Caruso
“How did this fucking happen?” Labriola demanded. His eyes glowed hotly in the murky darkness of the living room.
Caruso gripped the arms of the worn Naugahyde chair and shifted nervously. “He’s always been good for it before.”
“And so you let him get in this deep?” Labriola thundered. “Fifteen grand.”
“Like I say, he was good for it before, and so—”
“Before?” Labriola’s mouth twitched violently, spitting words like stones. “You mean before he suddenly wasn’t good for it no more?”
“Yes, sir,” Caruso admitted weakly.
Labriola’s eyes narrowed menacingly. “Well, here’s my question, then, Vinnie. Why the fuck do I care what he was before if he ain’t good for it now?” He stood up, his massive frame blocking Caruso’s view of the street outside, the gabled row houses of Sheepshead Bay. “Can I spend the money this guy ain’t good for?”
“No, sir,” Caruso answered meekly. Beyond the window, children played on the sidewalk and women stopped to chat, their arms filled with grocery bags or the latest baby. He wondered what it would be like to live on such a street, have a house, a wife, kids, be complete and on his own. His cramped apartment surfaced
in his mind, the soiled sheets and unmade bed. He called it his bachelor’s pad, but it was no such thing. A bachelor pad was a place a guy fixed up nice and kept clean because he might meet a girl and bring her home. The room he rented in Bay Ridge wasn’t like that at all. It was just the place where he slept and ate pizza from the box and waited for the phone to ring, summoning him here, to stand before the towering figure of Leo Labriola.
“You listening to me, Vinnie?”
“What?”
“Are you fucking listening to me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Labriola ticked off all the things he couldn’t buy with money he didn’t have—fancy cars and whores, and diamonds for Belle, his longtime mistress. If stiff dicks were for sale, he couldn’t buy one. And if “some broad” wanted a sawbuck for a blow job, he’d have to pass on that, too, because Caruso had let this deadbeat fuck get in over his head, which wasn’t going to stand, because nobody came up empty on Leo Labriola. No-fucking-body. Ever.
“So what I’m saying is, make him good for it,” Labriola fumed. “You don’t make him good for it, Vinnie, then I’ll make
you
good for it.”
“Yes, sir,” Caruso said. His fingers rose to the knot of his tie. “Don’t worry, Mr. Labriola. I’ll get the money.”
“You fucking better. Because I don’t make threats, right? I make promises.”
Labriola had told him about other promises he’d made to people who crossed him or disappointed him or simply failed him in some way. They’d ended up at the bottom of the East River or curled into the trunks of old sedans on President Street, he said. And always the stories about Russian roulette, how if you wanted to
face down a guy, you offered to play it with him, took the first turn yourself, proved you had the balls to look death in the fucking eye. You did that, Labriola said, nobody ever questioned who was boss.
Caruso wasn’t sure that any of Labriola’s gangland tales were true. Years before, when Labriola had given him a job, he’d believed the Old Man was a big-time mobster. Later he’d learned that in fact, he was little more than a nickel-and-dime shylock. But by then it didn’t matter whether Labriola was big or small. He was the guy who’d taken him in after Caruso’s father had vanished, the guy who’d given him work and patted him on the head when he did things right and yelled at him when he did things wrong, and in doing that had pulled him from the boiling rapids he’d been shooting down before Labriola had yanked him from the water, given him something to do besides boost cars and raid vending machines for a few lousy bucks. Mr. Labriola had brought him into his organization, given him real work, so that he wore a suit now and looked respectable, and if you didn’t know better, you might even think he was legit.
“So, you gonna straighten this fucker out?” Labriola barked. “’Cause nobody screws Leo Labriola and gets away with it.” He slashed the air, his hand like a cleaver. “Now get outta here.”
Caruso rose and headed for the door. He’d already opened it, when the Old Man’s voice drew him back.
“By the way, what did you think I’d tell you, Vinnie?” Labriola demanded. “Huh? To just forget it? Write this fucking deadbeat a ticket? Merry Christmas. Some shit like that?”
“I just thought you should know that in the past …”
Labriola laughed loudly. “You know what the past is, Vinnie?” he sneered. “A dead body. It fucking stinks.”
