Caruso took a quick sip of beer, then glanced about the nearly empty bar. “Slow night.”
“It’s early,” the man said. “We get a better crowd at night.”
“So, you got entertainment.” Caruso nodded toward the piano. “I seen the sign outside. Abe Morgenstern at the piano.”
Piano Man shrugged. “I just like to keep from getting too rusty. We used to have a singer.”
“This all you do, piano?” Caruso lit a cigarette.
“No, I own the place,” Piano Man answered.
“Own the place, no shit,” Caruso said. He smiled. “My father had a small business,” he lied. “A bakery. Lived right over it. All night he could smell the work he’d done that day. Never got away from it. It eats you alive, a small business.”
“It takes up a lot of time, that’s for sure,” Piano Man agreed.
“So, you’re like my dad, you live upstairs?”
“No,” Piano Man answered. “I got a place over on Grove Street.”
Caruso smiled cheerfully. He couldn’t tell if Piano Man was lying, but he hoped he was. He loved being lied to because it confirmed a truth he needed for his work, the fact that people were scum, so whatever you did to them, they fucking deserved it.
But that wasn’t the point at the moment, Caruso realized. The point was to nail the guy down, get something for Labriola to chew on. “So, I was wondering,” he began. “If I was looking to get a place in this part of town, would Grove Street be good?”
“Yeah, sure,” Piano Man said.
“What kind of rent would I be looking at?”
“A bundle.”
“Like how much?”
“Depends on how big. You got a family?”
The fact that he didn’t have a family stung Caruso briefly, like admitting to another guy that he couldn’t get it up. “No,” he answered quietly.
“So a studio, that would be enough?”
“A studio, yeah.”
“I would guess a couple grand at least.”
“A month?” Caruso gasped, momentarily taken in by his own ruse, the absurd notion that he was looking for a place in the city. He wasn’t, of course, and he told himself that immediately. Still, the fact that he couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan even if he wanted to made him feel like a guy who would always come up short, have a car, an apartment, a girl that was a couple notches down from the ones he really wanted. But this was a point uncomfortable to pursue, and so he returned to the issue at hand. “So the bar, it makes you a good living, I guess.”
Piano Man shook his head. “No, I barely scrape by.”
Caruso smiled delightedly. If this were really Batman, then he was lying through his teeth. Because Batman probably had plenty of dough. The trouble was that Piano Man didn’t look like he had a nickel. He wore a faded shirt and flannel pants and talked about how he was just scraping by, and if Piano Man was Batman, then all of that was bullshit. The problem was that the pose was solid. Piano Man actually looked like a down-at-the-heel guy. He talked like one too. Simple. Direct. He gave nothing away. Put it all together, Caruso reasoned, and it was the secret of his success. If it were all a disguise, no amount of small talk could cut through it. The guy was good. A real pro. Caruso realized that he could stand around and yap all night and not get through the mask.
“Well,” he said, “I better get going.” He downed the last of the beer and stared Piano-Man-Maybe-Batman right in the eye. “Take care of yourself,” he said.
“You too.”
Caruso headed for the door, but before going through it, looked back. Piano Man was making his way toward the front of the bar, his expression curiously vacant, his thoughts obviously somewhere else.
SARA
She’d not noticed the place before, but now she saw that it was McPherson’s. Years earlier she’d heard a singer there, a pretty good one, she recalled. The sign in the window said “Singer wanted. Open mike.”
She knew what that meant, every would-be Broadway ingenue in New York would take a turn. They would be young and bright and full of great expectations.
Even so, she walked across the street and peered through the window, expecting to see the latest arrival from Georgia or Minnesota singing her heart out, trying to make an impression on some potbellied agent or well- heeled producer, or perhaps just singing for herself, honing her skills, along with trying to keep hope alive. But the mike stood alone before the old piano, the man at the keys looking down for the most part, absently studying his fingers as if trying to remember what they were for.
She knew that if she were like Della, believed that the Great Something Out There inevitably provided for the lost sheep, the fallen sparrow, she would stride into the little bar, introduce herself, step up to the mike, belt a great number, get a full-time job on the strength of that one performance, and turn her life into grist for some inspirational film.
But Sara believed none of that. Instead, she believed in the raw play of chance, in opportunities as easily missed as seized, the wheel’s random turning. In long walks at the mall, she had argued her position with Della, knowing all the while that no matter how sound her arguments, how proven by the facts, Della would hold to the golden chord of her claim that nothing in the universe was truly accidental, that she had met Mike not by chance at a movie theater but because through past millennia their souls had converged. The meeting at the movie theater, where Della had dropped her change and Mike had picked it up, was merely part of the Plan, the way you achieved the Big Happy Ending.
Through the bar’s hazy window, Sara stared at the vacant mike and the battered old piano and guessed that the bar was barely making ends meet. This was not necessarily bad news, however. For it could be argued that what the bar really needed was a singer to revive it, a voice that drew people in, made them hang around a little longer than they might have otherwise, linger for the final set, maybe even still be there when the barman sounded last call.
She heard the wind in the corn, felt her body pushed into the enveloping green, Sheriff Caulfield behind her, telling her she had to play along, keep her mouth shut, which she might as well do anyway, since he ran things in Cumberland County, and who would listen to a white-trash tenant farmer’s daughter?
And so she’d played along and kept her mouth shut, and the thing was done, and she’d pulled herself from the ground and staggered back toward her car, the voice screaming in her ear,
She closed her eyes and tried to squeeze all that had happened after that from her mind. When she opened them again, the sign shone dully before her.
Last chance, she thought, though she wasn’t sure it was even that. Still, it was a job, if she could get it, and at least there’d be no more searching the paper and going on interviews and sitting silently while they looked at her from across their polished desks.
Okay, she decided, why not, and on the wave of that decision walked to the door.
THREE
Mean to Me
TONY
Tony snapped the cell phone closed and looked at Eddie. “He won’t tell me a thing,” he said.
They had been driving aimlessly for an hour, through a string of Long Island towns, Tony talking to his father,
