Peril

  TONY

  Tony stepped back as the truck pulled away, loaded with the daily delivery of bluefish, cod, and grouper, and suddenly imagined Sara locked in such a van, bound at the ankles and the wrists, kidnapped. This possibility circled briefly in his mind, gathering hooks as it circled, becoming more painful until it finally burst from his mouth.

  “Maybe she got snatched,” he said. “Not for ransom. But for revenge.”

  Eddie stripped off a pair of thick rubber gloves. “Who would hate you that much, Tony? To do something like that.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t me he was doing it to.”

  Eddie looked at him quizzically.

  “You know how it is with my father,” Tony explained. “You know the people he deals with.”

  “Did you ask him if maybe it could be something like that?”

  “No, he’d blow up if I asked him that.” Tony turned and headed back toward his office, Eddie trudging along beside him. “I think he’s got somebody looking for her.”

  “Why do you think that, Tony?”

  “Because when I told him about how Sara was missing, he started in on how I couldn’t just let her go, how I had to find her and bring her back and all that shit. Then he gets up and makes a call.” Tony stopped and peered out over the marina, where scores of spinnakers rocked gently in the breeze. “I think he put some guy on it. One of his guys. You know the type. Suppose this fucking guy does find her, Eddie? What then?”

  “I don’t know,” Eddie admitted. “But look, Tony, I mean, who knows, maybe she’ll come back on her own. I mean, it could be all she wants is a little break.”

  “A break?”

  “From . . . stuff.”

  “Me?”

  “Everything,” Eddie said. “My aunt Edna needed a break. She ran off to Atlantic City, stayed two weeks, then come back. With three hundred dollars in nickels. She poured ’em out on the kitchen table. Right there, in front of my uncle. Told him to buy himself a new suit. That was the end of it. She never went nowhere after that.”

  “I don’t think Sara went to Atlantic City,” Tony said despondently.

  “But maybe somewhere just to get away,” Eddie said.

  “Without telling anybody?”

  “Without telling you,” Eddie offered cautiously. “ ’Cause she just wanted to, you know, be alone.”

  “So who would she have told?”

  “Maybe nobody,” Eddie answered. “Or maybe a friend. Somebody she talked to.”

  “Della,” Tony answered. “She lives across the street. They go shopping sometimes, her and Della.”

  “Then maybe Sara said something, you know? You should talk to that woman, Tony. That Della woman.”

  Tony pondered Eddie’s suggestion, looking for a way to speak to Della DeLuria without actually revealing that Sara had left him, found no way to do it, then said, “Yeah, okay.”

  Inside his office, safe from view, Tony stared at the picture of himself and Sara that he’d placed on his desk nine years before. It showed the happy couple on the steps of St. Mary’s, Sara in a flowing white dress, Tony in a black tuxedo, his father alone and off to the right, as if in bitter surmise of his new daughter-in-law.

  He never liked her, Tony thought, remembering the evening a week before when he’d come home late to find the Old Man slumped in the living room, looking sullen. Sara had come in briefly, and his father had glared at her hatefully, then gotten to his feet and left with nothing beyond a mumbled That bitch don’t know her place, Tony.

  He picked up the photograph and concentrated on Sara’s face. Even on her wedding day there’d been a curious sadness in her eyes, a distance he couldn’t bridge. Had it been that distance that had first attracted him, he wondered, the way she seemed to distrust love, life, everything? If so, he should have been wary of her, he told himself. But instead, that very distance had formed part of what he’d fallen for when he’d fallen for her. And he had fallen for her. That much was sure. He could see that even now, in the picture, the two of them on the church steps, rice flying in all directions. At that moment she had been the indisputable love of his life. The love of my life that day, he thought, then with a sudden aching clarity realized that she still was.

  CARUSO

  Labriola’s voice seemed to reach through the phone line and slap his face.

  “Yeah?”

  “I talked to Morty Dodge about the meeting you want with this guy he works for.”

  “And?”

