“I’d kill him if it were legal,” he said, his voice quivering with the effort to regain control of himself. “I’ll settle for putting him in jail, and getting you out of my life forever.”
On Saturday night, he’d told her they’d been conducting a surveillance since the beginning of the year...
The son of a Mafia boss the U.S. Attorney put away for good. We’re certain he’s running the mob now, we’ve just been waiting to get enough for an OCCA conviction.
Andrew. He’d been talking about Andrew. Andrew was the target of his investigation, Andrew was the son of a Mafia boss in prison, Andrew was himself a gangster.
We know he’s linked to narcotics and loan-sharking, but we can’t prove it from what he or anyone else has said. We also think he may have ordered a hit or two, but again, no proof...
She had lain awake all that night, wondering if this was true, knowing it was true, they had tapes. Wanting to call Andrew, wanting to ask him, Is this true, can this be true? But of course it was true.
“This is the deal,” Michael said. “Plain and simple.” His voice had suddenly changed. It sounded clipped, cold, detached, professional. “If you get me what I need, Mollie never finds out about you. We divorce, we share custody, we live our separate lives. If you don’t cooperate...”
“I’m not one of your criminals,” she said.
“If you don’t cooperate, I’ll play those tapes in divorce court, you’ll be declared an unfit mother...”
“You wouldn’t do that,” she said.
“... you’ll be denied custody...”
“Listen,” she said, “don’t...”
“... and you’ll never see Mollie a—”
“... threaten me.”
She was suddenly shaking. My daughter? she thought. You’re threatening me with the loss of my daughter? My Mollie, you son of a bitch? What sort of man...?
“This is what I want,” he said. “You...”
“Don’t offer me any deals!” she said. “I’m not a criminal!”
“Aren’t you?” he asked.
And, of course, she was. Moreover, she had made the criminal’s unforgivable error. She had been caught. He had her cold.
“I don’t care how you do this,” he said, “and I wouldn’t presume to advise you. That’s entirely your business.” From the way he said those words, so slowly and carefully, she knew at once that he was somehow covering himself, a skilled lawyer protecting himself against some future allegation that might come his way. “My business is putting Faviola in jail,” he said. “I want you to get him to talk, that’s all.” She noticed again that he did not suggest — not even by innuendo — how she should get him to talk. It was as if, for the record at least, he was wiping out all knowledge of her infidelity, completely forgetting that she’d already made love to this man, and dismissing the possibility, for the record at least, that in order to elicit further information, she might have to make love to him again. Even here in the open air, where no one could possibly overhear them, he was unwilling to mention that sex was in fact the basic element in this transaction, unwilling even to suggest that in order to encourage conversation about criminal matters, Sarah would have to engage in criminal conversation of quite another sort. There had to be a reason for this, and she wondered what it was. “Get him to describe everything in detail,” Michael was saying now. “Get him to describe all the wonderful things he’s involved in.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” she said.
“Oh, I think you can do it, Sarah.” Spitting out her name as if it were something vile on his tongue. “I think you’d better do it, Sarah. Unless you want your daughter to learn what kind of woman you are.”
“Don’t threaten me!” she said again, louder this time, and turned to him with her fists clenched, ready to kill him if he told her one more time that he would use Mollie to...
“Oh?” he said, and raised an eyebrow.
They stood rooted to the sidewalk, both of them silent and staring, people rushing by heedless in this city of strangers, Sarah trembling, Michael looking down at her the way he must have looked at countless criminals in his office, a smug, superior look on his face, knowing he had her, knowing she was trapped. A faint angry smile flickered momentarily on his mouth and in his eyes. Then he turned away and began walking again, secure in the knowledge that she would follow him. Defeated, she fell into step beside him, trying to match his longer strides, struggling to keep up.
He told her exactly the sort of information he wanted her to elicit from her boyfriend. He kept calling Andrew her “boyfriend.” Each time he used the word it made whatever she’d shared with him sound shoddy and cheap. Her boyfriend. Was that all it came down to in the end? Was Andrew merely a boyfriend? And was she now to do whatever her husband asked of her in order to keep the cheap and shoddy, sordid and shameful truth from her daughter? She was wondering what sort of man could even make such a threat. For that matter, what sort of man would never once suggest that perhaps this marriage might still work. Not even to suggest it? Not even to say I love you, Sarah, I’ll forgive you, help me do this thing and I’ll forgive you? No. The opposite instead. Help me do this thing or I’ll...
It suddenly occurred to her that the detectives had heard everything he’d heard, seen everything he’d seen. Even if she agreed to do what he wanted, the detectives already knew; her daughter would still be vulnerable to...
“The detectives,” she said.
“What about them?”
“They know. They heard the tapes...”
“They don’t know who you are. There are millions of Sarahs in this city.”
“Didn’t they see the video?”
“All they saw was an unidentifiable blonde going in. And they already knew Faviola’s whore was a blonde.”
“Please,” she said.
“Lovely person you turned out to be,” he said. “You must be very proud of yourself.”
“State of the art,” Bobby Triani was saying. “The phones do everything but vacuum the floor. Thanks,” he said to the waitress, and looked her over as she left the table. Top to bottom. Didn’t miss a thing she was showing, and she was showing a lot.
It was late Tuesday afternoon, the eleventh of May, a bright sunny day. They were sitting at a sidewalk table outside a little pasticceria on Mulberry Street, eating cannoli and drinking cappuccino. Bobby had suggested the place. Andrew suspected he’d been here before. He also suspected he’d returned, because of the waitress. He wondered if he should give his underboss a friendly little warning. Keep your eyes off the legs and the tits, Bobby, and keep your hands in your pockets.
“Lenny’s kid put the phones in for me,” Bobby was saying, his eyes moving to the espresso machine, where the waitress was now filling several small cups. “Lenny Campagnia?”