Peril (3 page)

She might have gone back to Virginia, she thought now, but that door had closed long ago when her father had thrown her out, told her that her dead mother was rolling in her grave, that a singer was just a slut, that she'd either marry Billy Preston, if she could even be sure it was Billy who'd gotten her pregnant, or never show her face at his door again. She'd screamed, “Never, never, never,” moved in with her cousin Sheila, lost the child three weeks later, then split for New York like a million girls before her. At a bus stop outside Philly, in a greasy diner over black coffee and a cigarette, Samantha Damonte had been born.

Okay, so Samantha Damonte was totally made up, Sara told herself, like a character in a book. But who was Sara Labriola, this woman in this particular bus station? She didn't know, and that struck her as more frightening than anything else, the fact that she could define herself now only as a woman in a rage, half wishing she had done it long ago, drawn back the hammer, pulled the trigger, given up the foolish fantasy that there had ever been a choice.

TONY

After the sixth ring he hung up, irritated that it was ten-thirty in the morning, for Christ's sake, and Sara wasn't home. He'd been calling her every half hour since seven-thirty but gotten no answer. So where had she gone so early? She had no relatives to visit. No kids to take to school or walk to the bus stop. He glanced out the office window, noted the flurry of activity, men packing fish in ice, loading crates of sea bass and bluefish that would soon be served in restaurants throughout the East Coast. In the distance, Eddie Sullivan was hosing out a truck. Seven feet away Joey Fanucci slumped against a fishing boat, smoking a cigarette, the lazy bastard, who he wouldn't have hired on a bet if he weren't a cousin and the Old Man hadn't insisted that “family is family.”

He jerked open the window. “Hey, Joey. What the fuck? You got nothing to do?”

Joey tossed his cigarette into the churning water and disappeared into the warehouse.

He can hide in there, Tony thought, he can get behind a stack of shipping crates and beat his meat all fucking day. He slammed the window closed, snapped up the phone, dialed home. When no one answered, the dreadful unease flared, the corrosive feeling that something was wrong in the tidy little house he'd left only a few hours before.

He was still nursing that disturbing idea when his father burst through the door.

“Why you keep that fucking mick on the payroll, Tony? He's dumber than shit.”

“He's a nice guy,” Tony said.

“So what?” Labriola demanded. He strode to a chair in front of Tony's desk, plopped down in it, and spread his long, thick legs out across the floor. “So what are you telling me, that you're so rich you can keep some lazy mick on welfare forever?”

“He's not lazy, Dad,” Tony said. He grabbed a pencil from a cup that bristled with them and rolled it nervously between his fingers.

Labriola eyed the pencil, then said, “What you so jumpy about?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? I don't think so, Tony. You got something on your mind, spit it out.”

“Nothing,” Tony repeated.

Labriola laughed. “That wife of yours, she's probably not giving you any.”

Tony slid the pencil back into the cup.

“You want to get even with her, I could have Belle fix you up.”

Tony shook his head. “Stop it.”

Labriola laughed again. “I told Belle I wanted her to make that thing with sole your mother used to make. You remember, with tomatoes, garlic, capers.”

“I remember.”

“So, you got sole?”

“Yeah.”

Labriola pulled himself to his feet. “The mick can gimme it?”

“His name is Eddie.”

Labriola walked to the door, then looked at Tony. “Don't let that wife of yours fuck with you, Tony.”

“I won't,” Tony assured him.

“Good,” Labriola said curtly. “Because they try to get between us, these fucking broads.”

“Between us?”

“Guys. Set one against the other. Father and son.”

“Sara would never do that.”

Labriola laughed and waved his hand. “Yeah, sure, you know all about women, kid.” He turned and headed out the door.

Tony watched as the Old Man slammed down the stairs and strode out across the marina, waving to Eddie with one of his get-the-hell-over-here-asshole gestures, like Eddie was his slave. He knew he should have insisted on defending Sara, but he'd been frozen by his father's mocking laughter, a laughter that had become even more hard lately, tinged with an edgy craziness, as if the Old Man were unraveling in some way, growing more violent, something in him going haywire.

