Explorer or clean the pool or hose down the area around it. Tony would have been willing to hire someone to do such things, or even do them himself, but she’d never brought them up. She needed such petty tasks to keep her sane. They were what she did instead of drink or meet a guy at the local motel. For the rest, she’d relied on Della, the talks they’d had as they strolled the neighborhood streets or sat in Della’s kitchen, sipping coffee in the afternoon. It was the only thing she missed, a friend she could talk to.
She picked up the phone and dialed the number.
DELLA
She jumped when the phone rang, and in that instant recognized how deeply it had sunk, the sense of dread that had settled upon her since talking to Tony. If it were Sara, she decided, she would tell her everything, warn her that the Old Man was looking for her, do whatever she had to do to protect her from him.
“Hello.”
“Hi, babe.”
The sound of Mike’s voice, so firm and familiar, filled her with joy, and she wanted only to know that he was safe and happy and would always, always, come home to her.
“Mike,” she blurted out desperately, “are you okay?”
“What?”
She realized Mike had heard the frenzy in her voice.
“What’s the matter, Della?”
“Nothing, sweetheart. I was just thinking about you, that’s all.”
“Thinking about me?”
“Wondering how you were.”
He laughed. “I’m fine.”
“You’d tell me, right, if anything was wrong?”
“Of course I would. Della?”
“Yes.”
“Anything wrong on your end?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Everything’s perfect.”
“Because you sound a little . . .”
“Mike?”
“Yeah?”
“Could we go out for pizza tonight? All of us?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Good.”
“You’re sure everything’s okay?”
She thought of what she’d done, how she’d talked to Tony, and how she’d tell Sara everything, too, if Sara called. She’d done her duty while at the same time trying to keep Mike and her children safe. A wave of high achievement washed over her, the sense of having looked danger in the eye, maybe even stared it down.
“Everything’s perfect,” she said quietly. “It really is.”
SARA
The line was still busy. She returned the phone to its cradle, glanced toward the window, and reveled in the clear midafternoon air beyond it. She thought of going out, then the dread swept down around her, the fear he might be waiting for her out there, the Old Man or whoever he’d sent to do his work.
But it was a fear she had to put behind her, she decided, and so she lifted her head as if on the shoulder of a bold resolve and headed for the door.
Once outside, she turned right and walked to the corner, where she stopped, peered into the window of a florist shop, and thought of the roses Abe had brought to the apartment, a gesture so sweet, she thought now, that she’d felt herself crumble a little, some of the day’s panic fall away.
“Nice flowers.”
She jumped, then turned to face a small man in a worn suit, his features so dark and gloomy, his voice so oddly cold, she knew absolutely that he was Labriola’s man.
“Nice flowers,” he repeated.
She felt her body stiffen. “Yes.”
“You like flowers?”
She stepped back slightly, her attention entirely focused on the man who peered back at her from beneath the broad brim of a rumpled black hat, his face strikingly melancholy.
“Yes,” she told him. “Yes, I do.”
A thin smile glimmered on the man’s face briefly, then vanished. “Well, have a nice day,” he said.
“Yes, you too,” Sara answered.
The man touched the brim of his hat, then turned and headed in the opposite direction down the street, one shoulder lower than the other, as if bearing an invisible weight.
Sara stood in place until he reached the far corner, then disappeared around it. She wanted to believe that the man was only a Village oddity, a sad figure in his dark suit, but not in the least connected to her or Labriola, just a strange little man, nothing more.
She continued on down the street, trying to get the little man in the rumpled hat out of her mind, but his face kept returning to her, superimposed over other faces, Caulfield, Labriola, men she’d fled, men bent on harming her.
At the end of the block she stopped and glanced back down the street, half expecting to see the man in the rumpled hat lurching behind her, or quickly dodging behind a tree to conceal himself.
But she saw no sign of him, no indication that he’d been anything but a sad-faced man who’d commented upon the flowers in the florist’s window. And yet she could not get his image out of her mind, the feeling that he had purposely approached her, as if to get a better look, then lumbered away to call whoever had hired him to find her.
She looked down the street once more, then left and right along the side streets, then up ahead. Again she saw no sign of the man who’d approached her. But again she could not rid her mind of the dark suspicion that she had been found.
CARUSO
Labriola’s voice exploded through the phone. “Get over here!”
“You mean—”
“Right now!”
“Okay, sure, I’ll—”
Click.
The phone felt like something stiff and dead in his hand.
Shit, Caruso thought, fuck.
He rushed to the car, Labriola’s voice still scraping across his mind, harsh and demanding as always but with something different in it this time, a voice that seemed on fire.
The old neighborhood held its usual familiarity, mostly stubby brick buildings from before the war. He remembered playing stickball on these same streets, remembered the day his father had gone out for beer at that little deli right there, remembered watching him from that window, the one on the fourth floor, watching as he walked past the little store, checking his wallet as he turned the corner. He’d watched it for a long time after that, but his father had never come back around it again. What had he been? Four years old. And yet it was the one image that returned to him most often, his father, tall and lanky and always smiling and throwing him in the air, this man who seemed to hold eternity in his grasp, turning the corner as he thumbed the bills in his old brown wallet, head down, counting, with not so much as a quick glance back toward the little boy who watched him so adoringly
