Dev’s hands strangled one another. “And then?” he said.
And then? And then you can take me away, Dev, Devajyoti, brightest one I ever knew. Our lovers have left us and our lives aren’t what we thought they might be and we have been in the way of loving each other too long, I think, to stop now.
But I asked him for a cigarette. He pulled two from a pack in his vest pocket and I held my lighter ready. The scored circle in the metal pressed against my shaking fingers. I took a long drag, coughed, and lost track of everything but pain and his voice, reeling me in.
“You should sleep,” he said. His arm was around my back and my head lolled on his shoulder and I shook every time I took a breath.
“I can’t even hate the woman who did this to me,” I said, and then the last few pieces decided to snap together. How clearly I remembered his voice in my dream. “Maryann. Trent. Was he really a stoolie?”
“He’d agreed to testify, but—” Dev jerked and then laughed, looked down at me, and wiped his eyes. “That was low, Pea.”
“It was clever.”
“You were awake? That whole time?”
“I was stiff on morphine, but I guess I still heard you.”
He sighed, the way you sigh after a long kiss in the dark. “Ask.”
“You made a deal to save me?”
“Yes. Before you killed Trent.” It was like watching Dev merge with his reflection, the one in that dark mirror that I had always seen in myself, but never suspected in him. He felt sharper, fuller. “Pea, I dragged you off of Trent’s body. I was a witness to a murder. Either I testified against you or I found someone better to give them.”
I gasped. “Dev—you don’t—the Dewey investigation?” By the fall of ’35, police headquarters on Centre Street had become a charnel house for New York’s most infamous mobsters. The newly appointed police commissioner Lewis Valentine and District Attorney Thomas Dewey had political aspirations and a knack for making themselves out to be real-live comic-book heroes for the press. By the time the indictments wound down, Victor had been one of the few left standing.
Dev hesitated, then nodded. He shouldn’t be telling me this. I could kill him with a stray word, a glance.
I sucked on my teeth. “I always wondered why you’d get mixed up with some blustering fool like Dutch Schultz!”
He laughed softly. “Is Victor much better?”
“He has more style, at the least. But Dev … you came back. You’re still there. Why hasn’t Dewey dragged Victor in years ago?”
He looked away from me. “I’ve given them plenty. His midtown operations, his illegal shipments from the dockyards.”
I took that in. “But not me,” I said hoarsely.
“They say Victor has betrayal in his hands, but the truth is he had found a … way to steal it off of us.”
“You mean, it’s real? Vic can use the hands?”
“They work for him, but I don’t think they like it, if that makes any sense. They play tricks on him.”
“They must have told him about Trent.”
Dev nodded. “But then again, I’ve kept his trust for these ten years.”
“I have to kill him,” I repeated. God, but for a second my wrists hurt more than my arm.
Dev just shook his head. I breathed him for a little while, and then the cigarette he held to my lips.
“You said you haven’t done a job in seven months.”
I laughed, which was a mistake. When I finished coughing, I said, “And what’s it to you?”
“I’ve been thinking I could—” The voice from my dream. I closed my eyes, as though that would keep him here, wide open and breaking against me. “Remember those watermelon seedlings you bought in Hudson? That fancy new kind we paid through the nose for? You planted them right beside my mother’s tea roses. They’re regular nabobs of the garden, Pea. The oddest colors. Purple like a snowy night sky. Speckled yellow like stars.”
I turned my head and rested my lips against the sharp lapel of his jacket. The cloth smelled of him, of the clean sweat of making love and weeding the garden in those amber days in the house by the river.
“What happened to the goat?” I asked.
His arm tightened around me. “She died,” he said. “She stopped eating and I couldn’t watch her starve to death. So I put her in my lap and slit her throat.”
6
There was a story about Red Man, the kind the young soldiers liked to tell, about how he once beat a man to death for keeping back a cadillac of dope after a delivery. And when that unfortunate was holding his face together with the back of his shattered hand, crying for his mother, Red Man pulled out that little envelope and ripped it in half. A rain of glittering heroin snow settled on the blood and dirt of that hellish back alley and Red Man took out his camera, since it looked so beautiful. Then he stove in the side of the soldier’s head with the steel toe of his boot.
The part about the camera was true, though I wasn’t sure about the rest of it.
But this was just after I started working for Victor. That particular soldier had seen me dancing in the Times Square club and liked to shout offers for Victor’s yellow-skint octaroon whenever he was drunk and I couldn’t get away. I was passing with Victor’s crew, and he would have known the danger I’d be in if the wrong person heard him. One day that loudmouth ofay worked with us and