  “He says his guy needs information.”

  “About what?”

  “Sara. Things about her.”

  “What things?”

  “For example, what she did for a living or—”

  “She didn’t do a fucking thing.”

  “Yeah, okay, but like, where she might have gone. Stuff to get the guy started, that’s what he means.”

  To Caruso’s surprise, Labriola did not protest. “I got an idea who knows that shit.”

  “Good,” Caruso said. “I’ll pass on whatever you find out.”

  “You’ll pass it on? What about me? What about the meeting?”

  “That’s a problem, having a meeting.”

  “Why is it a problem, Vinnie?”

  “Because the guy, he won’t do it.”

  “I’m laying out thirty grand and this fucker won’t meet with me?”

  “He never shows.”

  Caruso could hear the Old Man breathing raggedly, like the snorting of a bull. He waited for him to speak, and when he didn’t, added, “But Morty’ll meet with you. I told him if it was okay you could hook up at Columbus Circle, two-thirty.”

  “But he’s nothing but a gofer,” the Old Man barked. “I don’t deal with no fucking gofers.”

  “He’s a little more than that,” Caruso protested. “I mean, the guy trusts him is what I’m saying.”

  “So he’s like a sidecar?”

  “Sidekick. Yeah, something like that. But more. Loyal. A loyal friend.”

  “A loyal friend. You know what a loyal friend is, Vinnie? He’s the other guy you toss into the fucking hole.”

  A small, aching laugh broke from Caruso. “That’s good, Mr. Labriola. That’s a good one.”

  “I want you to find out who this fucking guy is, Vinnie. I don’t have no ghosts working for me, you understand?”

  “The guy, you want me to . . . what?”

  “What I fucking said just now,” the Old Man screamed. “Who is he? I want to know.”

  “Yes, sir,” Caruso said weakly.

  “So, look, here’s what we do. You set up that fucking meet. Say to this sidecar shithead, sure I’ll have a meet. Then we meet, and we talk, and we shake hands like a couple of asshole buddies, see what I mean? Then I go my way, and the sidecar goes his. And you follow the little shithead all the way to this fucking guy he works for.”

  “Yes, sir,” Caruso breathed.

  “Understood, Vinnie?”

  “I understand,” Caruso said, looking about the cramped office from which he ran the Old Man’s loan-sharking business.

  “Okay, so, two-thirty,” the Old Man snapped.

  “Yes, sir,” Caruso said, adding the time to a head already full of numbers, loans, payments, due dates, not one of which he had ever written down.

  SARA

  The Waverly theater was still in the same location, and Eighth Street had the same feel to it, and their familiarity brought small parts of her former life back to her. These parts were nothing she could put her finger on exactly, only the sense that she’d packed up her youth and now she could unpack at least a little of it. Maybe that was why she’d come back to the city. Because it was the closet where she’d first secreted herself, the hole she’d burrowed into, creating an identity to go with her new name.

  For a moment she peered at the coffee shop across the street, watching silently as the patrons came and went. If they only knew, she thought. She felt the ghostly grip of Sheriff Caulfield’s hand on her bare shoulder, the
n other hands, no less ghostly but also no less palpable, the flesh of grasping fingers pressing into her flesh, sour breath in her face, the smell of drunken sweat, a man pushing her into the corn or down a narrow corridor, upright or weaving, dressed as a cop or barely dressed at all. With each memory she felt her own panic rise like a frenzied animal, trapped and panting, clawing its way out.

  To keep it in, she raced to the corner, bought a paper, took it to the coffee shop and turned to the classifieds. The first order of business was to find a job, and so she looked for one among the long columns. As she searched, the paucity of her skills, how little she had to offer, grew ever more distressingly apparent. Finally, one job caught her eye. Receptionist. No experience necessary. She could answer a phone, she thought. She could take a message. She knew that thousands of others could do the same, but she hoped that somehow she’d come through the door at just the right moment, and this hope suggested to her just how depleted she was. Her only resource was now little more than a baseless grab for luck.

