Another hour passes, with the lights on the lower floor, in the living room and the kitchen, remaining lit. Then the lights go out, the kitchen light first, as lights come on, in an upstairs bedroom and in the bathroom, more or less simultaneously. Carter’s thinking he might leave at this point. Tomorrow’s another day and there’s Angel back in Woodhaven. Hopefully.
But Carter doesn’t move, and his patience is finally rewarded at eleven o’clock when the bedroom goes dark as a light comes on downstairs. Epstein emerges a moment later. He ambles to his car, jingling his keys, whistling to himself. Then he’s off and running, with Carter following shortly behind.
The trip isn’t very long, only a few blocks to a pedestrian bridge crossing Shore Parkway. New York’s upper bay is just a hundred yards distant and Carter’s nostrils fill with the odor of the sea, though the harbor is screened by trees and bushes. When Epstein pulls to the curb near the overpass, Carter passes by and drives another block before sliding the van into a parking space. By the time he gets out, Epstein has crossed the bridge and disappeared.
Carter jogs to the overpass and takes the steps two at a time. Epstein’s nowhere in sight when he reaches the top, and he crosses the bridge quickly, the traffic zinging along beneath him. Carter intends to pursue Epstein, to run him down – this is Carter’s big chance to engage the cop in a long, pointed conversation – but the scene before him is too compelling and he stops for a moment. To his right, the towers of lower Manhattan rise like the phalanx of some great advancing army. Lady Liberty, alone on her island and lit from top to bottom, holds her torch aloft as if leading the charge. Across the harbor on Staten Island, single-family homes run in parallel lines across low shadowy hills. To his left, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, with its lit cables and towers, unites Staten Island with Brooklyn. The Verrazano is the most slender and graceful of the city’s suspension bridges, at least in Carter’s opinion, despite it being the longest by far.
Carter has been here before, to walk the promenade running between the highway and the water on a bright fall afternoon. When he spots Epstein sitting on a bench nearby, the faint glow of a cigarette in his right hand, he knows exactly why the man has come to this spot. The view is stunning.
Carter drops on to the bench next to Epstein a moment later, but Epstein doesn’t flinch. ‘I was hoping you were dead,’ he says.
‘Sorry to disappoint.’
Epstein tugs on his cigarette. He’s a short man, barely five-eight, and bald on top, with a barrel chest and heavily muscled shoulders. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he says, ‘Maybe I’m dense. But I don’t think I’m in your debt. I think we had a deal and I kept my end.’
Carter had exacted a price when he allowed Epstein to survive the second attempt on his life. Yes, I’ll let you live. But only if you put a gun to your partner’s head and pull the trigger. With his wife about to give birth any minute, Epstein had complied.
‘Benedetti,’ Carter says. ‘Bobby and Ricky, the Ditto brothers.’
‘Like I said, Carter, I don’t owe you a thing.’
The cop rises, grinds his cigarette into the pavement and begins to walk south, toward the bridge. Carter follows, not yet ready to pull out the big guns. He will, though, if it comes to that. From their right, the pulsating roar of high-speed traffic assaults their ears, reducing the splash of the waves against the boulders protecting the shoreline to an insinuating murmur.
‘How have you been, Solly?’ Carter asks.
Epstein laughs. ‘I got a kid now, a boy, and another on the way, and then Mr Death shows up. That would be you, in case you’re interested. So, how good can I be?’ Epstein hesitates, then lowers his voice. ‘I know you hit Ricky Ditto. The way it happened, inside the house, the alarms defeated, no sign of forced entry, one shot through the forehead? It had to be you.’ Epstein stops suddenly, but doesn’t meet Carter’s gaze. ‘And there were others. A Polish gangster shot through the head from three hundred yards away. A Russian dead from a single knife wound just below his sternum. You already used that one, Carter, in Macy’s a few days before Christmas. I thought you were more creative.’
Carter thinks he’s now supposed to ask the cop if he, Carter, is a suspect in any of these cases, if his name has come to the attention of the authorities. He doesn’t.
‘I’m gonna have to invoke my constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination,’ he says. ‘Mum’s the word.’
‘Yeah, well I wouldn’t sweat it. The FBI and the NYPD are places where nobody knows your name.’
Carter stares for a moment at a line of oil tankers and container ships anchored in the harbor. He wonders if they’re waiting to unload, or if they’re off to some faraway port with the turn of the tide. ‘I’ve been sitting in the van for the last eight hours. You mind if we keep walking?’
They continue on for several minutes, Carter watching headlights flicker in the superstructure joining the bridge’s upper and lower decks. Epstein needs time to adjust and Carter’s a patient man. He will not be the first to speak.
‘Are you married?’ Epstein finally asks. ‘You got any kids?’
‘No.’
‘So, you’re completely on your own? Nobody to report to at the end of the day?’
Carter smiles to himself. Only a few days before, he would have responded without hesitation. Now there’s Angel Tamanaka.
‘What’s your point, Solly?’
‘I can’t make ends meet. That’s the point. I can’t make the numbers add up, no matter what I do.’ He ticks the points off on the middle finger of his left hand. ‘The job’s cut back on overtime, so I have to make due on my base pay. Sofia’s been working for the last year, but child care eats up most of her salary. Now she’s pregnant again and she’ll be gainfully unemployed for a year, even if she works into her ninth month.’
Epstein glances at Carter, who’s staring at the bridge. ‘I work in a gas station on my off-days,’ he continues. ‘I’m the monkey in the booth you have to pay if you don’t have a credit card. I make twelve dollars an hour, but only because I carry a gun. The other monkeys get eight.’ He shrugs. ‘Between the house payments and the car payments – we need two cars now – and the payments for the loan I took out with the credit union ... Let’s just say I’m in over my head, Carter. Let’s just say that when Sofia quits her job, me and my little family are gonna sink beneath the waves. Glug, glug, glug.’
Epstein’s complaint reminds Carter of Angel’s cautionary tale about her father’s doomed attempt to save his lumber yard. Hideki Tamanaka had given his all to the struggle, but the forces arrayed against him were too powerful to resist. He’d found a way out, though, by firing a bullet into his head. Epstein, or so it seems to Carter, has other plans.
They walk past a couple, teenagers by the look of them, making out on a bench. Lost in lust, the young lovers appear not to notice the intrusion. Epstein smiles and nudges Carter with an elbow. ‘You remember when you were that young?’ he asks. ‘There was no such thing as enough.’
Carter returns Epstein’s smile, though his sexual experiences, before and after joining the military, have been sporadic and brief. ‘I’m not out to kill Bobby Ditto,’ he says.
‘Is he out to kill you?’
‘Sure, but he doesn’t know who I am, or where to find me, or how to fight me if he did.’
‘Then why come to me?’
‘I’m coming to you, Solly, because I want everything in the files you cops undoubtedly keep on the Ditto brothers. I want every known associate, every address, what they do, their connections ... hell, I want the names of their children and grandchildren. I want to be buried in information.’