Iron House

velvet jacket. Michael said, “It’s wrong, Jimmy. He wants to die.”

“It’s Stevan’s choice. Let it go.”

“And if I can’t?”

Jimmy shrugged.

“I’m not your enemy,” Michael said. “I just want out.”

Jimmy examined his other sleeve. “There’s only one way out, and you know it. When the old man dies, so do you. Either that or you convince us to trust you again.”

“That’s two ways.”

He shook his head. “One is a way out, one is a way back in. Different animals.”

“Convince you, how?”

He blinked a lizard’s blink. “Kill the woman.”

“Elena’s pregnant.”

“Listen.” Jimmy leaned closer. “I understand you have this misplaced sense of responsibility, but the old man won’t live much longer.” He gestured, taking in the house, the men below, then lowered his voice. “Stevan can’t hold this together. He’s weak, sentimental. He doesn’t have what we have.” He let that sink in, then said, “You can be my number two. I’ll give you a percentage, free reign on the street.”

Michael shook his head, but Jimmy didn’t stop.

“People might challenge me alone, but no one would risk the two of us-”

“I don’t want it.”

“We all know how the old man feels about you. The street would accept it. The men. We could do this together.”

“She’s pregnant, Jimmy.”

Jimmy’s eyes drooped. “That’s not my problem.”

“I just want out.”

“There is no out.”

“I don’t want to kill you.”

Jimmy put his hand on the knob. “You think you can?”

He pushed the door wide, grinned.

And Michael went in to see the old man.

CHAPTER THREE

Michael stepped in and Jimmy left him alone with the dying man who’d all but saved his life. A Persian rug stretched to far windows and a coffered ceiling rose fifteen feet above the floor. No lamps burned, and all the curtains but one were drawn, so that pale light ghosted in to touch a chair, the bed, and the wasted man in it. The space was long, narrow, and the gloom made it feel hollow. Michael had spent countless hours in the room- long months as the old man failed-but eight days had passed since his last visit, and change lay like a pall. Airless and overly warm, the room smelled of cancer and pain, of an old man dying.

He crossed the room, steps loud on wood, then soft when he hit the rug. The room looked the same except for a six-foot-tall cross that hung on the wall. It was made of smooth, dark wood and looked very old. Michael had never seen it before, but put it out of his mind as he stopped by the narrow bed and looked down at the only man he’d ever loved. Fluids ran into the old man’s veins through needles slipped under his skin. The robe he wore was one Michael had given him eight years ago, and in it he looked as light and weak as a starved child. His head was a death’s-head, with bones that were too prominent and veins that showed like thread through wax. Blue-black skin circled his eyes. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, and Michael wondered if the pain, ever- present, had become insidious enough to find him even as he slept.

He stood for long seconds, bereft, then took the man’s hand, sat in the chair, and studied the cross on the wall. The old man did not have a religious bone in his body, but his son professed to believe. In spite of his sins, and there were many, Stevan attended mass every week, a conflicted man twined in self-deception. He feared God, yet was too weak to sacrifice the things violence brought, the money and power, the pleasures of pale- faced models and society widows who found his name and good looks too compelling to resist. Stevan loved the notoriety, yet agonized over his father’s lack of contrition; it was for this reason, Michael suspected, that the old man had been resuscitated twice. Stevan feared that his father, unrepentant, would go to hell. Michael marveled at the depth of such hypocrisy. Actions had consequence; choice came with cost. The old man knew exactly who he was, and so did Michael.

He lifted a framed photograph from the table near the bed. Taken a decade and half earlier, it showed him with the old man. Michael was sixteen, broad-shouldered but skinny in a suit that could not hide the fact. He leaned against the hood of a car, laughing, the old man’s arm around his neck. He was laughing, too. The car against which they leaned had been a birthday present: a 1965 Ford GTO, a classic.

Michael put the photo where the old man could find it, then stood and walked to the wall of books on the north side. The shelves ran the length of the room and held a collection the man had been working on for over thirty years. They shared a love of the classics, and many of the books were first editions, including several by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Michael removed The Old Man and the Sea, then sat back down.

Through the window, he saw the river and then Queens. The old man had been born there to a prostitute with no interest beyond folding money and the next bottle it could buy. Shut up for years in a basement tenement, he’d been left alone for days at a time, unwashed and half-starved until he was orphaned at age seven. He told Michael once that he’d never known a childhood harder than his until their paths crossed. That fact made them family, he said. Because no one else could understand the loneliness they’d known, the fear. He said it gave them clarity, made them strong. And Stevan hated Michael for that, for having that bond with his father.

But Michael cherished it, not just because he was so otherwise alone in the world, but because the similarities did make a difference; because not even Stevan grasped the scope of deprivation that defined his father’s early days. He did not know that the scars on the old man’s feet came from rat bites in the crib, or that his missing fingers came from frostbite in the days before his mother died. The old man spoke of those things only to Michael, because only Michael could understand. He was the only one who knew the full story, the only person aware that the old man had chosen this room for the view, so that his last earthly sight would be the place from which he’d dragged himself one brutal day at a time. Michael found an undeniable elegance in this. The tenement house that almost killed the man was a river’s breadth away, and a lifetime apart.

The sun moved higher and light slipped from the old man’s face. So sunken were his eyes that Michael missed the moment they opened. One instant they were hidden, and the next they were simply there, pinched and deep and shot with red. “Stevan?”

“It’s Michael.”

The frail chest rose and fell in small, desperate pants and Michael saw pain bite deeper. Skin gathered at the corners of the old man’s eyes and his brows compressed at the center. “Michael…” His mouth worked. Something glinted in the sun that still touched his neck, and Michael realized that he was crying. “Please…”

Michael turned his face away from the thing he was being asked to do. For months, now, the old man had begged to die, so eager was the pain. But Stevan had refused. Stevan. His son. So the old man had suffered as Michael watched the illness take him down. Weeks stretched to months, and the old man had begged.

God, how he had begged.

Then, eight days ago, Michael had told him about Elena. He explained that life had become more than the job, that he wanted out, a normal life. And listening, his pain-filled eyes so very intent, the old man had nodded as hard as such a sick man could. He said he understood just how precious life should be. Precious. Fingers clawed into Michael’s arm. Short! And with those words still in the air above his lips, he’d told Michael that he loved him.

Like a son.