“I didn’t mean it literally, Nicky.”
“If you had my brother instead of yours and the Bulgarians knockin’ at your door, you’d see it that way.”
That’s where I wanted to leave it. I moved to put the intercom phone back in its cradle.
“I saved your life twice, Moe. Don’t you think you owe me at least a goodbye?”
“Twice?”
“Yeah, I shot Iliya, but that was as much for me and the hell they put my family through as for you. See, once the Bulgarians found out you were snooping around about Conseco’s murder, they were gonna just kill you. Instead I got them to let you talk to Joey Fortuna to throw you off the trail. I figured you’d give up sooner or later and they would leave you alone.”
“Thanks, Nick, but they tried to kill me anyway, tried running me off the Belt Parkway a few days ago.”
He laughed at that. “You don’t know the Bulgarians, Moe. They don’t go in for shit like that. They don’t like ifs and maybes. When they want to kill you, they shoot you or hack you up or blow you up. They don’t run you off the road. Whoever did that is still out there. Looks like that makes two of us who have to watch our backs.”
And that was how we left it.
I called Carmella immediately after getting out of the B-Tombs to explain exactly how Alta had died, who had done it, and why. The irony of it wasn’t lost on her. She thanked me for everything. I asked if she had gotten in touch with Kristen Jo Winston before she left Brooklyn for home. She said she hadn’t, that she couldn’t be somebody else. The irony in that wasn’t lost on me. She asked me to pass on her best wishes to Sarah at the wedding and I said I would. I didn’t tell her I was sick. Suddenly, I didn’t want her sympathy. I no longer wanted anything she had to give. There was a time when we both would have had so much much more to say, but that was ancient history now.
The wedding was amazing. I don’t think I even enjoyed my own wedding to Katy that much. Life is pretty fucking amazing when you take the time to actually let it in and wash over you. I danced like a madman with Pam, with Sarah, with my brother Aaron and my sister-in-law Cindy, with my little sister Miriam, with my nieces and nephews, with Paul’s mom, with his dad, with Fuqua. At the last moment I’d added him to the guest list and he accepted. Paul’s parents didn’t say boo. They weren’t about to say no to the man who had saved my life. For how long was anybody’s guess. Not once during the whole day was I tempted to tell Sarah about my health. The dark realities in our lives catch up to all of us and they didn’t need an assist from me. My daughter would find out about me soon enough. When she got home from her honeymoon, the surgery would be over and then we would all deal with things from there.
Pam had her own notions on the subject. After we threw the rice and waved goodbye to the limo, Pam took me by the arm and marched me to a quiet corner of the country club.
“You’re sick, Moe, aren’t you?”
I didn’t bother denying it. “How’d’ya know?”
“You mean other than the fact that you constantly seem distracted, that you’re too pale and thin, and that you only pretend to drink wine when we’re together?”
“Other than that, yeah.”
“It was something you said when we were in the car following Esme after she picked up the money at 79th Street. You said there wasn’t enough time for another time. I asked you what that meant and you ignored me, but I didn’t forget.”
“It’s bad,” I said.
“I figured. Let’s get back to my place and talk about it when we come up for air.”
She hasn’t left my side since.
On the strength of his arrest of Nick Roussis and for playing a part in breaking up a major drug ring, Fuqua is scheduled to get the bump to detective first and will receive a high departmental honor for saving my worthless ass. His instincts were right. It was better to feed his ambition with accomplishment than leverage. I’m very proud of him for that and I’m almost positive Larry Mac would have been too.
Sarah or Paul or both come down every weekend to visit and Klaus has taken over my responsibilities at the stores. My brother comes to visit, but he won’t talk to me. Cindy says he’s furious with me for not telling him that I was sick, but I know the truth. He’s frightened I’ll abandon him. So he sits across from me when he comes and doesn’t say a word. That’s okay. I hope his anger is strong enough to keep us both alive. Fuqua comes by and so does Flannery. Sometimes they visit together. I enjoy watching them drink in front of me. The deal is that when my treatments are over, they’re taking me to Nathan’s. I mean to hold them to it.
My oncologist says he’s cautiously optimistic, whatever the fuck that means. Talk about hedging your bets! Unlike the Bulgarians he seems perfectly comfortable with ifs and maybes.
The body I read about in the paper that morning was identified as Esmeralda Marie Sutanto, twenty-two years old, of Long Island City, New York. She had been found a few days earlier by a lost hiker in a state park in Orange County. Although the body wasn’t in the best of shape, there were signs she had been tortured before being suffocated. The cops weren’t very specific, but Fuqua had all the details when he called me later in the day.
“They used a black latex mask to suffocate her,” he said. “It was designed so that one might cut off the air supply to the wearer. From the shape of her, they did her a favor by killing her. Her murderer was very angry with her. The upstate authorities are putting it down to a sexual assault and homicide.”
“You sound unconvinced.”
“The homicide did not happen where the body was found, yet the murderer left Esme’s suitcase with her body.”
“So.”
“I have gone over the inventory of the things in the suitcase. They were mismatched. It was as if someone else packed the bag for Esme to make it appear as if she had left her apartment in a rush.”
Even in my frail state, I could read between the lines. I had no part in contacting the women Esme and Tillman had raped and blackmailed. Natasha said she would handle that. But none of us, not Pam nor Natasha nor Fuqua nor Devo nor I believed that simply getting Esme out of town would be the end of it. Devo said it to me straight, that there were no guarantees the videos wouldn’t resurface, that there were billions of hiding places in cyberspace and that any half-assed kid could embed videos in places no one would think to look. Basically, we’d all chosen to ignore the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. What Fuqua was saying was that one of us had decided not to it ignore it at all.
“What are you gonna do about it?”
“Do?” he puzzled. “I will do nothing.”
“I thought all victims were equal in murder.”
“Not all victims,” he said. “Not all. It is not my job to increase the pain in the world. It is my job to stop it.”
I let Fuqua hold on to that myth because as long as humans walked the earth, the pain would be there and we would go on doing what we could not help but do: inflict pain on one another as easily as we breathed. People can change, but they cannot change their essential natures. We were hurt machines and whether we evolved into them or God made us that way seemed beside the point.
