“No, not that,” Caruso interrupted. “I mean, did he say anything about some guy?”
“Some guy?”
“Some guy he maybe spotted.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Some guy he maybe caught following him.”
Mortimer felt a keen pain in his side, the slash of a knife. “What makes you think somebody was following him?”
Caruso crushed the napkin in his fist. “Somebody was following him, Morty. I know that for a fact.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I set it up,” Caruso answered. “Mr. Labriola wasn’t satisfied when he had that meeting with you. He still wanted to know who Batman was. So I put this guy on his trail.”
Mortimer stared at him, baffled. “Whose trail?”
“Batman’s.”
“How do you know who Batman is?”
Caruso sucked in a frantic breath. “I didn’t have no choice, Morty,” he said hurriedly. “Mr. Labriola, he don’t make suggestions. He gives orders, and if you don’t do what he says, bad stuff can happen.”
“That don’t answer my question how you know who Batman is.”
“Okay, all right, I know ’cause that day you met Mr. Labriola up on Columbus Circle, when you got out of the car, I tailed you down to the Village. To this bar. I figured maybe the barkeep was Batman.”
“Barkeep?”
“The guy owns that fucking bar on Twelfth Street.”
“Abe? He ain’t got nothing to do with this.”
“Okay, so now I know it was the other one.”
“What other one?”
“Chelsea. White-haired guy. Silver. Hi-yo Silver, you know? Him.”
“Jesus,” Mortimer breathed. “Jesus Christ.”
“To tell you the truth,” Caruso said, “I always figured it was the white-haired guy, you know? And Mr. Labriola, he’s all lathered up about this thing, and so I ask myself, how the fuck can I do my business and keep an eye on this guy, and maybe the other one too. You see what I mean, Morty? No fucking way. So that’s when I decided to farm it out.”
“Farm it out?”
“Subcontract it, you might say. So, the thing is, I give this guy a choice and he picked Hi-yo Silver. Which, it looks like, turns out to be Batman.”
“That was stupid, Vinnie,” Mortimer said.
“I know, but the thing is, what would he do to this guy, Batman? If he noticed he was being followed?”
“What makes you think he’d do anything to him?”
“Because he’s missing, this guy,” Caruso said.
“Missing?” Mortimer worked to get his mind around this new wrinkle. “He just vanished?”
“Yeah.” Caruso leaned forward and lowered his voice slightly. “So the thing is, I figure Batman maybe did something to him?”
“Like what?”
“Like whatever it is that’s caused him to come up missing. I mean, you know, like whacking him.”
Mortimer snorted. “You’re fucking nuts.”
“I’m serious,” Caruso insisted. “The guy is missing is what I’m telling you.”
“So what?” Mortimer demanded. “Jesus, Vinnie, this guy comes up missing and you automatic gotta lay it on me.”
“Not you.”
“Same as me, Vinnie. Adds up to me.”
“I’m asking, is all,” Caruso said soothingly. “Just asking.”
Mortimer was not soothed. “And I’m telling you that there’s no reason my guy would do something to some fucking bastard that was just poking around,” he said adamantly.
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Okay, but could you check it out for me anyway?”
“Check it out? What are you talking about?”
“Check with Batman, make sure he ain’t done nothing.”
“I’m telling you, he ain’t. That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Just the same, check it out.”
“How? You think I can just ask him straight out? It ain’t like that with him. If he did something to this guy, he ain’t gonna tell me about it.”
“But you could get a hint, right?”
“He don’t give hints,” Mortimer said. “If he’s done something to this fucking guy, he ain’t gonna tell me about it.”
“Shit.”
Mortimer noticed that Caruso’s face fell slightly. “This missing guy, you know him?”
Caruso nodded. “From the old days. He done me a favor. I figured I was doing him one by putting him on to Batman. But it didn’t turn out that way, looks like.” His tone darkened. “I got a feeling, Morty. I got a feeling something bad happened to this guy. And he was a good guy, the one I put on Batman. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He released a weary sigh. “Just check it out, that’s all I’m asking.”
Another blade of pain sliced across Mortimer’s abdomen. “Fuck,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Mortimer said.
“So, can you check it out for me?”
“Okay, okay,” Mortimer said. He pressed his open palm against his stomach. “But this is the last favor, Vinnie. You get what I’m saying? This whole deal is getting more and more fucked up.”
“I know,” Caruso said. “And Labriola is getting more and more steamed.”
“How do you know that?”
“He calls me, says I got to report every fucking day.”
“Report what?”
“Whatever’s going on. He’s got a real bug up his ass about this fucking bitch.”
Mortimer sucked in a labored breath and thought how fucked up things got if you didn’t keep your eye on the ball every goddamn second. He’d begun with a simple plan to get a few bucks for Dottie, now a guy was missing, Old Man Labriola was fuming, and God only knew what else was going on that he didn’t even fucking know about. “Things are getting out of control, Vinnie.”
“Yeah.”
Mortimer sat back and tried to sort out the jumble in his mind. Finally, he said, “What do you think, Vinnie, can we get out of this deal? I mean, suppose I just told Labriola it’s over. Deal’s off. Give back the money. All the money. Every penny.”
