She’s still laughing when I break the surface. She splashes water in my face while I heave for air, then wraps her arms around my neck so we both nearly go under again.
“I should do you like that,” she says. “Watch, you’ll be sleeping and I’ll just…” She’s kissing my eyebrows. She’s never done that before.
I laugh. “I’d touch your threat, sweet Pea.”
“Maybe I’d be faster.”
The water is so cold and her lips are so warm. Here we are baptized, blessed, reborn. Right now, I believe. Right now, I am grateful to be alive.
She drags me to the bank.
“It will get better, Dev,” she says, like she believes it.
Sometimes I don’t know how we will survive each other. Sometimes the greatest violence you can do to another person is to love them.
“I know,” I say, like I do too.
Victor’s voice chases me through my dreams that night. He is not a restful companion, but Pea and I sleep apart. So I stay awake, and maunder. I am remembering Walter, and all the times he’s saved me. I can’t go to war, I can’t give Finn what he wants, I can’t work for Walter and risk being the hook that drags Pea back. The Bells will never help me without the dirt that Alvin refuses to give up. Which leaves nothing. I know that.
Dawn, at last. Just barely, but the rooster chorus is pretext enough to put the percolator on the stove.
Pea’s door is open. She’s fallen asleep against the frame, her knees tucked under the peach satin gown. Her arms encircle her leather knife holster like the torso of her lover. She opens her eyes when I approach. They are bloodshot and painfully lucid.
“Shouldn’t walk so quiet past me, Dev,” she says, all Harlem swagger and West Village ice.
“What are you doing out here?”
She shrugs and then laughs. “Waiting for you, baby.”
I reach down and pick her up, which makes her laugh even more.
“Dev,” she says, “put me the hell down, what are you doing—”
I drop her on the bed and she stays there, breathing hard, looking up at me.
“I’ll make the coffee,” I say, and turn. My heart pumps too much blood, my lips sting. She’d give me whatever I needed. But I don’t want to need it.
We’ve both calmed by the time I return with a tray of flapjacks and late blackberries from the garden.
“My God, is this a bribe? Where’s the coffee?”
“You couldn’t have gotten much sleep like that.”
“You thief! I smelled it, did you drink it all? You did! What did I do to deserve a man who treats me so bad?”
“I made you flapjacks.”
She picks one up with her fingers and takes a bite. “Persuasive.” She pours a puddle of maple syrup on the plate and dunks. “Damn, Dev, can you always cook for us?”
“You wouldn’t miss the bacon?”
She looks up at me as she chews. “Well?” she says. “They’re getting cold.”
I use a knife and fork to eat my own, which she seems to regard as the custom of a strange and savage people. She lies upside-down on the bed once she’s eaten two—not enough, but I don’t want to ruin the moment by telling her so. She nestles her cheek against my thigh.
“You’re scaring me,” she says softly.
I stroke her hair absentmindedly as I finish the last flapjack. “With my hidden culinary talents?”
“Don’t make me so happy, Dev, don’t take it all away.”
I stay like that, stroking her, hurting just a little bit less, until her breathing evens out and I know she’s gone back to sleep. I wait a half hour. Then I call Walter.
8
I met Trent on the elevated train and we rode for an hour while he sketched what he could offer us in exchange for protection. His knowledge was patchy and oddly specific. It’s a foolish cop who believes that an informant is confessing the unvarnished truth, but I wondered what Trent wanted from us. He talked mostly about hunting men for Victor, men—and some women—with saint’s hands that Victor could use in his service.
“And what does he do with them?”
Trent glanced again at the old man sleeping at the other end of the train car. We were otherwise alone, stuck on the tracks right before the last stop.
“I can’t say.”
“Sure you can.”
“I don’t know exactly—”
“No need to be exact.”
“Listen, it’s that—what do you fellas want from me?”
“We want to bring down Victor and as many of his officers as possible on charges of murder and racketeering.” Finn had been very careful to drill me in this. Whatever other petty crimes wafted through the air of the Pelican (police bribery, for example) mattered very little to him.
“I can’t tell you anything about racketeering,” he said. “I stay out of the business side.”
“Murder, then.”
The train lurched forward and the old man startled awake.
“Not listening,” I said, before Trent could ask.
He swallowed. “I might,” he said, “know a bit about that.”
“Go on.”
“So does your old lady.”
A flush suffused my neck. Did he think I didn’t know that? I stayed up nights plotting the lies and gentle blackmail I would use to get her out of this. All she had to do was promise not to kill. All she had to do. I was—this is not an excuse—too self-righteous and too in love.
“What do you know, Trent?”
He gave me an appalling look. Like he pitied me. And then he gave me an address in Queens. He told me to go there tonight and to watch.
“It’s a full moon. You’ll see something.”
And so I did.
9
At exactly six o’clock that afternoon a silver Packard climbs up the drive. Pea pulls a knife and then tosses it in the air just as a dark hand waves a paisley scarf from the passenger window.
“Sugar,” calls a voice I had dreamed of often and still somehow forgot. Caramel
