North River

SIX

THE MIDNIGHT VISION OF MOLLY WAS WITH HIM AT BREAKFAST, and stayed while he tended to the morning patients, and as he ate a sandwich with Rose on the lunch break in the kitchen, and while Carlito showed off his growing skill with the paddleball. Molly was with him later, as Delaney moved through the neighborhood on house calls, leaning into the wind, and while he examined a cancer case and a raving late stage of syphilis in a woman he knew as a child. An old longshoreman moaned with diabetes, all feeling gone from fingers and hands, and tried to hide his terror about amputation. A thirtyish daughter explained that her sixtyish mother had fallen into some valley of depression and would not come out. An infant wheezed with croup. He looked at each of them, focused on them tightly, touched them gently, recommended remedies in a voice he hoped was soothing and kind and knowing, and moved on, and Molly was still with him.

Goddamn it, Molly, give me some fucking peace. I have done enough penance.

He remembered that morning last April, after she’d disappeared the previous August, the whole empty winter gone by, when Jackie Norris from the Harbor Police showed up with a sheaf of papers filled with the names of floaters and jumpers, the grisly harvest of the spring harbor. “If she jumped,” Norris said in a soft voice, “there’s a small chance that she was carried out to the Narrows and then on to the Atlantic. That’s pretty rare, Doc. Most times they end up around the horn in the East River, or they bump up against the shore in Brooklyn. Most times we find the bodies.” He sighed. “But then again, maybe she didn’t go in the North River at all.”

“Maybe,” Delaney said.

And yet he was filled with images of her swirling through the river waters, her long hair streaming as she floated free. Free of me. Free of the world. On some nights he saw her bumping against a roof of winter ice, separated from the air and the sky. On other nights, he saw her hand jutting from the water, desperate for rescue. All through the neighborhood that day, keeping his appointments with the sick and maimed, he saw her in her watery place, or remembered her sitting in the chair in the bedroom the night before, or heard her playing the piano in the sealed room on the top floor.

He returned at last to Horatio Street. Cottrell was walking from the subway, still dressed in the severe clothes of a banker, but he would not even glance at Delaney. Monique had gone home. On his desk he looked at the estimates on the steam heat system ($300, to start after April 1) and the cutting of new stairs directly into the kitchen ($100, to be started immediately), and checked phone messages at Monique’s desk and the mail that looked personal. Nothing from Grace. There were two notes from patients who were now well, thanking him for his help. There was an invite to a Democratic Party Valentine’s Day dance. There was a notice from the Metropolitan Museum about the opening of a show of art from the Renaissance. Among the artists was Botticelli. He should tell Rose. And then he thought about Frankie Botts, trying to imagine his face and his voice.

Delaney hurried upstairs to see Carlito and Rose. It was after seven now, and they already had eaten. Rose was seated on her bed, back against the wall, her legs extended, big downy slippers on her feet, reading the Daily News and marking it with a red pencil. She put the paper down and looked at him in an annoyed way. He went to the boy’s bedroom. Carlito leaped from his bed and jumped at Delaney, who scooped him up and hugged him.

“Ga’paw! Ga’paw! Rose, Ga’paw home!”

She came in and the boy slithered out of Delaney’s arms and grabbed the paddleball and started batting away.

“Dos, tres, quatro…”

He made it to nine and then missed.

“You okay?” Delaney said to Rose.

“Your dinner, it’s cold,” she said. Her face was stern, perhaps angry.

“I had all these patients, Rose…”

“Tell them you gotta eat.”

“I’ll eat it cold,” he said. “Thank you, Rose. I’ll just eat it cold.”

Rose sighed and tightened the belt on her housecoat, which was covered with printed roses.

“Come on, I’ll heat it up. I hope it’s not too dry. Hey, boy. Put on your bathrobe.”

In the warmth of the kitchen, the boy kept batting away, and counting in Spanish and English, while Rose fiddled at the stove, and the room filled with the garlicky aroma of simmering veal and tomatoes. Delaney watched the boy and glanced at Rose, her back to him, her waist more defined by the belt of the housecoat. She had hips, all right, and slender legs. Fat women must have called her skinny, but she would live a lot longer than they would. Her hair was brushed and gleaming. She placed a bread basket beside Delaney, then spread the veal and tomatoes on his plate and took it to him.

“Okay,” she said. “Eat.”

