They didn’t object. The grizzlies had lost their fascination.
“You’re the best, Aunt Pea,” Ida said, smiling again over a pistachio ice cream as green as summer grass. “You sure showed those boys. I wish I could bring you to school with me just once.”
Sonny looked at her sharply. “God didn’t create us to raise one above the other with unnatural gifts.”
Sonny’s voice, his father’s words. If I’d wanted to argue with Tom Senior, I’d have gone to Gloria’s for dinner. I sighed and took Ida’s hand.
“Don’t pick fights, Sonny, for your sister’s sake if not for mine.”
We were silent on the bus ride back uptown. Plenty of time for me to think about what Sonny had said. I remembered old Widow Baker on the second floor, who had a knack though she didn’t have the hands: she’d died last year at the age of ninety-three after hitting the numbers an astonishing seventeen times—though she always played for pennies, so the payout was never much. Once, while I waited for her to finish reading the cards and fill out her last slip, she said something to me that never left: Your hands are like the numbers, aren’t they, Miss Green? A little luck the Lord gives us to let us get on top, just for a bit, even though they got all the power.
Now I considered the kind of creature I had made of myself with the Lord’s luck, in the service of what I’d always considered to be the greater good. An angel, they called me. Some kind of holy beast.
3
Red Man was waiting when I got back home, his back against my door and his hat tilted over his forehead. Between that woman on my stairwell and mobsters in the hall, it was a wonder that my neighbors hadn’t reported me to the super. But then, my neighbors generally had the good sense to ignore anything unusual coming from my apartment.
I stepped over him to put a steady key in the lock. I could keep my head in a gale—you had to, in my game. One way or another, something would give. Red Man had another job for Russian Vic’s knife.
“You could have waited inside,” I said.
“Wouldn’t be polite,” Red Man said, and levered himself upright in a surprisingly fluid motion for one so thick and tall. I had reason to know his remorseless strength, but his muscle was padded everywhere by an inch of soft fat, so that he sometimes put me in mind of a corn husk doll with sturdy stitching and inflexible limbs. He might have been handsome if he put his mind to it; his wide face and moon eyes had intrigued me when we first met, before I understood the stoicism in him, and the cruelty carefully deployed in Victor’s service. We respected one another, and we kept the considerate distance of two of Victor’s most valued possessions.
“Can I get you something?” I asked when he closed the door behind him. “I can put some coffee on.”
“Do you still have any of that bourbon Vic gave us for Christmas?”
I laughed and shook my head. “Why the hell not,” I said, and headed for the liquor cabinet. Red Man made himself comfortable on the chaise in my living room, an old deco piece that I’d lifted from the effects of one of Victor’s deceased generals. Ghoulish, maybe, but Barney had died of a heart attack, not a knife, and his good taste couldn’t do him any more good where he’d gone. Red Man, who knew its history precisely, stretched out those long, thick legs and waited with a smile for me to serve him.
I poured two stiff fingers in two glasses of heavy crystal and chipped two spears of ice from the block to drop in each.
Red Man clinked the ice against the rim with a meditative swish. I pulled up a chair, spread my knees wide, and waited.
“Usually take it neat,” he said, after a moment.
I shrugged. “It tastes better this way.”
“The way Victor likes it.”
“Yes.”
“He once crippled a man for making his with soda. The bartender before Dev … Mitch, remember him? Stabbed the man’s hand through with a steak knife. With none of your artistry, Phyllis.”
He smiled a little, mostly with his eyes. He could be unsettlingly gentle, and I liked him, even when he scared me. After all, I sometimes liked myself, too.
I took a chill swallow of liquor I didn’t taste. “Lucky Dev is more careful.” Dev had circled around for years, doing the odd run and then disappearing, before he settled into the bartender job. I remembered it was ’35, when DA Dewey’s investigations had all of mobbed-up Manhattan shooting slugs at their shadows. Victor got taken in, but he had always been meticulous about covering his tracks; he offered up a few lieutenants to the gods of criminal justice and walked away with a vagrancy charge. Afterward he was happy to take on Dev, a refugee from Dutch Schultz’s sinking ship—for his discretion as much as for his hands.
My ice rattled against the edge of the glass. A natural enough response, for someone else’s hands. I looked down at the offending member—left—and it stilled. A memory of the ache that had passed through it this morning returned, and settled in the twists of my intestines. Was this it, then? Were the rumors true? The second dream had come, an oracle of the imminent desertion of my only power?
I looked back up at Red Man watching me, face like a portrait.
“What’s the job?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows slightly, which communicated a certain reserved sympathy. But he wouldn’t answer before he was ready. “You know, Tammy was after me all morning to read my cards.”
“Was she?” I said. Tamara always treated Red Man like a beloved younger brother, as though she didn’t know precisely what he was. It was enough to give a girl goosebumps, like you’d watch a fool sitting on a flagpole.
He nodded. “And I told
