alone in the old man’s house, but he felt a nervous restlessness that made him afraid to close his eyes.
Eddie had given him advice on that too. “Before you go to sleep, always be goddamned sure you’re going to be alive when you wake up.” He used to keep the boy up watching the cars behind them while he drove, or sometimes just looking for a likely place to drop a weapon or change a license plate. Once he had even made him check off landmarks to be sure the road map didn’t have any mistakes on it. Sometime in the last few years Wolf had admitted to himself that he had always known it was because Eddie hated to be alone when he was scared. Eddie would have said, “I’m not scared. I’m just alert.” It still made him sad to remember that Eddie had been alone when he had died.
He walked through the house to the pantry, opened the door and turned on the light. The shelves were lined with cans and bottles to last for years, all arranged in rows, front to back like the displays in a tiny supermarket. He found a twenty-five-pound sack of rice, placed it on the floor as a pillow, laid the shotgun on the floor next to it and turned out the light. For a moment he lay there in the dark, opening and closing his eyes and not detecting a difference. He wondered if he would have to try something else. It had been ten years since he had slept on a floor, and the tile squares were harder and colder than they looked. But the idea of getting up again seemed an immense labor at the moment, and then he forgot what he had been thinking, and had to remind himself. He decided he had better move, but later, when he felt more uncomfortable, and then he was asleep.
He didn’t dream. Instead, his mind roamed the house, running hands along the walls, feeling the faint vibration of the old man’s oil furnace, like the sound of an engine pushing it somewhere with glacial slowness. Deep in the timbers there was the almost-inaudible creak of the house standing up to the wind off the river, and outside, tiny particles of grit blowing against the impervious shell of brittle paint on the clapboards. It was like being deep in the hold of a ship at anchor. His mind kept patrolling the surfaces, reassuring itself that the shell was tight and unbroken, and that his sleeping body was secreted in the center, where he had hidden it.
When he awoke, his first sensation was that he had missed something on his rounds, made a mistake. But then his mind tripped on the contradiction: he couldn’t have been both asleep and awake. But he knew there were people in the house. The floor amplified the impacts of their steps, and he could feel them in his body. The old man would have come in alone and warned him if he was bringing somebody back with him.
He picked up the shotgun and slowly crawled to the pantry door. He pushed the door open an eighth of an inch and looked out into the kitchen. It was still dark. He listened for a moment, until he was sure they were no longer in the room. He heard the creak of a door in the hallway being pulled open quickly, then a long silence. If there were people sneaking around the house in the dark, then the old man wasn’t one of them. He would have known it was the best way to get his head blown off. Could the old man have sold him? Not after giving him a loaded shotgun. Somebody was looking for Wolf.
At first the search would be quick and cursory. They would duck across doorways and step aside to swing doors open. When they had been through the whole building once without any resistance, they would go through again looking for hiding places. He had to get out before they got to that stage. He held the shotgun level with the floor as he slipped out of the pantry into the open kitchen. He set his feet down softly, moving to the kitchen door. Now he could hear voices in the parlor, quick and urgent and soft.
He slowly turned the doorknob and pulled the door open before he let the spring turn it back. He took a step over the threshold, then another to take the weight of his body, then another and another until he was down the steps. He took a deep breath of the cool, damp air and blew it out to let it merge with the wind. As his head cleared, he admitted to himself that the old man must be dead.
He walked around to the back of the house, looked in the window and saw them. There were two of them, both carrying pistols in their right hands. One was tall and fat, with bristly gray hair brushed back like porcupine quills. He kept his pistol pointed down at the floor, while the other, a twenty-five-year-old with a pitted complexion and a sharp, chiseled face, danced around opening closet doors and jumping out of the way as though he weren’t sure when his partner might decide to shoot.
As he watched them, he studied the eager, predatory expression on the face of the young one. He looked as though he had just watched the old black man die, and the sight had agreed with him. He was in a state of excitement, thrilled that he was going to get to do it again. It took no more than a second for the impulse his look ignited in Wolf to travel its course. He knew Eddie Mastrewski would have said, “What do you get for it?” But by now the impulse was traveling too fast, gaining strength and getting hotter, and it made him raise the shotgun to his shoulder and hug it tight. He fired through the window, pumped it and fired again. After the second shot, as the barrel leveled from the kick and he pumped it again, there was an instant, like the wink of a camera shutter, when he saw pieces of glittering window glass turn end over end and sprinkle the two bodies sprawled on the floor.
