Inside, he swaggered through the rich Italian smells of garlic and tomato paste and onion and salami and peppers and basil and olive oil and dried anchovy. Behind the little sandwich counter the old Mustache Pete and his broadbeamed wife, both in their sixties, were chattering volubly in a patois of English and Genovese as they covered the cut meats left over from the noon sandwich trade.
The old man looked up as Tenconi loomed up beside the counter, starting, in a heavy accent, “Can I helpa...” then stopping and going on in a different tone, “Oh. You. Tenconi.”
Tenconi thrust by them without speaking and punched NO SALE on the old-fashioned ornate scrolled cash register. As he did, another customer entered the front of the shop. Tenconi paid no attention; in North Beach, he did what he wanted.
He took out the thin sheaf of bills held with a rubber band and counted them. He looked up scowling when he had finished.
“There’s only the vig here. Nothing on principal.”
The wife burst out despairingly, “E che vuoi. Sempre l’interesse, sempre piu interesse...”
Tenconi shrugged in cold indifference, meanwhile fighting hidden laughter. Actually, he didn’t want these old jerk-offs ever getting to their nut. They’d pay him interest forever.
“Hey, Mama, that’s your problem. The supermarket, they got lower prices, good fresh produce, Italian run, they get the business, capisce?” He added coldly, “Nobody asked you to borrow money to keep this dump going.”
He went out of the store shoving the money in his pocket, savoring the moment as he did every week. He’d worked as a delivery boy for these old sciagurati, they’d ordered him around plenty then. Now it was his turn. Jerk-offs.
When he was gone, the other customer appeared from the other aisle. He seemed not to notice their humiliation; instead, he gestured after Tenconi. “Wasn’t that Angie Tenconi?”
“Da big man,” muttered the old Italian.
“Where’s he living these days?” the man asked idly.
They knew, of course. Despite everything, North Beach was still an Italian community where people knew each other’s business. Runyan had counted on that.
Chapter 15
Louise, dressed in sloppy, comfortable country clothes that went with the Norman Rockwell room, worked through the manuscript with her ballpoint pen, scribbling revisions, crossing out words, writing a whole new sequence into the right margin. The phone rang. She swivelled to reach down and pick it up.
“Yes?”
“I’m back. We have to talk.”
“I thought maybe your plane had crashed.” She wrote in another phrase. “Hoped it had crashed.”
The heavy voice began, “There was a time when you were plenty goddamned grateful to—”
“That was before you started asking me to fuck other men on your behalf,” she said. She put down the manuscript page and, with the phone clipped between shoulder and jaw, fed a fresh sheet into the typewriter.
“Why not, you had plenty of practice in Vegas.”
“And you wonder why there’s nothing between us any more,” she said, and hung up.
She forced her mind back to Assault on the Citadel. She had written it over again since San Francisco, she thought it was a lot better than the version she had left behind. Writing as therapy? She started to type with the quasi-despairing concentration of impending interruption, dreading whatever scene was to come, but grateful for these few hours.
She wondered what Runyan might be doing.
Runyan walked briskly along the posh Pacific Heights street. Carefully nurtured hardwoods gave the block a slightly Eastern air, as if some early gold-rusher had been nostalgic for Connecticut. He was dressed in black tight-fitting clothes; his shoes were tight-fitting also, rubber-soled rock-climbing shoes that scraped no leather echoes from the sidewalk.
Gatian Sheridan had an impressive Queen Anne Victorian with a steeply slanting driveway which ran up to level off alongside the house and then continue back to the garage where the stable and carriage house once had been. No lights showed, but in the rounded turretlike structure at one corner of the house — a feature of Queen Anne architecture — a window was open.
That would do. If he still had his nerve.
He hyperventilated, went up the slope in a rush, cleared the low picket fence around the planting beds in a nimble leap, landed coiled in the bushes directly in front of the house, and sprang upward — all in one burst of movement. There was the adrenaline constriction in the chest, the feeling that he had to move, do something, act, or he would explode. God, he hadn’t known that feeling for eight years!
At arms’ length below the decorative trim under the front windows, he worked quickly over to the slot between bays. He chinned himself, kicked one leg up and hooked a heel, levered himself up, and was standing erect on the two-inch-wide trim.
He began chimneying himself up the slot exactly as he had done dozens of times rock climbing before San Quentin, his back against the side of one bay, his feet against the side of the other. His technique was rusty; but from the countless hours of gymnastics in prison he was stronger than he had ever been.
At the top he paused, wedged between bays. Directly above his head was the heavy metal rain gutter. He shook it with one hand, testing it for support; then he swung at arms’ length below it, kipped neatly up into a pressout, swung a leg up, and rolled over into the trough between the roof coping and the rain gutter.
The lower sill of the open third-story window in the curving face of the tower was only about two feet above his outstretched hands. As he crouched to spring, a heavy sedan turned into the slanting driveway.
Gatian Sheridan had gone to work in his father’s wholesale jewelry business after college at the age of 22. He had convinced old Hiram that if they ever wanted that nice standard 300 percent markup, they would have to enter the retail trade. His father had died a year after Runyan’s conviction.
As the lights of his conservative black Mercedes four-door swept across the front of the beautifully maintained Victorian, he noted with a little thrill of anticipation that the tower window was shut.
“I did close it, Norman,” he said. “You were right.”
The man beside him, who was about ten years younger and quite beautiful, said softly, “I’ll have to chastise you for doubting me, Gatty.”
A delicious shudder ran through Gatian as he killed the engine and the lights and got out, a soft pale man of 36, exquisitely dressed in a grey three-piece suit with a slight hint of salmon stripe running through it. Norman was taller, lithe as a dancer, with long blond hair that Gatian loved to kiss.
This was going to be some night. First Leontyne Price in Tosca and in magnificent voice; now... the tower room.
Inside, they went directly up to their adjoining bedrooms to get ready. Norman had spent a year in Morocco learning things that made Gatian weak to think about. He pulled on black silk pajamas, put on his superb velvet quilted smoking jacket, and padded barefoot to the connecting door.
“I’m going up, Norman,” he called through it. “I have the new Tosca as a surprise for you.”
“I can hardly wait,” said Norman in those soft tones that raised the hairs on the back of Gatian’s neck.
He opened the door with the mirror on it, flicked on the lights, and went up the circular staircase to the tower. The walls were covered with pornographic photos of copulating males; there was another full-length mirror on the ceiling above the king-size waterbed with the mauve velvet spread. He crossed to the expensive unitized stereo and put on the Tosca.