The boy sat down at his chair too, prepared to eat again.

“Not you, boy. Just your gran’pa. You ate already!”

The child sulked, a mixture of disappointment and confusion. He stretched an arm out on the table, his fingers fiddling with the sugar bowl, and then laid his head on his forearm. He was either exhausted or sulking. Probably both.

“I better take him up. You eat, Dottore. I’ll come back and make tea.”

The veal was still moist, and as he ate Delaney marveled at his good fortune. This woman was now essential to his life, and he knew almost nothing about her, except, perhaps, the most important things. Her ferocious passion for the child in her care. Her skills with food. Her intelligence. He knew the outlines of her life, as told to Monique on the first day that she arrived here. He knew about Gyp Pavese and the dangers of the streets that she had resisted. But little else. Who had scarred her face? Who were her lovers during the American years as a cook or a pieceworker? Perhaps he should not try to learn more. The potential for disaster, living in the same house, was too obvious. But if he knew nothing about her it was also possible that he would unwittingly insult her. He was sopping up sauce with the crisp Italian bread when she returned.

“This is great, Rose,” he said. “Just great.”

“It’s even more great two hours ago.”

He tried to explain how he couldn’t always be sure how long a house call would last. She’d have to get used to his uncertain routines. Some patients need more time than others, he said. They’re not machines. That’s what I told Molly too, but after a while she just didn’t care. In some way, he said to Rose, a house call was like baseball. There was no script. You didn’t know who would win. Above all, there was no clock. It took as long as it needed.

“Don’t say any more,” she said. “I understand. You gotta go help people. It’s not easy. I just want it, the food, to be good for you. You earn it. You work hard, I know that, and you got all these other things to worry about.” She paused, slowing herself down. “So when you eat, it should be simple. You and the food. Besides, I told you: I don’t know nothing about baseball.”

She took his plate and laid it in the sink and ran the water. She grunted, flicked off the faucet. The kettle began to whistle on the stove. She lifted it and poured water into cups and laid a tea bag on each saucer. She placed his cup before him almost gently and he knew she was no longer angry.

“It must be hard, all them sick people,” she said, taking a seat facing him, examining a wedge of lemon.

“Sometimes.”

“I guess you dream about them?”

“When I was young, I did. I dreamed about them every night. Not so much now, except for the war.”

“You were a doctor in the war, right?”

“Yes.”

“You musta seen lots of terrible things.”

“Yes,” he said.

She squeezed lemon juice into her tea.

“My husband, he was in Caporetto.”

“So he saw terrible things too.”

“They made him crazy.”

He waited for her to go on. She was very still, as if afraid of saying too much.

“Tell me about him,” Delaney said, as if asking a patient how she was injured. Rose turned away.

“He wasn’ my husband then, when he was at the war,” she said, her voice wavery with recall. “I was thirteen when the war starts, and Caporetto was, I think, three years later.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, the war ends. He comes back, and there’s a parade, and he’s with the other soldiers, all with no legs or no arms, and his head is all bandages, and I notice him, because of the bandages. What I can see, he’s very handsome. My father sees me looking and another year goes by, and then my father says I got to marry this man. That’s when I hear his name the first time. Enrico Calvino. A beautiful name, no? But I don’t know him, except for the bandages in the parade. So I say this to my father. I say, let this Enrico Calvino come and see me. And he does. He comes for three months, and takes me for to walk, and to the new cinema in Agrigento… He don’t talk much. He has headaches, and he tells me, inside his head there’s a, a —”

“Silver plate?”

“Sì, a plate inside. Made of silver. To hold his head together. Right that minute I should have left Agrigento. A man with metal in his head, he ain’t ever gonna be normal… But he’s a hero of the war. How can I run away from a hero of the war?”

Most patients had a narrative that explained many things, and he had learned to be gentle in discovering it. But he wanted to stop now. To stop the process of knowing her. She was not a patient. She was not asking to be healed. He should leave her to tend the boy and cook and provide warmth to the house. But he wanted to know her too.

“And so?” he said.

“You want to know the whole story?”

“If you want to tell it.”

“I didn’t tell it to Monique. I didn’t lie. But there’s another story.” A pause. “Maybe I better tell you, maybe you should know about me, if I’m gonna be here for the boy.”

He waited, looking at her, and she began to talk.