He lowered the shotgun, pressed the disconnector and quickly pumped out the last three shells. Then he released the magazine, gave the barrel a quarter-turn and removed it from the receiver. He held both halves under his coat and walked down the driveway to the street. He had told the old man he hadn’t come to town to get Angelo Fratelli, but a lot had changed since then.
Angelo Fratelli hated white wine. It was his belief that it was a weak, sour version of the rich, blood-red Paisano that he had been drinking since he was a child. He had heard the sister say in school that when Jesus was on the cross, the Romans had given him vinegar and water with a sponge, and he had assumed they were talking about something that just tasted like vinegar, maybe cheap Spanish sauterne. That was what Angelo was drinking now. Every year, between Ash Wednesday and Easter, he drank white wine only. It was a legacy from the days when people ate fish on Friday, and although religion had said nothing about what went with it, the Fratellis had always assumed that the Scriptures implied white wine. The drop of cognac or grappa that he liked after dinner was out too, because those concoctions were clearly on the side of luxury. He was still drinking white wine this late in the year because of a promise he had made to Saint Giovanni in return for a favor, and from time to time he wondered if the favor was sufficient to merit the sacrifice.
But he always lost weight during Lent, and on the whole he was satisfied with the return he got on this last vestige of his religion. He weighed two hundred thirty pounds on Easter morning each year. By the time Ash Wednesday came again he weighed two forty-five, and over twenty years that was an extra three hundred pounds. So he calculated that if he hadn’t switched to white wine every Lent and spoiled his appetite, he would weigh about five hundred fifty pounds. He was fifty-three now, and it would have been a real problem; he wouldn’t even have been able to slide into his reserved booth at the Vesuvio Restaurant.
This would have been more than a humiliation, because the booth where he now sat was his place of business. It was under a stained-glass window with a picture of Mount Vesuvius trailing a huge cloud of white smoke across the blue sky. It allowed him to sit with his back to the wall without seeming to, because behind the window were six inches of whitewashed brick with light bulbs cunningly placed to simulate the light of the Italian sun and the glow of the volcano. The booth wasn’t reserved in a crude way; it was simply that the waiters never seated anyone else there. If an outsider asked for it, they would smile and nod and conduct him to another part of the restaurant.
Angelo Fratelli was an important man. In a way, he was the restaurant’s biggest attraction. Every night at six he would drive into the lot at the rear of the building, walk around to the front, come in, smile at the older waiters and go through the dining room to his booth. When he sat down, Lorraine, the fiftyish blond waitress he seemed to prefer, would bring him his wine. She would set the carafe on the table roughly, nearly spilling it, and clank down his glass. If he said, “Nice day today,” she would snap, “Can’t prove it by me. I’ve got to be on my feet in this dark hole all day.” If he said she looked good, she’d say, “Don’t even think about it.” For reasons nobody had ever fathomed, Mr. Fratelli found Lorraine amusing, and when he left each night, he would give her a large tip. Since all the employees in the Vesuvio divided their tips equally, Lorraine’s rudeness to Mr. Fratelli was considered a form of heroism. From a certain point of view, she was risking her life for the good of all. Angelo Fratelli was the reigning leader of what in Buffalo was called “The Arm.”
Nobody presumed to guess why Angelo tolerated Lorraine, but it was for a combination of reasons. One was that he thought it made him seem affable and approachable. In reality he was anything but affable. In the wars of the fifties he had filled his share of car trunks, and since then had cultivated a reputation for savagery by ensuring that the kills he wanted attributed to his wrath were found naked and mutilated in fields south of the city. Everything he did was calculated and premeditated. Although he had no interest in spending time with other people, he had found that a good portion of his business was brought to him by people who would never have dared speak to him if it weren’t for his supposed accessibility. His demeanor had been practiced since the forties, when he had been given as a franchise a stable of shopworn and unprepossessing prostitutes by Francisco Del Pecchio, the
