Peril

EDDIE

He checked the address, then the nameplates, confirmed that one was blank.

What now?

Nothing, Eddie decided, but wait.

And so he sat down on a cement stoop across the street, watching as the late-afternoon pedestrians made their way down Nineteenth Street. He had never actually lived in the city, nor ever wanted to. Manhattan was not his kind of place, and the people could hardly have been more different from himself. First off, they were educated. Everyone who lived in Manhattan, he supposed, had gone to college. His cousin Patsy had done that. She’d gotten a scholarship to Columbia, then landed a big job with a law firm whose offices were on Park Avenue. At Christmas parties back home, she tried to be nice to everybody, but despite the effort, she looked as if she were in a dentist’s waiting room rather than at home with her family. You could tell she wanted to get back to Manhattan, to her smart, well-dressed friends. Because of that, the cousins usually started talking about her once she’d left. They called her stuck-up and snooty and said she should just stay in the city if she thought she was so great, so much better than the people who’d never left the old neighborhood. But Eddie had never added his voice to their condemnations. If anything, he’d felt sorry for Patsy, sorry that she’d let go of something that seemed precious, the hold of family, which was, he thought, the fortress you lived in, and which kept you safe. That was it, he thought now, that was what made him jumpy in Manhattan and eager to leave it as fast as he could. It wasn’t just that he didn’t feel at home in the city. It was that he didn’t feel safe when he was out of his own neighborhood, away from his own kind, didn’t feel that he could just be Eddie Sullivan… and survive.

His gaze drifted up the building, then along the line of windows on the fifth floor, hoping to get a glimpse of the man who’d been hired to find Tony’s wife. He imagined him as a tall, thin ice pick of a man. They had a tendency to look like that in movies, but Eddie knew the guy could just as easily be short and pudgy. The thing he had to keep in mind was this guy might be dangerous, might be capable of anything. That’s what a bad man was, Eddie thought, a guy who would do anything if the money was right or he was scared not to do it, a guy who lived without a line. Eddie couldn’t fathom how such men went through their days with no sense of limits. He’d never been sure of what he wanted to be, only that he didn’t want to be that.

It was nearly an hour later when the man finally appeared, and despite the hazy light of early evening, Eddie had no doubt that he was the one Caruso had described the night before. He was around five ten, dressed in a black suit, and carrying a tightly wrapped umbrella. His hair was gray, and there was plenty of it, but it was the graceful way he moved down the street that pegged him for sure. This was a man who knew how to handle things, who could think his way out of a real pickle, then make all the right moves. He had that assurance, that look of being in control, or at least able to get control of any situation.

Eddie followed at a discreet distance, watching carefully as the man continued east until he reached Fifth Avenue, where he turned south and made his way to Washington Square Park.

There was something about the way he moved, never looking right or left, that gave Eddie the idea that this was a walk the man often made, perhaps routinely at this same hour every day. He decided that he would station himself opposite the building at the same time tomorrow, check if the man came out again, walked to wherever he was going. If so, then he’d have established at least a portion of the man’s routine, could predict, though not with absolute certainty, where he could be found at a particular moment. He knew that this wasn’t much, but at least it was something he could report to Tony, let him know that he was on the job.