Peril

  Vinnie lifted the glass. “To old times.”

  “Old times,” Eddie echoed.

  The glasses clinked together and each man drank.

  “You been waiting long?” Vinnie asked.

  Eddie shook his head.

  Vinnie leaned forward. “So, what’s on your mind, Eddie?”

  There seemed no way to edge around it, close in slowly, so Eddie said, “You know about Tony, right? That his wife left him?”

  “Yeah, I heard about it.”

  “Tony says his father is trying to find her.”

  Vinnie’s fingers tightened around the scotch. “So?”

  “So I was wondering if he asked you to do it.”

  Vinnie took a quick hit from the scotch, then set the glass down hard. “I don’t talk about business, Eddie.”

  “That means yes, right?”

  “That means I don’t talk about business is what that means.”

  “The thing is, Tony’s spooked,” Eddie said.

  “Spooked? Why?”

  “ ’Cause he don’t know what his father has in mind.”

  “For that wife of his?”

  “Yeah. He don’t want nobody strong-arming her.”

  “Who said anybody was gonna strong-arm her?”

  “He’s afraid, that’s all,” Eddie said. “You know how Labriola is.”

  “Mr. Labriola just wants to find his wife for him,” Caruso said. “Then he’ll tell Tony where she is and Tony, he goes and talks to her.”

  “He told you that? The Old Man?”

  “Yeah,” Caruso said.

  “So you’re looking for her?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Caruso admitted. “But like I said, Mr. Labriola, he just wants they should talk, Tony and his wife, work things out, you know what I mean? Make nice. He don’t like it when things don’t go smooth.”

  Eddie looked at Vinnie doubtfully.

  “What?” Vinnie asked crisply.

  “And if the wife didn’t want to make nice, you wouldn’t do nothing to her, would you, Vinnie?”

  “What would I do?”

  “You wouldn’t do nothing is what I’m asking.”

  “Why you asking me that, Eddie?”

  “I’m asking because suppose you find Tony’s wife and she don’t want to have nothing to do with Tony. What then?”

  “What then?”

  “What do you do?”

  “To the broad, you mean?”

  “Tony’s wife, yeah. Supposing you find her and she don’t want to . . .”

  Caruso laughed. “Suppose I ain’t actually the guy looking is what you should be supposing.”

  “You ain’t looking for her?”

  “No,” Vinnie said. “Not me personal.”

  “Who is?”

  Vinnie laughed. “I ain’t sure myself. All I know is this. Mr. Labriola had me pay a guy to find Tony’s wife. So I did.”

  “You paid a guy?”

  “Paid him plenty.”

  “What guy you pay, Vinnie?”

  “A guy ain’t connected to Mr. Labriola or me or Tony or nobody else you ever heard of.” Caruso laughed. “Mr. Labriola mulled over some guys. Burt Marx, remember him? I told the Old Man, I said, ‘Burt Marx? That fucking guy couldn’t find a chink in Chinatown.’ ”

  “So who’s looking? Who’s the guy?”

  Vinnie suddenly glanced about nervously. “You think I can tell you that, Eddie?”

  “Vinnie, you remember that night when we come up on each other there at the hotel?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “And we talked awhile, right, you and me? And then I got up to leave and you said, ‘So, Eddie, how you doing?’ Remember that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so, this is how I’m doing. I need to know who this guy is, Vinnie. The one looking for Tony’s wife.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “It ain’t for me,” Eddie answered. “It’s for Tony.”

  “What does he care who’s looking, long as she turns up?”

  “He wants to know what’s going on, that’s all. It’s his wife, you know, so he wants to know.”

  Caruso downed the last of his scotch. “Okay, suppose I give you this guy. What then?”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him, that’s all.”

  “Just you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Caruso laughed. “You can’t watch a guy twenty-four hours a day.”

  “As much as I can, then. When he turns in, I’ll turn in.”

  Caruso considered this for a moment, then said, “You know what Mr. Labriola would do to me, don’t you, Eddie?”

