By nine o’clock, they had moved Angel to the loading dock at the sawmill, where the platform was at least dry and partly sunny-and in view of the parking lot. They had stripped the body and removed almost twenty leeches; they’d wiped Angel clean with his wet plaid shirt, and had managed to re-dress the dead boy in an anonymous combination of the cook’s and his son’s unrecognizable clothes. A T-shirt that had always been too big for Danny fit Angel fine; an old pair of Dominic’s dungarees completed the picture. For Ketchum’s sake, if Ketchum ever showed up, at least the clothes were clean and dry. There was nothing they could do about the pearl-gray, bluish tint to Angel’s skin; it was unreasonable to hope that the weak April sun would return the natural color to the dead youth, but somehow Angel looked warm.
“Are we waiting for Ketchum?” Danny asked his dad.
“For just a little while longer,” the cook replied. His dad was the anxious one now, young Dan realized. (The thing about time, Dominic knew, was that it was relentless.)
The cook was wringing out Angel’s soaking-wet and dirty clothes when he felt the wallet in the left-front pocket of the Canadian’s dungarees-just a cheap, imitation-leather wallet with a photo of a pretty, heavy-looking woman under a plastic window, which was now fogged by its immersion in the cold water. Dominic rubbed the plastic on his shirtsleeve; when he could see the woman more clearly, her resemblance to Angel was apparent. Surely, she was the dead boy’s mother-a woman a little older than the cook but younger than Injun Jane.
There wasn’t much money in the wallet-just some small bills, only American dollars (Dominic had expected to find some Canadian dollars, too), and what appeared to be a business card from a restaurant with an Italian name. This confirmed the cook’s earliest impression that Angel was no stranger to working in a kitchen, though it might not have been the boy’s foremost career choice.
However, something else was not as Dominic Baciagalupo had expected: The restaurant wasn’t in Toronto, or anywhere else in Ontario; it was an Italian restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts, and the name of the restaurant was an even bigger surprise. It was a phrase that the illegitimate son of Annunziata Saetta knew well, because he’d heard his mother utter it with a bitterness born of rejection. “Vicino di Napoli,” Nunzi had said-in reference to where Dominic’s absconding father had gone-and the boy had thought of those hill towns and provinces “in the vicinity of Naples,” where his dad had come from (and, allegedly, gone back to). The names of those towns and provinces that Annunziata had said in her sleep- Benevento and Avellino -came to Dominic’s mind.
But was it possible that his deadbeat dad had run no farther than an Italian restaurant on Hanover Street -what Nunzi had called “the main drag” of the North End of Boston? Because, according to the business card in Angel’s wallet, the restaurant was called Vicino di Napoli-clearly a Neapolitan place-and it was on Hanover Street, near Cross Street. The street names themselves were as familiar to Dominic’s childhood as Nunzi’s oft-repeated recommendations for parsley (prezzémolo), or her frequent mention of Mother Anna’s and the Europeo-two other restaurants on Hanover Street.
Nothing struck the cook as too coincidental to be believed-not on a day when twelve-year-old Daniel Baciagalupo had killed his father’s lover with the same skillet the cook had put to such legendary use. (Who would believe he’d once saved his now-dead wife from a bear?) Even so, Dominic was unprepared for the last item he discovered in Angel Pope’s wallet. As near as the cook could tell, this was a summer pass to Boston ’s streetcar and subway system-a transit pass, Dominic had heard his mother call it. The pass declared that the bearer was under the age of sixteen in the summer of 1953-and there was Angel’s date of birth, to prove it. The boy had been born on February 16, 1939, which meant that Angel had only recently turned fifteen. The youth would have had to have run away from home when he was only fourteen-if he had really run away. (And of course there was no way of knowing if Boston was still the dead boy’s “home,” although the transit pass and the business card from Vicino di Napoli strongly suggested that this was so.)
What would most convincingly catch Dominic Baciagalupo’s attention was Angel’s real name-it wasn’t exactly Angel Pope.
ANGELÙ DEL POPOLO
“Who?” Danny asked, when his father read the name on the streetcar and subway pass out loud.
The cook knew that Del Popolo meant “Of the People,” and that Pope was a common Americanization of the Sicilian name; while Del Popolo was probably but not necessarily Sicilian, the an-geh-LOO was definitely Sicilian, which the cook knew, too. Had the boy worked in a Neapolitan restaurant? (At fourteen, a part-time job was permitted.) But what had made him run away? From the photograph, it appeared he had still loved his mom.
But all the cook said to his son was: “It seems that Angel wasn’t who he said he was, Daniel.” Dominic let Danny look over the transit pass-it and the business card from Vicino di Napoli in the North End were all they had to go on, if they were going to try to find Angelù Del Popolo’s family.
Naturally, there was a more pressing problem. Where the hell was Ketchum? Dominic Baciagalupo was wondering. How long could they afford to wait? What if Constable Carl hadn’t been all that drunk? What if the cowboy had found Injun Jane’s body, but he’d known in an instant that he hadn’t laid a hand on her-at least not last night?
It was hard to imagine what written message the cook could leave for Ketchum on Angel’s body, because what if Ketchum didn’t find Angel first? Wouldn’t the message have to be in code?
Surprise! Angel isn’t Canadian!
And, by the way, Jane was in an accident!
Nobody did it-not even Carl!
Well, just how could the cook leave a note like that?
“Are we still waiting for Ketchum?” young Dan asked his dad.
It was with notably less conviction that his father replied: “For just a little while longer, Daniel.”
THE SONG ON THE RADIO in Ketchum’s badly lived-in truck reached them on the loading dock of the sawmill before the truck itself appeared on the haul road-maybe it was Jo Stafford singing “Make Love to Me,” but Ketchum turned off the radio before the cook could be sure about the song. (Ketchum was on his way to becoming chainsaw-deaf. The radio in his truck was always overloud, the windows-now that it was what passed for spring-usually open.) Dominic was relieved to see that Six-Pack hadn’t come along for the ride; that would have seriously complicated matters.
Ketchum parked his rattling heap a discreet distance from the Pontiac; he sat in the cab with his white cast resting on the steering wheel, his eyes looking past them on the platform to where Angel was reclining in the uncertain sunlight.
“You found him, I see,” Ketchum said; he looked away, toward the dam, as if he were counting the logs in the containment boom.
As always, both predictable and unaccountable things were transported in the back of Ketchum’s pickup truck; a homemade shelter covered the bed of the pickup, turning the entire truck into a wanigan. Ketchum carried his chainsaws around, together with an assortment of axes and other tools-and, under a canvas tarp, an inexplicable half-cord of firewood, in case the suddenly urgent need to build a bonfire possessed him.