Tony shrugged helplessly. What could you do with such a man?
Nothing,
he decided as always.
Nothing but stay out of his way.

MORTIMER

Brandenberg handed him the envelope. “Tell your man he did a good job.”

Mortimer tucked the envelope into the inside pocket of his jacket.

They were sitting in the lounge of the St. Regis Hotel, a place whose sumptuous decor made Mortimer feel poor and ragged. Glancing about, he wished he'd met Brandenberg in the park, where there were guys digging soda cans and scrapes of food out of the garbage. Instead, he had only the plush carpet and the thick, luxurious curtains and the well-dressed gentleman at the table to the right, some actor he vaguely recognized, though he couldn't recall the name.

Brandenberg sipped his brandy, then said, “You want a drink?”

Mortimer shook his head. “You need anything else? Some other job?”

Brandenberg considered Mortimer's questions for a few seconds, then said, “Not for myself. But I have an associate. A businessman from Saudi—”

“No.” Mortimer shook his head. “Two types he don't work for. Foreigners is one of them.”

“And the other?”

“Mob guys.”

“I see.” Brandenberg took another sip. “And why does he draw this line?”

“He got fucked. Years ago, but he don't forget.”

“So you screen his clients?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then it could be kept strictly between us. I mean, as regards this associate of mine. Which is strictly a business matter, by the way. A question of internal security. Nothing . . . messy. And as far as payment is concerned, the money could come through me. So in a situation like that, how would your man know if—”

“It ain't his job to know,” Mortimer interrupted.

“Fine,” Brandenberg said in the crisp, cold tone of a man unaccustomed to being refused. “I suppose I admire your . . . honesty,” he added grudgingly. He brought his finger to his lips, and the polished nail gave off a glint of light.

To be dolled up like that, Mortimer thought, to be all elegant and refined that way, what would that feel like? “So, I guess we're done,” he said.

“It would appear so.”

“Okay,” Mortimer said, and on that word got to his feet and made his way out into the cheerless light.

On the street he sucked in a quick breath, felt a searing ache in his abdomen, and remembered that he was dying. He'd been close to death only once before, that day in the war when they'd come under attack from all directions. He'd felt the ground tremble, the whizzing bullets, the heat from the burning hutches, and finally the shell that had torn into his side. If it hadn't been for Stark, he'd have died right then, he thought, and suddenly the prospect of that earlier death appealed to him as few things ever had. To die abruptly, without waiting. To die owing nothing. To die young and stupid and before you'd fucked yourself over and fucked other people over, and married the first woman who'd have you, and accumulated nothing but a string of useless days. Before you'd learned just how goddamn worthless the future was. That, Mortimer decided, was a good death, and the only regret he felt as he turned and headed down the street was that he'd managed to escape it.

SARA

The bus cruised along Sunset Highway, through the clustered towns of Long Island. Within an hour she would be in New York. She had planned her future just that far, made no plans beyond her arrival, lined up no job, booked no hotel, nothing. At thirty-eight, she would return to the city exactly as she had first come to it twenty years before, with a single suitcase, no prospects, fleeing Long Island as she'd once fled the South, caught again in the same grim vise.

“Looks like we're going to get a little rain.”

Sara glanced toward the woman who sat next to her.

“I checked the weather station before I left this morning,” the woman added. “There's little spots of rain all up the East Coast.” She opened a brown paper bag and took out a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil. “I don't eat in bus stops,” she explained. “Too expensive.”

Sara said nothing. She wanted silence and distance, wanted only to get away from Tony and his father and from her own devouring rage.

Stop!
she told herself fiercely.
Put it out of your mind, everything before right now.

“Where you headed?” the woman beside her asked.

“North,” Sara said, her voice oddly stiff and inflectionless, as if it came from stone.

