rise and fall to the cadence of her curses, and Bracken listened contentedly enough, poised on the dark knife-edge of sleep.
He was a wop, a stinking spic, a lover of sheep, a crude bludgeoner who went to chic restaurants and ate pie with his fingers; a grabber and a twister, a black-and-bluer of flesh; a lover of junk shop gimcracks; an aficionado of Norman Rockwell; a pederast; a man who would not treat her as a diadem but rather as a brace for his sagging manhood; not as a proud woman but as a dirty backstain joke to bolster the admiration of his pasta-eating, sweaty associates.
'A man with a belly,' she whispered into the darkness just before Bracken dropped off, 'I am his belly. I am his guts. I am his honor.' It occurred to him, as his mind fled to sleep, that the conflict of their honor had formed a bridge of hate between them that he now walked on, across oceans of darkness.
While they sat in the breakfast nook the following morning, eating doughnuts and watching legs pass in the tiny window above, she made her proposition: 'Make me pregnant. I will pay you to do this.'
Bracken put down his doughnut and looked at her.
She smiled and brushed her hair back. 'He wants a child. Could he make one?' She shrugged. 'Perhaps lasagna is good for potency. I, however, take pills. He knows I take them.'
Bracken sipped his coffee. 'Stud service?'
Norma laughed, a tinkly sound. 'I suppose. I go to him today. No makeup. Black eye. Scratched face. Tears. How I wish to be a good wife.' The, black charring note of score began to creep in. 'How I want to learn the recipe for his favorite greasy noodles. How I want to give him a son.'
Her face had become alive, lovely. 'He will be prideful and forgiving...in short, blind. I'll get what I want, which is freedom of the tables. And he will get what he wants: which is an heir. Perhaps not.'
She was lying, and when she looked into his eyes she saw his knowledge and smiled with slow, shy guile. 'And perhaps, at the right time, I will kill him with the truth. You won't tell him?'
'Would it kill him?' Bracken leaned forward with mild professional interest.
141
'If someone cut open your belly, would it kill you?'
'It would cost one hundred thousand dollars”, Bracken said. 'Forty before conception and sixty after. Have you got that kind of money?'
'Yes.'
He nodded. 'All right.' He paused. 'It's a funny hit, you know that? A funny hit.'
She laughed.
He returned to the Graymoor that afternoon and collected the rest of his money. Correzente was smiling and robust.
Bracken was thanked profusely. More business would be thrown his way.
Bracken nodded, and Correzente leaned toward him in a fatherly way.
'Can you keep your mouth shut about all this?'
'I always keep my mouth shut.' Bracken said, and left.
Benny the Bull gave him a handshake and an envelope containing a plane ticket to Cleveland. Once there, Bracken bought a used car and drove back. He took up residence in Norma Correzente's second apartment. She brought him a carton of paperback novels. He read them and watched old movies on TV. He did not go out even when it would have been safe to go out. They made love regularly. It was like being in a very plush jail. Ten weeks after the contract with Dan Vittorio had been fulfilled, she killed the rabbit.
Bracken left town again.
He was in Palm Springs, and the phone connection was very bad.
'Mr. Bracken?'
'Yes. Talk louder, please.' Bracken was dressed in sweaty tennis whites; the girl on the bed wore only her skin. A tennis racket dangled from one hand. She swished at the air with it idly watching Bracken with the nearly expressionless eyes of experienced desire.
'This is Benito Torreos, Mr. Bracken.”
'Yes.'
'You did a job for my Don seven months ago. You remember?'
'Yes.' New sweat began to crawl down his back.
'He wants to see you. He's dying.'
Bracken thought carefully, knowing his life almost certainly depended on his next words. He did not see what he had done as a double-cross: he had fulfilled two separate and exclusive contracts, and had been able to vacation from then until now on his earnings. But the old man would see it as a cross, a stain on his pride and good faith. He was a man with a belly.
'Why does he want to see me?'
'To ask a question.'
142
The connection was very bad, and Bracken knew that to simply replace the instrument in its cradle would likely mean death. The family has a long arm. It was either to go Vito or run, and the connection was very bad.
'How is Mrs. Correzente?' he asked politely.
'Dead,' Benny Torreos said flatly. 'She died last month, in childbirth.'
The bedroom was gothic shades of white on white – rug, walls, ceiling, curtains, even the sky beyond the windows. A steady drizzle was falling outside the Graymoor. Don Vito, shrunken to the size of a jockey twisted from the back of his horse, lay immured in his deathbed, which was also white.
