“I wanted to talk to you.”
“So knock! Like a normal person!”
“Well, but you weren’t home, see, so I just-”
She cut him off with a look, then lugged her groceries into the little galley kitchen.
Ricky followed her in and gave her a peck on the mouth.
“You’ve been drinking. Where were you? No, wait, let me guess. McGrail’s.”
“How’d you guess?”
“You’re a creature of habit. You should have your mail delivered there.”
“I’ve been banned.”
“From McGrail’s? They’ll go broke without you.”
“It’s true.”
“What’d you do, run out on a tab?”
“I consorted with the criminal element.”
“You are the criminal element.”
“I mean the real criminal element. This guy came to see me. That’s what I need to talk to you about. I need to disappear for a while, take care of this thing.”
“What guy?”
“Amy, really, you don’t want to know.”
“I do.”
His face was blank. This was the infuriating thing about Ricky, the secrecy, the way he just disappeared into himself.
“What’s going on, Ricky?”
He did not respond.
“Come on,” she teased. “It’s not so hard. It’s what the little hole in your face is for; that’s where words come out.”
“Amy…”
“Fine, Ricky. That’s just…fine.”
“Amy, it’s nothing. I’ll take care of it. It’s just better we don’t talk about it. Trust me, I have reasons.”
“What reasons? Tell me.”
“Amy, please. Just let it go.”
She studied him. She knew, oh, she knew what Ricky did. But if he chose not to discuss it, then the subject was verboten. That was the unspoken rule. At times like this, though, it killed her to let it go, just killed her. Her temperament, her training, her every day was about finding things out. She was a born finder-out. But, good Lord, did she love that man! Everything about him. His face, his smell, his voice, his body. The more she looked at him, the more she feasted on him. It was just possible, too, that she loved Ricky the more for his tantalizing secrets. He was a story she could never quite get. In any event, there was no sense in pressing him for answers. He wouldn’t talk anyway.
But in the next moment all that sighing, girlish acceptance was gone. How could you really know a man if you could not discuss his work? What kind of relationship was that? Where was it all headed? They’d been together all these years and still?…Oh, the hell with secrets! Were they a couple or not? Did he love her or not?
“Ricky, it’s not fair. You can’t just show up and tell me you’re going to disappear for a while without even explaining what’s going on. It’s…”
“This again. It’s what?”
“It’s not fair.”
“Not fair? How do you know that? How do you know I’m not doing this for your own good?”
“I think I can decide what’s for my own good. I’m a big girl.”
“Well, the answer is no. You don’t get to know this time. It’s better you don’t know. You’ll just have to trust me on that. Now, do you trust me or not?”
Her mouth fell open. Trust him? Ricky, you hypocrite! What balls! She raised her hand to slap him in the chest, not playfully but because there was nothing else to do, no other way to reach him.
Ricky snatched her wrist before she could strike him. He held it, and though his face showed nothing, he squeezed her arm hard. His message could not have been clearer: Don’t snoop.
“Ow, Ricky, stop it, you’re hurting me.”
He released her, then shook his head, frustrated, inarticulate. “Sorry.”
“You’re hurting me.”
15
Joe was the man of the moment. He had rescued the girl from the clutches of the Mad Strangler, wrestled with the very monster itself-and he’d had the extraordinary good fortune to be photographed in his hour of high heroism. (The incident took place a few blocks from Newspaper Row on Washington Street, where several papers maintained their city rooms.) There was still the matter of attaching a name to the suspect and then finding him, but at least the cops had a description now. Joe received a commendation from the commissioner. True, this was the same commissioner Joe had humiliated a few weeks before on national television, but to Joe the rescue erased everything that had gone before. He presumed he would be rehabilitated. He informed Brendan Conroy that his first choices for reassignment would be Homicide or maybe Alvan Byron’s new Strangler Bureau. Neither would happen.
One night Conroy showed up at Station Sixteen before last half to tell Joe, “You’ve been resurrected.” But the resurrection was incomplete. Joe was restored to detective, but in Station One, in the North End. The precinct covered parts of downtown and the North and West Ends. But the West End had already been reduced to a construction site, for the most part. And the North End was small and insular; it tended to police itself, without interference from outsiders like the Boston PD. Joe told Conroy he did not want the assignment. It was a step backward. “Now, don’t be stiff-necked, boyo,” the old man advised. “It’s a detective bureau. This is the way back. Take it.”
And so Joe found himself in plain clothes again, standing before a narrow shopfront in the old West End, near North Station. The big plate glass window had been smashed, and the hole covered over with plywood sheets. Only a transom remained to identify the place, in gold lettering:
MORRIS WASSERMAN • 26 • DELICATESSEN GROCERY
Moe Wasserman’s little deli was on the ground floor of one of the few remaining tenements in the area, on one of the few remaining open streets, tethered to the city by a single road that led out to Causeway Street. Joe knew the place. He remembered that missing window. It had been decorated with gold lettering, too, in English and Jewish, and near the door cardboard signs had been taped to it advertising the lunch specials. Sometimes there would be a line out the door at lunchtime. But Joe did not know from Jewish food, and what did he need it for anyway? He knew what he liked. Besides, he’d probably go in there and say the wrong thing. So he had never tried it. Ricky would have tried it. Ricky would have strolled in there and come out gibbering Jewish and munching on a kosher pickle and doing the hokey-pokey and been elected mayor of Jerusalem, because that’s how things went for Ricky. Not Joe. Joe had to work for things.
The shop was closed, permanently, and Moe Wasserman himself had to come unlock the door for Joe and show him in. Wasserman was thin and tired-looking, handsome but dingy, sixty-five or so. Joe liked him before he had even opened the door. He liked all Jews, he thought. Twenty years before, as a nineteen-year-old Marine, Joe had marched across France into Germany with the Fourth Armored Division and he had seen things. He had seen things. In France he thought he had seen it all in the fighting in the forest, nothing could shock him anymore. Then in Germany he saw what the Germans had been up to. He didn’t like to think about it. Joe had figured out that every country needed its niggers and in Europe of necessity the niggers had been white. Growing up Daley, it had been an article of faith that the Irish were Englishmen’s niggers. From that traditional ethnic underdog-ism, it had been a short leap to pro-Semitism. Even before the war, Joe’s dad had openly admired Jewish boxers and gangsters, the local booze-runners like Charlie “King” Solomon and Louie Fox. Weren’t the Jew-gangsters just looking out for their people the same way the Gustin Gang looked out for the Irish? And hadn’t Hitler taught everyone, finally, the need
