but it had done no good. Lucille called her dark mood The Weight, and he knew how it worked in her, falling before midnight and growing heavier every minute so that she felt that she was being slowly squeezed to death, each second dropping upon her like a stone. By dawn she’d have lost all desire to open her eyes. And why not? All she’d see was a cramped, dingy room, chairs littered with old newspapers, piles of square white boxes from Tan’s Golden Dragon. Abe wondered how long it had been since she’d ordered anything but moo goo gai pan. That should have told her that it was getting worse, he thought, that The Weight would continue to fall upon her until it crushed everything—touch, taste, smell—left her with no sensation whatever except the impossible heaviness of the surrounding air.

  And yet, for all that, she’d been a first-class singer when he’d met her years before. Like the best bar singers, she’d always known what the customers expected of her, how they wanted to have their spirits lifted. She’d been able to do that because she’d understood that in every man there was a knight, and in every woman a lady of the lake. The knights were fallen and the women were faded, but their vision of themselves lived on. If you kept that vision in mind, you could make each customer feel special. For years Lucille had accomplished that extraordinary feat, but at some point The Weight had crushed it, and she’d stopped singing except by rote, just mouthing the lyrics to no one in particular. He’d briefly thought of letting her go but lacked the heart to do it, and so simply had done nothing but helplessly watch The Weight grow heavier each year.

  Jorge returned to the bar, mop in hand. “Okay I start now?”

  “Yeah,” Abe said, then grabbed a stack of envelopes from beside the cash register, walked to a booth at the rear of the bar, and began to do the bills. Casey McPherson had taught him to pay everything on time. That way, if you ever had a problem, the suppliers would cut you a little slack. Twenty years had passed since then, but Abe had yet to ask anyone to wait for the money or take less than what was owed. That’s the one thing he could say, the bar had sustained him. It paid for his apartment on Grove Street and the occasional night at some cabaret joint uptown. Those were the nights he lived for, a table alone, a dark room, a singer with a trio—piano, sax, bass—an ensemble so pure in Abe’s mind that there were moments, brief and a little scary, when the voice and the instruments joined in an arrangement so balanced, so inexpressibly right, it brought tears to his eyes. There were even a couple of times when he had actually hit that elusive mark himself, the unexpected D-flat he’d added at the end of his arrangement of “She Was Too Good to Me,” for example. Perfect. He looked up from the bills and remembered the sound of it, the way Lucille’s voice had curled around the note, so sad and lost and goddamn hopeless. That was a moment, he told himself now, smiling quietly the way he always did when he thought of something really good.

  MORTIMER

  The car swept up beside him before he’d even noticed it, but once he saw Caruso get out, he knew he was in deep shit.

  “Hello, Morty,” Caruso said.

  “Vinnie.”

  “Let’s take a ride.”

  Mortimer climbed into the car. “I’m gonna pay you, Vinnie,” he said.

  “Oh, I know you are, Morty,” Caruso said.

  Mortimer could see that Caruso was trying hard to add a hint of the psychopath, the idea that not only would he hurt you, he’d have a great time doing it.

  “It’s just a question of whether you do it now or after you’ve maybe lost a piece of yourself,” Caruso added.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Suddenly Caruso grabbed Mortimer’s left wrist and squeezed. “Spread your fingers.”

  “Oh, come on, Vinnie . . .”

  “Spread your fucking fingers!”

  Mortimer gave in and spread his fingers, then watched as Caruso’s gaze snagged on his wedding band.

  “A married man,” Caruso said. “Your wife love you, Morty?”

  Mortimer shrugged.

  Caruso released Mortimer’s hand. “So here’s the thing. You’re down fifteen grand. So I ask myself, has Morty got that kind of cash? And I say to myself, I don’t know and I don’t fucking care. ’Cause if Morty don’t have it, he’s gonna get it. He’s gonna pay me. I’m right about that. I know I am. Because you’re not stupid, Morty. And you know what happens to a guy if he don’t pay me. Right?”

  Mortimer nodded dully.

  “So what are we looking at? Week?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Good,” Caruso said. He seemed glad that it was over, as if the psycho act were a heavy load he was happy to lay down. “So, we’re clear then.”

  “We’re clear,” Mortimer said.

  The car stopped and Caruso reached over and swung open the door on Mortimer’s side. “So, you feeling okay, Morty?” he asked like a guy who’d hurt another guy’s feelings and was now looking to make up.

