Peril

Her eyes scanned the station for her father-in-law’s shadowy agents and she saw them all around her. The teenage runaway flicking her pierced tongue; the soldier snoozing softly, his face concealed behind a newspaper; the old black man reading a tattered Bible; the businessman tapping at his laptop. Could all of them be working for the Old Man?

Of course not, she told herself, think about something else, put him out of your mind. She drew in a long breath. Think about something else. Something before Tony. Before the Old Man. Something good.

She returned to her first days in New York, the small-time cabaret singer she’d invented as herself. She’d even given her a name, Samantha Damonte, then created a person to go with it, a smoky-bar woman with plenty of experience, a burnt-out case at twenty-five. Not a bit of it had been true. In fact, as she’d finally come to recognize, Samantha Damonte was just a young woman who’d been afraid to grow up, afraid to go to college, afraid that she wasn’t really special or all that talented, and so, despite the smoky-bar persona, just another girl who wanted to be taken care of. That was what Tony had dangled before her, a safe life, a chance to quiet the voice in her head, its incessantly murderous demand. She’d gone for it because she was weary of short gigs in out-of-the-way clubs, tired of agents and club owners who saw her as a mark, tired of fingers raking up her thigh, tired of the rage that swept over her like a hot wind every time some boozy customer sidled up to the piano, tossed a twenty in the glass, and nodded toward the room at the back, tired of the voice that kept rising from the smoldering center of herself, Kill him!

She might have gone back to Virginia, she thought now, but that door had closed long ago when her father had thrown her out, told her that her dead mother was rolling in her grave, that a singer was just a slut, that she’d either marry Billy Preston, if she could even be sure it was Billy who’d gotten her pregnant, or never show her face at his door again. She’d screamed, “Never, never, never,” moved in with her cousin Sheila, lost the child three weeks later, then split for New York like a million girls before her. At a bus stop outside Philly, in a greasy diner over black coffee and a cigarette, Samantha Damonte had been born.

Okay, so Samantha Damonte was totally made up, Sara told herself, like a character in a book. But who was Sara Labriola, this woman in this particular bus station? She didn’t know, and that struck her as more frightening than anything else, the fact that she could define herself now only as a woman in a rage, half wishing she had done it long ago, drawn back the hammer, pulled the trigger, given up the foolish fantasy that there had ever been a choice.

TONY

After the sixth ring he hung up, irritated that it was ten-thirty in the morning, for Christ’s sake, and Sara wasn’t home. He’d been calling her every half hour since seven-thirty but gotten no answer. So where had she gone so early? She had no relatives to visit. No kids to take to school or walk to the bus stop. He glanced out the office window, noted the flurry of activity, men packing fish in ice, loading crates of sea bass and bluefish that would soon be served in restaurants throughout the East Coast. In the distance, Eddie Sullivan was hosing out a truck. Seven feet away Joey Fanucci slumped against a fishing boat, smoking a cigarette, the lazy bastard, who he wouldn’t have hired on a bet if he weren’t a cousin and the Old Man hadn’t insisted that “family is family.”

He jerked open the window. “Hey, Joey. What the fuck? You got nothing to do?”

Joey tossed his cigarette into the churning water and disappeared into the warehouse.

He can hide in there, Tony thought, he can get behind a stack of shipping crates and beat his meat all fucking day. He slammed the window closed, snapped up the phone, dialed home. When no one answered, the dreadful unease flared, the corrosive feeling that something was wrong in the tidy little house he’d left only a few hours before.

He was still nursing that disturbing idea when his father burst through the door.

“Why you keep that fucking mick on the payroll, Tony? He’s dumber than shit.”

“He’s a nice guy,” Tony said.

“So what?” Labriola demanded. He strode to a chair in front of Tony’s desk, plopped down in it, and spread his long, thick legs out across the floor. “So what are you telling me, that you’re so rich you can keep some lazy mick on welfare forever?”

“He’s not lazy, Dad,” Tony said. He grabbed a pencil from a cup that bristled with them and rolled it nervously between his fingers.

Labriola eyed the pencil, then said, “What you so jumpy about?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? I don’t think so, Tony. You got something on your mind, spit it out.”

“Nothing,” Tony repeated.