“Drop the gun!” he shouted.
Harry didn’t move. Marlene stood frozen against the door. She couldn’t breathe.
“Drop it! I’ll cut its fuckin’ head off!” screamed Vinnie.
The baby became frightened. Her face grew red and crinkled up, and she began to wail. Tears sprang from her eyes, and then from Marlene’s eyes.
Slowly, carefully, Harry Bello bent his knees and placed the pistol on the cobblestones.
“Back away from it!” shouted Vinnie. Slowly Harry did so, never taking his eyes off Vinnie, part of his mind cool under the terror, considering options, looking for an opening. Vinnie would have to put the baby down or take the knife away from her in order to pick up the gun. That’s when he’d make his move.
Harry was a lot faster than he looked. He figured he’d have to take at the most two bullets before he got to the guy.
Vinnie shuffled forward into the street, toward the pistol. Marlene followed behind him.
Then the roar of an engine gearing down filled the canyon of Crosby Street, and a green Karmann-Ghia whipped around the Howard Street corner and screeched to a halt twenty feet from where Vinnie stood. Jim Raney stared at the scene through his windshield. It was not hard to figure out what was going on.
Raney got out of his car and walked a few steps toward Vinnie. He took his Browning Hi-Power out of its holster, jacked a round into its chamber, and took up his stance, pointing the weapon at Vinnie’s head. “It’s over, Vinnie,” he said. “Put the kid down.”
Vinnie had no intention of putting the kid down, not until he had a gun. With the baby under his knife, he was in control of the situation. He had seen all the movies. The cops always dropped their guns when you had the kid. He shouted, “Fuck you, cocksucker! You drop it! I’ll rip its throat out, I swear …!”
Raney looked at Marlene. She stood white-faced behind and to Vinnie’s right. Their eyes met. In a conversational voice he said, “Marlene. Red dog. On three.”
Vinnie heard this. He didn’t understand it, but he didn’t have to. He was in control. Again he shouted.
“Drop the fuckin’ gun!”
Raney took two deep breaths and let the second one out very slowly. Holding the pistol in both hands, he brought the little Day-Glo dot on the front sight in line with Vinnie’s sloping forehead. He said, “Hut, hut, hut.”
On the third “hut” he pulled the trigger.
On the third “hut” Marlene started to move.
Vinnie saw the flash of the gun. He formulated a thought: he would stab the baby and grab the woman.
This thought was still turning itself into neural impulses when Raney’s 115-grain 9mm parabellum silver-tip hollow-point punched through the bone of Vinnie’s forehead as if it were wet cardboard, expanding to the diameter of a champagne cork as it did so. The resulting shock set up a cone of destruction in Vinnie’s brain tissue, turning that thought and all the other thoughts he had ever had, and all his memories, and his unpleasant personality, into a reddish slurry that was, within the next hundredth of a second, ejected out the back of his skull in a graceful arc.
The decorticated mammal exhibits limb extension. The body of Vincent Boguluso did so; the legs stiffened, the arms shot wide, a fleshy crucifix. Squalling, Lucy Karp dropped like a brick.
Marlene was airborne in a low dive. She twisted in the air, her back crashed along the stones, her cupped hands reaching under her falling baby to cushion its skull. She felt the warm weight in her hands and whipped the little body around, pressing it to her breast.
She looked up at the standing corpse. Desperately she started to roll away from it, but there was no need.
The knees buckled, they hit the street, and it fell over slowly onto its side.
“Are you all right?” Harry Bello was kneeling by her side, his face the color of cheap toilet paper.
“Yeah,” said Marlene. She checked the baby. She was still whimpering, and her sundress was torn, but the only marks on her were a thin red bruise on her neck and finger impressions on her arm. Marlene shuddered and tried to force deep breaths into her lungs.
There was a loud, disgusting noise. It went on for some time. Harry looked up.
Marlene said, “It’s okay. He always does that.”
“What, puke his guts?”
Marlene nodded. “When he kills people.”
Harry said nothing. He was pretty sure that if Raney had missed, if he had hit Lucy, Harry would have taken his own gun and killed Vinnie, Raney, and himself, in that order. He put the thought out of his mind and helped Marlene to her feet. Then he went to his car and called the incident in on the police radio.
Karp had slept through the whole thing: the screaming, the shot, the sirens. Raney and Bello said they would handle the clean-up and the various official acts New York considers necessary when one of its citizens has his brains blown over one of its streets. Marlene returned to the loft alone. She got the baby interested in some toys in her playpen and poured herself a tumbler full of red wine. Which she drank and poured another.
There was still dinner to get, she thought, horrific event or no, and, naturally, she had not gone to the store. She was not going to go either. Maybe she would never leave her loft again.
No food in the house. Of course, there is always food in the house. She found half a Spanish onion, some faded escarole, and a chunk of salt pork. There was a bulb of garlic and olive oil.
She gets down an iron pot, splashes in some oil, cuts up the onion, chops in half the garlic and the salt pork, and puts the pieces in the oil, with the gas on low. She doesn’t know what she is going to cook yet, but she knows that it is going to involve garlic and onions.
There was a can of tomatoes and one of tomato paste. Impossible there should not be, in Marlene’s kitchen. She pulls out a handful of dry spaghetti, but sees it is not enough for two and puts it back. She had been going to shop for pasta today.
There is a bag of flour. She gets out her largest pottery bowl and pours a mound of flour into it. She adds water and an envelope of yeast and makes dough. The dough rises, and she scours the back of the refrigerator and comes up with a bag of dried mushrooms and the end of an ancient sausage. She cuts the moldy parts from the sausage. The knife shakes in her hand, and she works slowly.
She opens the can of tomatoes, drains it, and dumps the contents into a steel sieve. She pushes the tomatoes through the sieve into a bowl. The pulp is brighter in color and in texture not very much like Vinnie’s brains blown out across Crosby Street. Nevertheless, vomit rises in her throat, and she has to stop for a moment and lean over the table on her knuckles, breathing, her eyes closed. Then she throws the tomatoes into the pot, adds oregano and bay, covers the pot, and turns the flame down to sharp blue dots.
Karp wakes up and rises, attracted by the sounds and the odors. He comes into the kitchen on one crutch.
“What’d you get?” he asks.
“I didn’t get anything.”
He sees her face. “What happened?” he says in alarm.
She takes a deep breath and tells him. He’s horrified, guilt-stricken. He looks at the child, who is in her playpen, banging two blocks together and crooning to herself.
“She’s fine,” says Marlene. “She’s forgotten it already.”
He senses Marlene doesn’t want to discuss it now. “What’s for dinner, then?” he asks.
“Pizza,” she says.
He is amazed. She amazes him further by pounding out the risen dough and flinging it up in the air. She has done this before, but never for him. A certain ethnic embarrassment: during the summer of her fourteenth year she did it fifty times a day at the restaurant owned by her father’s brother in Belmar, New Jersey. It is obviously something you don’t forget how to do, because Marlene can still do it.
She flings the dough high in the air again and again. Karp and the baby watch this, rapt. The dough enters the realm of pure ballistics, suns and galaxies tug at it. It becomes round and thin. Not a fast food this pizza.