  Eddie nodded.

  “You get any idea the guy’s maybe getting suspicious, maybe catching on to you, you got to back off, you understand? And I mean fast, Eddie. You don’t look back. You just back off and he don’t see you no more.”

  “Okay.”

  Caruso plucked a cigar from his jacket. “ ’Cause let me tell you something, this guy, he’ll drop the deal he gets wind of something. And you know what would happen if this guy dropped the deal he has with Mr. Labriola?” He lowered his voice to a desperate whisper. “I’d have to whack him, that’s what.”

  “You?”

  Caruso lit the cigar and waved out the match expansively. “Who else would Mr. Labriola trust with a job like that?”

  Eddie gave no answer.

  “So we’re clear on this?” Caruso asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Caruso rose and motioned Eddie to follow him outside. They walked to Caruso’s car and got in. “Okay, Eddie, here’s the deal.” In the car’s shadowy interior, Caruso’s eyes gleamed eerily. “There are two guys could be looking for Tony’s wife. I ain’t sure which one. There’s a guy runs a bar on Twelfth Street in Manhattan. Morgenstern. It could be him, but I don’t think so. The other guy lives in Chelsea, 445 West 19 Street. Right off Ninth Avenue. You pick.”

  “The bar guy, you don’t think it’s him looking for Sara?”

  “My guess, no.”

  “Okay.” Eddie offered his hand. “I’ll keep an eye on the other one.”

  “Up to you,” Caruso said with a light shrug.

  “Yeah, okay, the other one. Chelsea.”

  “Good enough,” Caruso said. “I only seen the guy once. Fifties, I’d say. White hair. Tall. Thin.” He grasped Eddie’s hand. “One thing, though,” he added. “Whatever you find out about this fuck, you gotta let me know.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Eddie said. He drew his hand back, but Caruso held on to it.

  “I mean it, Eddie,” Caruso warned. “This is business, and you tell me you’re going to keep me posted, you gotta do it.” He released Eddie’s hand. “You don’t, then favors, friendship, that’s all in the shitcan now.”

  SARA

  She sat across from him in a booth at the back and listened as he detailed the terms. The basic salary was decent, and she’d get a piece of the music charge, and even better, a piece of the bar, which she knew was more than fair. They never liked to give a piece of the bar, and she couldn’t remember ever having been offered it until now. But here this guy was, giving her a piece of the bar, and yet, as she listened, the cold, hard truth kept pressing against her mind, the fact that she simply couldn’t do it, couldn’t take the offer, the whole thing was impossible.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked.

  She had to tell him and she knew it. She had to tell him right now that she’d made a big mistake, that she couldn’t possibly take the job, this great deal he was handing her. She had to tell him that she’d been taken in by her own pathetic fantasy of being a singer again, even stupidly blurted out her old stage name, and that now she was sorry, really sorry, that she’d wasted his time.

  “Samantha?”

  Okay, she thought, I’ll do that. I’ll tell him that Samantha Damonte is a phony name, that I’m married and on the run, and that the only job I could possibly take would be one I could hide behind, a job in t
he back or in the basement.

  “Does it sound fair?” Abe asked.

  “Fair?” she asked weakly.

  “Is there something else you want?”

  She shook her head at how crazy she’d been to let herself get caught up in this fantasy that she could return to a singing career, erase Tony and his father, take any kind of job other than one she could crawl into and pull over her head like a thick blanket. A singer? Ridiculous. Even in a little bar like Abe’s, the singer’s name and photograph would be taped on the window or the door, her face for the whole world to see.

  “I mean, we could . . . negotiate a few things,” Abe said.

