Thomas Cook - Peril

Della stepped back and watched as he came into the foyer. He was not a large man, but there was something about him that seemed both huge and dangerous, like a boulder rolling toward you, grim and unstoppable. You either got out of its way, or it crushed you like a bug.

“You seen Tony?” His close-cropped white hair glimmered in the light. “He been over here?”

“No,” Della said.

“Too embarrassed,” Labriola said. “Okay, well, to make a long story short, that wife of his, she dumped him.”

“Oh,” Della said weakly.

“You ain’t heard about it?”

She felt like a deer caught in the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. “Well, I…”

Labriola’s bushy gray eyebrows arched menacingly. “You talked to her?”

So this is the moment, Della thought, this is the moment when the ground suddenly shifts and you find yourself teetering on the edge of a cliff. Her lips parted, but nothing came out, and in that instant of hesitation she saw Labriola’s face turn grim and stony.

“You don’t want to keep nothing to yourself,” he said. “ ’Cause I’m gonna find her, no matter what it takes.”

She heard Nicky cry, and the sound of his needful voice was like a spur gouging at her side. “She called me,” she said, her voice little above a whisper. “The day she… left.”

“Where was she when she called?” Labriola asked.

Nicky was crying loudly now, an insanely demanding scream. “I have to-”

Labriola grabbed her arm and squeezed. “Where was she?”

“I don’t know,” Della answered. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

“What time did she call?”

“I don’t know for sure. Late.”

“And she was already where she was headed?”

“I guess she was. It was tough to hear her.”

“Why?”

Della suddenly realized that she’d given out just that little morsel of information Sara had feared she might. “I don’t know.”

“You said it was hard to hear her.”

“Yeah,” Della said hesitantly.

“Traffic?”

“Maybe that was it,” Della said softly.

“She in the city?”

“I don’t know.” Nicky’s cries were like a screeching bird in her brain. “I need to change my son’s-”

Labriola’s grip tightened. “The kid can sit in it.”

Sit in his shit. Della knew that that was what Labriola meant, and with that understanding, she knew that she had plumbed the full measure of his brutality.

He brought his face very close to hers. “She in the city?” he repeated.

“She didn’t say.”

“She got a man? She fucking around on Tony?”

Della shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Labriola eyed her for a moment. “Okay,” he said finally. He released his grip. “If she calls again, you gonna call me, right?”

Della nodded meekly and massaged her arm. “Okay.”

“You’re clear on that, right?”

“Yes,” Della answered faintly. “Yes, I am.”

“Good,” Labriola said. He grabbed a pen from his shirt pocket, then took her wrist in his iron grip and scrawled a number across her white flesh, the point of the pen jabbing with a hair more than the necessary force, so that she knew the little bite of pain she felt was the old man’s way of making a final point. “And Tony, he ain’t to know nothing about me coming here, talking to you, nothing like that.”

“Okay,” Della whispered. She cautiously drew her wrist from Labriola’s grasp. “I won’t tell anybody.” She felt crushed beneath him somehow, wriggling, Nicky screaming for her, confused that she’d not yet come to him. And yet she knew that she could not rush things with this man, could not show anything but her fear. “I won’t,” she repeated.

“If you do-” he began, then stopped, leaving her to conjure the consequences of crossing him.

“I won’t tell anybody,” Della said again. “Mike. Tony. I won’t tell anybody.”

Labriola stared at her silently, a smoky, hellish darkness in his eyes, so that she knew absolutely that there was nothing to stay his hand, nothing within him or without that could prevent him from committing whatever savageries he imagined.

“So, we’re clear, am I right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Della told him. “We’re clear.”

He turned to the door, then stopped and again faced her. “She tell you anything about why she run off?”

“No,” Della answered quietly.

To her relief, Labriola appeared satisfied.

“Okay,” he said, then opened the door and stepped out onto the small porch. His blue Lincoln Town Car rested at the curb, and Della watched as he trudged toward it, all the world curiously silent during the few seconds it took him to drive away, then abruptly jangling with a harsh and deafening noise, not just Nicky’s insistent squealing, but all the clang and clatter of the world.

She took his hands and placed them in the tray.

“So, things good with you?”

Stark nodded.

Lucia was a brown swollen berry of a woman. Her hair was black but without shine, and her voice bore the cadences of the peasant island from which she’d come. But she had a ready smile, and she did a good job on his nails, and Stark found it refreshing to be touched by someone who wanted nothing from him but a generous tip.

“You got your health, that’s the main thing, no?” Lucia asked.

Stark remembered a line from Neruda, how on certain days the smell of aftershave made him sob. He knew well what the poet meant. On certain days something mournful hung in the air. Everything was draped in black crepe. He could not predict when such a day would come, nor ever fathom why it came. He knew only that on such occasions death seemed even sweeter than usual, and he felt an unmistakable longing to be rid of life’s unseemly detritus, the body’s crude humiliations, the idle patter of the streets, the heavy sense that nothing could be rescued from the stale water in which all things floated briefly and then sank. Each breath seemed empty, and he could find no reason to take it. It simply happened. He breathed. He didn’t will it, or want it. His lungs sucked in air, and this reflexive grasp for life struck him as no less absurd than Lucia’s mindless chatter, or the way her fat fingers massaged his own. It was all part of the same purely mechanistic design, without direction or purpose or will, desperate but not obviously so, the desperation built into the machine, its slimy oil. The hours were unbearable, and so you filled them with whatever you could in the same desperate way the lungs filled with air. That was the design, and Stark thought that one simple stern admonition must be tacked to the wall of every chromosome: Just get through it.

Lucia began to clean beneath the nails with a pointed wooden stick.

“You got pretty hands,” she said. “You got hands like a woman.”

Stark knew that this was not true. His hands, despite the creams and oils, were rough, his veins were raised and faintly blue. His fingers were stubby rather than tapered, and the pink nails were marked with milky-white specks. His father, the mill worker, had had rough, unattractive hands. So had his mother, the gray lady who washed the halls of the building they lived in, and in which she may well have entertained the squat little landlord on those months when she’d fallen behind in the rent.

“You want I should do the toes?” Lucia was blowing gently on his fingers now. “Some men, I do the toes.”

Stark shook his head, drew a twenty from the breast pocket of his jacket, and handed it to Lucia.

“Thank you,” she said happily. “I do good job, no?”

“Excellent, as always,” Stark told her.

On the street he tried to admire the day, the sunlight, the warm spring air. But it continued to bother him, this thing that had begun to trouble him as he sat in Washington Square and was now dragging his mood lower and lower. At the time he’d thought it had something to do with Marisol, but now he understood that it had to do with Mortimer, the new job he’d brought him, the woman he had to find for Mortimer’s friend.