She'd been going out with him for three weeks and it was getting serious. They'd meet at noon, check into a hotel a couple times a week and spend two hours in bed, screwing and drinking champagne. It was something, best sex she'd ever had in her life. He did things to her nobody had ever done before. She'd say, where'd you learn that? And he'd say, you inspire me, beautiful. The only bad thing, he called her Sharona, or my Sharona. Everything else was great so she let it go.
They'd take his boat out on Lake St Clair and she'd sunbathe topless. Something she'd never done in her life and never imagined herself doing. She felt invigorated, liberated. He always told her she looked good, complimented her outfit. Showered her with gifts, bought her clothes and jewelry. She felt like a teenager again. They'd meet and talk and touch each other and kiss. She was happy for the first time in years. She had to be careful. Ray, the next time he came home, might notice something and get suspicious. Why're you so happy? she could hear him saying — like there was something wrong with it.
But this relationship with Joey also made her nervous.
Things were happening too fast. She was falling for him and she barely knew him, and she was married.
Joey drove a Cadillac STS with the big engine. He liked to drive fast, too, like a high-school kid, always flooring it, burning rubber. He'd have a few drinks, nail it and the tires would squeal and he'd get a big grin on his face.
She said, 'What're you running?'
'469-horsepower V8,' he said.
She said, 'What's its ET?'
'Jesus, you know cars, huh? I don't know what its ET is. Never been timed.'
Her dad used to take her to Detroit Dragway when she was a kid to see the nitromethane-burning fuel dragsters, fuelies that went zero to sixty in two tenths of a second. Nine seconds in the quarter mile, its ET, elapsed time.
Her dad said you could tell the guys that burned nitro. When they took off, it smelled like acid. Nitro isn't a fuel, it's an explosive. It would blow off cylinder heads like a hat off your head.
Her dad's interest: most of the stock blocks were 426 Hemis, an engine Chrysler made.
One day they went to Nino's for groceries and then drove to Joey's place, this atrocious-looking, fake brick neo-colonial. He popped the trunk and as they were unloading the bags of groceries, Sharon noticed a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger that was stained with something red. She said, 'What's on your bat? Is that blood?'
He told her he played on a softball team and one of his teammates got hit in the face by a pitch. That's where the blood came from. She knew you didn't use a wooden bat to play softball, but didn't really think about it at the time. But then Joey had his friends over and everyone had a nickname.
There was Hollywood Tony.
Joey said, 'Ain't he a good-looking kid?'
There was 'Big Frankie' and 'Cousin Frankie.' They were cousins who looked like twins. Sharon said, 'How do you tell them apart?'
'What do you mean?' Joey said. 'It's easy.'
There was 'Joe the Pimp' and 'Skippy' and 'Paulie the Bulldog.' 'Fat Tony,' who was thin, and 'Chicago Tony,' who was fat, and 'Tony the Barber' who didn't cut hair. They all drove Caddys and had money and hung out with hot young girls who looked like models or strippers. Sharon had heard of some of the guys, knew they were mobsters.
She remembered Jack Tocco, the don, coming in Club Leo one time with his entourage, and the whole place stopped, people looked like they were frozen, the men, her father included, paying homage to the man, the boss of all bosses.
She said, 'Joey, what the hell do you do? You connected?'
He said, 'To what?'
'The Mob?'
He never answered the question. They were on his boat called Wet Dream, that's how imaginative he was, looking out at the lake, a couple miles offshore, Canada somewhere in the distance, sun setting, red highlights on the horizon, Sharon thinking she'd gotten herself in too deep and shouldn't see him any more. He got up and went below and she was trying to think of what to say to him.
He came back on deck with a bottle of champagne and two flutes three-quarters filled and handed one to her.
She said, 'What's the occasion?'
Joey said, 'I've been thinking about this for a while. I hope you have, too.'
He put the bottle in a cooler that was on deck. He got down on one knee and looked up at her.
'Will you marry me?'
He clinked her glass and took a sip. She did, too.
'Be careful,' he said. 'There's something in there.'
Sharon saw it at the bottom of the flute, floating just above the stem. She knew what it was.
'It's our anniversary,' Joey said. 'Five weeks from the day we met.'
Joey was a party boy. This was the last thing she would've expected. She said, 'I've got to tell you I'm a little surprised. I thought you were seeing other girls, too.'
'Not since I met you, babe. When I saw you I got hit by a tornado, a fucking hurricane.'
She didn't know what else to do so she drank the champagne and felt the ring tickle her mouth, bobbing in the bubbles. When her champagne was gone, she turned the glass upside down and caught it, a diamond ring, a big one.
He said, 'Put it on.'
And she did, the biggest engagement ring she'd ever seen.
'Three fucking carats,' he said.
He was grinning, holding his champagne glass by the stem. 'Had it made special. What do you think?'
Chapter Four
McCabe waited at the bus stop on Via Trionfale with a heavyset gray-haired woman wearing a black dress. She was holding hands with a young girl in a school uniform who looked nine or ten. The woman wore dark translucent stockings and he could see the hair on her legs matted against the fabric.
Two tradesmen in blue coveralls were smoking, a slight breeze blowing it toward the woman. She glanced at the men, fanning her face. They dropped their cigarettes on the sidewalk and stepped on them as the bus pulled up. The doors opened and people got off and McCabe and the others got on.
The bus was packed, siesta over, people going back into the city to work. McCabe stood leaning against the rear window, looking down the aisle, the air thick with the smell of body odor. At times it was so heavy he had to breathe through his mouth.
He watched traffic approach, looking out the rear window, helmeted riders on Vespas and Lambrettas coming up close to the bus then gunning their motorbikes, hearing the throaty whine of their engines at high rpms as they whipped by. The bus drove down Via Cola di Rienzo, over the river and through the giant arches of Flaminia and stopped in Piazza del Popolo. McCabe got off and walked across the square to Rosati.
He sat at a sidewalk table, sipping a Moretti in a stemmed glass, taking in the scene, studying the obelisk that was brought to Rome by Augustus after the conquest of Egypt, appreciating the simplicity of it. Beyond the obelisk was the Porta del Popolo, a giant arch carved out of the Aurelian Wall, the original perimeter of the city.
He watched pigeons land in the piazza in front of the churches, strutting and bowing on their little red feet, blue- gray feathers flecked with red. He once saw a show on pigeons on the Nature Channel and remembered some amazing pigeon facts: they could fly fifty miles an hour and they came in seven different colors and when they had sex, the female bent down and the male climbed on top, flapping his wings for balance, saying 'Coo roo-croo
