The receiver is lying face-up on the box. “Subtle as ever, Finn.”
“Calm down, kid, I didn’t say anything but your name. She at least knows that, right?”
“Very funny. And you’d have told Deborah you were dodging the draft?”
“Oh, sure, I told her everything.”
“No wonder she left you.”
“Don’t I know it.” We laugh, and I wait. “Kid, are you sure about this? You know I can’t pull these strings without some big favors coming due. I thought you wanted out.”
“I wasn’t expecting to spend my peaceful retirement in a bomb shelter.”
“Our work isn’t always much safer. But you know that. Hell, you’re living with her.”
“Christ, Finn.”
“I’m not bothering you about it. Just saying. These favors…”
“What do they want?”
“Red Man Finch.”
I take a sharp breath. “No.”
“He’s a killer.”
“We’re all killers.”
“And now even you, kid. How many years did you avoid pulling that gun of yours? And then you make Victor calamari with your girlfriend’s knife.” His laughter hits me. I start to shake. It’s not remembering so much as drowning. The hard wall of his skull and the soft slip of his brains. His bloody, still face. Life that had ended because I ended it. What I had let Pea do. Oh sweet Christ, the years that I had let Pea—
“Kid, you all right?”
The tide recedes. I cough and wipe my eyes. “What does vice want him for, anyhow?”
“Because we’re cops and it’s our job to take down criminals. Or have you spent so long undercover you think you’re a gangster now?”
I grit my teeth. “I had hoped,” I say, “to be a civilian.”
“Too late for that, private. They know that old injun trusts you—”
“Finch suspects something.”
A pause followed by a soft, wet sound: Finn chewing on a pencil, or a cigar. “You saying you’re compromised, kid?”
Walter knows everything, and has for years. But my divided loyalties are not anything I plan to share with my former handler.
“Not compromised. But I don’t have the access they need.”
“Sure you could, with a bit of work.”
“There has to be something else.”
“Yeah, basic training.”
Pea waits for me in the garden. My hot-blooded killer, my reformed assassin. I once believed in justice too. But if such a thing exists, it doesn’t look like betraying Walter Finch. Luckily, he’d never be slow enough to let me.
I take a deep, steadying breath from the diaphragm. Seven in, seven out. I feel the channels of my power, my quiet hands. They play the numbers.
“They can get me out?”
“If you’re more valuable on the home front than overseas, yadda yadda.”
“Let me see what I can do.”
“I’m in Albany now, kid. Something like retirement. You’ve got to call Valentine if you want this deal.”
I’ve been in Commissioner Valentine’s good graces since my years undercover with Dutch Schultz and then planted in the lower rungs of Lucky Luciano’s outfit. My time there helped net Valentine and District Attorney Dewey one of the biggest victories of the century against organized crime. Now Dewey is due to resign at the end of this year and there are rumors that he has his sights on the governor’s seat in Albany. What better way to drum up good press than a new wave of high-profile indictments on his way out?
Unsticking myself from that corrupt spider’s web had been hard enough the first time. There were certain—questions—about my failure to bring in actionable evidence against Victor or his top lieutenants. They didn’t precisely lament Victor’s death, but Valentine is a rule-man if there ever was one. Calamari, as Finn so vulgarly put it, is not standard procedure in any police manual. If I go back this time, I’ll be in it for life. But the police would be, if nothing else, a wall between Pea and our old world. She couldn’t join me on Centre Street even if she wanted to. Walter’s help, on the other hand—
“I just need some time. To see if it’s even possible.”
Finn sighs. “Your draft board is in my jurisdiction. I can call and tell them to defer for a month or two, for official police business. More than that and I’m risking my neck. So whatever side you’re gonna pick, kid, do it by then.”
“What sides are you referring to, Finn?”
He wheezes a little. “Oh, none at all, kiddo. Us police, we’re pure as driven snow.”
Neither of us laugh. As we bid terse farewells I imagine his grim smile, a mirror of my own.
Outside, Pea has sliced and arranged the cucumber on a plate, topped it with basil and salt.
“I’m going to town,” I tell her, but I sit down on the chair she has appropriated and wrap my arms around her waist. She leans into me and I wonder, again, if she’s lost weight.
“To check on that devil-child? Do you want me to come with you?”
“To talk to Bobby Junior. If I can help Alvin, I should.”
“You want to help that boy who nearly—”
She grips my wrists. Her breaths tickle my shoulder, where she rests her head.
“Will you try it?” she says, after a few minutes. “It’s nice with the basil.”
She feeds me. I crunch into the cucumber, sharp herbs and smoked brine. I am transported as much by her fixed gaze as the flavors popping on my tongue.
We kiss briefly. A summer kiss at the start of fall. A promise of a kiss, when the draft board or the NYPD will have my neck in a month or two. The Bells might give me a third way out, if I can ferret out the truth of what happened with them and Alvin. With that kind of leverage, they might be persuaded to use their connections to give my draft card an indefinite deferment. They might, but if they aren’t? What would she do, if the army shipped me off? Survive, surely.
“See you
