Viper's Sinful Bargain

Chapter 1

MARINA

The last drunk in Cassidy's is crying about a woman called Denise, and I have four minutes to get him out the door before I stop being nice about it.

"She took the dog," he says.

"I know."

"Fourteen years. And she took the dog."

"Finish your drink, Frankie."

He finishes it. That is the thing about Frankie.

He does what he is told as long as you say it like you mean it, and I have been saying things like I mean them since I was sixteen years old.

I take the glass out of his hand before he can look at the bottom of it and start again.

I put his jacket on him one arm at a time, the way you dress a child.

I walk him to the front and I put him out into Third Avenue and I lock the door behind him, and through the glass I watch him stand under the streetlight and decide which way is home.

Left. Good. Left is the direction his apartment is in.

Then it is just me and the hum of the beer fridge and a floor that needs doing.

I do the floor first. I always do the floor first, because if you count the tips first you make decisions about the floor based on how the night went, and the floor does not care how the night went.

Then I do the fridge, and the wells, and the wipe-down on the taps that Kev never does, and I put the chairs up, and then I sit on the end stool with the tip jar and the bank bag and I count.

Two hundred and eleven dollars. A Tuesday.

I fold ninety into the bank bag for Kev.

I fold forty into my back pocket for the week.

The rest goes into a strip and the strip goes into my left shoe, under the insole, where it lives with the rest of it, and I do not think about how much is in there because thinking about it is the first step to spending it.

The back door opens.

I do not turn round. I know the sound of the back door, and I know that Kev is in Rockaway with his girlfriend and that the delivery does not come until Thursday, and I know that the only other person with a key is my brother, and he is meant to be asleep in Sunset Park with the chain on.

"Nico."

"Don't turn around."

So I turn around.

He is standing in the door of the stockroom with his hood up and his hand on the frame, and the light back there is bad, but it is not bad enough.

The left side of his face is a colour faces should not be.

The eye is closed. Not swollen shut. Closed, the way you close a door on a room you are not going back into.

There is blood on the collar of the hoodie and it has dried brown and cracked when he moves, and he moves, because he cannot stand still, he has never been able to stand still, he was a baby who kicked and a boy who ran and he is a man who does not know what to do with his hands.

He puts his hands in his pockets. That is how I know before he says a word.

"Sit down."

"Mari."

"Sit down, Nico, or I'm going to sit you down."

He sits. I get the first-aid tin from under the register, and a bar towel, and a glass of water, and I put the water in front of him and he looks at it like he has forgotten what water is for.

"Drink that."

"I'm not thirsty."

"I didn't ask if you were thirsty."

He drinks it. I wet the towel and start on the blood at his hairline and he flinches, and I keep going, because the blood is the part I can do something about. His eye is not. His eye needs somebody with a degree, and somebody with a degree costs money, and here we are.

"Who."

"It doesn't matter who."

"Nico."

"Some guys."

"Some guys." I press the towel flat above his eyebrow. He makes a noise through his teeth. "Some guys did this for fun, or some guys did this because you owe them."

He does not answer. His hands come out of his pockets and go back in.

Twelve years I have been doing this. Not the towel.

The waiting. He was eight the first time I sat across a kitchen table from him and waited, and it was a stolen bike, and it took eleven minutes for him to tell me, and I have been getting faster at the waiting and he has not been getting faster at the telling, and somewhere in the middle of the last twelve years I stopped asking myself whose fault that was.

"How much," I say.

"Mari."

"Give me the number, Nico. I can't do anything with a face."

"Two twenty."

"Two hundred and twenty dollars." I say it slowly, because I am giving him the chance. "You let somebody do this to you for two hundred and twenty dollars."

He looks at the water glass.

The beer fridge hums. Somewhere out on Third a car goes by with its windows down and a song I know coming out of it, and I hold on to the song for the length of time it takes to pass, and then it is gone and I am still standing here with a wet towel in my hand.

"Thousand," I say.

He nods.

I fold the towel in half and put it on the bar. I put the first-aid tin next to it. I line the two of them up, the tin and the towel, so that the edges are square, and I look at that for a while, because it is the only thing in the building that is going to do what I tell it to.

"Whose book."

"It doesn't"

"Whose book, Nico."

"Sonny Fusco."

I know the name. Everybody from the Island knows the name.

Sonny Fusco takes bets out of the back of a laundromat on New Dorp Lane, and he has done since before I was born, and he does not take bets of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars from twenty-year-olds who bus tables in Sunset Park unless somebody has told him to.

Sonny Fusco does not own anything. Sonny Fusco is owned.

"Say the rest of it."

"You know the rest of it."

"I want you to say it."

He takes his hood down. There is a cut across the top of his ear that I had not seen, and it has bled into his hair, and I am going to have to cut that out because it will not wash.

He is twenty years old. He has our mother's mouth and my father's hands and he has never once in his life understood what either of them cost.

"It's Vitale money," he says.

And there it is.

I do not make a sound. I am proud of that, later.

I stand behind my own bar in a locked room in Bay Ridge with the chairs up and I hear that name said out loud for the first time in nine years, and I do not make a sound, and my hands do not do anything, and the only thing that happens is that I am nine years old.

The block.

Rosebank in October, the year everything went.

Sitting on the stoop with my knees together because my mother said a girl sits with her knees together.

Mrs Amato coming down her steps across the street with her shopping.