Rose and her wounded husband got married and moved into a tiny house out where Agrigento ended and the olive groves began. A kitchen, a bedroom, that was all. Enrico Calvino was an old thirty-two and she was a very young nineteen. She discovered he was a fanatical Catholic and something of a mama’s boy, but she tried. She offered no clinical details but implied that he was not a hero in bed.

She worked. He didn’t. A year or two went by, and he started talking more and more about Benito Mussolini. “That was his job, talking about Mussolini,” she said, and paused. “By then, I’m working in a fish house down by the water, because he can’t work. I buy a used bicycle and go down in the morning, with big boots on my big feet, and back up the hills at night…”

Her face hardened and a sliver of bitterness came into her voice.

“But because I don’t give him a baby boy, a nice little fascisti boy, he starts to hit me.” Another pause. “A slap, then another, and after a while, punches.”

Her chin jutted out, and she said, “Eh…” The sound of contempt. She stood up and poured more hot water in her cup and did the same for Delaney.

“Finally, I know I can’t live with this Enrico no more. I can’t live with him punching me no more. I can’t take his sitting there, smoking cigarettes, not workin’, not talking about anything except that goddamned Mussolini, and I start planning to get away.”

She saved money, a few lire at a time. She checked boat schedules to Naples and trains to Torino and Genoa and Milano. She thought about La Merica. In the telling, the old buried rage blossomed. Her words came more quickly, her voice shifted to a higher pitch.

“One night, I come home late, and Enrico’s there, drunk and pissed off. The big hero starts to yell. Where’s my dinner? Where’s my dinner and where’s my baby boy? He calls me bad names, and I call him bad names, and then he comes for me with a knife, and I turn around and grab a stool, one of those small stools? With three legs?” She took a quick breath. “And I hit him in the head. The head with the, the, with the plate.” Her voice fell. “And he goes down on the floor.” A pause. “There’s no blood, but I know he’s dead.”

She sipped the tea. She lowered her head, not looking at Delaney.

“I’m very scared,” she said. “I mean, worse than scared. What’s the word? Panico?”

“Panicked,” Delaney said.

“Yeah, panicked. I think about burning the house down with Enrico inside. I think about going on the bike to the cliffs and jumping into the sea. I think: My life is over. I think: My parents, they’ll be disgrace. I think a lot of things. Then I think: I want to live.”

She looked up at Delaney as if trying to decode his face. Then turned away again.

“I wait a long time, till some clouds cover the moon. Then I drag Enrico out to the olive groves and leave him there. I go back to the house and make sure there’s no blood, and I pack some clothes and get out the bike. I put Enrico down a dry well and drop big rocks on him, the rocks they use to mark the fields. Then I go. There’s a midnight boat to Naples. I get on the boat with the bicycle and my bag of clothes, and I’m on my way. To America. To here. This house. This kitchen.”

She looked exhausted and distraught now, shifting her body, clenching her hands. Delaney wanted to place his good hand on her and comfort her. He didn’t move.

“I’m glad you told me all this, Rose,” Delaney said quietly, and felt stupid for the clumsiness of his words.

“You not gonna fire me?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m a murderer.”

“In this country, self-defense is not murder.”

She waved a hand as if dismissing the distinctions. She now seemed older, her thin face more drawn, as if debating the wisdom of saying anything at all. Delaney ended the silence, saying: “You’d better get some sleep, Rose.”

Her eyes were full. She stood up and placed the cup in the sink. Then she turned on the faucet and watched running water quickly spill over the brim of the cup. She didn’t say another word about her husband. She didn’t mention Gyp Pavese. She said nothing at all about the boy she needed so much.

Instead, she said, “Buona notte, Dottore,” and hurried to the hall. He heard her footsteps rising heavily on the stairs. Her aroma lingered in the kitchen, roses melding with garlic. He had learned again that sometimes a kitchen was more intimate than a bedroom. Or even a doctor’s office, where he had listened to so many confessions without any hope of granting absolution.

In the gray morning, wrapped in his bathrobe, he pushed aside the life within the house and glanced through the newspapers: 400,000 on relief in New York, Hitler ranting in Germany, fighting in China, a volcano erupting in Mexico. There was a photograph of the erupting mountain with a peasant in the foreground, dressed in white pajamas and sandals and holding a machete. You missed this, Grace. You missed the volcano. What paintings it might have inspired. I always thought that you had married Mexico even more than Santos. You were not a communist. You were an artist. Or so I thought. And never said.