Caruso shook his head. “That wouldn’t do no good. He wants that fucking woman is what he wants. He don’t give a shit about nothing else. He’s all lathered up, like I said.”
“What’s his beef with her?” Mortimer asked. “I don’t get it. It ain’t like she left him.”
Caruso shrugged. “All I know is, he’s gonna find her, Morty. And there ain’t nobody can stop him.”
STARK
He opened the door and the light swept over the crumpled parka, the dusty jeans, the wrinkled, grease-stained shirt, and up the bare naked feet that now trembled slightly against the white plastic bands that held them in place against the metal legs of the chair.
“Who sent you?” Stark asked.
No answer came, but Stark could hear the man’s rhythmic breathing. He lit a cigarette and blew a column of smoke into the blackness. He’d held the man all night, simply left him tied in a chair, sitting in the darkness, in his underwear, barefoot, vulnerable.
“I need a name,” Stark said.
The feet moved, but there was no other response.
“Who sent you?”
Stark waited for a reply, though he knew it would be incoherent, at most a grunt. The tape would make any more articulate response impossible.
“Are you the woman’s husband?”
The man strained against the bands that held him to the chair.
“Or do you just work for him?”
The man’s head trembled, and beneath the tape his lips fluttered briefly then grew still.
Stark stepped over and raked a single finger down the man’s jaw. “Who do you work for?”
The man made no effort to speak but only glared silently, his jaw now set and rigid, like a fighter readying for the blow.
“Did you really think y
ou could do it?”
The man shifted his eyes to the right and stared at the room’s blank wall.
“Did you think I would lead you to a woman and then let you hurt her?”
The man drew his gaze back to Stark, staring at him intently, as if trying to see into the working of his brain. Then he closed his eyes.
EDDIE
In the darkness Eddie tried to imagine the man who stared at him from just beyond the closed lids of his eyes. He couldn’t see him, but he knew he was there, towering over him. He could hear his steady breathing. Slowly, the man himself swam out of the darkness, vaguely translucent, an afterimage in Eddie’s mind. He was tall with silver hair, and his eyes were blue, and he wore clothes that Eddie had only seen in movies and on brief trips to midtown Manhattan. He was one of those people, the ones who controlled things, and beside whom everyone else felt small.
And he was smart too. Eddie knew that much. He’d turned the tables on him, accused him of following him so he’d be there when Tony’s wife was found, be there because he was going to hurt Tony’s wife. I know this game. That’s what the man had said. I fell for it once, but never again. But none of that was true. Eddie knew that much. None of it was true because the man with the silver hair was working for Tony’s father, one of his thugs, a guy he’d hired to track Sara down.
In his mind Eddie recalled Sara as she’d appeared the last time he’d seen her. She’d seemed sweet and lovely, and she’d smiled at him and said hello but he knew that even if she’d hardly noticed him or treated him badly he’d still be holding out the way he was because it really wasn’t about Sara. It was about Tony, this guy who’d stood with him when his father died, and sent him a Christmas card, and sometimes took him out for a steak and fries. Tony, who’d visited him in the hospital when he got hurt on the job and seemed to know when he needed a hand. Tony had done all of that despite the fact that he was busy and his business was in trouble and he had worries of his own, and so it was clear to Eddie that you knew who your friends were not by their favors but by their sacrifice.
“Who sent you?”
He opened his eyes and the silver-haired man was peering at him, his face very still and menacing, like a snake poised to strike.
“Who sent you?”
The silver-haired man ripped the tape from his mouth with a fierce, violent jerk.
“Who sent you?” he repeated, now very sharply.
Eddie closed his eyes again and thought of Tony at his side, and it seemed to him that in the end a friend could be judged only by how much he was willing to lose. He drew a steely breath, opened his eyes, and glared defiantly at the man whose face was very near him now, and in which he saw a terrible capacity for violence. He never used bad language, but just this once it seemed okay.
“Fuck you,” he said.
ABE
He sat down behind his desk and stared at the pile of bills, the liquor stacked high in cardboard boxes, the calendar that hung from the wall like a condemned man. Nothing would change in this room, he thought, if nothing changed in his life. Someone would simply come in one day and find him curled over the desk or sprawled on the floor. That was the curtain he saw. End of Act Three.
And so he reached for the phone and dialed Lucille’s old number.
“Hello.”
“Samantha, it’s Abe.”
“Oh, hi.”
“Listen,” he began, then stopped and drew in a quick, uncertain breath. “Listen, about tonight. I thought maybe you should start off with something lively.”
“Okay.”
“Something to get their attention, you know. And then maybe end it with a ballad. Tug the heartstrings, you know?”
“All right.”
There was a pause, and he knew she was waiting for some final word. He considered his options for a moment, then charged ahead like a man out of the trenches.
“And one more thing,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we could have dinner before you come to the bar. You know, talk things over. Then we could go to the bar and maybe we could sit around awhile, and then, whenever you feel like it, you get up, do the songs.”
“Okay,” she said.
