“It’s better if you make it up.”
She looked at him distantly, as if unsure if he was what she really wanted, whether what she saw in him offered merely the allure of danger or the real thing.
“Okay, I’ll play along,” she said. “Let’s say you’re some kind of secret agent.”
He leaned forward and looked at her gravely. His whisper was charged with conspiracy. “Our country is in danger, and I desperately need your help.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet you sell insurance. I’ll bet your name’s Harry and you’re from Spokane.”
“I’ll be Harry if you want.”
“No.” She took a sip of the brandy Alexander. “No, I like your story better. Our country is in danger and you desperately need”-she hesitated, then released her final word like a small, wounded bird-“me.”
SARA
She stood at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street, holding tightly to the suitcase. She’d known from the beginning that the moment would come when she would freeze. She’d come to New York with no idea of what to do or where to go. And so there’d have to be a moment when you couldn’t figure out what you were going to do next. That was when you were most vulnerable, most gullible, most willing to take whatever hand reached out to you. Which was what she’d done with Tony, and later hated herself for doing, and would never do again.
A voice inside her head gave the instruction, Just keep moving!
She lifted her hand and hailed a cab.
“Where to?” the driver asked as she settled into the backseat.
“Brooklyn Heights,” she said for no reason other than that she’d sometimes strolled at night on the wide promenade, the radiant gleam of the Manhattan skyline, the great bridge shimmering above the dividing river.
On the Brooklyn Bridge, she glanced out over the harbor, the distant green of Lady Liberty, her torch hefted high. She tried to imagine herself as an immigrant, new to the country, carrying nothing but a single suitcase and some hopeful vision of the future. She labored to find something hopeful too, but her past reached for her like a bony hand thrust up from the ground, and she felt only the dreadful opposite of nostalgia, memory itself a haunted house.
“Anyplace in particular you want to be dropped off?” the driver asked as he turned off the ramp that led to Brooklyn Heights.
“Just near the river.”
The cab came to a halt on Columbia Heights Street. Sara paid the driver and got out and stood, suitcase in hand, facing the river until she recalled a small hotel whose dark little cabaret room she’d once worked.
It was called the Jefferson, and the cabaret room was now just a bar off the lobby. Still, it was a place she knew and so she decided to check in for the night. The man behind the desk asked if she had a reservation. She told him that she hadn’t.
“Very well,” he said a little sadly, as if in recognition that a hotel where a person could just walk in off the street and get a room was a second-rate hotel, and so he must be second-rate too. “The room’s on the fifth floor.” He gave her the key and tapped a brass bell.
A bellhop appeared. He grabbed her suitcase. “This way.”
The bellhop wore a little round cap with a strap beneath the chin, the kind she remembered on bellhops in movies from the forties, and suddenly she felt the sweet, romantic glow of those old films turn sour in her mind. Their promise of a big happy ending was no more than a cruel joke, a Hollywood fantasy in which the ones who hurt you got what they deserved.
EDDIE
As he pulled up to the curb in front of Tony’s house, Eddie was relieved to see that Sara’s red Explorer was the only vehicle in the driveway. He had not wanted to find some strange car parked there. He knew what that might mean, that there was a guy in Tony’s house, in bed with Tony’s wife. He didn’t want to think about this because he liked Sara. She’d always been nice to him and he didn’t want to imagine that she was doing the wrong thing now, something he didn’t want to tell Tony, though he knew he’d have to.
He got out of the car, walked to the front door, and knocked lightly.
No answer.
He knocked again.
Still no answer.
He peered through the narrow window in the door. Beyond it, he could see the living room, but it didn’t look like a room anyone really lived in. It looked like a picture in one of those magazines his mother used to buy at the corner drugstore, rich people’s homes, always with gleaming floors and fresh flowers, and this feeling that no one really lived there.
He inserted the key but didn’t turn it. It was someone else’s house, and he felt a biting reluctance to go inside. More, it was a woman’s house, a woman alone, if she were there at all. What if he came upon her when she was… doing something women do. He knew Tony had given him permission to go inside, even ordered him to do it. Still, he couldn’t. Even if Tony’s wife weren’t there, he might see her things lying around, her panties, a bra, and if you saw those things, the intimate apparel of another man’s wife, didn’t that mean that you knew too much about her, because only Tony should see such things, touch them. He shook his head. No, he would not go inside the house.
And so he stepped off the porch and walked to the back of the house, moving along the wooden fence that enclosed the backyard. The pool was covered, the pool furniture stored in the cabana. The diving board stretched out over the vacant cement cavern.
Eddie stood on the recently mowed lawn and decided that this was an unhappy place. He didn’t know how he sensed such things, and he understood that no one would pay any attention to what he thought, and yet he knew absolutely that this house was unhappy and that if Tony’s wife had left it, there was a good reason for it. He would never say anything like this to Tony, of course, because no matter how it came out, Tony would hear it as an accusation. A guy always took it that way. He might rage about what a bitch his wife was, but in his heart he’d feel that in some important way he hadn’t measured up.
He turned back toward the car, now resolved that he had nothing to bring back to Tony, nothing to tell him save that Sara’s car was in the driveway but that she hadn’t answered the door. Tony wouldn’t like it that he hadn’t gone inside the house, but what could be done about that? Nothing, Eddie thought, until he noticed a woman at the mailbox across the street and wondered if maybe she could help him out.
DELLA
He was a big guy and she was sure Tony had sent him. As he came toward her, she noticed his hands, how huge they were, and the shoulders, enormous. So maybe it wasn’t Tony who’d sent him, she thought, maybe the guy had been sent by Tony’s father, one of Old Man Labriola’s goons.
“Hi,” the man said as he drew close.
She closed the lid of the mailbox before replying. “Hello.”
“My name’s Eddie,” the man said. “Eddie Sullivan.”
The guy smiled, and Della thought it a warm, curiously innocent smile. But then, these guys all smiled that way, didn’t they? These made men who joked with you until the moment they wrapped the cord around your neck or put a bullet in your head. She’d seen guys like that in the movies, and she believed the movies were true.
“I was wondering if you know the people across the way,” the man said. “Tony Labriola? Sara?”
She felt her hands tighten around the stack of bills she’d just retrieved from the mailbox. “I know Sara.”
The man smiled again. He had a gap between his teeth and looked harmless, but she steeled herself against believing that he really was. A guy like that, she told herself, a guy like that could break your neck in a second, then go have a big bowl of his mother’s Irish stew and forget the whole thing.
“Tony’s been calling Sara all morning, but she don’t answer,” the man said. “He’s worried about her. Maybe she had an accident, something like that. He sent me over to see if she’s okay.”