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“What’s the matter with proactive? We’ve got a chance to quit sitting around with our thumbs up our asses. You like that better?”
“What I don’t like,” I said, “is staking my wife out like a sacrificial goat.”
There was more, and both our voices got a little louder toward the end. When I hung up, Elaine asked me just what the role of sacrificial goat consisted of. I told her to forget it.
“They want me to open the store?”
“It’s a bad idea. Sussman likes it because it gives him a chance to do something.”
“That must be where proactive came in.”
“He can station men here and there and have them all stay in touch with walkie-talkies. He gets to be the general, he gets to direct the movie. But you’re the one who’d be taking the risk, and to no purpose, because this guy’s not stupid.”
“So you’re saying it wouldn’t work?”
“Not in a million years. You think he’ll just waltz into the shop? They can have two guys in a Con Ed truck, looking like they’re working in a manhole, and they can have another guy dressed like a bum and collecting coins in a paper cup—”
“Like TJ, with his denim cap.”
“—and two cops in the back room, and one in the basement and another on the roof, for all I know. The guy’ll spot ’em in a hot second, and he’ll stay away.”
“Say he does. Nobody gets hurt, and at least I’m out there doing something instead of just sitting here like a piece of Wedgwood that’s too delicate to put on the table. What’s the downside?”
“They put you out there,” I said. “They bait the hook and he doesn’t bite.”
“They bait the hook with a goat? Never mind. So he doesn’t bite.
Does that mean it wasn’t worth trying?”
“It does if it means they lose their edge,” I said. “They keep preparing for something that keeps not happening, and they start taking it for granted that nothing’s going to happen. And they get sloppy, and All the Flowers Are Dying
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they let their guard down. And he sits back and waits and watches, and when he finally makes his move nobody notices until it’s too late.”
“You really think that would happen?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“And you wouldn’t just be standing there behind the counter for six or seven hours a day. You’d have to get there and back. They’d give you a police escort, and don’t you think he’d spot it? And figure out a way around it?”
“I see what you mean,” she said. “You can only take precautions so long and then you start loosening up. But won’t the same thing happen to us here? I’m already getting a fierce case of cabin fever. We’ve got a nice roomy apartment, so I’ve got more than four walls to stare at, but I’m getting pretty tired of them just the same. I’ve been good, I do my yoga in the living room, but I don’t know how long I can take it.”
“We’ll take it a day at a time.”
“Like staying sober, huh?”
“Like getting through anything. Even guys in prison figure that much out. You take it a day at a time and you wait it out.”
“I know you’re right,” she said. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Suppose it was you.”
“Suppose what was me?”
“Suppose it was you on this asshole’s shit list. And as far as that goes, how do we know it isn’t? Maybe I’m not the only one he wants to kill, did you ever think of that?”
“If he makes a move on me, I hope he doesn’t bring me a bottle of Strega.”
“I’m serious.”
“I guess the flowers would be okay, though. But no Strega.” A little later she said, “You take risks. You’ve even let yourself be the bait in the trap. What about the time that Colombian came at you with a machete?”
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“That was more than twenty years ago. I was young and reckless then.”
“You still take risks. When you and Mick went out to his farm after those men—”
“There was nothing else to do, honey.”
“I know.”
“There was no way to bring the cops in, and we were in no position to hang back and wait it out. It was a different situation.” She nodded. She said, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the time I was stabbed. It