Delaney sighed and skipped through the Daily News, where a story told about the glories of a new theater in Harlem called the Apollo, and he thought: I should go up there and see it. To listen. To see. Another story told about a woman in Brooklyn who had shot her husband dead. Delaney tried to imagine Rose on her final night in Agrigento. The husband with his knife. His eyes mad in the light of candles. Coming at her. Then Rose reaching for the three-legged stool. What have I done? She is here now. She is caring for the boy. And yet within her is a woman who killed. He imagined himself under oath in a court of law, explaining that yes, he had known about the death of her husband. But he could not imagine her ever killing again. Except to protect Carlito.

He dropped the newspapers on the carpet and got up to brush his teeth.

The boy played with his paddle and his teddy bear. Rose moved through the day without saying a word about her confession. Patients demanded help. The watchers kept watch on the street. That night, in a light trembling sleep, Delaney was on a melancholy strand of beach and something was behind him. An immense creature. He could not see it but heard the great weight of its body, feet smashing into sand, the foul gnashing of its breath, and he was running and running and running…

The ringing phone snapped him awake. He was still breathing in the darkness, still fleeing the unseen beast. He fumbled for the telephone. Something fell. From the sound, surely a book. Surely Lord Byron.

“Hello,” he said softly.

He heard someone laughing. And then a man singing. Gyp Pavese.

“Listen to me, pal,” Delaney said. “I want you to take a message to Frankie Botts.”

There was silence, except for the man’s breathing.

“Tell him I’m coming to see him today. Right after lunchtime. The Club 65.”

Delaney hung up. The man, almost certainly Gyp Pavese, didn’t call back. Delaney stretched out in the dark, taut and angry, flexing and unflexing his hands, his head teeming with scenarios.

In the morning, his guts were churning and his head ached. I can’t live like this, he thought, but I can’t die either. Too many people depend upon me. He imagined himself at Club 65, tape pasted over his mouth, punched in the stomach, bundled into a car. Racing away. And then told to get out an hour later, shot once, twice, six times, and dropped into a lime pit in Jersey. What if that happened? He descended to the kitchen, drawn by the sound of Caruso on the radio and bacon frying in a pan. He went in and Carlito came charging, to be lifted, hugged. “Ga’paw, g’mornin’, Ga’paw! Buenos días!” The boy’s warmth infused him with life. They will not harm you, boy. I will hurt them first. He glanced at Rose and remembered her saying the same words — they would have to go through her — and she gave him a troubled look and then a smile.

“Everything okay, Dottore?” Rose said.

“Nothing that can’t be cured.”

He whispered to Carlito. “You okay, big boy?”

The boy smiled in a cheeky way. “Okay.” He pointed at his plate. “Bay-con an’ egg!”

Delaney sat him back in his chair. Rose touched his plate.

“What’s this?” she said, pointing at the plate.

“Play!” he said.

“Play-tuh.”

“Play-t.”

“And this?”

“Fook.”

Rose laughed out loud, and Delaney grinned.

“No fook. That’s a bad word. Faww-rrrrrr-kuh.”

“Fork.”

“And this?”

“Mesa!”

“No, no, in English!”

He paused, then blurted: “Table!”

He was naming the world, one glorious word at a time, but enough was enough. Time to eat. Carlito scooped up the scrambled eggs, dropping some of them off the fork, which he held firmly in his left hand. Rose came from the stove with Delaney’s plate. The Italian station had a female soprano on the air now, but in his own skull he heard Jolson singing, in some lost year at the Winter Garden. When there are gray skies, I don’t mind gray skies, you make them blue, Sonny Boy… And Molly scoffing at the sentimental rubbish, and then laughing when Delaney stood on a Broadway corner and sang the words, and promised her, in Jolie’s voice, You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet…

He ate quickly, sipped the jolting dark coffee, kidded with the boy and with Rose. But the headache nagged. He would need an aspirin. There was one appointment he wished he could avoid. One that put fear in his guts and an ache in his head. Then he heard Monique come in, and she poked her head into the kitchen and smiled.

“Morning all,” she said. “Looks like, uh, a busy day. They’re already waiting outside, and it’s thirteen degrees in the sun.”

