Peril

“The problem is, you don’t stand up for yourself, Tony. You ain’t never stood up for yourself. A woman runs all over you, you just sit there drinking that pussy drink you got there. Your cousin Donny would never have let his wife do something like this.”

“Donny’s an asshole,” Tony said.

“Donny’s an asshole?” Labriola yelped. “Okay, let me ask you this. You think Carla would run off with some fucking scumbag? What that hayseed bitch done to you? Huh? You think Carla would do that to Donny? Fuck no. ’Cause Donny wouldn’t take it, that’s why. You know what would happen to Carla she done that to Donny, what your wife done to you? And there’s your fucking answer. You never taught her to respect you, Tony, and this is the price you pay.”

“Yeah, Dad, but—”

“No fucking buts,” the Old Man snarled. “You’re my son. You’re Leo Labriola’s son. And you know the rule I got, right? You fuck my son, you fuck me.”

“Yeah, but the thing is—”

“You fuck my son, you fuck me,” Labriola repeated fiercely, his eyes glowing red. “You understand?”

Tony nodded mutely.

“You got to find her and bring her back, Tony,” the Old Man added sternly. “Otherwise, won’t nobody ever treat you with no respect.”

“Well, sure, but the thing is, I don’t—”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t know where she is.”

The Old Man’s eyes went cold. “There ain’t nowhere that bitch could run to she can’t be found.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Nowhere, you understand?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Labriola drained the rest of the beer. “I got to make a call.” He got to his feet. “Then me and you are gonna shoot a little pool.”

CARUSO

The phone shook him from his sleep, the Old Man’s voice like a fist around his throat.

“This guy, the deadbeat, he knows people, right? People who find people.”

“He’s connected to some guy who does that,” Caruso told him.

“Okay, here it is. He gets this guy to do a job for me, I’ll let go what he owes me.”

“The guy usually gets thirty,” Caruso said cautiously. “The bill to you is just fifteen.”

“What are you saying, Vinnie?”

“That Morty’s guy, he maybe won’t do it for fifteen.”

“Okay, so I pay the shithead thirty, and he keeps fifteen and gives the other guy fifteen.”

“He shorts him?” Caruso said.

“Yeah, he fucking shorts him, Vinnie,” Labriola bawled. “Or we break his fucking thumbs.”

“Okay,” Caruso said quickly. “Maybe he’ll do that.”

“Like he’s got a fucking choice?” The Old Man’s laugh was brutal.

“I mean . . . he will,” Caruso added hastily. “What’s the job?”

“Find that bitch married my son. She took off this morning. He ain’t heard a word since then.”

Caruso nodded briskly, as if the Old Man were in the room with him, feeling the way he’d tried to make Mortimer feel a few hours before, like a cringing worm.

“Tony ain’t to know nothing about this, you understand?” Labriola added. “You just find that bitch and let me know.”

“Yes, sir,” Caruso said quickly.

“So make the deal with this little shit owes me fifteen grand,” Labriola said. “Then get back to me.”

“Yes, sir,” Caruso repeated in what had become the litany of his life. He hung up, paused briefly, then picked up the phone and dialed one of the scores of numbers he had stored in the hard drive of his mind, this one under the heading “Deadbeats,” the mental file to which he’d but recently added Morty’s name.

STARK

He ate in the garden at Gascogne, surrounded on three sides by high brick walls laced with vines. Within a week the garden would be closed, and so he lingered over a final glass of brandy until nearly midnight.

After that he walked to his apartment on West Nineteenth Street. He’d bought the first-floor apartment nearly twenty years before, and bit by bit he’d turned it into a home that suited him, the walls decorated with carefully chosen oils, the floors draped with large Oriental carpets.

Once inside, he poured a glass of port, sat down in a high-back leather chair, and drew a book from the small mahogany table beside it. In his youth, reading had been his passion. He’d pored over the classics, devouring the Greeks, Shakespeare, scores of nineteenth-century novels, but now he read only for business—travel guides, catalogues filled with the latest high-tech surveillance equipment, computer manuals, private publications from the field, tips of the trade exchanged by the few people who’d made it to the top of his precarious profession.

He knew why this radical shift had occurred, and as he drank, he revisited the grim reason in a series of ghastly mental photographs—a body strewn in a Madrid alleyway, another floating in the shallow currents of the nearby river, and finally a dark-haired beauty tied to a chair, her body drooping forward, mercifully dead after what had been done to her.

Marisol.

At just past midnight, the buzzer signaled someone at the door.

He opened it to find Mortimer swiping droplets of rain from his jacket and stamping his rubber galoshes on the mat outside the door.

“Fucking wet,” Mortimer said morosely. He drew an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Stark. “From Brandenberg. Payment in full.”