She reached the bottom of the stairs, then hurled herself down the walkway and through the gate, Labriola’s voice still rushing at her like a snarling dog.
“You tell that to your fucking daughter.”
She knew he’d stopped at the top of the stairs, but she didn’t dare look back to make sure, afraid that such a glance might inflame him further, send him flying through the clanging gate and after her again, his breath upon her back like a raging bear. And so she raced on down the street, her legs aching beneath her weight, her ankles shooting tongues of pain into her fleshy calves, until she finally stopped beside a tree, darted around it, then pressed her back against it, exhausted, panting, her mind still whirling in the aftermath of a meeting she’d thought might go well but which she would now remember only with a bitter taste, the last sweet thoughts of youth now shattered beyond repair, Labriola no more than a brutal old man, and she the fool who’d loved him all her life.
SARA
He arrived with roses wrapped in clear plastic, the stems secured with a blue rubber band.
“I got them at the corner deli,” he told her. “I figured they’d brighten the place up a little.”
She took them from him. “Thanks.”
They walked up the stairs, and she stood silently while he fumbled for the keys, retrieved them at last, then opened the door.
“Lucille used to have a vase in the kitchen,” he told her. “Top shelf.”
He found the vase, filled it with water, stuffed the flowers into it, and returned to the small living room, where he stood, glancing about. “You can rearrange things any way you want,” he said. Then he placed the vase on the small wooden table next to the front window. “Place could use a little light,” he said as he threw open the curtains.
A bright shaft of light swept down in a gleaming slant.
“I’ve never seen the curtains open,” he said, turning to her. “Lucille was, I don’t know, she didn’t like too much light. Actually, she didn’t like any at all.” He looked at the flowers. “Lucille didn’t like flowers either.”
“Why was she so unhappy?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know,” Abe answered. He faced the window. “Nice street. So, what do you think of the place?”
“I like it,” she said.
He moved to the piano and put down the music he’d brought. “I was hoping you’d sing again.” Before she could answer, he placed the music on the music stand. “I put them in the order I think they should be sung,” he told her. “I mean, if it were an act.”
She started to say no, to repeat once again that it was impossible, but he sat down and placed his hands on the keyboard. “Ready when you are.”
“I can’t,” she said.
He looked at her sternly. “You have to,” he said. “You have to, Samantha, or you’ll”— his eyes appeared almost to melt in the intensity of what he said—“or you’ll give up on everything.”
Tentatively, she stepped over to the piano, looked at the music, and began, singing softly at first, her eyes meeting his briefly, then leaping away.
She finished four songs before he said “Okay, that’s enough for now” and lowered the top back over the keys. “What you need is an audience,” he told her. “Feedback.” Before she could respond, he plunged ahead. “I don’t mean a full act. Just a few songs for a few people. The late-night crowd.” He smiled. “How about tonight?”
She felt her stomach draw into a knot.
“What’s the matter, Samantha?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I have to stay . . .”
“What?”
She shook her head.
“Hidden,” Abe said. “Isn’t that what you told me when I offered you a job? That you couldn’t take it because you had to stay hidden?”
She nodded.
“Who are you hiding from?”
She turned away, but he took her shoulders lightly and drew her back to him. “Some guy after you? Boyfriend?”
She shook her head.
“Husband?”
“No.”
She tried to turn away again, but he held her more firmly. “You in trouble with the cops, something like that?”
A short, aching laugh broke from her. “No,” she said. “Not the cops.”
“Who, then?”
A small wall seemed to give way inside her. “My father-in-law,” she answered quietly. “He’s a bad man.”
“Who is he?”
She shook her head adamantly, and he knew absolutely that she would not reveal the name.
“Okay,” he said, “but bad man or not, you can’t hide forever. And besides, you have to make a living, right?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “So here’s what you do. You come in around midnight. There’ll be just a few people in the place. You’ll sing a few songs. Just for the regulars. No advertising. Nothing to draw attention to you.” He didn’t ask her to accept or refuse the idea, but simply rose, walked to the door, then stopped and looked back at her. “It’s what you want more than anything, isn’t it?” he asked. “One more stab at singing . . . or maybe just . . . happiness?”
She settled her gaze upon him in a way she hoped did not make her appear broken, did not ask for pity, but just a chance to make it work. “Yes,” she said.
ABE
Happiness.
Where had that word come from?
On the walk back to the bar, he realized that he’d not thought of happiness in years, that happiness was like childhood, a place he could not return to or recapture in the present. A dark wonder settled over him as he recognized that he couldn’t actually remember the last time he was happy, though he suspected it had been the years during which he’d tried to make it, have his own group, cut records, tour, be known. He’d stopped trying for any of that years before, and the truth of why he’d stopped had tapped lightly at the door of his consciousness ever since, though he’d rarely let it in. Now he did. It was laziness, pure and simple. Even if he’d actually had talent, making a name for himself would still have required more energy than he’d ever had.
For a moment he considered his talents. They were few and modest. The greatest one, he decided, was just the talent for going on.
