“I’ll do it,” he blurted out suddenly.
Eddie looked at him quizzically.
“I’ll do it,” Tony repeated. “Move to the city, if that’s what she wants. That’s what I’ll tell her if I get to her first.” He stared at Eddie desperately. “But I got to get to her first. Help me, Eddie. Talk to Caruso.”
Eddie seemed to see the depth of his desperation. “Okay, Tony,” he said. “Okay.”
Tony turned his gaze westward and considered the limitless expanse that presented itself to him, his country from sea to shining sea, the vast landscape into which Sara had disappeared, his mind now focused exclusively on one question: Where could she be?
SARA
She sat at the window, the skyline of the city so close she could almost touch it. It was the phone that seemed far away and deadly silent. Perhaps she’d get a call, perhaps she wouldn’t. The guy had said he liked her singing and taken her number, but an odd look had come into his eye when she’d told him that she was living in a hotel. Maybe at that moment he’d figured her for trouble, a woman at loose ends, a drunk, maybe, or worse-anyway, undependable.
She tried to put the bar and the open mike out of her mind, along with whatever hope she’d briefly harbored that she might actually get the job. She couldn’t even be sure that she’d sung all that well. It didn’t matter anyway, because the guy who owned the place had no doubt noticed how jittery she was, the way her eyes darted around like a frightened little bird. Who would want a singer like that, nervous, strung out, probably on the run?
On the run.
She recalled her first days in New York, how she’d waited by the window as she did now. The only difference was that now someone could show up suddenly, Labriola in his big blue Lincoln, pounding on her door, kicking it open, dragging her down the stairs and through the lobby while the little bellhop looked on, aghast, but ready to take the fifty Labriola slipped him, along with the icy command, Keep your fucking mouth shut.
She had no doubt that the bellhop would do precisely that. After all, it was what she’d done years before. In her mind, she saw Caulfield standing above her, zipping up his pants, telling her to keep her mouth shut. She’d known instantly that she would do it, let him just walk away, back to his car, and after that go home to the little shack she lived in with her father, hoping somehow she could put it all behind her.
She’d almost done it too, she thought now, almost gotten clear of it. She’d come to New York, landed enough work to keep a roof over her head, married Tony, moved to Long Island, where, despite the little nagging problems and disappointments that plagued any life, she’d almost made a go of it.
In her mind she heard the heavy thud again, a beast closing in upon her from behind.
Almost, she thought, but not quite.
ABE
He knew only that her name was Samantha, that she lived in a Brooklyn hotel, and that from the moment she’d begun to sing he’d felt the old, forgotten stirring, felt again what a song can be, along with something more, something extra, a small, barely detectable charge.
He looked over to where Jake stood at the bar, slicing a lime. “That singer who came in last night, how old you think she is?” he asked.
“Thirties,” Jake said.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.” In his mind he saw her standing by the piano, heard her voice again. “She sings older though.”
“You wish she was older,” Susanne piped in with a laugh. “You wish she was older but still looked like a chick.”
“Chick?” Abe asked. “I thought that was sexist, that word.”
“No, just sexy,” Susanne returned. “At least for old guys.”
“Upbeat would be good,” Jake said absently. “Lucille was always singing those downers.”
“Lucille was a torch singer,” Abe reminded him.
Jake dropped the slices into a white dish. “Used to sing ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ remember? Like it was bullshit. Like nobody could do that for nobody else.” He shook his head. “Fucking depressing, the way she sung it.” The knife suddenly stopped. “So, you’re going to hire this broad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, sure you are,” Susanne said with a laugh. “I could see she was getting to you.”
Getting to you? Abe asked himself. Was that the small charge he’d felt as the woman sang?
A sudden agitation seized him, the sense of something broken loose and rolling about inside him.
Getting to you.
He walked out of the bar and stood on the street and tried to forget that a woman named Samantha had come into the place the night before, sung a song, and somehow shaken something loose.
Getting to you.
If that were true, he had to stop it, and so, at that instant, he decided not to call her, just let her find a gig somewhere else and leave his life alone. That would be the safest thing, he thought, just to leave things where they were, Jake slicing limes and Susanne straightening tables and Jorge in the back, stacking cases of beer, and himself standing alone on the street or sitting at the piano, his fingers resting without movement on the ever-yellowing keys.
CARUSO
“So, anyway, like I said. I see you give Morty the envelope and you pull away, and so I follow him and he starts walking downtown.”
Labriola kept his eyes on the road as he steered the Lincoln off the Henry Hudson Parkway and headed east along the Cross Bronx Expressway.
What, Caruso wondered, could he possibly be thinking? One thing he knew, that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. In the few days since Tony’s wife had disappeared, a strange darkness had settled over Labriola. It was like a stain that seemed to sink ever deeper into his mind. It was thick and black, and it kept him grimly focused on finding her to the exclusion of other, more important matters, like who’d paid him recently, or what should be done about Toby Carnucci, who should maybe be slapped around a little, the fucking deadbeat.
“So, anyway, when Morty gets to Twelfth Street, he swings east,” Caruso went on. “He makes it almost to Fifth, then he stops at this fucking bar.”
Caruso had gone over all of this once before, but Labriola seemed to want to hear it all again, as if he were hunting for something, or pondering secret calculations.
“Like I said, the place is called McPherson’s,” Caruso added. “So, anyway, I go to the window and look in. Morty don’t see me, but I see him clear as day. He’s talking to this fucking guy at the bar, who turns out to be the piano player, but like I find out later, also owns the place.”
“Owns the place,” Labriola muttered.
“Owns the place, right,” Caruso said. “So, okay, like I said, I figure this is maybe Morty’s hangout, you know, that maybe he’s a regular, so I wait and he has a couple of drinks and I don’t see he ever pays a nickel, and him and the other guy are talking away, and then they stop, and Morty gets up and heads for the door. So I run across the street ’cause I don’t want this fuck should see me watching him, and he comes out and the same guy is with him. And right there on the street, Morty gives this guy the envelope, which I figure is the same envelope you give him when he had that meet with you.”
“You seen him pass the envelope to this other fucking guy?” Labriola blurted out with a sudden leaping virulence. “With your own eyes, you seen it?”
“With my own eyes.”
Labriola glanced out the window and surveyed the neighborhood the expressway had destroyed. “You ever live in Tremont?”