Caruso chuckled. “No, he ain’t.”
“My father is a very bad man,” Tony repeated emphatically.
Caruso waved his hand. “He’s been good to me, your father, treats me like a—” He stopped. “Treats me good is what I’m saying.”
It was then Tony saw it, the weird loyalty Caruso had for the Old Man. “You don’t owe him anything, Vinnie. You know why? Because he wouldn’t lift a finger for you. And something else. No matter what you do, he’ll never give a shit about you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Tony,” Caruso said in a voice that struck Tony as curiously childlike, a piece of wishful thinking, like a little boy clinging against all evidence to his belief in Santa Claus.
“Yeah, I do,” Tony said almost gently. “I do know because he’s done it before.”
“Done what?”
“Gotten a guy to try to please him, do everything he could to please him,” Tony answered. “And this other guy did his best too. Because he was like you, Vinnie. He just wanted to feel like the Old Man loved him.”
Caruso looked at him doubtfully. “What guy you talking about?”
Tony felt relieved that he’d finally figured it out, the whole rotten scheme. “Me,” he said with a small, sad smile. “That other guy was me.”
DELLA
She could hardly believe the urgency in her mother’s voice, the way she’d demanded that she drop everything, pack Nicky into his car seat, and come right away. You’d have thought her house was on fire.
But the house looked just the same when Della brought the car to a halt in front of it. Despite the chill, her mother was sitting on the stoop, loosely wrapped in an old wool coat, and looking uncharacteristically tense.
“What is it, Ma?” Della cried as she got out of the car.
Mrs. DaRocca stood up immediately. “Just come on in,” she said harshly.
Della scurried to the other side of the car and whisked Nicky out of the car seat. By the time she’d turned back toward the house, her mother had already disappeared inside.
“I got to talk to you, Della,” Mrs. DaRocca said once Della came into the house.
“Okay, so, talk,” Della said. Nicky squirmed madly in her arms. “It’s past his nap time.”
Mrs. DaRocca waved Della into the living room. “In here.”
Della followed her mother into the living room and slumped down on the old blue sofa by the window. “You okay, Ma?”
“I’m fine,” Mrs. DaRocca said. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Me?”
“Because of that neighbor of yours,” Mrs. DaRocca said. “The one who took off. She didn’t turn up yet, did she?”
“No,” Della said. “What’s going on, Ma?”
Rather than answer directly, Mrs. DaRocca said, “Stay out of it, Della. ’Cause it’s not safe, getting involved in it.”
Della studied the worried look on her mother’s face. “What happened, Ma? And don’t say nothing happened, because I know something did.”
Mrs. DaRocca shrugged. “I talked to him.”
“Him?”
“Labriola.”
“Tony?” Della shrieked. “Why?”
“Not Tony,” Mrs. DaRocca said. “The father.”
Della’s eyes widened in astonishment. “You what?”
“I went to his house,” Mrs. DaRocca continued. “I spoke to Leonardo.”
“Leonardo? You call him Leonardo? What, you know him somehow?”
“A little,” Mrs. DaRocca said without emphasis. “From the old days.”
“What old days?”
“In school. We was in school together. Our Lady of Fatima. We was—how you call it?—chummy.”
Della sat back, drained by astonishment. “Chummy? You and Leo Labriola?”
“He was a nice boy in them days,” Mrs. DaRocca said. Then her face turned grave. “But not no more. Which is why I’m telling you to stay out of this thing with the neighbor.”
She felt her mother’s dread wash toward her like a wave of blood across the floor. “What happened, Ma? What happened when you talked to . . . Leonardo?”
“Nothing happened,” Mrs. DaRocca answered. “But you get a feeling when you talk to a person, and the feeling I got was you should stay out of his business. It’s got nothing to do with you, that woman.”
“Except that she’s my friend.”
Mrs. DaRocca looked at Della with all the authority of an old-world mother. “Della, stay out of this.”
Her mother’s words were heavy with warning, and because of it, she knew.
“He’s going to hurt her,” she said. “Labriola’s going to hurt Sara.”
“He didn’t say that,” Mrs. DaRocca said quickly. “He didn’t say nothing like that, Della.”
“But you saw it, didn’t you? You saw it in his eyes.”
Mrs. DaRocca didn’t answer, but the truth was in the grim look on her face, the stiff posture. The old fear of Sicily lay upon her shoulders as thick and visible as the black scarves of women she’d seen in pictures from the island.
“Would he kill her?” she asked.
“Della, he didn’t—”
“Ma, listen to me. You spoke to him face-to-face. Would he kill her?”
Her mother didn’t speak, but the slow crawl of her hand to her throat provided the only answer Della needed to glimpse her best friend floating facedown in the river.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
The old woman placed her hand on Della’s. “Listen to me,” she said. “It ain’t your business. She left her husband. That ain’t your business. Even what Leo does about it, Della, even that ain’t your business.”
Della thought of Sara, then of Labriola. She had not been able to imagine why Sara had left Tony, nor why Labriola was so determined to find her. Now she could.
“It ain’t your business,” her mother repeated.
Della rose to her feet. “Yes, it is,” she said.
MORTIMER
Mortimer waited glumly for Caruso to arrive, his eyes surveying the Port Authority crowd, people who had normal lives, didn’t have to sit in crummy little diners, and whose ordinary, everyday troubles Mortimer suddenly envied, because they seemed like such small potatoes compared to his own.
As for Caruso, he’d sounded weird on the phone, so whatever he had on his mind, whatever had made him insist on this stupid meeting, no way was it good.
Mortimer was still considering all the ways it could be bad, when Caruso swept into the seat opposite him.
“I had a talk with the husband,” Caruso said quickly. “And we got a problem.” His voice was tense, like his body, everything wired. “A serious problem.” He reached for a napkin and twisted it violently. “Have you talked to Batman lately?”
“Yeah,” Mortimer answered.
“So, what did he tell you?”
“He needs more information,” Mortimer answered. Perhaps that was the key, he thought. If there were no more information, then Stark could get out of the deal, simply do what he’d already threatened and pull out of the whole lousy scheme. “If he don’t get more information, then he’s gonna—”
“No, not that,” Caruso interrupted. “I mean, did he say anything about some guy?”
“Some guy?”
“Some guy he maybe spotted.”
