17
By noon Nick Amato’s home had become a place of well-organized grief and mourning. His wife’s friends filled the house, moving solemnly about their duties with funereal expressions on their work-worn faces. There was little they could do to comfort Anna; she lay in bed, turning her head slowly from side to side, pressing Mario’s first communion picture tightly against her breasts. She had passed from hysteria to shock; her expression was dazed and incredulous and only at infrequent intervals did tears start in her dull brown eyes. Her friends murmured their sympathies to her and left her room with handkerchiefs pressed to their eyes. Time would help her, they knew. Nothing else. Meanwhile there was work to be done; the house to be cleaned from top to bottom, the plans made for marketing and cooking. The men who came to the wake would need to eat and drink. Nothing ever changed that.
Nick Amato sat in the kitchen, a cigar stub in his hand and a cup of hot coffee before him on the table. He was tired and nervous; his face was gray with fatigue and there was a tiny but annoying tremor in his left eyelid. The knowledge that he was safe hadn’t put him at ease, for some reason. With Mario and the girl dead he was safe, but he couldn’t relax; every sound in the house grated on his quivering nerves, and there was a cold, painful ache in the pit of his stomach.
Joe Lye stood with his back to the window, smoking a cigarette with quick, hungry drags. Occasionally he glanced at the ceiling, in the direction of Anna’s room. “She’s calmed down,” he said, drawing a deep breath.
“Don’t talk about it,” Amato said.
A stout gray-haired woman opened the door without knocking. “Father Bristow is here,” she said to Amato. “He’s gone up to see Anna.”
“That’s good,” Amato said, and stared at her until she smiled nervously and closed the door.
Lye rubbed both hands over his face. “You think he can help her?” he said.
“Anna will listen to him,” Amato said. “He’ll tell her it was God’s will. He’ll tell her to be brave.”
“What would he tell her if he knew the truth?”
“Don’t talk about it, I said.”
“That’s easy for you.”
“Shut up!” Amato said, glaring at him. “It had to be done. Connors told me he’d spilled something to the cops. Supposing he squealed that I told him to hire Evans? It had to be this way, Joe. He could hurt me. Like I can hurt you.”
Lye rubbed a fist over his tight mouth. He stood indecisively for a moment, and then pulled out a chair and sat down at the table facing Amato. “We’re going to talk,” he said. “I got something to say to you.” Amato shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“Kay told me about the deal you offered her.”
“Women are funny, Joe. You pay ’em a compliment that don’t mean anything and they think you’re serious.” There was a purpose in Lye that Amato didn’t understand; but his intuition told him it was dangerous. “So why worry about the funny ideas a woman gets, Joe?” He smiled slowly but his eyes were wary and alert.
“That’s not the important thing,” Lye said. “So she misunderstood you. Okay. What I’m talking about is you and me, Nick. I’m going to work with you from now on, not for you. You understand?”
“You got a gripe, I guess. Keep talking, Joe.”
“When we take over Glencannon’s local, I’m going to run it,” Lye said. “You and I will split up this stretch of the docks. We’ll be partners.”
Amato dropped his cigar into his coffee and it went out with an angry little hiss. “Joe, I don’t like partners,” he said gently. “You know that by now. Joe Ventra wanted to be a partner, remember?”
“You remember something now,” Lye said, in a tight, straining voice. “Kay is ready to swear she heard you tell me to kill your nephew. You better remember that good. We’ll go to the cops — Kay and me — and that will put you right in the chair.”
Amato smiled faintly. “That would put you in the chair too, Joe.”
“It’s a standoff,” Lye said. “You got the Donaldson rap hanging over me, I got the kid’s murder on you. So we’re partners, Nick. You ain’t going to needle and hound me about going back to jail. If you do you’ll pay a high price for your fun.”
Amato kept his anger in check. He raised his eyebrows in a little gesture of good-humored resignation. “I’m a sensible fellow,” he said. “You can hurt me, I can hurt you. So it figures we should be friends.”
“Partners,” Lye said.
Amato shrugged and smiled. “Partners.”
Lye rubbed a hand over his damp forehead. He could hardly believe that he’d won; it had taken all his courage to do this, and now he was so spent and drained that his hands were shaking. But he had never known such relief. Already the tense and clotted fear of Amato was easing out of him, and he was suddenly sure that the violent crimson nightmares would never haunt his sleep again. There would be an end to the smothering horror, to the taste of shame in his mouth, as he climbed with agonizing slowness to sanity and consciousness. And the tic that afflicted his face, that sinister barometer of his passions, even that might disappear. Without fear, anything was possible. He was almost grateful to Amato now. “I swear, Nick, we’ll get along fine,” he said. “You’re still the boss. But I had to get out from under you. Kay and I want some kind of life together. We want to live like normal people.”
“That’s what you want, eh?”
“Everybody does, I guess.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Amato looked at the dead stump of his cigar floating in the coffee. “You know, Joe, she was out of the room when I told you to take care of Mario. She didn’t hear nothing.”
Lye felt his lips tightening. “She’ll swear she heard it all,” he said. “Oh sure. I was just thinking. You can’t be normal people.” He looked at Lye and smiled. “You’re too smart.”
“That’s a good thing to remember, Nick.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll remember it,” Amato said. He stood up then and rubbed his stomach. “I better go up with Anna.”
“Okay, Nick. I’ll be at the local if you need me.”
When he had gone Amato stood for a minute or so staring at the door. He heard Anna’s friends moving about above him on the second floor, and from the street the faint noise of children playing. At last he sat down and rubbed both hands over his face, drawing a black curtain over reality for a brief welcome moment. His body felt slack and hot and his left eye was quivering with fatigue. He knew he was in trouble; the knowledge was intuitive but certain. There was Retnick and Neville, and now Joe Lye. They were forcing him to move, prodding him into action, not giving him time to think. That was how they got you; by making you jump. Finally you jumped one time too many...
Amato went down the hallway and got into his heavy overcoat. He heard Father Bristow’s voice at the top of the stairs, and he let himself out quickly; he didn’t want to talk to the priest now. It was one thing with the old woman, listening to them say how terrible it was that the boy was dead, but the priest was different. He looked right through you; Amato knew he had never fooled him for a minute.
The day was cold and overcast with heavy dark clouds. In the steel-gray light the bitter colors of the street were more dismal than usual. The street was dirty, and the black iron fire escapes crawled like a rusty growth up the faces of the mud-colored brownstones. Amato walked slowly to the waterfront, not quite sure why he had left the house. He looked through the fog and saw the terminal his local controlled, a long square finger poking into the gray river. Five hundred men, coopers, checkers, truckers, winch operators, laborers — they paid him to work there. The jobs were safe as long as they stayed in line. That used to mean something to him, but today it seemed flat and pointless.