He had no difficulty finding the home address. There were only four Talarese numbers, and only one Antonio. But then he noticed the business numbers. The first was Talarese’s Bella Italia, then a number for catering, and one for reservations. The address was on Mott Street in Little Italy. It had to be the same place, the little catering store where he had met Tony T years ago. He walked back to the bar and sipped his bubbly water. The antique clock on the wall over the bar, a plain black face with glowing green numbers and a green neon ring around it, said that it was ten minutes to one.
He sat in the subway car looking at the spray-painted graffiti on the walls. The colors had gotten better, the viridian greens and new shades of orange, and the gold and silver metal-flake, but the script was now so ornate that he couldn’t read any of it. When it occurred to him that it might be a different language, he decided it should still be organized into words. It looked more like the samples of Sumerian and Phoenician in the books he had found in his house in England than like any modern language. The British were always complaining that London was no longer an English city. They should see New York. It had always been a few steps closer to chaos than London was, but now no European would recognize it as having any historical relationship with anything he knew or understood. It was as though the Indians had returned to claim it after a three-hundred-year sojourn in the woods.
The train clattered to a stop, the doors opened and he stood and followed two anorectic heroin addicts onto the platform. They were probably younger than they looked, and they looked about twenty, two pockmarked young men in tight black pants that betrayed the fact that they had sat on the ground at some point, and thin almost-antique jackets of early synthetic materials—one in a silky blue-gray that he remembered seeing on someone when he was a teenager, and the other in a dirty bile-green with a texture almost like foam rubber. He could tell that they were holding, because the shorter of the two kept patting his pocket to reassure himself that he hadn’t dropped the bag or his works. In England they made an effort to keep the poor bastards supplied and off the streets, so he had forgotten about them. But at least these two were holding, so he wouldn’t have to watch his back when he moved out into the darkness. They would be on their way to a peaceful place where they could bring up a vein.
He ascended a set of concrete steps that smelled like a urinal, past old paint that was beginning to peel, taking with it the most recent graffiti and revealing more beneath it. When he reached the street he came around the railing and moved toward the catering shop he remembered.
He had no trouble seeing the store from a distance. It was after one on a Saturday night, and two men in suits were standing on the street like parking attendants. A big gray car pulled up in front, and one of them went to the window to talk to the driver. When the car pulled around the building, Ackerman remembered the loading dock in the back. Even in the old days, the little square of tar had been an unusual extravagance in this part of town, where trucks usually stopped on the street in front of businesses and unloaded onto the sidewalk. By now the Talareses could probably have lived off the rent on that much land. It was a place invisible from the street, where they could park a truck and bring anything in or out of the building. If the police had been both smart and honest for any extended period, they would have given themselves an education by watching that lot.
He walked up the street opposite the store, holding it in his peripheral vision. There was more to it now. There was a restaurant on one side with lights on but drawn curtains, and a big CLOSED sign in the window. The store that he remembered was dark. As he walked, the street began to take on an unreal quality, as though it were part of an old, familiar dream, the changes that time had made in it no more important than the little alterations his mind made when he invoked a landscape to contain his explorations in a dream. Once again he was walking alone on a dark street, clearing his mind and relaxing his muscles for the moment when he would need to decide and act faster than others could. This life should have been over long ago.
Disconnected bits of memory began to merge as he walked. Eddie Mastrewski must have been about forty on the winter day in Cleveland when they had sat in the car and watched the man walking through the snow toward the parking lot, and had both realized that if Eddie used his gun someone would hear. Eddie had leaned down to zip up his rubber boots over the cuffs of his pants, whispering “Aw shit, Aw shit” to himself more than to the boy. Then he had said, “It has to be now. Tomorrow he’ll know, and then nobody will ever get near him.” So Eddie chased the man down and killed him quietly with a tire chain. He came back red, sweating and gasping for breath, his eyes bulging as he started the car. “I’m too old for this,” he had said. The boy had said nothing. Eddie hadn’t been entirely serious, but from the boy’s position in the front seat next to him, watching his big chest heaving under the heavy overcoat, and the bloated cheeks inflating as he blew out air, it had seemed true. Eddie had lasted a long time in the trade, and by now he had come to understand what that meant. Nobody could go on for thirty years now. It had been a generation that had something more than strength and stamina. They had some kind of animal stupidity, something that made them unaware of the pointlessness of going on. Some of the men who had dialed the telephones in the early 1950s and heard Eddie’s cheerful, resonant baritone sing “Eddie the Butcher” over the wire were still at it: wizened, desiccated old skeletons, still studying the changing configurations of people and money to discern a pattern that would give them another way to steal. Eddie, younger than they were, was long dead.
Eddie had been a butcher, and the shop hadn’t been a simple disguise. It was part of Eddie’s homemade philosophy that a false identity was always a transparent, amateurish ruse. He had raised the boy in the butcher shop, first teaching him to sweep and wash the floors, then to care for the gleaming knives and saws, then finally to use them himself, as though Eddie had expected him to follow that trade rather than the other one. But Eddie hadn’t thought things through clearly. He simply taught the boy what he knew, some of it nonsense and some of it useful. Sometimes the long days in the shop came back to him now.
“I never knew a man named Earl that you could trust. For some reason they’re all thieves.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. But knowing it gives you an edge, because they don’t know you know.”
He had taught the boy the skills of the butcher shop, but Eddie had never imagined that in such a short time butchers would become as anachronistic as blacksmiths. Now only the rich bought their meat from a real butcher. The shops were like boutiques, and the only reason customers came was because they had the illusion that the prices they paid made the chemicals and hormones disappear from the meat. All the butchers worked for big meat-packing plants now and punched time clocks and belonged to the meat cutters’ local. They couldn’t accept part-time work that might take them out of town any time they got a telephone call. Eddie had lived to see the beginning of this change. He would notice that some of his old customers drove past the shop on the way to the supermarket. He would shake his head as though the small profit he made from the shop mattered to him. “You know what those bastards charge for a chicken? Two dollars a pound. When I was your age I could get laid for two dollars.”
“Did you?”
“Hell, no. You think the clap is a joke?”