Peril

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

Abe gave her the address, then took a chance and said, “May I ask you a question?”

A pause, then, “All right.”

“Are you . . . is something—” He stopped, thought better of his question, and decided on another direction. “Whatever it is, you can beat it, Samantha.”

He heard a soft breath through the line, though “Thank you” was all she said.

EDDIE

He checked the address, then the nameplates, confirmed that one was blank.

What now?

Nothing, Eddie decided, but wait.

And so he sat down on a cement stoop across the street, watching as the late-afternoon pedestrians made their way down Nineteenth Street. He had never actually lived in the city, nor ever wanted to. Manhattan was not his kind of place, and the people could hardly have been more different from himself. First off, they were educated. Everyone who lived in Manhattan, he supposed, had gone to college. His cousin Patsy had done that. She’d gotten a scholarship to Columbia, then landed a big job with a law firm whose offices were on Park Avenue. At Christmas parties back home, she tried to be nice to everybody, but despite the effort, she looked as if she were in a dentist’s waiting room rather than at home with her family. You could tell she wanted to get back to Manhattan, to her smart, well-dressed friends. Because of that, the cousins usually started talking about her once she’d left. They called her stuck-up and snooty and said she should just stay in the city if she thought she was so great, so much better than the people who’d never left the old neighborhood. But Eddie had never added his voice to their condemnations. If anything, he’d felt sorry for Patsy, sorry that she’d let go of something that seemed precious, the hold of family, which was, he thought, the fortress you lived in, and which kept you safe. That was it, he thought now, that was what made him jumpy in Manhattan and eager to leave it as fast as he could. It wasn’t just that he didn’t feel at home in the city. It was that he didn’t feel safe when he was out of his own neighborhood, away from his own kind, didn’t feel that he could just be Eddie Sullivan . . . and survive.

His gaze drifted up the building, then along the line of windows on the fifth floor, hoping to get a glimpse of the man who’d been hired to find Tony’s wife. He imagined him as a tall, thin ice pick of a man. They had a tendency to look like that in movies, but Eddie knew the guy could just as easily be short and pudgy. The thing he had to keep in mind was this guy might be dangerous, might be capable of anything. That’s what a bad man was, Eddie thought, a guy who would do anything if the money was right or he was scared not to do it, a guy who lived without a line. Eddie couldn’t fathom how such men went through their days with no sense of limits. He’d never been sure of what he wanted to be, only that he didn’t want to be that.

It was nearly an hour later when the man finally appeared, and despite the hazy light of early evening, Eddie had no doubt that he was the one Caruso had described the night before. He was around five ten, dressed in a black suit, and carrying a tightly wrapped umbrella. His hair was gray, and there was plenty of it, but it was the graceful way he moved down the street that pegged him for sure. This was a man who knew how to handle things, who could think his way out of a real pickle, then make all the right moves. He had that assurance, that look of being in control, or at least able to get control of any situation.

Eddie followed at a discreet distance, watching carefully as the man continued east until he reached Fifth Avenue, where he turned south and made his way to Washington Square Park.

There was something about the way he moved, never looking right or left, that gave Eddie the idea that this was a walk the man often made, perhaps routinely at this same hour every day. He decided that he would station himself opposite the building at the same time tomorrow, check if the man came out again, walked to wherever he was going. If so, then he’d have established at least a portion of the man’s routine, could predict, though not with absolute certainty, where he could be found at a particular moment. He knew that this wasn’t much, but at least it was something he could report to Tony, let him know that he was on the job.

TONY

He was on his fourth drink and nothing was getting better. If anything, he could feel his mood darkening, growing dense, with something hateful rising out of the smoky depths, the red-eyed terror of his father.

“Hey, Tony.”

He looked up from the glass and saw that she’d swung into the booth and was now sitting firmly opposite him.

“You been nursing that one for a while,” she said.

Her name was Carmen, and she worked for some guy who kept a boat in the marina, or maybe she was his girl. Anyway, she was dressed in bright colors, as always, with huge hoop rings that sparkled in the smoky light.

“You wanna buy me a drink?” she asked.

Tony straightened himself abruptly and pressed his back against the wooden booth. “Carmen, right?”

The woman laughed. “As in Miranda. That woman with the fruit basket on her head.” She laughed again. “And some opera singer too.”

Tony blinked absently. “So, what’ll you have?”

“How about a Bloody Mary?” Carmen said.

“Done.” Tony snapped his fingers and Lucky, the waiter, came trotting over. “Bloody Mary for the lady.”

“Coming up, Tony,” Lucky said, then trotted away again.

Carmen brought a long, bright-red fingernail to the corner of her right eye. “So, you out alone tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“She lets you off the leash like that, your wife?”

Tony nodded.

The bright-red fingernail made a slow crawl down the side of Carmen’s face until it came to rest at her lower lip. “Not me. If I had a handsome guy like you, I’d hold tight.”

Tony considered the options, his eyes lingering on the face before him, the dark brown eyes and black hair and slightly olive skin. Carmen wasn’t bad looking, and she would probably get a real kick out of being with him, even if for only a night. She would tell her girlfriends about it, and in the story he would be stronger and more handsome and better in bed than he really was, because Carmen Pinaldi needed to believe that the guy she was with was strong and handsome and great in the sack, because if he were less than that, then so was she. So he should just do it, he told himself, just take her back to his house or to some motel and just do it. Sara had left him, after all. So why shouldn’t he just buy Carmen another drink, chat her up for a few minutes, then whisk her away to a shadowy bedroom and huff and puff and get it done and feel the sweet revenge of having done it?

Revenge, Tony thought. That was the problem. He would do it only for revenge, a way of getting back at Sara. And because of that it would be without pleasure, and laced with pain, and during every moment of it he would be thinking of Sara.

He took a long draw on the cigarette, then crushed it in the square glass ashtray. “I better be going,” he said.

Carmen looked surprised and offended and seemed to see her face in a mirror and not like what she saw. “Oh, okay,” she said coolly.

He didn’t want to hurt her but knew he had. “Sorry,” he said quietly.

She shrugged dryly. “You gotta go, you gotta go.”

He rose and paid the tab and walked out of the bar and into the dark, dark night. He could hear the muffled sound of the jukebox in the bar, the equally muffled sound of the people inside, little bursts of laughter that seemed aimed at him, at his situation, at how much he’d screwed things up. He turned and walked toward his car, away from the music and the talk and the laughter until he was safely beyond all these things and stood alone in the silence, beneath a canopy of rain-gray sky. Briefly, he peered upward and in his mind painted his wife’s face in the low-slung clouds, the weight of her loss growing ever more immense, crushing him beneath it, grinding him to dust—the tiniest speck, the blindly whirling atom—becoming smaller and smaller with each passing second until at last he felt smaller than the smallest thing that ever was.

He got into the car but couldn’t turn the key or press his foot down on the accelerator. And so he sat, frozen behind the wheel, remembering their first days together, the later wedding with its ecstatic night, the morning