And nothing would ease my responsibility to wield my knives—one last time.
“I love you, Gloria. I love you more than anything. And if I make it out of this, I swear you won’t have to worry about me again.”
“Christ, sugar, make it out of what?”
“I’m in over my head. Maybe I always have been, and I just now noticed. But I’m going to see it through. Probably … better you not call me till it’s over.”
“And how will I know?”
I gave her Dev’s number. And then, after a moment, Walter’s.
After we hung up, I picked up my holster and played with the four-inch throwing knife—over my head, behind my back, and then into the wall behind me. I considered the advantages of my injury: I would look less dangerous than I was. I could kill with my left hand as easily as my right. I unsheathed the three-inch knife and threw it in the wall, next to the first. Two kills, sweet and clean. Do that one more time, and then walk away forever.
I wrenched the knives from the plaster. Some dust came after them and settled on the floor and the thick fringe of Turkish carpet. I didn’t bother to clean it up.
7
I waited until that night. Dev didn’t call or come by.
Hitler was invading the Soviet Union, had been for the past month, crossing its borders from the Baltic to the Black Sea with a flood of soldiers, hundreds and hundreds of thousands, so many that I couldn’t make myself believe the numbers printed in the papers.
If Roosevelt had his way we’d be in the war the day after tomorrow.
Tamara called to check on me, and to update me on the latest gossip from the dentist’s big show. I talked for longer than I should, gripped despite myself with a certain Schadenfreude at the image of the dentist earnestly standing beside his six paintings of show horses with anatomically correct smiles while the packed house thronged the Hungarian exile’s sculptures of creeping death.
We argued about the war and never mentioned the men who might get killed in it. I caught myself staring at the delivery boy who brought by my paper in the morning, wondering if he’d get drafted, or volunteer, and if he’d make it out the other end. The delivery boy just held out his hand for a tip and skipped off.
The second time Tamara called, I gave in.
“Dev?” she repeated, and stopped short. “Well, I don’t know that I’ve seen him today, sugar. I think he’s tending the bar in a few hours, but you know that we’ve been giving one another a little more room these days.”
“Did he ask you to?”
“Well,” she drawled, with a certain acid knowing that made me pull the receiver away from my ear. “He disappeared, more like. But I got his point. Is there something in particular you want him for?”
I knew Tamara always meant just what she said when she was that precise in her diction. I grimaced and changed the subject.
“How on earth did Marty get a showing at the Pelican in the first place?”
“Oh, you know, whatever Victor says, goes. I only get so much freedom over here.”
“But what kind of favors could Vic owe his dentist?”
Tamara laughed after the briefest of pauses, which might have contained worry or surprise or just dead air. “Maybe he had a few tough extractions,” she said.
I laughed with her, though I didn’t much feel like it, and I doubted she did either. Dev wasn’t around and Marty would enjoy the dubious benefits of Victor’s favor, as long as it lasted. I could have told him, it never did. Tammy begged off the call a minute later, and I sat with myself for a little while. I always worked best alone.
I prepared myself: dark burgundy dress, a rack number from Macy’s that I bought by the half dozen and didn’t care if I had to throw out at the end of a night’s work. Knife holster for three five-inch knives and two three-inch knives tucked away in my garters. Sometimes I brought more, but I wouldn’t need them tonight. For this, I wouldn’t need more than one, but I liked the feel of them too, and the illusion of protection that glittered in my peripheral vision when I moved with their weight through the world.
My hands twisted and ached like they wanted to send me another dream, but I knew they didn’t; they were just furious and long ready for me to fulfill their true purpose. They had tried to tell me about the deception. When I’d killed Trent, I must have known—not in my head, or even in my heart, but in my muscles and bones, in the hands that had slaughtered, full knowing, an innocent man. They might yet forgive me for that, but they demanded recompense first, they demanded real justice. Kill Russian Vic, kill the white man who had stolen them and twisted them into this unnatural, deadly shape, and I might yet live to dream another true dream.
I passed Walter’s man outside the door and nodded to him. Surprised, he nodded back. I wondered if he’d tail me, but he stayed on the building. Thoughtful of Walter. He wouldn’t stop me, he’d said. But did I wish he would?
It felt different, this last time.
There had been an excitement before, an anticipation of glory that had counterbalanced the jittery fear of facing death. Even my last kill—some skinflint numbers banker down in Bed-Stuy, who had tried to buy me off for an amount I knew was half of his nightly take—had greeted me with that raw, fluttering edge of purpose before I sliced his throat. The edge was dull and rusted now, liable to poison my blood. I was scared, at last. Fifteen years too late, my guts twisted like flypaper