  She imagined Vinnie Caruso or some other of Labriola’s thugs seeing her picture, reporting what he’d seen to the Old Man. She could see Labriola’s smile, feel the wrath sweep over him, his desperate need to find her. She knew that he would stop at nothing to accomplish this, and on that thought she realized that she had now put this guy in danger just because she’d come into his place, sang a song, and been offered a job she couldn’t possibly take. The stark nature of her circumstances swept over her in a shivering wave, the terrible truth that she was not only in danger herself, but like some Long Island version of Typhoid Mary, infected everyone she touched.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She could feel his gaze like a hand, pressing her back to the wall. “Yeah, sure.”

  “So, what do you think? Sound good, the deal?”

  It sounded better than anything she could have imagined, but she knew no way to accept it. “It’s a very good deal,” she said quietly.

  “So?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Can’t what?”

  “Take the job.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes very intent. “Why not?”

  She began gathering her things. “I can’t.” She felt her own sudden frenzy, the desperate clawing of her fingers as she reached for her purse.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Hide,” she answered before she could stop herself.

  “From who, what?”

  She was on her feet, turning, the door of the bar before her now like an escape hatch.

  “For how long?” he asked.

  She looked at him, the word chilling her spirits with its fatality. “Forever,” she said.

  DELLA

  Her mother poured the coffee, then sat down. “So, how’s Mike?”

  “Fine,” Della said. She wiped a scattering of crumbs from Nicky’s mouth.

  Mrs. DaRocca smiled. “They all like graham crackers. You liked them. Your brother.”

  Della nodded crisply. “You heard from Chuck?”

  “Not in a couple weeks,” Mrs. DaRocca said. “He’s got a new girlfriend. When he has a new girlfriend, he forgets to call.”

  Della thought of her kid brother, remembered his tendency to mischief, the way she’d always tried to pull him out of whatever trouble he got himself into. She wished he were home now rather than on some army base out west, and so unable to help her, or even give advice. Unnecessarily, she brushed again at Nicky’s mouth, then glanced at her mother, recognized the look in her eyes.

  “You and Mike having trouble,” the old woman said.

  It was not a question, but a declaration, and for a moment Della thought it might be easier if it were true. Married trouble stared you in the face. There were ways to deal with it. A priest. A counselor. With married trouble, there was a line of defense, a method for dealing, maybe even a solution somewhere down the road.

  “Another woman?” her mother asked.

  “No, Ma,” Della said. “Nothing like that.”

  “Money?”

  “No, Ma,” Della repeated. She started to draw Nicky into her lap.

  “Leave him where he is,” Mrs. DaRocca snapped.

  Della obeyed instantly, like a little girl.

  “Look me in the eye and tell me nothing’s wrong,” the old woman demanded.

  Della knew she couldn’t do that.

  “It’s not you, is it? You’re not cheating on Mike?”

  “No!” Della cried indignantly. “Ma!”

  The old woman leaned forward. “So what is it, Della?”

  There was no escaping her, and Della knew it. Her only hope was to come up with a story her mother would believe. “It’s my neighbor,” she began, making it up as she went along. “His wife left him. He came over. He thought I might know where she went.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “So, how come you’re upset about this?”

  She shrugged, thought fast. “I don’t know. You just get to thinking, you know, about . . . things.”

  “What things you thinking about, Della? This ain’t got nothing to do with you, so what things you thinking about?”

  She was like a crab, Della thought, her mother. Once she grabbed on to something, she never let go. “You know, how a person can live with a person and maybe not know . . . anything. That’s the way it is with this guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “My neighbor. He didn’t have any idea she was going to leave him.”

  “Like he’s the first,” Mrs. DaRocca said with a laugh.

  “Anyway, it makes you think.”

  The old woman waved her hand. “It makes you think because you’re a worrier, Della. Always worrying about something.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Della said, hoping to drop the subject.

  But this only made her mother more intent. “Mike, he comes home every night, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you, you make dinner. You see everything’s clean. The other stuff, you know, private. That’s okay too, right?”

  “Yeah, Ma, it’s fine.”

  The old woman looked at her sternly. “So stop worrying about that neighbor of yours. It ain’t your problem.”

