Gerry stared straight ahead as he spoke. “Last Saturday, I get a call from a guy named Rico Blanco—you don't want to know what he does for a living—and he invites me over to a club called the Spanish Fly in lower Manhattan. I've known Rico since high school, so I say, what's the harm?”
“Isn't that club in Alphabet town where all the drug deals go down?”
“Alphabet town got cleaned up,” his son said. “Studio apartments go for two grand a month, bathroom down the hall. Anyway, I meet Rico at the Fly. There's a bartender named Sid. He starts serving us drinks. Then this gambler comes in named Frankie Bones. Frankie is all flash and cash. I've heard Frankie is a made guy, but he's always seemed okay to me, you know what I'm saying?”
“Look at me,” Valentine said.
Gerry turned sideways and looked into his father's eyes.
“Get to the goddamned point, I'm freezing my nuts off.”
“Get on with it!” his father roared.
“Right. So Frankie starts betting on East Bumfuck—”
“And you started betting on BC.”
“How could I not bet on them? It was like watching a scrimmage.”
“And you started winning,” Valentine said. “Let me guess. By halftime, you were up ten grand.”
Gerry's expression turned sullen. All his life, his old man had been a mind reader, knowing exactly where and how he'd screwed up. “Twenty,” he said.
“You took a drunk for twenty grand? Shame on you.”
“Pop, cut it out.”
Valentine bit his lip. He was trying to be civilized about this and let Gerry present his case, but it was hard. He loved his boy more than anything in the world, but it did not change who his son was.
“So what happened?”
“Start of the fourth quarter, East Bumfuck's quarterback gets knocked out. The coach sends in some red shirt. Frankie pulls out this monster wad and throws it on the bar. He says, ‘Seventy grand says BC is going down.' Then he goes to the john. I ask Rico and Sid what they think—”
“And they told you to do it,” Valentine said. He could no longer feel his toes and decided to finish his son's tale before he got frostbite. “So you bet the farm against a loud-mouth drunk on a game that was a sure thing. But then a crazy thing happened. The red shirt starts throwing the ball like Dan Marino. He runs BC's defense up and down the field. One touchdown, two touchdowns, three, then four. Of course, your buddies are feeling terrible. And when the game's over and BC loses, well, they're downright miserable that you've lost all your money. Weren't they?”
“You're really enjoying this, aren't you?”
“It was a setup, Gerry. The game was a tape. It's the oldest hustle in the world. Didn't you see
The clouds had opened up like a busted feather pillow. Snowflakes stuck to everything they touched, the two men turning white before each other's eyes.
“So what happened?” his father asked.
“I wrote Rico a marker,” Gerry said. “Rico sold the marker to these hoods named the Mollo brothers. They tracked me down to Yolanda's apartment. They slapped me around, then Big Tony made a move on Yolanda. I'm sorry, Pop, but I caved in.”
“Meaning what?”
“I gave the Mollos the bar.”
Gerry had borrowed fifty grand to buy the bar, plus gotten Valentine to put the place in
“They think I own it, Pop.”
Valentine thought about his clogged artery, wondering if the pressure building inside him might send a piece of plaque to his brain. “What do you want me to do?”
“I know this is going to sound stupid . . .”
“Try me.”
“Lend me another fifty grand so I can buy the bar back.”
“Come on, you've got the money. What's the point of sitting on it? You're just going to give it to me eventually.”
“I am?”
“Sure. Have you ever seen a Brinks truck at a funeral?”
Valentine's jaw tightened. His son had come here to put the squeeze on him. He placed his hands on Gerry's chest, and gave him a shove.
Gerry slid backward on the slick sidewalk. Then he took off at a dead run. Crossing the street, he entered a wooded park.
“Come back here.”
Puffing hard, Valentine entered the park and followed Gerry's footprints until they disappeared beside a brick wall. Did his son think he was born yesterday? Standing on tiptoes, he peeked over the wall. Gerry sat in a frozen flower bed, cell phone in hand.
“Will you listen to me? My father said no. That's right.
It was Yolanda, Gerry's third-year med-school girlfriend whom Valentine hadn't met but had a low opinion of anyway.
Seeing his old man climbing over the wall, Gerry started to run, his butt caked with brown dirt and leaves.
“I'll figure out something,” Gerry told Yolanda, fleeing through the woods toward a frozen pond.
Kneeling, Valentine packed a snowball between his gloveless hands, then hurled it with all his might. He'd always had a strong arm, and the snowball arced gracefully in the air, then returned to earth and hit the back of his son's head. Gerry fell like he'd been shot.
An invisible knife pierced Valentine's heart. Years ago, Lois had made him promise never to fight with his son when he was in a bad mood. “You'll hurt him,” she'd warned.
He ran through the forest in a panic. What if he'd scrambled Gerry's brains, turned the worm into a vegetable, could he live with that? No, no, of course not. He loved him; that had never changed. Coming to the forest's end, his eyes fell on the spot where his son had fallen.
Gerry was gone.
5
The Great One
Cursing, Valentine climbed into his rental. Buying Gerry the bar had been an olive branch, his way of trying to make peace. And now Gerry had given it away to a bunch of hoods. His son could screw up a wet dream.
The engine whined but did not turn over. The car was made by Ford and called a Probe. Naming a car after a surgical procedure seemed pretty dumb. Through the snowy windshield he saw a white van with tinted windows pull up to the corner.
The light changed, but the van did not move. Rolling down his window, Valentine stuck his head out and