  DELLA

  She’d seen the man several times before, been introduced, shaken his hand, but even now his dark eyes seemed so lethal she could easily imagine a deadly acid spewing from them, turning human beings into mounds of glistening flesh.

  “Good morning, Mr. Labriola,” she said quietly.

  A smile labored to form on Labriola’s mouth, then gave up and curled into a frown. “Mind if I come in?”

  Della stepped back and watched as he came into the foyer. He was not a large man, but there was something about him that seemed both huge and dangerous, like a boulder rolling toward you, grim and unstoppable. You either got out of its way, or it crushed you like a bug.

  “You seen Tony?” His close-cropped white hair glimmered in the light. “He been over here?”

  “No,” Della said.

  “Too embarrassed,” Labriola said. “Okay, well, to make a long story short, that wife of his, she dumped him.”

  “Oh,” Della said weakly.

  “You ain’t heard about it?”

  She felt like a deer caught in the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. “Well, I . . .”

  Labriola’s bushy gray eyebrows arched menacingly. “You talked to her?”

  So this is the moment, Della thought, this is the moment when the ground suddenly shifts and you find yourself teetering on the edge of a cliff. Her lips parted, but nothing came out, and in that instant of hesitation she saw Labriola’s face turn grim and stony.

  “You don’t want to keep nothing to yourself,” he said. “ ’Cause I’m gonna find her, no matter what it takes.”

  She heard Nicky cry, and the sound of his needful voice was like a spur gouging at her side. “She called me,” she said, her voice little above a whisper. “The day she . . . left.”

  “Where was she when she called?” Labriola asked.

  Nicky was crying loudly now, an insanely demanding scream. “I have to—”

  Labriola grabbed her arm and squeezed. “Where was she?”

  “I don’t know,” Della answered. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “What time did she call?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Late.”

  “And she was already where she was headed?”

  “I guess she was. It was tough to hear her.”

  “Why?”

  Della suddenly realized that she’d given out just that little morsel of information Sara had feared she might. “I don’t know.”

  “You said it was hard to hear her.”

  “Yeah,” Della said hesitantly.

  “Traffic?”

  “Maybe that was it,” Della said softly.

  “She in the city?”

  “I don’t know.” Nicky’s cries were like a screeching bird in her brain. “I need to change my son’s—”

  Labriola’s grip tightened. “The kid can sit in it.”

  Sit in his shit. Della knew that that was what Labriola meant, and with that understanding, she knew that she had plumbed the full measure of his brutality.

  He brought his face very close to hers. “She in the city?” he repeated.

  “She didn’t say.”

  “She got a man? She fucking around on Tony?”

  Della shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Labriola eyed her for a moment. “Okay,” he said finally. He released his grip. “If she calls again, you gonna call me, right?”

  Della nodded meekly and massaged her arm. “Okay.”

  “You’re clear on that, right?”

  “Yes,” Della answered faintly. “Yes, I am.”

  “Good,” Labriola said. He grabbed a pen from his shirt pocket, then took her wrist in his iron grip and scrawled a number across her white flesh, the point of the pen jabbing with a hair more than the necessary force, so that she knew the little bite of pain she felt was the old man’s way of making a final point. “And Tony, he ain’t to know nothing about me coming here, talking to you, nothing like that.”

  “Okay,” Della whispered. She cautiously drew her wrist from Labriola’s grasp. “I won’t tell anybody.” She felt crushed beneath him somehow, wriggling, Nicky screaming for her, confused that she’d not yet come to him. And yet she knew that she could not rush things with this man, could not show anything but her fear. “I won’t,” she repeated.

  “If you do—” he began, then stopped, leaving her to conjure the consequences of crossing him.

  “I won’t tell anybody,” Della said again. “Mike. Tony. I won’t tell anybody.”

  Labriola stared at her silently, a smoky, hellish darkness in his eyes, so that she knew absolutely that there was nothing to stay his hand, nothing within him or without that could prevent him from committing whatever savageries he imagined.

