It seemed as if a vicious practical joke had been played on them all, but when the next message came, Teo knocked again on Lefty Antic’s door. He hadn’t seen the saxophone player since Lefty had staggered out to place their bets on Bright Venus. There still was no answer, and Teo, filled with a terrible sense of abandonment and foreboding, sure that Lefty Antic was dead inside, got the landlord to open the door, only to find the room empty and orderly. Alone, feeling too apprehensive simply to ignore the message, Teo studied the racing pages looking for clues as he’d seen Lefty Antic do. It seemed to him that the new rain-smudged message, “delay plaza,” referred to the mayor, Richard Daley, and when he could find no connection whatsoever at any of the race tracks, he took the El train downtown. There wasn’t a Daley Plaza in Chicago, but there was an open square near City Hall, and Teo walked there, not sure what he was looking for, yet hoping to recognize it when he saw it. But no sign presented itself, nothing was going on in the square but a rally for a young senator from Massachusetts, an Irish Catholic like the mayor, who was running for president in a country that Teo figured would never elect a Catholic.
The messages have continued to arrive, and Teo continues to save them, and the cigar box fills with scraps of paper his pigeons have brought home from God knows where. Teo can’t shake the foreboding or the loneliness. His sleep is haunted by the recurrent dream of a funeral that extends the length of a country of ruined castles and burning ghettos. He’s part of the procession following the casket, ascending a pyramid, its steps dark and slippery with the blood of what’s gone before. He doesn’t want to see what’s at the summit. Unable to return to sleep, sometimes he spreads the messages on the table and tries to piece them together, to see if the torn edges fit like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or if the words can be arranged into a coherent sentence. He senses some story, some meaning, connecting them, but the words themselves baffle him: knoll, motorcade, six seconds, bloodstone …
And it’s not dreams alone that disrupt his sleep. There’s an increasing tenderness in his chest that waking doesn’t dispel. In the darkness, his nipples ache as if they’ve been pinched with tongs; the palpitations of his heart resonate like spasms through soft tissue. His flesh feels foreign to his breastbone. He can feel his inflamed mounds of chest swelling beneath his undershirt, and he brushes his fingertips across his chest, afraid of what he’ll find. He’s put on weight, and his once sculpted chest has grown flabby, his weight lifter’s pectorals drooping to fat. Come morning, he reassures himself that’s all it is — fat, he’s simply getting fat, and this strange pain will also pass. Better to ignore it. He avoids studying the bathroom mirror when he shaves.
Sometimes, after midnight, he thinks he hears Lefty Antic playing his saxophone softly on the roof, but it’s only wind vibrating the rusted chimney hood, streaming clouds rasping against a rusty moon, the hoot of pigeons. He hasn’t seen the sax player since they lost their stake on “Lone Star.”
Teo has written his own notes—“Who are you? What do you wants?”—and attached them to those pigeons of his who have brought the strange messages. Noah-like, he’s sent them flying out over the wet rooftops to deliver his questions, but those pigeons haven’t returned home, and it takes a lot to lose a homing pigeon. They fly in a dimension perilous with hawks and the ackack fire of boys armed with rocks, slingshots, and pellet guns. Fog and blizzards disorient them, storms blow them down, and yet instinct brings them home on a single wing, with flight feathers broken, missing a leg or the jewel of an eye.
Teo has decided that since his communiques go unanswered and his birds don’t return, he will refuse to accept further messages. All week he has kept his remaining pigeons cooped. And now this morning, attached to a strange pigeon, another message, the first in Spanish: asesino. “Murder” or “assassin,” Teo doesn’t know which.
He’d like to ease the loneliness, if not the foreboding, and tell Zip about the messages. But until this afternoon, when he found Zip drinking alone and obviously needing someone to talk to, Teo has been reluctant to talk about anything more personal than Zip’s favorite subject: fishing. True, Zip was obviously curious about Teo’s wrestling career, but it didn’t seem right to tell the insignificant story of the Hummingbird to a man who is so careful never to speak of war wounds.
“This feels like we’re in some kind of joke,” Zip says, opening his palm and allowing the pigeon to step from Teo’s hand to his.
“What do you mean?” Teo asks.
“You know,” Zip says, “there’s all these jokes that start: A man walks into a bar with a parrot, or a man walks into a bar with a dog, or a gorilla, or a cockroach. You know, all these guys walking into all these bars with every animal on the ark. So in this one, a man — no, a wrestler, a masked wrestler — walks into a bar with a pigeon.”
“So, what’s the punch line?” Teo asks.
“You’re asking me?” Zip says. “It’s your pigeon.”
“No, not one of mine.”
“Yeah, but you brought it in here.”
“But the joke is your idea.”
“Jesus, we got no punch line,” Zip says. “You know what that means?”
“What?”
“We’ll never get out of the joke.”
Whitey calls.
Joe, lying on the bare mattress, naked but for mismatched socks, doesn’t answer. He knows it’s Whitey on the phone. Joe can almost smell his cigar.
What day is it? Must be Thursday, because yesterday was Wednesday, a day’s reprieve Johnny Sovereign never knew he had. Joe can have the conversation with Whitey without bothering to lift the receiver.
— Joe, what the fuck’s going on with you?
— Hey, Whitey, you ball-buster, vaffancul!
Are these ball-busting calls some kind of psychological warfare? Maybe Whitey knows about Gloria Candido, and the whole thing with Johnny Sovereign is a setup. Maybe it’s Whitey arranging for these women to distract Joe from doing his job, giving Whitey an excuse other than being a fucking cornuto to have Joe clipped. Could Whitey be that smart, that devious? Maybe Whitey has tipped off Sovereign to watch his back around Joe and Sovereign is waiting for Joe to make his move. Or maybe the women are good luck, guardian angels protecting him from some scheme of Whitey’s.
Joe quietly lifts the receiver from the cradle. He listens for Whitey to begin blaring, Yo, Joe, whatthefuck? but whoever is on the line is listening, too. Joe can hear the pursy breathing. It could be Whitey’s cigar-sucking, emphysemic huff. Joe slides the stiletto from his right sock, holds it to the mouthpiece, thumbs off the safety, touches the trigger button, and the blade hisses open: Ssswap! Then he gently sets down the receiver.
Joe dresses quickly. The shirt he’s been wearing since Tuesday reeks, so he switches to the white shirt Marisol left behind even though it smells of perfume. She’s left a trail of rusty footprints down the hall from the kitchen as if she stepped on broken glass, and Joe splashes them with Rémy and mops them with the dirty shirt he won’t be wearing, then kills the bottle, washing down a mix of painkillers. There’s a soft wheeze from his closet, as if an accordion is shuddering in its sleep. When he dials Johnny Sovereign’s number, Vi answers on the third ring.