Caruso nodded, walked out of the room, and closed the
door behind him. He knew that he should be pissed at the Old Man for talking to him like he was a jerk, but each time his anger flared, he remembered how much he owed him, along with how much he looked forward to those moments when Labriola seemed to like him, seemed to want him around, even to think that he did a good job.
He knew that if he did enough good jobs, he’d get the Big Assignment. Labriola had never told him what the Big Assignment was, but Caruso had seen enough movies to know that it was a hit that made a guy big. Someday, he thought, Mr. Labriola would put his arm over his shoulder, give him the Big Assignment, then kiss him once on each cheek. At that point it would have all been worth it. The waiting by the phone, the times he’d been chewed out. At that point it would be worth it because he’d know that he was something important, the one guy the Old Man trusted to carry out the ultimate big deal.
He knew that moment would one day come, and because of that, he couldn’t get mad at the Old Man, and so immediately shifted his anger to the deadbeat bastard who’d landed him in this fix, lulled him into false trust by always being good for it before, and in that way set him up to get hauled over the coals by Labriola. It was, he concluded, all that fucking Morty’s fault.
Della
She rinsed the coffee urn while Mike ate his breakfast and thumbed through the paper. Nicky gurgled happily in his high chair, his small, pink fingers dunking in the milk, reaching for a Cheerio.
“Where’s Denise?” Mike asked.
She turned and saw that he’d folded the paper and placed it on the table beside his plate. “Upstairs. Primping.”
“Primping? Jesus. She’s twelve years old.”
“They start early now,” Della said. “More coffee?”
Mike shook his head and got to his feet. “No. I’d have to piss halfway into the city if I had another cup.” He shrugged. “Probably will anyway.” He smiled that boyish smile of his, the one she’d fallen in love with twenty years before. Then he turned and trudged up the stairs, his big, hulking shape a comfort to her, like living with Santa Claus. Once he’d made it upstairs, she listened as he moved from the bedroom to the adjoining bathroom and back again. He’d misplaced something. His keys probably. What a lug she’d married. What a kind, sweet lug.
She walked to the bottom of the stairs. “Look in the hamper,” she called. “They’re probably still in your pants.”
She listened as he did as he was told.
“Got ’em,” he said loudly. “Thanks, babe.”
She felt a modest surge of accomplishment, a sense of being useful, then returned to the kitchen and began clearing the table. She’d just finished wiping milk from Nicky’s mouth, when she saw Denise fly down the stairs and bolt out into the yard. Kids, Della thought, they’re so crazy now.
“Okay, I’m off,” Mike said as he lumbered back into the kitchen. He glanced out the window to where Denise stood waiting for a bus. “She okay?”
“Getting to be a teenager, that’s all.”
“Anything I should know about?”
“She talks to you as much as me.” She drew Nicky out of the high chair. “Say bye to your dad.”
Mike kissed Nicky on the cheek. “You be a good boy
now,” he said brightly. He looked at Della, and his big, clownish face warmed her. “See you tonight.”
“We’re having tuna melts,” she told him. His favorite.
He kissed her, walked to the car, and got in. Denise offered a grudging, halfhearted wave as he drifted backward into the cul de sac.
Della returned Nicky to his high chair, then began to load the dishwasher. The school bus arrived and Denise bounded into it. Then the bus pulled away, and Della glimpsed her friend Sara’s house across the cul de sac. It looked cold and cheerless and abandoned, everything
her
house was not, and she felt a sudden vaulting gratitude that unlike Sara, she’d married a good guy, one who’d always take care of her, make sure she had everything she needed, provide a life that was truly safe.
Stark
He thought of time, then death, then the sweetness of oblivion and of how much he yearned for the end of days. So easy, he told himself, so easy just to let it go, this chain of days that stretched ahead of him. He imagined the moment, the feel of the pistol in his mouth, the shattering impact, and felt himself instantly disintegrate, burst like a vase of air, leaving nothing behind.
Literally nothing save the few luxurious items he’d purchased because the high craft employed in making them lifted his spirits and took his mind off Marisol.
