Peril

CARUSO

As he followed Mortimer westward, Caruso thought of the man at the top of the stairs, and the more he thought of him, the more one thing seemed clear. This guy looked a lot more like Batman than the barkeep he’d seen talking to Mortimer minutes before. For one thing, he’d had a book in his right hand. A very old book, like the ones Caruso had seen in movies about rich people who had huge country estates and whole rooms filled floor-to-ceiling with books you never saw in bookstore windows because they’d probably been made for the people who read them and nobody else. He knew that such people were phonies, that they would shake his hand, then quickly wash. He would always be low and dirty and disreputable to such people.

Okay, so forget about the barkeep, Caruso thought, it was this guy he’d love to waste, this smart and arrogant guy, with the fancy book in his fucking hand. He could put a bullet between his eyes and walk away smiling. He imagined doing just that, getting the word from Mr. Labriola, Whack Batman, then coming up behind this fuck and whacking him good. He thought of the shiny thirty-eight revolver he’d bought eight years before and which he kept, fully loaded, in the glove compartment of his car. When the moment came, he knew he’d be ready.

The only problem was that even if Labriola gave him the Big Assignment, he couldn’t be sure if this guy was really Batman. Because if he were Batman, then wouldn’t he want to look like he wasn’t instead of like he was?

Mortimer had made it to the Seventh Avenue subway by the time Caruso had run the various permutations through his mind. By that time he no longer felt certain which of the men Mortimer had visited was actually the man Labriola had hired to find his daughter-in-law, and this left Caruso utterly perplexed as he watched Mortimer descend the stairs to the station, then finally disappear.

Nothing was easy, that was the bottom line, Caruso concluded. Everything required more than you thought it would. More investigation, he decided, he needed more investigation before he could tell Labriola who Batman was and be sure that he was right. But how could he check out two different guys at the same time? That was a real mind twister, and as he made his way down the stairs, still vaguely on Mortimer’s trail, he tried to figure out a way to do it. The obvious answer was that he could hire some punk to keep an eye on one of the guys while he kept an eye on the other, but the punk would want money, and Caruso didn’t have any money, and he knew Labriola wouldn’t spring for an extra dime.

A problem, Caruso thought, as he watched Mortimer step onto the uptown number one, a real fucking problem.