“Better bring them in, Monique.” Then he raised an open palm. “Give me a bit of time first.”

He hugged the boy a final time and thanked Rose and then went to his consulting room. He made some notes: Call Zimmerman. Call Knocko. Call Danny Shapiro at the station house. He took an aspirin, telling himself: Leave instructions, in case I’m killed. Then he sat there, guts churning again. What if Frankie Botts was a real animal, as Rose had called him? And then thought: After the war, I promised myself I’d never live again in fear. But now it’s not just about me. It’s the boy too… it’s Rose.

He took a piece of stationery from his desk drawer and unscrewed his fountain pen. At the top he wrote the month, day, and year. Nineteen thirty-four. He addressed a note: To Whom It May Concern. He stated clearly that the bulk of his estate, his money, would go to the boy and his mother, Grace Delaney Santos. Monique and Rose would each receive ten percent. Mr. Carmody of the Longshoreman’s Union would serve as executor. He wrote down the combination to the wall safe. Then he signed the note and sealed it in an envelope, which he marked Just In Case. Monique would know where to put it.

He took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened the door to the waiting area.

“Who’s first?”

He was ready to vanish into their pain and not his own. The headache disappeared.

At ten-thirty, with no patients waiting and the room disinfected, Rose and Carlito came in. She was carrying a tray with a sandwich of prosciutto and mozzarella, and a glass of water. She seemed to know that there would be no more patients for a while. Carlito went to Delaney’s leather bag.

“Ga’paw’s bag,” he said.

Rose placed the tray on Delaney’s desk and said, “Eat something. You look terrible.”

“No, I feel —”

“No back talk. Eat.”

Carlito leaned an elbow on his thigh, and Delaney began to eat. Suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He gave the boy a crackling crust and he munched away.

“Pan bueno.”

Rose said: “In English.”

“Bread good.”

Was that his first adjective?

“The radio says good weather’s on the way,” Rose said. “Maybe two more days.”

“I hope so. The sidewalk’s like glass.”

“Two more days, you use the bicycle.”

“Pray for it, Rose.”

“I don’t pray, but it’s gotta come. You gotta get sun. You don’t have any color. You’re gonna get sick. You, the dottore!” Then suddenly: “Carlito, don’t eat your gran’father’s sandwich.”

“Samich.”

They both laughed. Then Rose turned to Delaney.

“What are you worry about?” she said.

“The usual.”

“Well, stop,” she said. Then to the boy: “Come on, boy.”

She took the tray and the plate with its crumbs and started for the door. She left the water.

“Rose?”

“Yeah?”

“That was the best damned sandwich I’ve had since I came home from the war.”

She blushed slightly, then waved a dismissing hand at him.

“Baloney.”

“No,” Delaney said, and smiled. “Prosciut’.”

“Puh-shoot,” the boy said.

Around noon, when the last morning patient was gone, Delaney was still for a while and thought about Frankie Botts and how stupid it would be to die. Then he took a breath, exhaled slowly, lifted the envelope, and stepped into Monique’s area. He handed it to her. “Just in case?” she said. He nodded. She told him that Rose had gone shopping with the boy, where various people would be watching.

“I have to go see a guy on Bleecker Street. Tell Rose I’ll skip lunch.”

“How long’ll you be?”

“Two hours, most.”

She looked at the schedule of house calls and the stack of bills. Delaney saw from the clock that it was twelve twenty-five.

“But if I’m not back by three, call Danny Shapiro, the detective, and Knocko Carmody. Tell them I went to Club 65. They’ll know what to do.”

She jotted a note on a pad. Then her eyes narrowed. “What’s this all about?”

“I can’t tell you till I get back.”

He was donning his hat, scarf, and coat. She lifted the envelope again.

“Just in case? I don’t like this even a little bit.”

“Just in case I get hit by a car,” he said, and forced a smile. “Just in case a flowerpot falls off a roof. Just in case a woman aims a gun at her husband and hits me. This is New York, Monique.”

She started to say something, but he was gone, clanging the gate behind him.

He walked south and east, shivering on the corners when he stopped to let traffic pass. If it was thirteen degrees this morning, it must be twenty by now. The glaze of ice was melting in the noon sun, and as he walked more quickly, the movement warmed him. He was walking the long way, refusing train, trolley, or taxi, and he knew the true reason was fear. He was delaying his arrival at Club 65, like a patient facing surgery. Alone, he could feel his own trembling uncertainty. At Club 65 they might, after all, kill him. And he would be cursed as a goddamned fool.