SARA
She wasn’t sure why, but suddenly all the reasons she should keep her head down only made her want to lift it more. She knew that to show up at McPherson’s, even if only for a few songs before the usual crowd, was dangerous. You never knew who might wander in. Certainly Labriola himself never frequented such places. It would be far more likely for Tony to show up, probably alone, taking the off chance that she might have returned to her old life. It wasn’t likely, of course, and yet it was something she had to consider.
So why had she not simply refused to do it? It would have been easy to do, and as she stood by the window, staring down at the street, she imagined having done just that. Abe would not have pressed the issue. He would have taken her refusal at face value and left the apartment with no further word.
But she’d said yes to the proposal, regardless of the risk, and she knew now that she’d done it because to have done anything else would have been to retreat even further into the netherworld she occupied now, to abandon all future hope of a happy ending to her life.
She felt the weight of the pistol in her hand, heard the chilling voice, Kill him! Now she knew precisely why she hadn’t done it then or later. Against all odds, against the terrible urgency of the murderous voice in her head, she had glimpsed the precipice, felt her feet poised at its jagged edge, but at the decisive moment also glimpsed the hope she would forfeit if she leaped, and so had said, to her own astonishment, Not yet.
TONY
He steered the boat out of the marina and into the choppy waters of Long Island Sound. Caruso stood a few feet away, the collar of his jacket raised against the wind despite the fact that the cabin was entirely enclosed.
“You know, I never cared for the water,” T
ony told him.
Caruso watched the churning waters apprehensively. “I fucking hate it, being in a fucking boat.”
“Why’s that?”
Caruso looked embarrassed. “I never learned to swim.”
Tony revved the engine, and the boat lurched forward so abruptly that Caruso grabbed the metal railing to his left. “Jesus.”
Tony turned the wheel to the right and the boat made a broad loop, bouncing roughly in the churning waters until it came to a halt and sat, weaving unsteadily in the heaving waves.
“Okay, here it is,” Tony said. He shut off the engine and faced Caruso. “I know Eddie talked to you. I know because I told him to do it. So if anything happened to him, I’m to blame.”
Tony could see that Caruso was trying to play it cool, but that he was nonetheless growing edgy and uncertain.
“I wanted Eddie to talk to you and find out what was going on with my father,” Tony continued. “I know he’s looking for Sara, and I figure he’d put you on the job.”
Caruso’s eyes drifted over to the roiling, foam-spattered sea. “I told you all that.”
Tony guessed that Caruso was trying to calculate exactly how much he could tell him without betraying the Old Man.
“You think I’m just a gofer, right?” Caruso asked sharply.
“I know you work for my father, that’s all,” Tony answered.
“Everybody thinks I’m just a fucking gofer,” Caruso said. “But I ain’t. He gives me important things to do. Looking for your wife, he wouldn’t put me on that. He’d say, ‘Vinnie, find a guy to do this thing.’ That’s what he’d say. And that’s what I’d do.”
“Is that what you did?”
Caruso looked as if he’d been challenged to stand and deliver. “Yeah, as a matter of fact. Goddamn right I found a guy.”
“So it’s not you that’s looking for Sara?”
“No.”
“Who is?”
“Like I just told you, some other guy.”
“What’s this other guy’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Vinnie, don’t fuck with me,” Tony warned.
Caruso’s eyes swept over to Tony, fear like small blue flames leaping inside them. “I swear I don’t know,” he said.
“But you told Eddie about this other guy?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you tell him?”
Caruso didn’t answer.
“What did you tell him, Vinnie?”
Caruso drew in a deep breath. “If your father knew that I was—”
Tony stepped over to him. “Listen to me,” he said. “I know you work for my father, but this thing’s between my wife and me. It’s none of his business, but he made it his business anyway. Just like he has since I got married. And it wasn’t any of Eddie Sullivan’s business, but I pulled him into it. So the thing is, I got two people to worry about now. And the whole fucking thing is because my father stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong, and I let him do that. The whole thing is my fault, Vinnie. My fucking fault. And so it’s for me to straighten this thing out, you understand?”
Caruso remained silent, and so Tony drew in closer.
“He’s a bad man, Vinnie,” he said.
Caruso chuckled. “No, he ain’t.”
“My father is a very bad man,” Tony repeated emphatically.
Caruso waved his hand. “He’s been good to me, your father, treats me like a—” He stopped. “Treats me good is what I’m saying.”
It was then Tony saw it, the weird loyalty Caruso had for the Old Man. “You don’t owe him anything, Vinnie. You know why? Because he wouldn’t lift a finger for you. And something else. No matter what you do, he’ll never give a shit about you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Tony,” Caruso said in a voice that struck Tony as curiously childlike, a piece of wishful thinking, like a little boy clinging against all evidence to his belief in Santa Claus.
“Yeah, I do,” Tony said almost gently. “I do know because he’s done it before.”
“Done what?”
“Gotten a guy to try to please him, do everything he could to please him,” Tony answered. “And this other guy did his best too. Because he was like you, Vinnie. He just wanted to feel like the Old Man loved him.”
Caruso looked at him doubtfully. “What guy you talking about?”
Tony felt relieved that he’d finally figured it out, the whole rotten scheme. “Me,” he said with a small, sad smile. “That other guy was me.”
