The rain came with him, the scent of it, his hair flattened across the top and hanging in loose wet strands around his ears. “Well?” she said. “Not him, right?”
“He's at the restaurant. That”-he turned the engine over, put the car in gear-“was his cousin, I think he said.”
“Restaurant? What restaurant?”
“Fiorentino's. On South Street-we passed it earlier, don't you remember? I guess he must work there or something… the guy that answered the door was maybe, I don't know, forty, forty-five, totally overweight-he had this huge belly. In a wife-beater, no less. Could you see him from here? No? Anyway, he just looked at his watch and said, 'You'll catch him over at the restaurant at this hour.' I asked him what restaurant and he said Fiorentino's before he thought to ask me what I wanted with Frank-and that was when he started to give me the suspicious look.”
“What? What did you tell him?”
“That I was a friend. From the coast. From California.”
She could feel her heart going again. “But what if he calls and warns him?”
“Shit,” Bridger said, and they were out on the street now, water planing away from the tires, “if he does, he does. We don't even know if it's him-and it's probably not, because you're telling me he already has a house and a job? I mean, how likely is that?”
Fiorentino's was on the far side of a broad street a few blocks down, and as Bridger hung a U-turn and pulled up at the curb in front, she had the feeling she'd been here before, déjà vu. Could this be the place, the one her parents had taken her to? The thought made her feel queasy. If this “was” it, then the whole thing got stranger and stranger. She imagined the thief, the guy with the sideburns and the cocky walk, shrunk down to the dimensions of a child, watching her from the kitchen, watching her eat and sign and roughhouse with her brothers, pizza on a shining silver platter, and memory like the taste of it.
She climbed out of the car, fumbling with her umbrella, and looked up at the façade. The restaurant occupied a pair of storefronts somebody had tried to unify with lateral strips of varnished wood that set off the windows like a big picture frame and the sign over the main entrance had been hand-painted in a flowing script. Each of the tables, dimly visible through the screen of rain, featured artificial flowers and a Chianti bottle with a red candle worked into the neck, but it was all so generic. Once she stepped inside, though-a long L-shaped bar to the left, an alcove and then the dining room to the right-she knew. And as if her visual memory weren't enough, there was an olfactory signature here too-some peculiarity of the pizza oven, the imported pomodoro and homemade sausage, the spices, the spilled beer, the mold in the back of the refrigerator in the farthest corner of the kitchen-who could say? But this was it. This was definitely it. She took hold of Bridger's hand and squeezed it. She wanted to say “No more, stop right here,” but her throat thickened and her fingers felt as if they'd been carved of wood.
What she saw was a typical neighborhood bar, half a dozen men in short-sleeved shirts, the white-haired bartender with his flaming ears and red-rimmed eyes, the cocktail waitress in a little skirt and net stockings, bored, her elbows propped on her tray. The TV was going-baseball-and nobody was eating. Too early yet. Too hot. Too rainy.
She stood beside Bridger, her hand locked in his, as he leaned in at the end of the bar and waited for the bartender to acknowledge him. There was a suspended moment, people giving them furtive glances, the quick assessment, her blood racing with fear and hate even as she felt crushed by a kind of trivial nostalgia for the place, for the way she was then, as a girl, when her parents were still married and her brothers were contained by these very walls, and then the bartender made his slow way down the skid-resistant mat and she saw his lips shape the obvious question: “What'll it be?”
She couldn't bear to look at him-she was watching Bridger, as if that could protect her, expecting the thief to step out of the shadow of the alcove and put an end to it all. “Is Frank here?” he asked. And then the movement caught her eye and she was watching the bartender's head swing back as he called down the bar and the cocktail waitress, buried under the glitter of her nails and the sediment of her makeup, awakened briefly to drift to the swinging door of the kitchen, lean into it and convey the message, the name passed from mouth to mouth: “Frank,” she imagined her saying, or maybe shouting over the noise of the dishwasher, the radio, the tintinnabulation of pots and pans, “Frank, somebody wants you.”
Frank Calabrese turned out to be a disappointment. He wasn't who he was supposed to be, not even close. The door to the kitchen swung open and she caught her breath, expecting the Frank Calabrese she knew to emerge wiping his hands on an apron, hiding out here in his father's or uncle's or cousin's third-string Mafia restaurant till the heat was off him and he could ruin somebody else's life, a mama's boy, a failure, wasted and weak, and this time she would be the one to stare him down, but the face she saw in the doorway was the face of a stranger. This man was short, broad-shouldered and big around the middle, and he was too old-forty, forty at least. He looked to the waitress, then to the bartender, and followed the line of sight from the bartender's pointed finger to herself and Bridger.
He was deceptively light on his feet for such a big man, this Frank Calabrese, and he glided down the length of the room as if he were wearing ballet slippers, his features composed, his eyes searching hers. “Hi,” she said, and held out her hand. “I'm Dana, and this”-indicating Bridger-“is my fiancé, Bridger. You're Frank Calabrese, right?”
“That's right,” he said, and he'd caught something in her speech that made him narrow his eyes and cock his head ever so slightly as if to get a clearer picture. “What can I do for you?”
Bridger started in then-Bridger, her spokesperson. He dropped her hand and unconsciously ran his fingers through his hair, trying to smooth it back in place. “We're looking for this guy-”
She cut him off: “Criminal. He's a criminal.”
“-this guy who I guess must have used your name as an alias, because-”
She couldn't make out the rest, but she knew the story anyway, not just the gist of it, but the whole of it in all its sorry detail, and she watched Frank Calabrese's face till the rudiments of awareness began to awaken there-Yes, somebody had used his credit cards without his knowledge, and yes, it had been a bitch to straighten it all out; he was still getting bills in the mail and this was three years ago already-and then she unzipped her black shoulder bag and extracted the file folder. Frank Calabrese stopped saying whatever he was saying. Bridger gestured to the bar, meaning for her to lay the folder there and display the evidence. Everyone was watching now, the customers, the bartender, the waitress. She took her time, almost giddy with the intensity of the moment, and then she leaned forward to spread open the folder on the counter, making sure that the police report, with its leering photograph and parade of aliases, was right there on top.
The moment was electric. Frank Calabrese laid a hand on the rail of the bar to steady himself and she could see the current flowing right through him, his face hardening, eyes leaping at the page, and before she formulated the question she knew the answer: “Do you know this man?”
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a fucking bitch.” He looked up at her, and it was as if he didn't see her at all. “You bet your ass I know him,” and his fist came down on the bartop with a force she could feel through the soles of her shoes. She didn't catch what he said next, the key they'd been looking for all along, the base identifier, the name Bridger repeated twice and then reproduced for her with his rapidly stitching fingers so that it hung like a banner on the air: “Peck Wilson. William Peck Wilson.”