  “Right,” Della said. She saw Sara in the city, trying to start over, unaware of the mad dog that was hot on her trail, a vicious old dog that was tracking her relentlessly but one she could not tell Sara about for fear that it would turn on her as well. “Right,” she repeated. “Not my problem.”

  And yet if that were true, she wondered, then what was this pain she felt and which seemed to grow larger by the minute. She felt nothing but that deepening distress for a moment, then glanced up and saw that her mother’s eyes were bearing down with the old relentlessness she remembered from her girlhood, questions fired like rockets toward her ever-crumbling defenses, That boy treating you good? You letting that guy touch you? You pregnant?

  “Mike raise his hand to you?” the old woman asked sharply.

  “No!” Della shot back. “You know Mike. He wouldn’t—”

  “Della,” her mother said, cutting her off. “I look at you, and I see scared. Something’s scaring you.” She planted her fleshy arms on the table and leaned forward. “Now, what’s scaring you?”

  There was no point in lying to her, Della realized. For nearly forty years, the old lady had seen through her like a sheet of cellophane. “I don’t know what to do, Ma.”

  Her mother’s scowl was dark and fearsome. Even sitting, even completely still, she looked as if she were strapping on a gun.

  “You tell me right now, Della,” she commanded. “And don’t leave nothing out.”

  Della hesitated briefly, then said, “It’s Leo Labriola.”

  Her mother looked at her as if she’d just blurted out the ingredients of a secret recipe. “How you know him?”

  “My neighbor. Labriola’s his father.”

  “What’s that got to do with you?”

  “His wife ran off, like I said, and Mr. Labriola is looking for her. He came to my house. He wanted to know if I knew anything about Sara, that’s my neighbor, Tony’s wife, the one that ran off, who Labriola is looking for. And he . . . threatened me, Labriola did.”

  Her mother’s face seemed to gray and flush at the sa
me time, like firelight on a stone. “He done what?” she asked.

  “He threatened me,” Della repeated. “Grabbed my arm. Right there.” She rubbed her arm softly. “He scared me, Ma.” Her face was wreathed in shame. “And I didn’t tell Sara about it. That he was looking for her, I mean. But more than that. The way he’s looking, you know?”

  “What way?”

  “Like . . . mean. I didn’t tell Sara about that.”

  “How could you tell her? You talked to her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know where she is?”

  Della nodded. “But not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “She always talked about the city. I figure that’s where she went.”

  Mrs. DaRocca offered a surprisingly bright smile. “I’ll straighten this out, Della,” she said.

  “What?” Della asked unbelievingly.

  “I’ll straighten it out,” Mrs. DaRocca repeated. She patted her daughter’s arm. “Stop worrying about it.”

  And Della, to her vast surprise, did exactly that.

  CARUSO

  He felt smart, and he loved it when he felt smart. He’d always wanted to feel smart more than he’d wanted to feel anything else. More than he’d ever wanted to be good-looking or tough. You could be tall, dark, handsome, but none of that lasted very long. And in the end, nobody really admired a guy just for his looks. You admired a guy who was tough, could take a trimming, give back what he got, but only if he weren’t a dope at the same time. A moron with guts was mostly just a moron. But a guy with brains, that was a guy everybody admired. He’d heard somewhere that when a dolphin met a shark eye-to-eye in the ocean, it was the shark that blinked. That was what brains did for a guy, he thought, made the idiots give way.

  A soaring wave of self-esteem swept over him, and on the crest of that wave he picked up the phone, dialed the number, smiling pleasantly until Labriola answered.

  “I got it done,” Caruso told him.

  “Why you talk to me like a dope, Vinnie?” Labriola barked. “Huh? Why you do that?”

  Caruso felt the hot-air balloon deflate. “Well, I . . .”

  “I answer the fucking phone, right? And you don’t say who it is I’m talking to. You don’t say what it is you’re talking about. So answer me this, Vinnie. How do I know I’m not talking to some fucking cop, huh?”

  “I thought you’d—”