DELLA
She could hardly believe the urgency in her mother’s voice, the way she’d demanded that she drop everything, pack Nicky into his car seat, and come right away. You’d have thought her house was on fire.
But the house looked just the same when Della brought the car to a halt in front of it. Despite the chill, her mother was sitting on the stoop, loosely wrapped in an old wool coat, and looking uncharacteristically tense.
“What is it, Ma?” Della cried as she got out of the car.
Mrs. DaRocca stood up immediately. “Just come on in,” she said harshly.
Della scurried to the other side of the car and whisked Nicky out of the car seat. By the time she’d turned back toward the house, her mother had already disappeared inside.
“I got to talk to you, Della,” Mrs. DaRocca said once Della came into the house.
“Okay, so, talk,” Della said. Nicky squirmed madly in her arms. “It’s past his nap time.”
Mrs. DaRocca waved Della into the living room. “In here.”
Della followed her mother into the living room and slumped down on the old blue sofa by the window. “You okay, Ma?”
“I’m fine,” Mrs. DaRocca said. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Me?”
“Because of that neighbor of yours,” Mrs. DaRocca said. “The one who took off. She didn’t turn up yet, did she?”
“No,” Della said. “What’s going on, Ma?”
Rather than answer directly, Mrs. DaRocca said, “Stay out of it, Della. ’Cause it’s not safe, getting involved in it.”
Della studied the worried look on her mother’s face. “What happened, Ma? And don’t say nothing happened, because I know something did.”
Mrs. DaRocca shrugged. “I talked to him.”
“Him?”
“Labriola.”
“Tony?” Della shrieked. “Why?”
“Not Tony,” Mrs. DaRocca said. “The father.”
Della’s eyes widened in astonishment. “You what?”
“I went to his house,” Mrs. DaRocca continued. “I spoke to Leonardo.”
“Leonardo? You call him Leonardo? What, you know him somehow?”
“A little,” Mrs. DaRocca said without emphasis. “From the old days.”
“What old days?”
“In school. We was in school together. Our Lady of Fatima. We was—how you call it?—chummy.”
Della sat back, drained by astonishment. “Chummy? You and Leo Labriola?”
“He was a nice boy in them days,” Mrs. DaRocca said. Then her face turned grave. “But not no more. Which is why I’m telling you to stay out of this thing with the neighbor.”
She felt her mother’s dread wash toward her like a wave of blood across the floor. “What happened, Ma? What happened when you talked to . . . Leonardo?”
“Nothing happened,” Mrs. DaRocca answered. “But you get a feeling when you talk to a person, and the feeling I got was you should stay out of his business. It’s got nothing to do with you, that woman.”
“Except that she’s my friend.”
Mrs. DaRocca looked at Della with all the authority of an old-world mother. “Della, stay out of this.”
Her mother’s words were heavy with warning, and because of it, she knew.
“He’s going to hurt her,” she said. “Labriola’s going to hurt Sara.”
“He didn’t say that,” Mrs. DaRocca said quickly. “He didn’t
say nothing like that, Della.”
“But you saw it, didn’t you? You saw it in his eyes.”
Mrs. DaRocca didn’t answer, but the truth was in the grim look on her face, the stiff posture. The old fear of Sicily lay upon her shoulders as thick and visible as the black scarves of women she’d seen in pictures from the island.
“Would he kill her?” she asked.
“Della, he didn’t—”
“Ma, listen to me. You spoke to him face-to-face. Would he kill her?”
Her mother didn’t speak, but the slow crawl of her hand to her throat provided the only answer Della needed to glimpse her best friend floating facedown in the river.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
The old woman placed her hand on Della’s. “Listen to me,” she said. “It ain’t your business. She left her husband. That ain’t your business. Even what Leo does about it, Della, even that ain’t your business.”
Della thought of Sara, then of Labriola. She had not been able to imagine why Sara had left Tony, nor why Labriola was so determined to find her. Now she could.
“It ain’t your business,” her mother repeated.
Della rose to her feet. “Yes, it is,” she said.
MORTIMER
Mortimer waited glumly for Caruso to arrive, his eyes surveying the Port Authority crowd, people who had normal lives, didn’t have to sit in crummy little diners, and whose ordinary, everyday troubles Mortimer suddenly envied, because they seemed like such small potatoes compared to his own.
As for Caruso, he’d sounded weird on the phone, so whatever he had on his mind, whatever had made him insist on this stupid meeting, no way was it good.
Mortimer was still considering all the ways it could be bad, when Caruso swept into the seat opposite him.
“I had a talk with the husband,” Caruso said quickly. “And we got a problem.” His voice was tense, like his body, everything wired. “A serious problem.” He reached for a napkin and twisted it violently. “Have you talked to Batman lately?”
“Yeah,” Mortimer answered.
“So, what did he tell you?”
“He needs more information,” Mortimer answered. Perhaps that was the key, he thought. If there were no more information, then Stark could get out of the deal, simply do what he’d already threatened and pull out of the whole lousy scheme. “If he don’t get more information, then he’s gonna—”