where? California? Jesus, Tony, think!” The Old Man slapped him lightly on the side of the head. “Think about it! This bitch ain’t on foot or thumbing a ride. Or maybe you figure she’s in some big fucking balloon. Floating in the air.” His laugh was clanking brass. “Face it, Tony. She run off with some guy.”
“I don’t know what to think, Dad.”
“How about money? She take any money?”
“I don’t know,” Tony answered weakly.
“You don’t know? You ain’t checked the accounts?”
“No.”
“Jesus,” the Old Man muttered. “Your wife takes a hike and you don’t check the fucking accounts.”
“I didn’t think of it, Dad. I been . . . you know . . . upset.”
“She played you for a chump from the beginning, Tony. Just a little hayseed singing in some fucking club, and in you walk, a meal ticket if ever there was one.”
“She didn’t know anything about me. I could have been—”
“Oh yeah, take me back, Tony. To that night, I mean, when you first met this fucking broad. Was you alone?”
“No. I was with Frankie and Angelo and—”
“And you paid for the drinks, right, because those two assholes never sprung for a drink their whole fucking lives.”
“Yeah, I paid for the drinks.”
“And you think a broad don’t notice that, Tony, don’t notice who’s paying?”
“She was way up front, Dad, she couldn’t have—”
“Yeah, yeah, up front. But she could see you, right? She ain’t fucking blind. She could see you standing there with those two jerkoffs, and that it was you paying.”
“Yeah, I guess she could see me.”
“And how was you dressed, Tony? You have a hard hat on? Huh? You carrying a tub of fish out clubbing? You wearing some greasy, fucking work shirt, or was you dressed nice?”
“Nice.”
“So she didn’t have to be no fucking brain surgeon to figure it out, right? That you was a guy with cash.”
“I guess not,” Tony admitted.
“So there it is,” the Old Man said, satisfied that he’d made his point. “That’s the whole story with this bitch. Now some other asshole comes along, and she plays you for a chump.” His eyes squeezed together. “I never liked her, Tony. From the South. Shit. What do you know about girls from the South? You could have married your own kind. Kitty Scalli, for example, you could have married her. But, no, you see this fucking hillbilly in some goddamn cheesy bar. End of story.” He shook his head at the idiocy of it all. “You’d married Kitty Scalli, we wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation.”
Tony took a quick sip of his drink. “Well, the thing is—”
“The thing is, you ain’t gonna let her get away with it, Tony,” the Old Man said darkly. He took a noisy pull on his beer and set the glass down hard. “ ’Cause if she does, you’ll never live it down.”
“Yeah, I know, but—”
“The problem is, you don’t stand up for yourself, Tony. You ain’t never stood up for yourself. A woman runs all over you, you just sit there drinking that pussy drink you got there. Your cousin Donny would never have let his wife do something like this.”
“Donny’s an asshole,” Tony said.
“Donny’s an asshole?” Labriola yelped. “Okay, let me ask you this. You think Carla would run off with some fucking scumbag? What that hayseed bitch done to you? Huh? You think Carla would do that to Donny? Fuck no. ’Cause Donny wouldn’t take it, that’s why. You know what would happen to Carla she done that to Donny, what your wife done to you? And there’s your fucking answer. You never taught her to respect you, Tony, and this is the price you pay.”
“Yeah, Dad, but—”
“No fucking buts,” the Old Man snarled. “You’re my son. You’re Leo Labriola’s son. And you know the rule I got, right? You fuck my son, you fuck me.”
“Yeah, but the thing is—”
“You fuck my son, you fuck me,” Labriola repeated fiercely, his eyes glowing red. “You understand?”
Tony nodded mutely.
“You got to find her and bring her back, Tony,” the Old Man added sternly. “Otherwise, won’t nobody ever treat you with no respect.”
“Well, sure, but the thing is, I don’t—”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t know where she is.”
The Old Man’s eyes went cold. “There ain’t nowhere that bitch could run to she can’t be found.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Nowhere, you understand?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Labriola drained the rest of the beer. “I got to make a call.” He got to his feet. “Then me and you are gonna shoot a little pool.”
CARUSO
The phone shook him from his sleep, the Old Man’s voice like a fist around his throat.
“This guy, the deadbeat, he knows people, right? People who find people.”
“He’s connected to some guy who does that,” Caruso told him.
“Okay, here it is. He gets this guy to do a job for me, I’ll let go what he owes me.”
“The guy usually gets thirty,” Caruso said cautiously. “The bill to you is just fifteen.”
“What are you saying, Vinnie?”
“That Morty’s guy, he maybe won’t do it for fifteen.”
“Okay, so I pay the shithead thirty, and he keeps fifteen and gives the other guy fifteen.”
“He shorts him?” Caruso said.
“Yeah, he fucking shorts him, Vinnie,” Labriola bawled. “Or we break his fucking thumbs.”
“Okay,” Caruso said quickly. “Maybe he’ll do that.”
“Like he’s got a fucking choice?” The Old Man’s laugh was brutal.
“I mean . . . he will,” Caruso added hastily. “What’s the job?”
“Find that bitch married my son. She took off this morning. He ain’t heard a word since then.”
Caruso nodded briskly, as if the Old Man were in the room with him, feeling the way he’d tried to make Mortimer feel a few hours before, like a cringing worm.
“Tony ain’t to know nothing about this, you understand?” Labriola added. “You just find that bitch and let me know.”
“Yes, sir,” Caruso said quickly.
“So make the deal with this little shit owes me fifteen grand,” Labriola said. “Then get back to me.”
“Yes, sir,” Caruso repeated in what had become the litany of his life. He hung up, paused briefly, then picked up the phone and dialed one of the scores of numbers he had stored in the hard drive of his mind, this one under the heading “Deadbeats,” the mental file to which he’d but recently added Morty’s name.
STARK
He ate in the garden at Gascogne, surrounded on three sides by high brick walls laced with vines. Within a week the garden would be closed, and so he lingered over a final glass of brandy until nearly midnight.
After that he walked to his apartment on West Nineteenth Street. He’d bought the first-floor apartment nearly twenty years before, and bit by bit he’d turned it into a home that suited him, the walls decorated with carefully chosen oils, the floors draped with large Oriental carpets.
Once inside, he poured a glass of port, sat down in a high-back leather chair, and drew a book from the small mahogany table beside it. In his youth, reading had been his passion. He’d pored over the classics, devouring the