  “So, we’re clear, am I right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Della told him. “We’re clear.”

  He turned to the door, then stopped and again faced her. “She tell you anything about why she run off?”

  “No,” Della answered quietly.

  To her relief, Labriola appeared satisfied.

  “Okay,” he said, then opened the door and stepped out onto the small porch. His blue Lincoln Town Car rested at the curb, and Della watched as he trudged toward it, all the world curiously silent during the few seconds it took him to drive away, then abruptly jangling with a harsh and deafening noise, not just Nicky’s insistent squealing, but all the clang and clatter of the world.

  STARK

  She took his hands and placed them in the tray.

  “So, things good with you?”

  Stark nodded.

  Lucia was a brown swollen berry of a woman. Her hair was black but without shine, and her voice bore the cadences of the peasant island from which she’d come. But she had a ready smile, and she did a good job on his nails, and Stark found it refreshing to be touched by someone who wanted nothing from him but a generous tip.

  “You got your health, that’s the main thing, no?” Lucia asked.

  Stark remembered a line from Neruda, how on certain days the smell of aftershave made him sob. He knew well what the poet meant. On certain days something mournful hung in the air. Everything was draped in black crepe. He could not predict when such a day would come, nor ever fathom why it came. He knew only that on such occasions death seemed even sweeter than usual, and he felt an unmistakable longing to be rid of life’s unseemly detritus, the body’s crude humiliations, the idle patter of the streets, the heavy sense that nothing could be rescued from the stale water in which all things floated briefly and then sank. Each breath seemed empty, and he could find no reason to take it. It simply happened. He breathed. He didn’t will it, or want it. His lungs sucked in air, and this reflexive grasp for life struck him as no less absurd than Lucia’s mindless chatter, or the way her fat fingers massaged his own. It was all part of the same purely mechanistic design, without direction or purpose or will, desperate but not obviously so, the desperation built into the machine, its slim
y oil. The hours were unbearable, and so you filled them with whatever you could in the same desperate way the lungs filled with air. That was the design, and Stark thought that one simple stern admonition must be tacked to the wall of every chromosome: Just get through it.

  Lucia began to clean beneath the nails with a pointed wooden stick.

  “You got pretty hands,” she said. “You got hands like a woman.”

  Stark knew that this was not true. His hands, despite the creams and oils, were rough, his veins were raised and faintly blue. His fingers were stubby rather than tapered, and the pink nails were marked with milky-white specks. His father, the mill worker, had had rough, unattractive hands. So had his mother, the gray lady who washed the halls of the building they lived in, and in which she may well have entertained the squat little landlord on those months when she’d fallen behind in the rent.

  “You want I should do the toes?” Lucia was blowing gently on his fingers now. “Some men, I do the toes.”

  Stark shook his head, drew a twenty from the breast pocket of his jacket, and handed it to Lucia.

  “Thank you,” she said happily. “I do good job, no?”

  “Excellent, as always,” Stark told her.

  On the street he tried to admire the day, the sunlight, the warm spring air. But it continued to bother him, this thing that had begun to trouble him as he sat in Washington Square and was now dragging his mood lower and lower. At the time he’d thought it had something to do with Marisol, but now he understood that it had to do with Mortimer, the new job he’d brought him, the woman he had to find for Mortimer’s friend.

  Something was wrong.

  And this something wrong began with the request itself, the fact that during all the long years of that association, Mortimer had never before asked a favor of him. Nor had he ever expressed the slightest hesitance in bringing him a new client. Now Mortimer had both asked for a favor and appeared unsure about the client he’d brought him. In Stark’s experience, such changes never boded well. With Lockridge, he’d noticed an unexpectedly snide look when he’d told him that he’d been unable to find Marisol. This response had signaled not only that Lockridge already knew that Marisol had been found, but that finding her had been only the first stage of a darker plot. Now he had the same uneasy feeling about Mortimer.