Only Child

become true, see?”

“What you’re talking about, it’s too delicate. Valachi was a gift, dropped in their laps. They could never be sure a hit would miss.”

“Exactly! But what if the guy got a warning first?”

“A warning not to rat? That doesn’t make any sense. The way you’re laying it out, the cops would already know he’s not.”

“It would make sense if the warning came from...people who weren’t sure, maybe. But worried...”

“You’ve lost me now,” I said, telling the truth.

I caught the glance between them again. Went back to waiting.

“Fuck it,” the Italian said again. Not angry, resigned. “I got a daughter. By a...girl I knew when I was a kid. It was an outside-the-tribe thing, you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“The girl, when she told me, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t ask anybody, either. I offered her money to get rid of it, but she wouldn’t. I even didn’t feel right about that myself. Abortion—by the church, that’s murder. I was just getting some traction then. I wasn’t made or anything, but I was on my way; sure thing. What was I going to tell my people? What was my mother going to say? ‘Oh, my Giovanni don’t live here no more. He’s over in the Village, married to a moolingiane. I got a beautiful granddaughter, too. Sweetest little half-breed you ever saw.’ That was all the choice I had.

“The girl, she wasn’t some whore I had on the side. She was...a very pure person. I was the first man she’d ever been with. I had...feelings for her, for real.

“But if I went with her, that was the end of everything. I’d end up like one of those robots from my old neighborhood. Ride the subway to work every day. Hope you get on with the union; be like every good paisan with a steady jay-oh-bee. Keep some tomatoes out back, some pigeons on the roof, maybe. Play some bocce, get a weekend in Atlantic City once in a while. Once a year, two weeks in Florida; do some fishing or whatever. Always making payments on something. What’s all that? Just putting in time until they get old enough to go down to Florida for good. Get fucking buried there.

“I told her I could get money. I mean, even then, I was doing good. I had a new Camaro, my own place...but no way I was having my name on the birth certificate.

“She didn’t get mad. Didn’t even cry or anything. But she told me she wasn’t getting rid of the kid. And if she had to go on Welfare, they’d make her tell who the father was, and she wasn’t going to act like some tramp, pretend she didn’t know. She had an aunt she could go live with. Her aunt could watch the baby while she went to work.

“She wasn’t jacking me up for money, just telling me the way things were. If I’d thought it was a shakedown, I would have...I don’t know what I would have done. It doesn’t matter. What I did was, I pulled a job. Down in Jersey, with two cousins of mine. I didn’t keep a dime for myself—I gave her my whole share of the take.”

He looked at me. I looked back, as unreadable as rain.

“I never saw her again,” he said. “But I know she had a little girl. Every once in a while, I’d get a letter. Not a written one, just an envelope with pictures in it, some little notes on the back. Pictures of the girl. Her name was Vonni. After me, I guess.

“I got other stuff. Report cards, copies of letters from her school...I know what you’re thinking, but this wasn’t nothing like blackmail. Sure, I sent money. I figured the pictures was her way of telling me that kids need things. Like...a school picture, okay? That maybe meant the kid needed stuff for school, you see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” I said, just to let him know I was listening.

“They lived out on the Island. Got her own house. I...helped her with that. Money, I mean. But Hazel, the mother, she always worked. She never went near the Welfare,” he said, completely unaware of the pride in his voice.

“And the girl, she wasn’t into anything. Not in her whole life. She was an honor student. Going to college. I mean, not some dream, okay? She was already accepted. To SUNY. That’s a very good school,” he said solemnly.

He stopped and did his breathing thing again.

The Latin lit another smoke, tilted his pack toward me. I accepted.

“Some sick fuck killed her,” the Italian said, his voice flat and hard, tiptoeing past emotion like a mouse around a cobra. “Stabbed her to pieces. For no reason, you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, going even flatter than he was.

“What it was, it was a warning. But not the kind my people use. You see what I’m saying?”

“The kind of warning Felix’s people might use,” I said, no longer mechanical.

“Yeah. But whoever did this, there’s one thing they never counted on.”

I kept quiet, waiting.

“If Felix was warning me, then someone must have warned Felix. You see what a mess this is? Someone tells Felix I already turned. I’m wearing a wire, maybe. Who would do that? If I got scared enough that my boss was going to find out what...what we were doing to make money...if I got scared and made a deal with the feds, Felix’s people wouldn’t care. Not unless I was going to bring them into it...”

“I understand.”

“You know what they never counted on? Me and Felix. That I’d go to Felix. And that I’d take his word when he told me he had nothing to do with...what...happened.”

“Did the cops ever ask you—?”

“I was never in it,” he said. “When I...heard, I...I called her. For the first time since we...She told me the cops said it was a sex maniac.”

Another breath. Close to a sigh.

“That was over a year ago,” he went on. “And nobody’s ever been popped for it.”

“And your boss...?”

“Hey, fuck my boss, all right? This isn’t about him. I’m a boss myself now. It’s about me. Me and Felix. About our thing. Somebody was trying to send a message, wreck what me and Felix have. Who else but the feds? They spook me into going over, they get everything, the dream RICO case.”

“It’s too subtle for them,” I said.

“Yeah? Who else would know about my...about her? It was so long ago. And I never told anybody. Not in my life. Not my mother. Not no priest. Not even...Nobody knew. There’s nothing to tie her to me. But the feds, they’ve got everything in the world in their computers....”

“I still can’t see the feds actually—”

“Not the feds. A fed. Someone who hates...us to death. Hates us that much that he’d want to see us kill each other.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

He looked ice-picks at me for a few seconds, then held his finger under his nose, pinched one nostril, and snorted an imaginary line.

“You have a name?” I asked, eye-sweeping to include them both in the question.

“We do not have a name, but we have a way to the name...if there is one,” Felix said. “What we need is the truth of what happened. And only one man can tell us.”

“The killer,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you want me to, what, exactly?”

“Here’s the deal,” Giovanni said, leaning forward, handcuffing my eyes. “I promised Hazel that I’d find out who did this. If it was some fucking skinner, that’s easy. I can fix that.” He paused, did his breath trick again. “But if it’s a game, if it’s someone trying to crush me and Felix, what we have, then I want whoever did it to talk.

“That’s not your problem, getting him to talk. What we want to do is hire you. Hire you to find whoever did it. We’ll take it from there.”