On his walk the Depression was everywhere. Even on Broadway. Huge TO LET signs were taped inside the windows of abandoned stores. At every corner men in army greatcoats sold apples. When they first started to appear, three years earlier, all with VETERAN signs displayed in their racks, there were many photographs of them in the Daily News. Not anymore. Now they were almost as common as lampposts. He gave one hollow-eyed man a quarter and left the apples. “This,” he explained, “is from Sergeant Corso.” The man grunted something and stood there against the wall, out of the wind. Down the street, Delaney saw a woman, sagging with abandonment, trudging with two children, her gloveless hand outstretched. Her hair was wild and dirty. Her shoes flopped and she wore no socks. He gave her a dollar, and she looked astonished and burst into tears.

He turned east at West Third Street and saw more than a dozen grizzled men in a lot huddled around a fire in a battered garbage can, one of them roasting a potato on a stick. Maybe a baked or roasted potato would sop up the acids in his churning stomach. The lot was piled with anonymous rubble, strewn garbage, splintered timber, a dead dog picked apart by rats. The far wall was scorched by an old fire. One man took a swig from a wine bottle and passed it on. A half-block away he saw a line of men waiting for entrance to a government building. Most wore dirty overcoats, shirts with curling collars, neckties, old fedoras, as if trying to retain a lost respectability. Scattered among them were men with caps, union buttons, heavy boots. None talked, silenced by humiliation. A few read the meager listing of want ads in the Times or the Herald-Tribune or the World. Come home and paint this, Grace. Come home. And then he realized something large: He didn’t really want her to come home. He wanted to be with the boy. He wanted to do what he was about to do, and live. And then he would make certain that the boy would live too.

The wind blew harder when he reached Bleecker Street. Up ahead he saw his destination. He shuddered in the wind.

Club 65 was a corner saloon, older than the century, with a triangular cement step at the main entrance. A side door opened into the back room, where long ago men could bring women. Once before the war, he’d even taken Molly here. Then it was called the Fenian Cove, and on Friday and Saturday nights they played the old music from Ireland. Not the Tin Pan Alley stuff of the Rialto on Fourteenth Street, with its sentimental delusions, its cheap stage-Irish jokes, but music made before anyone on the island spoke English. It was all flutes and drums and fiddles and pipes, and Molly loved it. Listen, she said, it’s Smetana. Her face amazed. And he didn’t know anything about Smetana, and she explained the way he used folk melodies from Czech villages in his music, and she was sure those villages had once been Celtic. “Just listen, James.” A year later she took him to a concert of Smetana and said: Do you remember? The Fenian Cove? He didn’t really remember clearly what was played there, but said of Smetana, Yes, I hear it, I hear Ireland.

Now he hesitated. Thinking: I don’t need to do this. I can leave it for the police. For Danny Shapiro. For Jackie Norris. Leave it. Leave it. And then walked in as abruptly as he used to dive into the North River as a boy.

The bar was bright from the light of the street and was still laid out the way it had been in the years of Fenians and rumrunners. But there were far fewer drinkers now. Propped on stools at the bar, each forming a little triangle with one leg on the floor for balance, three men whispered inaudibly, as if their volume had been reduced by the sudden presence of a stranger. Another man was at the far end of the bar, near the window, hands in his pockets, gazing at the street. They all wore the gangster uniform: pearl-gray hat, dark unbuttoned overcoat, polished black shoes. The clothes said that not one of them was about to go to work, ever. As in memory, a passageway led to the back room. Delaney stepped to the bar. The bartender was a huge suety man with thinning hair and a pug’s mashed nose. Delaney remembered Packy Hanratty’s saying of such a face, If he could fight, he wouldn’t have that nose. The bartender spread his large hands on the bar and leaned forward.

“Need directions?” he said.

“Just a beer,” Delaney said, and laid a dollar on the bar. The man eased over to the tap and pulled a lager. He placed it in front of Delaney and lifted the dollar. He rang up ten cents on the register, brought the change back to him, and stared at Delaney.

“Is Frankie Botts around?” Delaney said.

“Who?”

“Frankie Botts.”

“I don’t know no Frankie Botts.”