  “I’m fine,” Mortimer said a little sourly, but only because the pain had suddenly swept in again, reminding him of the little time that remained, and all the time before it that he’d wasted, and how time was like a river that swept you along invisibly, taking some people to nice well-lit places and others into the deep dark wood.

  STARK

  The scotch was warm, and he settled back in the high leather chair and listened to Brahms’s violin concerto, the final movement, where all the yearning was. So much yearning, he thought, the lone violin seemed to reach ever upward, toward some impossible height of unquenchable desire. To be captured by such longing for even the briefest moment, he knew, could change a man forever.

  He closed his eyes and she was with him.

  Marisol.

  The odd truth assailed him once again, the fact that he’d traveled the world only to find the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen lounging in a small bar in Chueca, on the dark side of Madrid.

  It had begun as business, just another day in the life of one whose job it was to find the scattered pieces of broken lives. Runaway partners, children, husbands, wives, people he tracked down and bought back to what they’d shattered when they left—homes, businesses, a lolling sense of trust. He’d always understood that it was not his job to put anything back together—blasted families, companies, estates. He simply brought back the ones who’d fled the destruction so that they could face whatever punishment or reconciliation his clients had in mind.

  He remembered the small packet of information Lockridge had given him.

  Lockridge, who claimed to be Marisol’s lover.

  Lockridge, who claimed to want her back because he loved her so.

  Lockridge, who said he only wanted a chance to talk to Marisol, apologize, beg her to return.

  Lockridge, who swore that if Marisol refused to go back to him, he would let her go.

  There’d been a photo of the woman in question, but it hadn’t done her justice. A beauty like hers was rare and deep, but it was not the beauty of a fashion model or a movie star. Nothing about her appearance seemed the product of oils and powders, the right slant of light. Her loveliness made its own light, and this light flowed over her like a stream.

  “She’s a seductress,” Lockridge had written along the margin of the photograph, “so be careful.”

  Careful, Stark thought now, lifting the glass to his lips again as he recalled the moment he’d first seen her in the flesh, the way she’d looked at the little wrought-iron table in Chueca, her long, slender fingers curled around a glass of red wine to which she’d just added a burst of Casera water. Her black skirt fell well below her knees, and her plain white blouse was knotted at the front and open j
ust enough so that the orbs of her brown breasts were slightly visible.

  Her coal-black hair had thrown off small white flashes when she’d turned her head at his approach, and as he’d drawn near, he’d seen tiny drops of sweat along her upper lip. But it was her eyes he most remembered when he remembered her—dark, oval, with a hint of ancient coastal towns about them. “Buenas tardes, señor” was all she’d said.

  TONY

  He sat behind the wheel and stared at the house, the unlighted windows, the motionless curtains, the Explorer that rested in the otherwise vacant driveway, everything just as Eddie had described it after he’d gotten back to the marina.

  She was gone. The pain of her leaving turned instantly to a wild, inchoate anger, so that he flew out of the car and strode across the lawn and bolted into the house as if carried on a boiling wave.

  Once inside, he slammed through the first floor, checking each room, then stormed up to the second floor, where he did the same. In the bedroom he made no move to retrieve his clothes from the floor, his attention focused instead on the unmade bed, the way she’d left the sheets rumpled, the blanket sagging toward the floor.

  A stinging heat assailed him, and in a single explosive charge he slammed his fist into the wall. The sting of the impact felt good, and so he hit the wall again and again and again, until he’d pounded a gaping hole into the plaster and bits of shattered debris lay scattered like small white bones at his feet.

  When it was over, he slumped down on the plush blue carpet. In his mind he saw Sara as she’d appeared the night he’d met her, a slender young woman with shoulder-length hair who’d come on tough and worldly but had melted at his touch. He felt the sweetness of her unexpected surrender, the way she’d given herself up to him, the fever and the shuddering and the low moan, the way she’d whispered “I love you” that first time. To hear her say that again, just once, was all he wanted now.

  ABE

  It was a slow night. By ten there were only four people left in the bar, all of them regulars, some who’d even known McPherson when he’d still owned the place and Abe when he’d played for tips, the Bordeaux glass filling slowly with crumpled bills and pocket change as night crawled toward morning, and Lucille leaned back against the piano and drew a red feather boa along her bare white shoulders and broke into the final, melancholy song before last call.