“So! How do I know this?”
“Put your hand under the table.”
Wesley slipped the envelope he had picked up in Cleveland into the old man’s hard-dry hand.
“Take that someplace and open it up,” he said. “Carmine said you’d show me a building to buy.”
The old man left the table. He returned within a minute.
“If you hadn’t brought it back here, I never would have known. Carmine never said anything to me, never described you, nothing—you could’ve left the country with that cash. Carmine told me his son would come here one day with the money. But he told me all this before they took him away the last time. I didn’t know what you’d look like or when you’d be coming.”
“But you knew I’d come?”
“Yes. This means Carmine’s dead?”
“They buried his body.”
“I understand. You come with me now. I got to set you up until we can get the building.”
The old man’s car was a dusty black 1959 Ford with a taut ride. He drove professionally, whipping through traffic without giving the appearance of going fast.
“We’ll talk in the car. Nobody hears then, okay?”
“Whatever you say.”
“I got the building all picked out. It’s on the Slip ... you know where that is?”
“Over far east, by the river?”
“Yeah. It used to be a shirt factory, but now it’s nothing. We can get it for about half of this money and use most of the rest to fix it up right.”
“I’m going to live there?”
“You and me too, son.”
“My name’s Wesley.”
“Pet—my friends call me Pet.”
“Carmine said Mr. Petraglia.”
“That was so I could make the decision first, right? You call me Pet. What if you got to call me in a hurry— you gonna say all them syllables?” The old man laughed high up in his dry throat. Wesley nodded in agreement.
28/
Petraglia took him to a house in Brooklyn. Its garage led directly into the basement, which was double-locked from the outside.
“You stay here. Maybe three weeks, maybe a month. Then we’ll be ready to move into the building. There’s a john in the back, plenty of food in the refrigerator, got a TV and a radio. But only play them with the earplugs— nobody knows you’re down here, right?”
“Okay.”
“You’re not worried that it might take so long?”
“I been waiting a lot longer than that.”
“I figured you had to be Inside with Carmine. We got to do something about that paleface shit—a cop could spot you in a second. There’s a sunlamp down here too, and some lotion.”
“Will the people upstairs hear the toilet flush?”
“Just me is upstairs and I don’t hear a thing. I’m not really worried about anybody seeing you—I’d just prefer it, you know? You got a PO to report to?”
“Just you, Pet.”
The old man smiled and went out, leaving Wesley alone. Wesley dialed his mind back to solitary confinement and did the next nineteen days in complete silence. He kept the radio on and the earplugs in most of the time, listening to the news with careful attention. He watched the TV with the sound off and looked carefully at the styles of clothing, haircuts, and cars; the way people carried themselves. He familiarized himself with how the Yankees were doing and who was mayor and everything else he could think of, since there was no library in Pet’s basement. There was no telephone, and Wesley didn’t miss one.
29/
When Petraglia returned to the basement, he found Wesley totally absorbed in the TV’s silent screen, lying perfectly motionless on the floor in what looked like an impossibly uncomfortable position. The old man motioned Wesley to turn the set off, ignoring the pistol which had materialized in the younger man’s hand when he entered the door.
“How in hell can you lay on the floor like that?”
“I can do it for three hours,” Wesley assured him.
“How d’you know that?”
“I already did it yesterday. I found the piece in the toilet tank.” The old man seemed to understand both Wesley’s gymnastics and his search of the premises and said nothing more about it. They got back into the Ford and drove all the way out to the old shirt factory. It was dark on the FDR, and it was pure pitchblack by the time