“Frankie Botticelli. Tell him Dr. Delaney is here. He should be expecting me.”

The bartender stared harder at Delaney, then gestured with his head to one of the three men. They’d heard everything that was said. One of them slipped off his stool and strolled into the back room. He was back quickly, looking surprised.

“Hands up,” he said.

Delaney raised his hands and was patted down.

“Back there,” the man said.

Delaney left a nickel tip and carried the beer through the passageway. A window opened into a tiny kitchen, but there was no cook and no sign of food. In the corner of the large back room, four men were playing cards. There were booths along one wall, as in the old days, and about six tables, but nobody else except the card players. Delaney walked to them, taking off his hat, holding it in his bad right hand.

“Give me a minute, Doc,” said the man who must have been Frankie Botts. “I wanna finish takin’ these bastards’ money.”

The other players looked up in an amused way, and the game continued. The back room was warmer, radiators knocking with steam heat. The side door was closed. Each player had a pack of cigarettes in front of him: two Lucky Strikes, one Chesterfield, one Old Gold. They used a common ashtray. Three of the men each had a shot glass in hand, but Frankie Botts sipped from a cup of black American coffee, a distinction that made him look more sinister.

Delaney moved away from the table, sipping from his beer. Club 65 was the same kind of place where Eddie Corso had been shot on New Year’s morning. The Good Men Club was Eddie’s joint. Club 65 belonged to Frankie Botts. Neighborhood saloons that functioned as private clubs. All strangers were discouraged. There were framed photographs of prizefighters on one wall. Dempsey, of course, Mickey Walker, Tony Canzoneri, Jimmy McLarnin, others whose names he used to know, now vanished from memory. A framed cover of the Police Gazette showed Gene Tunney in his prime. One larger one was signed by Jimmy Braddock, who must have known the place well. The ballplayers were there too. Ruth and Gehrig and Crosetti. And high in the corner was Matty. From before the war, before Prohibition, before the Depression. Browning now, and dim. Christy Mathewson himself. And there were other photographs: soldiers in uniformed rows, all from the AEF, and he moved closer and peered at them. Looking for familiar faces, but seeing none. Two neighborhoods away from the North River, and the living and the dead were strangers. Every saloon south of Thirty-fourth Street used the same decorations.

Delaney turned at the sound of groans and saw that the game was over. Frankie Botts swept up the pot. He was a lean man in his early forties, elegantly dressed, hair slicked back like George Raft. His shirt was, as usual for a big-shot gangster, white on white, with linen threads in diamond patterns adding luxury to a cotton base. And as usual, he was wearing a pinkie ring. His eyes were black under trimmed brows. He remained seated while the others stood up and moved to the far side of the room, where they took a table out of earshot.

“Sit down,” Botts said.

Delaney sat down, placed his beer beside him. It was going flat.

“You got some pair of balls, coming here,” Botts said, his mouth a slit.

“Mr. Botticelli, I never did anything to you.”

“Yeah? On the street, I hear you pissed off some people. On the street, I hear you saved Eddie Corso’s miserable fuckin’ life.”

“He saved mine. Twice. In France.”

Botts stared at him. His mouth got tighter.

“I don’t want to hear no war stories.”

Delaney shrugged. “Fine with me.”

Botts moved a spoon through his coffee, sipped, then yelled across the room: “Charlie, I need a fresh coffee.”

The one named Charlie hurried into the passage to the bar. Botts stared at Delaney.

“You was in France?”

“Yes.”

“My brother Carmine was killed in France. That’s him over there.”

He turned to the wall and pointed at a photo of a handsome young man. He seemed to have been photographed by the same cameraman who had pointed his lens at the Fischetti boy now on the wall of Angela’s restaurant. He remembered Packy Hanratty’s old advice: Don’t punch with a puncher. Box him.

“Where was he killed?” Delaney said politely.

“Château-Thierry.”

“That was a horror. What outfit?”

“The Sixty-ninth. What else? He was there three days and bang! Good-bye, Carmine. He was just nineteen. A fuckin’ waste.” He paused. “They didn’t just kill Carmine. They killed my mother too. She ain’t been right ever since.”

Delaney sighed, said: “I’m sorry for your trouble.” The Irish cliché. Then added: “Eddie Corso was shot too. Twice.”

“Yeah, but the prick lived.”

“That wasn’t Eddie’s fault. The Germans did their best.”