The woman took the sandwich out of the foil. It was egg and bacon. She took a large bite and chewed with her mouth open. “Me too. Change for Boston when I get to the city. I got a daughter in Boston. I'm staying with her for a few days.”

Sara listened as the woman prattled on and on, a low drone in Sara's mind as she detailed the route her daughter Lynn had taken through life, where she'd gone to school, the two guys she'd married, the jobs she'd had. The dragonback of Manhattan was visible before the tale wound to its end.

“I think Lynn's pretty settled now,” the woman concluded.

Settled.

Sara saw a field of summer corn, felt a sweetly sickening breath in her face. She should have known at that instant that nothing would ever be settled after that because from then on, even when alone, she would hear nothing but the heavy tread of something from behind, and then the frantic scampering of prey.

ABE

He jiggled the key until it opened. It hadn't turned smoothly in years. Like everything else, Abe thought, cranky and erratic, determined to thwart the smooth flow of things.

He switched on the light, closed the door, locked it. The clock over the bar read eleven-fifteen. Jake would arrive at noon, and the daily routine would begin in earnest, setting up the bar, checking the supplies, cleaning, polishing, paying bills. Jorge would show up twenty minutes later, mop the place, break down the boxes, gather up the garbage, all the drudge work of keeping the joint relatively clean. Susanne Albert, the college girl who'd worked in the place for only a couple of months, would come in an hour before opening, do the few things Jake hadn't finished, then sit in the back booth, reading some book about Hindu philosophy. And last, Lucille, the bar's only entertainment, a sixty-one-year-old former Broadway chorus singer who'd been at the bar for as long as Abe could remember, the singer he'd first accompanied all those many years ago, and who he'd kept on even after he'd bought the place.

That was it, then, Abe thought, the family.

It was a far cry from what he'd intended, but it was no doubt better than tapping out “Feelings” in some seedy lounge on the Jersey shore. He was forty-eight, old enough to know that the jazz pianist's life he'd once envisioned for himself would not have suited him very well. In fact, when he thought of it now, it was as little more than a Blue Note fantasy, like becoming a writer or an actor. Mavis had always said that he wasn't very adventurous, that all he really wanted was the anchor of a steady, predictable life. Toward the end she'd been plenty frank about it,
When you get right down to it, Abe, you're a stick-in-the-mud.

He walked behind the bar, took the canvas cash bag he'd brought from the bank around the corner, and began to fill the register. He'd just opened the quarters into the drawer when the phone rang.

“McPherson's,” he said.

“Abe. Lucille.”

“You sound shitty.”

“It's the mood, you know?”

“You need anything?”

“No. I'm just gonna sleep through it.”

“Well, if you do . . .”

“I know, Abe.”

He heard the click of the phone as Lucille hung up. Okay, he thought, his longtime chanteuse was in a mood and so wouldn't be showing up for her set. But it was a Tuesday, the slowest night of the week, so with Susanne working the tables and Jake the bar, and Jorge busing and himself at the keyboard, the bar would make it through all right.

He glanced at the old piano at the rear of the bar and remembered the first time Mavis had leaned against it, dark-eyed and looking more experienced than she should have, this woman he'd later married and who'd promised to stay with him always but had run off with a guy who'd later made it big, and whose smiling face Abe continually confronted in record stores and concert billboards. He knew what Mavis' flight had stolen from him: self-confidence, for one thing, along with the money she'd emptied from their accounts. All of that he could have gotten back one way or another, but what he'd never regained was the lightness of life, the sense of humor that had once so lifted him and made the good times roll and, more than his playing, brought buoyancy and joy to the people around him. That had gone with Mavis, and now seemed as irretrievable as the wedding ring she'd stripped from her finger and hocked at Forty-sixth and Eighth when Hell's Kitchen still smoldered on the west side of the city.

Jake came through the door and seemed to read his face. “Trouble?” he asked.

“Just Lucille,” he lied.

TONY

Tony tossed the house keys to Eddie Sullivan. “She never locks the place, but just in case.”