Florek looked across the kitchen at Costa, who had not spoken more than a handful of words to him that day. Costa had opened his switchblade and was now making a two-inch cut at the top of the long leather sheath before him. He made another cut parallel to the first, then went down past the halfway point of the sheath and made two more identical slices with the knife.
“What’re you doing?” said Florek.
“I’m makin’ somethin’,” said Costa. “You just keep workin’, take care of that lettuce underneath the table there. We gotta get this place ready for lunch.”
Florek picked up the cardboard crate of lettuce, dropped it onto the prep table. Coring lettuce was not the same as coring tomatoes — coring lettuce was hard work. And after a few minutes of slamming his palm against the lettuce core, loosening it and then digging his fingers in and pulling the core out by hand, he was always ready to move onto something else. His first couple of days at Nick’s, Florek’s palms were bruised purple from the job.
“Ah,” said Costa, who had removed his belt and had passed it through the slices he made in the sheath. “I’m gonna need one more belt. Then it’s gonna work pretty goddamn good.”
“What’s that, Costa?”
“Nothing, Florek. I’m only talkin’ to myself a little bit here. You just worry about that lettuce.”
Costa folded the blade back into the handle of the knife, slipped it into his pocket. Yessir, there was nothing like a good knife when you wanted to get a job done. A gun, you had to clean it and buy ammunition and worry about the casings you left behind, and anyway, a gun, it could blow up for no reason right in your face. After all, look what had happened to Niko with that cheap Italian pistol of his, up in Batavia, New York. Yeah, you could have your pistols and your shotguns and everything else; close in, there was nothing like a knife.
Costa smiled crookedly, thinking that it was a knife that had brought him to America in the first place. That knife was beautiful, the best one he ever owned, a six-inch blade with an inlaid, onyx handle. Too bad he had to leave it in the man who married his sister. The bastard, he had reneged on the dowry he promised when he asked for Stella’s hand.
The day of the wedding, after the papathe had made them man and wife, Costa had asked his new brother-in-law about the details and whereabouts of the promised dowry. The bastard had laughed then, told Costa to relax, to have a good time at the party — that the dowry, the prika, it was a myth he had dreamed up to secure Stella’s hand. The prika never existed, it held no more value than smoke. The bastard laughed, like it was some big joke. Costa laughed then, too; he let them have their fun at the party, danced and ate their fayito and drank with them all, even wished his sister and her new husband well as they went off late that night to their wedding bed. And the next morning, as the lying, laughing bastard walked down the road to get his first cafe, Costa stepped out from behind a stand of olive trees beside the cafeneion, and plunged the knife with the onyx handle deep into the bastard’s armpit, shoved it straight in and clean down to the hilt, twisted it there as the warm blood spilled over his hand. A cousin came from behind another tree as Costa stepped back, handed Costa a handkerchief to wipe away the blood. Costa thanked him and walked away. He kept right on going that morning, to Cairo first and on to America, where he met a fellow Spartan named Nick Stefanos, a young immigrant running bootleg hootch in upstate New York. Costa had never looked back, had never spoken or contacted his sister again, knew he could not return — as the man whom he had killed, this man had cousins, too. He felt neither regret nor remorse, though occasionally he would dream about the incident, the dream ending with the look on the bastard’s face: surprise at first, coupled with raw pain, and then fear, the fear of the black unknown that was swiftly rushing toward him as Costa gave him the knife, gave it to him real good and quick. Yes, close in, there was nothing like a knife.
“You workin’ on that lettuce?” said Stefanos, stepping into the kitchen, a tomato in one hand and a knife in the other.
“Yes,” said Florek, wondering why Nick was being so short and impatient with him.
“When you gonna work on it, huh? Next week?”
“My hand’s sore,” said Florek. “I bruised it coring that other crate of lettuce two days ago.”
“Ah,” said Costa with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You got more excuses than Carter’s got liver pills, boy.”
“I’ll be done in a couple of minutes.”
“Yeah, hokay. I’ll be looking for it out front.” He turned to Costa. “And what the hell you think you’re doin’?”
“I’m makin’ somethin’! Why you gettin’ all upset about everything?”
“It’s my nevra, I guess. I’m waitin’ on that phone call, that’s all.”
“Uh,” said Costa.
Stefanos walked back out to the front of the house. A couple of Negroes sat in a booth, talking quietly, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in the slow hour between breakfast and lunch. Stefanos went to the radio, pushed the plug into the wall socket. Music came from the speaker, some mavros going on and on about a woman who left him for another mavros. This colored music, Stefanos could take it or leave it. But it made the customers happy, so what the hell.
Stefanos looked at the phone on the wall. When was the Italos going to call?
He picked up a tomato, held it firmly in his left hand, began to slice it thin.
They thought they could squeeze him for protection money, they had another thing coming to them, goddamn right.
The knife slipped off the skin of the tomato, its serrated edge raking across Stefanos’s thumb. He pulled his hand back, shook it, looked at the thumb. The cut was not so deep, but it had already begun to bleed. He pressed his thumb tight against his apron to stop the blood. He took a deep breath, let it out slow.
There was no way he would let them push him around. In this country, he had learned straight away, an immigrant had to stand his ground.
From the moment he stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, Stefanos recognized the importance of that. After his young wife had died of tuberculosis in the village, Stefanos had left his infant son with a sister and had come to America where it was said there was money to be picked right up off the street. He worked a few weeks as a common laborer in New York City, then met a man in a speakeasy who offered him a job as muscle for a bootleg operation he ran upstate, in a place called Batavia. Stefanos looked at the man’s fine suit, the way he wore his hat, and accepted the offer. Soon he was wearing a fine suit himself, riding in a car behind a truck full of hootch, armed with an Italian pistol, protecting the load on its weekly run. The driver of the car was a tough little patrioti named Costa, from a village in Sparta not unlike his own. The two of them became fast friends.
Stefanos and Costa made two runs each week without incident over the course of seven months. It was on the last of these routine runs that they were ambushed by rival bootleggers after being flagged off the road by a woman standing beside a broken-down jalopy. The woman was a plant, but Stefanos had been suspicious from the start — there was no steam coming from beneath the upraised hood of the car, and the woman looked cheap, way too hard to be as helpless as she wished to appear. By the time the two gunmen had come from out of the trees, Stefanos had already rolled out of the passenger side of their car. He came up firing, wounding both men with four shots. On the fifth pull of the trigger, the Italian piece blew up in his face, sending a hot shard of barrel into his cheek. Costa finished the two gunmen with his knife; Stefanos heard the gurgle of their final breaths as he watched the woman drive off.