There was color now on the face of Frankie Botts. “Then, New Year’s Day, you save him, again.” His eyes sunk beneath his brows. They took on a metallic sheen. “And you cause nothing but trouble for me.”

“Mr. Botticelli, I’m a doctor. It’s what I do. I’d do it for you, too.”

“Bullshit.”

“Try me sometime. You know where I live. Unfortunately.”

Charlie came in with a cup of coffee and placed it in front of Botts. His voice and manner were apologetic.

“Sorry, boss. Had to make a fresh pot…”

Frankie Botts waved him away. Without looking at Delaney, he sipped from the hot coffee, laid down the cup. The pinkie ring flashed.

Then looking up, the eyes still lurking below the brows, his body coiled as if to strike, he said: “So whatta you want from me?”

Delaney cleared his throat. “Tell your man Gyp Pavese to move to Minnesota,” he said. “He calls my house last night, two in the morning. He repeats a threat he made the other night. He’s a clown, a knife artist, a gunsel, a prime jerk, and you must know it. But he’s doing his act in your name.”

“Why should I give a fuck?”

“First of all, if this clown Gyp kills me, there’ll be open warfare. And you know it, Mr. Botts. I’m the only doctor they have over by the North River. They don’t have much money anymore, but they do have guns. A lot of them. There’d be piles of corpses. Some pissed-off Mick will shoot at your guys and hit a little girl going to buy day-old bread. One of your guys will shoot out the window of a cab and kill a woman who lost a son at Château-Thierry. The war here would be more senseless than the war in France.”

Thinking: Stop. You’re making a speech. Get to the goddamned point.

“There’s another thing,” Delaney said, lowering his voice. “The most important thing of all.” A pause. “I’ve got a kid living with me. He’s three years old. My grandson. His mother’s gone off. If anything happens to me, I don’t know what will happen to that little boy.” A beat. “And last night Gyp threatened to do something bad to the boy.”

In the eyes of Botts, a shift. Irritation with Gyp? Annoyance? Certainly not sympathy.

“And I promise you, Mr. Botticelli, if Gyp puts the snatch on that boy, if Gyp kills him, I’ll make sure Gyp dies. And a few other people too. That’s not a threat. That’s a promise.”

“It sounds like a threat to me.”

He tamped out the cigarette and stood up, scraping his chair on the tiled floor. The wall clock said one forty-five. Delaney tensed. A nod to the other gangsters could kill him.

“You wanna end this?” Botts said. “It’s easy. Tell me where Eddie Corso is.”

Delaney looked directly at him.

“I told you I don’t know,” he said. “I assume he’s far away.”

A pause.

“You better get outta here,” Botts said. “While you can fuckin’ walk.”

Delaney went out the side door, pulling his hat tight against the bitter wind. He inhaled deeply, held his breath, then exhaled hard, making a small cloud of steam. His guts settled, as if he’d swallowed a gallon of vanilla ice cream. Nothing else was settled, but he had said his piece and was still alive. Frankie Botts knew better now what the stakes were. What could happen, if… He started walking west, glancing behind him. Nobody left Club 65. There were more people on Bleecker Street now, kids heading for school or home, women carrying groceries, men with slabs of lumber on their shoulders and others with toolboxes, hurrying along toward the Bowery or Broadway. He walked faster now, the sidewalk traffic thicker as he approached Broadway. And then he saw her, one hand inside the long blue coat, the other deep in a pocket, a dark wool hat pulled low over her ear, her men’s boots large and clumsy. Rose.

He stopped and waited for her to reach him. Her face was tight and concentrated, all vertical lines, two of them above the long nose. Then, six feet away, she saw him. Her eyes glistened.

“You’re here,” she said. “Right here on Bleecker Street.”

“Yes. And I still have a heartbeat.”

“God damn you,” she said, standing there, not taking her hands from the pockets of the coat. She looked smaller. Angry tears began coming.

“Why’d you go see Frankie Botts and not tell me? Why do I have to learn this from a note on Monique’s desk, when she goes to the bathroom? About if you don’t come back, call Knocko. Call Shapiro the cop. God damn you, Dottore!”

A few people turned their heads to look at them, and kept moving. Rose stepped back and wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her coat. He hugged her, patting her back.

“Let’s go home,” he said quietly. “We can buy ice cream for Carlito.”