“Don’t do this to me,” I pleaded.
“I’m doing.”
“You can’t just use me and then toss me out. I’m not a tampon.”
“No, you’re not as useful.”
“Why do you make me leave each night?”
She sucked smoke. “I like to wake up alone.”
“Well, tonight I’m staying.” I lay back in the bed, my arms crossed beneath my head.
“Then tonight’s your last night.”
I sat up. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m as serious as celibacy.”
“I bet Jimmy stays over.”
“Never,” she said.
“Really? What’s he like in bed?”
“The thing about men,” she said, holding the cigarette in her lips while she stooped to pick up my T-shirt and then tossed it into my face, “is that they see sex as a competitive sport. They want scores from the judges, a set for technical merit and a set for artistic impression.”
“I’m just curious,” I said, starting to dress.
“Well, how do you think he is?”
“Passionate. He’s a very passionate man.”
“He is.”
“Yes?”
“So are you, Victor.” With one of her bare feet she nudged a sneaker toward me. “Now put on your shoes and go.”
“When will I see you again?”
“When I call,” she said.
“I’ll be waiting.”
“Surprise me sometime, Victor,” she said dryly, holding the cigarette in front of her face. “Let the phone ring more than once before you answer it.”
Ever since the incident with the hatchback I had developed a small ritual upon leaving Veronica’s apartment. There were no windows in the hallway, but the elevator had a scuffed Plexiglas side from which the residents could see out as they descended to the cobblestone plaza. When the elevator opened for me I slipped in and searched through the Plexiglas to see if anyone was waiting for me outside. My plan, if I saw anything suspicious, was to get off at a lower floor and cower, but that night, as best as I could see in the uneven light, the plaza was deserted. When the elevator reached the ground floor I looked carefully out the front glass door before I opened it. Again there was nothing.
Slowly I slid out the door and walked along the shadowy edge of the plaza to Church Street, the little cobble-stoned street on which Veronica’s building sat. Like a little boy I looked both ways. Nothing, no car idling malevolently, no shadowy pedestrians lurking, no stray raccoons. Relieved, I walked down Church Street to 3rd, where my car was parked. I was leaning over, my key in the driver’s door, when I felt the hand clamp onto my shoulder.
I jumped, or I tried to jump, but the hand kept me pressed down on the ground like the gravity of some giant planet. I turned to see who was there. It was a tall bruiser, an older man with sallow yellow skin, a tan fedora, a loud plaid jacket, yellow pants, white shoes, a nose that had been run over by a forklift. He looked like an aging heavyweight retired to Miami Beach.
“You’re Victor Carl,” the man said in a ragged, nasal voice carved by one too many shots to the schnozzola.
“No,” I said. “You got the wrong fellow.”
Without taking his hand off my shoulder, the man reached into his plaid jacket and pulled out a piece of newspaper that he showed to me. It was a picture of Jimmy Moore and William Prescott talking to the press outside the courthouse, and there, behind Moore’s shoulder, inside an ominous circle drawn with black, was me. Not a bad likeness, I thought as I stared at it. The paper made me look heavier and more handsome.
“No, that’s some other guy.”
“It sort of looks like youse.”
“I got that kind of face,” I said, and it would have been a pretty brave line if my voice hadn’t cracked in the middle of it.
“Maybe it’s not youse after all,” said the bruiser. “Maybe not, you know, because the guy here in the picture, this guy looks like a handsome guy and you, you look like a punk. But there’s a man wants to see youse. If it turns out youse ain’t you then I’m sure he won’t want to see youse no more.”
“Huh?”
“Whatever. He’s waiting up the block, here.”
He squeezed the hand on my shoulder, yanking me away from my car and toward Arch Street.
“What about my keys? I left them in the car door.”
“From what I hear,” said the bruiser without slowing down, “this here’s become a very safe neighborhood.”
That was the sum of our conversation as he led me to Arch Street. The front, squared-off nose of some big white American car parked on Arch jutted out from behind a brick wall. I didn’t know whose car it was, I couldn’t tell if it was a limousine from what I could see. I expected it was Norvel Goodwin inside, or maybe Jimmy, but no matter who it was there waiting for me I knew it wasn’t a good thing to be snagged by a bruiser outside Veronica’s apartment after sticking my thing in her thang. I thought about running, but the hand was tight on my collarbone, squeezing so hard my shoulder rose as we walked. When we were closer to the car more of it came into view. It wasn’t a limousine, it was a Cadillac, long, shiny, dangerous with chrome. Its windows were up and tinted black so that it was impossible to see inside.
The bruiser stopped me just in front of the rear door. He knocked on the window and slowly the door opened. For a moment I saw nothing but the blackness inside. And then a man stepped out and smiled at me.
“How’s it going there, Sport?”
It was Jasper, the gregarious poker player at the Sons of Garibaldi Men’s Club, and he was smiling at me in a way I didn’t like.
“We want you should come for a ride with us,” he said.
“Thanks, but I’d just as soon go home alone.”
“C’mon, Sport, a short ride. I got someone here you need to meet.”
As he was speaking the darkened window on the front passenger side opened slowly, electrically, and appearing like a ghost at some boardwalk house of horror was Dominic, Bissonette’s second cousin twice removed, the hit man whom I had falsely accused of cheating. “Get in, kid,” he said softly and, with a push from the bruiser, I was in the car.
There was an old man on my left and Jasper got in so that he was on my right. It was a big car, with a wide bench seat in the back, and there would have been plenty of room if Jasper hadn’t jammed himself next to me. The bruiser closed the door and immediately went around the car to the driver’s seat. The bench seat was black leather; the car smelled of Brylcreem. The old man on my left was looking out the window, out into the night. He wore a cream-colored suit, his thick hands were carefully laid one on the other in his lap. There was a diamond in his lapel. Slowly, easily, we pulled out on Arch Street and the bruiser turned up 2nd Street and we drove on for a while, south, toward Society Hill Towers, without anybody saying anything. And then the old man spoke.
“I wanted to meet you, Victor.” His voice was soft and lightly sprinkled with an old world accent. When he turned I saw his face, pitted ugly, his hair gray but pulled back elegantly and heavily greased. “I thought it was time we should talk. Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” I said. The word came out in a gush of breath that I had been holding once I recognized the man. I had seen his face in newspaper photographs, on mug shots flashed on TV, in gory hard-boiled articles in Philadelphia magazine. The man sitting next to me, his swollen hands calmly resting on his lap but close enough to my throat so that he could have reached up and strangled me before I let out a yelp, that man was the boss of bosses, Enrico Raffaello.