He gave her the name of the restaurant he’d already chosen just in case and told her to meet him there at eight. When she said fine, he hung up and sat back in his chair with a modest sense of achievement, not the thrill of winning the race, but at least the knowledge that when the starting gun fired, you came out of the gate.
DELLA
It was her business, she thought, but what could she do about it?
She sat at the table, Nicky now sleeping soundly, and smoked the first cigarette she’d had in three years. She’d bought the pack at the convenience store on the way back from her mother’s house, asking for it guiltily, like a teenager hoping the orange-haired clerk behind the register wouldn’t demand proof of age.
After that she’d driven directly home, put Nicky down for his afternoon nap, then wandered into the kitchen to light up. She knew why she was smoking. Nerves. She couldn’t get the look on her mother’s face out of her mind, the terrible, hopeless fear she’d seen in the old woman’s eyes. And something else too, Leo Labriola, the way he’d grabbed her arm and written his number on her wrist. The remembered violence of that act, the nip of the pen in her flesh, now seemed more real than anything around her. He knew his business, Labriola, she thought, knew exactly how to terrorize people, make them cringe.
Labriola was capable of anything. That much was absolutely clear now. Whatever feeble hope that he was all bluff and hot air, a posturing old man who could rage and bluster with the best of them but in the end do nothing, all she’d used to convince herself that Sara wasn’t really in danger, all of that was gone, and she was left only with the certain knowledge that the danger she was in was even deeper than she’d supposed. Not only would Labriola hurt her, he would enjoy doing so, and that enjoyment would itself blossom and expand, urging him to greater outrages against her. He wouldn’t just kill her, Della decided, he would torture her. He would beat her up or burn her with cigarettes or pass a blowtorch up her arm or use a chain saw the way Colombian drug lords did to the people who crossed them. She’d read about these things in books and magazines, and she knew they were true, that some people were capable of indescribable cruelty, and that Leo Labriola was that kind of man.
She crushed the first cigarette into the saucer she’d commandeered for an ashtray, then lit another one and tried to find a way out of the situation that would somehow save everyone from harm. It was all she wanted, just that simple measure of getting everyone through this thing—Sara, her mother, Mike, Nicky, herself—everyone through this thing unharmed.
But how?
She considered the situation, trying to focus on a solution, a way out, but each time, the situation itself exploded into a thousand glittering shards. This flying apart happened, she thought, because she simply lacked the capacity to think. Bright people saw the world with a clarity that was beyond her. They could find a pattern, chart a road through the entangling forest. But she saw only what was directly before her. It had always been that way, she thought. It was as if her brain were a gigantic eye that could detect only the brightest colors, all subtlety and shading beyond her view. She was like a ship that sailed from island to island on a journey that moved from Big Thing to Big Thing. GET A BOYFRIEND. MARRY. HAVE KIDS.
The trip had gone remarkably smoothly, she realized, the sea always calm in a world without storms and where night never fell. But now everything was storm-tossed and she could feel a terrible blackness approaching. She remembered Sara talking about a play in which, at the end, the whole house was turned upside down, everything falling on top of everything else, and it seemed to Della that her own house might do the same thing; one wrong move and everything she loved would be annihilated.
Maybe the thing to do, she reasoned, was to rate love. Make a list of people you cared for. The one you loved the most was at number one. Next w
as number two. And if helping the third person on the list put the people at one and two in danger, then you just didn’t do it. Number one for her, she decided, was Nicky. Number two was Denise. Then Mike. Her mother, grudgingly, made number four. Okay, she thought, if helping Sara endangered the others, then I won’t help Sara. That was simple enough, wasn’t it? Yes, she thought, momentarily pleased with the little mathematical scheme she’d worked out. Then, in the midst of that satisfaction, blurring the clarity of rated love, another calculation emerged. Herself. Where did she fit in the scheme she’d worked out? Who would she be—what would be left of her—if she turned away from a friend in danger, made no attempt to warn her, save her, but simply closed the door, turned out the light, and with that gesture switched off the power to her heart?
STARK
The buzzer sounded unexpectedly, and like all such surprises, it was unwelcome. He walked to the door and opened it.
“Sorry to bother you,” Mortimer said. He took off his hat but didn’t leave it on the rack by the door. “You busy?”
Stark closed the door, leaving the two of them in the shadowy light of the foyer. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s about my friend,” Mortimer told him. “The one you’re helping out.”
“Did he give you more information?”
Mortimer shook his head. “The thing is, he’s in a bind. Complications. He’s got complications.”
Stark said nothing. Instead, he worked to conceal the raging sense of betrayal he felt in the certainty that Mortimer had lied to him.
“So, that’s what we need to talk about,” Mortimer said.
Stark faced him squarely in the foyer’s shadows. “Talk,” he said.
MORTIMER
Talk.
That was all Stark said, and at that instant Mortimer thought, He knows.
But he was not sure what Stark knew. Only that he knew something, and that what he knew was very bad. He could see how bad it was in Stark’s pale blue eyes. Because of that, Mortimer knew that his own next words were crucial, that they had to give Stark the impression that it had all been a mistake, that whatever Stark had discovered, Mortimer had also discovered it, that they’d both been fooled, not that one had attempted to fool the other.
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