But now, as he approached the grim anniversary of her death, he realized that the power of a beautifully cut piece of glass, or a perfectly woven scarf, to change his mood had waned enormously during the preceding
twelve months. He suspected that his getting older was part of it, though he was only fifty-three. The rest was loneliness, and the fading hope that there would ever be an end to it while he lived on earth. He’d loved once, and overwhelmingly, lost that love in a whirl of violence, then lived on in the aftermath of that explosion, its echo forever in his mind, the earth forever trembling beneath his feet. Now more than ever, he admitted to himself this morning, he wanted an end to memory, to all sensation, an end to light and movement. Beyond life he saw a world of utter stillness and eternal dark, and yet he harbored the hope that somewhere in that darkness the soul of Marisol waited for him patiently. The nurturing of this hope, he knew, was an act of will. But if he abandoned it, Henderson would win and Lockridge would win, and they could win only at the cost of Marisol.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Stark faced the dealer, noted the small rosebud in his lapel, thought it foppish.
“It’s sixteenth century,” the dealer added with a nod toward the crystal goblet at which, Stark realized, he must have been gazing while thinking of Marisol.
“Not my thing,” Stark said coolly.
The dealer looked as if he’d been gently pushed away, perhaps with the nose of a pearl-handled derringer. “Well, if I may be of help …”
“I’ll let you know,” Stark said.
“Of course,” the dealer said, then vanished.
Alone again, Stark strolled back down the aisle toward the shop’s front door. Finely wrought objects lined his path, but nothing called to him, and because of that he knew that he’d slipped out of the old reality, the one that had held him for so many years. Even though Mortimer would arrive that night with the latest payment,
he would never spend another dime on what he now suddenly dismissed as “collectibles.”
Once out of the shop, he headed south down Madison Avenue. He knew that dressed as he was, in a fashionably cut black suit, he looked like a successful Manhattan business executive. It was a look he’d cultivated over the years, and which he carefully maintained. It went with the phony name and the secret life, the elegant bars where, if he sat long enough, a woman would finally approach him.
Woman.
The very word returned him to the sunny afternoon he’d first seen Marisol, and whose anniversary was in three days. For years he’d tried to tell himself that she was just a woman, that if she’d lived, and they’d remained together, they would have grown apart, their passion faded. But she had died horribly and this death had immortalized her. She was Helen still on the walls of Troy, and he had never been able to bring her down from that mythic height. He’d tried to find another woman, fall in love again, but the ghost of Marisol lingered in the air around him. She slithered between himself and any woman he caressed. Her breath was on every kiss. He’d tried to resist her by finding someone else. Year after year, he’d cast his line into a sea of women, but never reeled in more than an empty hook.
And so for the last few years he’d pursued sex alone, sex without affection, and except for Kiko, always with strangers. He’d withheld all emotion, cut off any information about himself, and tried simply to enjoy the purely physical pleasures of the act. But he could sense that this was just another detour from the road he truly sought, and which he now imagined leading off into the shadowy and impossible distance, Marisol at the end of it, willowy and perfect and unchanged, her arms
opening to receive him. He could almost hear her whisper,
Welcome home.
Mortimer
Sitting in Dr. Langton’s office, he felt small and uneducated, both of which he knew he was, a dull, pudgy little man with a mind that had precious little in it, at least precious little of the stuff educated people had in their minds—dates and names, and bits of poetry. If he had it all to do over, he thought, he’d have gone to college, even if nothing more than Bunker Hill Community College, gotten a little polish, a little class, so that he could look a doctor in the eye and not feel the way he did now, two pegs up from a bug.
“Good afternoon,” Dr. Langton said as he came into the office.
Mortimer nodded.
Dr. Langton sat down behind his desk, a wall of diplomas arrayed behind him. He placed the folder he’d brought with him on his desk and opened it. For a moment he flipped through the pages, then he lifted his eyes and Mortimer saw just how bad it was. His stomach emptied in the way it had during the war, when someone yelled, “Incoming!”
“I have the test results,” Dr. Langton said. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid.”
“How long?” Mortimer asked. He didn’t want to be curt, but he didn’t want to string it out either, because he knew that if he didn’t get it quick and straight, he’d end up feeling even worse than he already did.