Eddie closed his eyes again and thought of Tony at his side, and it seemed to him that in the end a friend could be judged only by how much he was willing to lose. He drew a steely breath, opened his eyes, and glared defiantly at the man whose face was very near him now, and in which he saw a terrible capacity for violence. He never used bad language, but just this once it seemed okay.
“Fuck you,” he said.
ABE
He sat down behind his desk and stared at the pile of bills, the liquor stacked high in cardboard boxes, the calendar that hung from the wall like a condemned man. Nothing would change in this room, he thought, if nothing changed in his life. Someone would simply come in one day and find him curled over the desk or sprawled on the floor. That was the curtain he saw. End of Act Three.
And so he reached for the phone and dialed Lucille’s old number.
“Hello.”
“Samantha, it’s Abe.”
“Oh, hi.”
“Listen,” he began, then stopped and drew in a quick, uncertain breath. “Listen, about tonight. I thought maybe you should start off with something lively.”
“Okay.”
“Something to get their attention, you know. And then maybe end it with a ballad. Tug the heartstrings, you know?”
“All right.”
There was a pause, and he knew she was waiting for some final word. He considered his options for a moment, then charged ahead like a man out of the trenches.
“And one more thing,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we could have dinner before you come to the bar. You know, talk things over. Then we could go to the bar and maybe we could sit around awhile, and then, whenever you feel like it, you get up, do the songs.”
“Okay,” she said.
He gave her the name of the restaurant he’d already chosen just in case and told her to meet him there at eight. When she said fine, he hung up and sat back in his chair with a modest sense of achievement, not the thrill of winning the race, but at least the knowledge that when the starting gun fired, you came out of the gate.
DELLA
She sat at the table, Nicky now sleeping soundly, and smoked the first cigarette she’d had in three years. She’d bought the pack at the convenience store on the way back from her mother’s house, asking for it guiltily, like a teenager hoping the orange-haired clerk behind the register wouldn’t demand proof of age.
After that she’d driven directly home, put Nicky down for his afternoon nap, then wandered into the kitchen to light up. She knew why she was smoking. Nerves. She couldn’t get the look on her mother’s face out of her mind, the terrible, hopeless fear she’d seen in the old woman’s eyes. And something else too, Leo Labriola, the way he’d grabbed her arm and written his number on her wrist. The remembered violence of that act, the nip of the pen in her flesh, now seemed more real than anything around her. He knew his business, Labriola, she thought, knew exactly how to terrorize people, make them cringe.
Labriola was capable of anything. That much was absolutely clear now. Whatever feeble hope that he was all bluff and hot air, a posturing old man who could rage and bluster with the best of them but in the end do nothing, all she’d used to convince herself that Sara wasn’t really in danger, all of that was gone, and she was left only with the certain knowledge that the danger she was in was even deeper than she’d supposed. Not only would Labriola hurt her, he would enjoy doing so, and that enjoyment would itself blossom and expand, urging him to greater outrages against her. He wouldn’t just kill her, Della decided, he would torture her. He would beat her up or burn her with cigarettes or pass a blowtorch up her arm or use a chain saw the way Colombian drug lords did to the people who crossed them. She’d read about these things in books and magazines, and she knew they were true, that some people were capable of indescribable cruelty, and that Leo Labriola was that kind of man.
She crushed the first cigarette into the saucer she’d commandeered for an ashtray, then lit another one and tried to find a way out of the situation that would somehow save everyone from harm. It was all she wanted, just that simple measure of getting everyone through this thing—Sara, her mother, Mike, Nicky, herself—everyone through this thing unharmed.
But how?