Looking at me. Looking at me the way she had never looked at me before, the way you look at a dog that has been in the bins, and then crossing over, and walking past me without a word, and going up her own steps, and shutting the door.

That was the first day.

There were a lot of days after that.

"They said five days," Nico says.

I come back. It takes a second. I put my hand flat on the bar so I have somewhere to put it.

"Five days for what."

"To get it. Or to start paying. They said there's ways to start paying."

"Who said."

"The guys."

"Did the guys have names?"

"One of them was Paulie somebody. The other one didn't talk. He just held me."

Paulie somebody. That is nothing. That is every third man on the Island over forty.

I look at his eye again and I think about the man who just held him, and I think about what kind of man is good enough at holding somebody that he does not have to talk, and I stop thinking about it, because there is a limit to what you can carry from one side of a room to the other and I have reached mine.

"Okay," I say.

"Mari."

"Okay. Drink the water."

"I'm sorry."

"I know you are."

"I'm going to fix it."

I look at him.

"I am," he says. "I've got a guy. There's a guy who says"

"There's always a guy, Nico. There was a guy when you were fourteen and there was a guy last year with the phones. The guy is how you got here. The guy is who you owe. There is no version of this where the guy is the way out."

He shuts up. He is good at that, at least. He knows when I have finished being somebody he can talk to.

"Go home," I say. "Put the chain on. Put ice on that. Don't open the door for anybody who isn't me, and I mean anybody, and I mean anybody, and I'm going to say it a third time so you know I mean it. Anybody."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm closing the bar."

He goes. I hear the back door, and the alley gate, and then nothing, and then the beer fridge.

I do not close the bar.

I go into the walk-in, because it is the only room in the building that does not have a window in it, and I pull the door to behind me, and I stand between the kegs and the box of limes with my arms wrapped round myself and my breath coming out white, and I let myself have it.

Not crying. I do not do that. I have not done that since I was sixteen and a coroner's assistant with kind eyes asked me if there was anybody he could call, and I said no, and I meant it, and I have gone on meaning it. I do not cry. What I do instead is this: I hum.

I do not choose the tune. It chooses itself.

It is the same one it always is, a little run of notes that goes up and stops and comes down again, and my fingers start going against my own arms without me telling them to, finding the keys on my own skin, and I stand in a refrigerator in Bay Ridge at one o'clock in the morning and I play the piece my father taught me on my own two arms until my hands stop shaking.

Then I do the arithmetic.

I am good at arithmetic. It is the one thing I got from him that nobody could take off me, because it was already inside.

There is four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars in my shoe.

There is nine hundred in the checking account, and rent is Friday, and rent is fourteen hundred.

There is a car that is worth less than the parking tickets on it.

There is nothing else. There is nobody else.

There is no aunt in Jersey and no friend of the family and no man with a kind face who owes my father a favour, because my father's name is the reason there are no favours, and every door that could have opened for me shut sixteen years ago on the same afternoon, one after another, all down the block.

Four thousand one hundred and sixty. Two hundred and twenty thousand.

I do not need to do that sum. I can see the shape of it from here.

So there is one plan. There was only ever going to be one plan. I stand in the cold and I turn it over the way you turn over a stone in a stream that has been there so long you thought it was part of the bed, and underneath it there is exactly what I expected to find.

I know where they live.

Everybody knows where they live. It is a stone house on a hill on the Island with a snake worked into the gates, and my father used to drive up there on Sundays with his good shoes on and come home smelling of cigars and other people's whisky, and once, when I was seven, he took me.

I do not remember much. A long drive. A big room with a piano in it, and me being told not to touch it, and touching it.

A man with a heavy face who looked at me over a glass and said to my father, she has your hands, Enzo, and my father laughing the way he only laughed up there.

Two years later that man had my father taken down into his basement and shot in the head.

That is who I am going to go and see.

I come out of the walk-in. I put the tip jar away. I turn the fridge light off, because Kev says it costs, and I take the bank bag and I put it in the safe and spin the dial and check it twice.

Then I sit on the end stool in the dark and I take my left shoe off and I count the strip.

Four thousand one hundred and sixty. I was right.

I am always right about that number, because it is the only number I keep in my head instead of on paper, and it is not a nest egg and it is not savings.

It is the thing you put your hand on in the night.

It is a train ticket and a first month's rent in a city where nobody knows the name Silvestri, and it has been that since I was seventeen years old, and I have never spent a dollar of it, not when the boiler went and not when Nico broke his wrist and not when I had the flu for nine days and no shifts.

It is for leaving.

I put the shoe back on. I lace it. I sit there in the dark with the fridge humming and I think about what two hundred and twenty thousand dollars looks like from the inside of a basement, and I think about my brother's eye, and I think about the way Mrs Amato crossed the street, and I understand, sitting there, that I have been getting ready for tonight for sixteen years without once admitting it, and that the money in my shoe was never going to be for leaving.

It was for this. For walking up a hill.

I stand up. I put my jacket on. I check the locks, front and back, and I set the alarm and I go out into Third Avenue and pull the shutter down and padlock it, and Frankie is long gone, and the street is empty, and it is starting to rain the way it does at the end of September, not hard, just enough to tell you what's coming.

I stand under the awning.

Tomorrow morning I am going to put on my good shoes and take the ferry and a bus and walk up to the gates of the people who killed my father, and I am going to knock.