Chapter 4 #2
And my body, the analyst noted, with the cool detachment that had served me so well in court, had already decided. I wanted him.
Mafia. Not adjacent to it. Not a man who had grown up in a neighborhood where mafia happened around him.
Not a man who occasionally did business with someone who knew someone.
The watch and the shoes and the staff who did not look at him and the violence that had been delivered like a service — he was the thing itself.
He was the category.
He was the species of man I had taken to a federal courtroom in a black skirt suit and a blouse buttoned to the throat and described, in a clear quiet voice, for thirty-one consecutive days of testimony, in language so careful and so unemotional that one of the partners had screamed at me from the defendant’s table on day seventeen and called me a whore and a rat and I had sat there with my hands folded in my lap and not answered him because answering him was not what they paid me to do.
I hated them.
I hated the way they took up rooms. I hated the way they assumed the rooms would shape themselves around them.
I hated the wives. I hated the watches. I hated the careful soft soaps and the careful soft shoes and the careful soft voices that came out of mouths that, when the room was empty, said things to other men that ended other men’s lives.
I had hated them on day one of the wire and I had hated them on day three hundred and ninety-three of the wire and I hated them now, in a booth in a diner on Lincoln Avenue at half past three in the morning with my hands flat on a formica that smelled faintly of bleach, and the hating of them was, at this point, less an opinion than a structural feature of my interior architecture.
I hated him.
And I wanted him.
That was the report the analyst had handed me. That was the report I was now reading.
I wanted him.
I had wanted him from the moment I had looked up across the floor and registered him in the booth above the rail.
I had not known I had wanted him at the time.
I had registered, at the time, that he was a threat, and I had logged the threat, and the part of my body that had begun, somewhere underneath the logging, to do something else entirely—that part had been outvoted, because the logging part had been louder.
But it had been there. The pulse had started there.
The thing I was sitting with now had started the second his eyes had found mine across that room and not let go.
He had looked at me like I was the only person in the building.
I had felt the look go through me like a hot wire pulled tight, and the wire had landed in the place between my hips that I had assumed two years ago had been permanently switched off.
Turns out, it had not been switched off.
It had been waiting.
I shifted in the booth. The formica was cold under my forearms. The coffee was cold in the cup.
My pulse was not cold. My pulse was somewhere lower than my pulse should have been, doing something I had not given it permission to do, a slow heavy beat between my thighs that did not respond to me telling it to stop.
I pressed my legs together under the table.
The pressure was the wrong thing. The pressure made it worse.
I uncrossed them and put both feet flat on the floor and made myself breathe, and the breathing did not help either, because the breathing made me think about the breath I had not heard from him when I had bitten him.
My body was throbbing. I was actually wet.
I could feel it, hot and humiliating, between my legs.
I had not been wet for any man in two years.
I had not even been wet for myself. I had not touched myself in eighteen months, not since the trial.
And now here I was, in a diner booth, with my pulse between my legs and my mouth full of the memory of his hand, and I felt alive.
For the first time in two years, every single nerve in my body was on, and the man who had turned them on was a gangster—a man I should hate.
I put my face in my hands.
I did not cry. I had not cried in eighteen months either. The tears, like the wetness, like the want, were a luxury I couldn’t afford.
The waitress drifted past and topped up my coffee without asking. I did not look up. I heard her go.
I am, I told the analyst, a deeply stupid woman.
The analyst did not disagree. The analyst was sitting across from me in the booth with her hands folded and her hair in the bun she had worn in court, and she was looking at me the way she had looked at the partners on the day they were sentenced — without judgment, exactly, but with the small still attention of someone watching a structure she had warned about for years finally come down.
The coffee, when I picked it up again, had gone cold.
I drank it anyway.
Ihad to leave Chicago.
That was the report the analyst handed me when I finished the coffee. They had found me. I did not know who they were—Halberd people, Valenti people, another group of hired thugs. Frankly, it didn’t matter who they were.
They had been tracking me, and they were good. They’d almost taken me at the club, and I had a feeling that next time, they wouldn’t fail. There would be no-one to save me. They would come somewhere I could not be saved.
I asked myself where to go, and the answer effortlessly swam up from my subconscious.
Detroit.
I had thought about Detroit before. From Detroit I could go four ways: north into Canada if I could find a way over the border, west toward Chicago, south to Toledo and then anywhere, or east toward Cleveland and Pittsburgh and the places that were forgettable enough to forget me back.
Detroit was a hinge. Detroit was a place to disappear from, not a place to disappear in.
I picked up my phone. I opened the Greyhound app. The 6:05 to Detroit, with one stop in Kalamazoo, arriving at 1:40 in the afternoon. Forty-two dollars. Money was exceptionally tight, but I could make it work.
I paid the bill. I left a dollar on the table for the waitress, who had not looked at me twice and who deserved more, but she would have to settle for what I could afford.
I shouldered my bag. I checked the door before I opened it, the way I had been checking doors for six weeks, the small forensic glance for anything wrong on the other side.
Nothing wrong. The street was empty. The wind was up.
I stepped out into the cold.
Five blocks. I had mapped them while I was paying.
Three north, two east. The streets at this hour were the streets I had walked an hour ago—empty, every-third-streetlight, the small red lights of closed shops.
I was so tired, so impossibly, eye-stingingly tired.
A salt truck went past me at one point and I stepped back into a doorway and waited for it to pass and then I came out and kept walking.
I tried not to think about him.
I thought about him.
I tried to think about him as a problem set, as a category.
The analyst in me was patient. The analyst said, look at what he is.
The analyst said, he is exactly the thing you ran from.
The analyst said, you do not get to keep the people who almost touch your wrist. The analyst said, this is not a thing that was going to happen.
This is not a thing that could ever have happened. You are doing the right thing.
I knew I was doing the right thing, but I did not feel like I was doing the right thing.
That was the problem with the body, the analyst said, with something almost like sympathy, almost like a hand on my shoulder.
The body did not understand right and wrong, good and bad.
The body understood warm and cold, fed and starving, touched and not-touched, and the body had, in the last six hours, been touched in a way that was not violent for the first time in two years, and the body did not have the moral vocabulary to file that experience correctly.
The body wanted to go back to where the warm thing was.
The brain had to walk the body to the bus station, because the body, left to itself, would have walked back to the club.
I crossed an empty intersection.
The bus station was in front of me now, a low concrete building with the lights on inside, the kind of harsh fluorescence that made everyone in it look like a fugitive.
There was a vagrant asleep against the wall outside, wrapped in a sleeping bag I recognized as the kind they handed out at the Catholic place on Wabash.
I clocked him. I clocked the entrance. I clocked the man behind the glass at the counter, who was on his phone and not looking up.
I had to disappear again.
I had done it before.
I could do it again.
But he didn’t let me.
He stepped out of a doorway half a block from the station.
I stopped walking before I had registered who it was. The man from the club.
He stood in the half-light with both hands open and lifted to chest height, the way you lifted hands at a dog you did not know, and he held very still. My pulse relocated to my throat.
“You’re safe,” he said.
His voice was lower than it had been in the alley. Quieter, somehow, in the empty street than it had been over the music. The Sicilian was there, soft, threaded under the English, like silk under wool.
I did not say anything.
He kept his hands where I could see them. He did not step out of the doorway. Everything about him was non-threatening in the most calculated way.
“My name is Pietro,” he said.
The name went into me like a coin into a slot.
Pietro.
For a moment, I looked at him. Under the streetlight, gently watching me.