Michael Collins - Silent Scream

She looked away. “No.”

They sat silent. Hal looked around as if he hoped a waiter would appear with a drink. I thought of all the couples I’d seen sitting silent in restaurants, saying nothing, or only a few commonplace words without meaning. Silent because everything had been said long ago, or because they didn’t have the words to say what hadn’t yet been said.

“You could have told me first, said what you wanted,” Hal said.

Her blue eyes were wet. “It wouldn’t have helped.”

“I suppose not,” Hal said.

“I’m thirty, Hal. I have to try to-” She brushed at her eyes. “Something just went wrong. At first… I don’t know, I want things, Hal. You don’t. It all changed.”

“Just like that?”

“No, not just like that.”

He still held her hand, stroked it.

“You stopped biting your nails,” he said.

She took her hand away.

“I didn’t notice,” he said.

“You have your painting, you don’t want much else,” Diana said. “You make a woman feel you wish you didn’t need her.”

“Do I?” he said.

“Wrapped in yourself. You won’t try. When I had doubts, tried to talk about us, you pushed me away as if I had to love our life a hundred percent or I was zero.”

“I’m not rich, successful. He is.”

“You won’t try! Not for me, and not for success! The world isn’t perfect, so you won’t try in it!”

“Are you going to marry him, Diana?”

I watched her. She looked down at her hands, twisted the new diamond ring. She shivered. Was it from doubt, uneasiness, ecstasy, excitement, or all of them combined? Her chance.

“He’s exciting, Hal,” she said, soft and aware that she was hurting him, but unable to stop. “All that power. He’s alive, successful. We… can do things. You and I never did anything. I… he scares me sometimes, a little, but maybe a woman should be a little scared of a man. I want to live, Hal.”

I saw the words hit him like blows. His boyish face was calm, intense-almost too calm. But I guess it hurt.

“You must have lived the last three days,” he said.

She was up. Looked down at him. He was being nasty. Women expect too much of men. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

“When we married, you were different,” she said. “You wanted me then, us together. Maybe we weren’t ourselves then.”

“Myself,” Hal said. “The complete failure.”

“You don’t have to be! You’re a good painter!”

“You have to bolster the egos of men you kick?”

“Your ego doesn’t need any bolstering!”

He glared up at her, seemed to understand her better than I did. To me it all sounded like a contradiction, just words.

“I wasn’t important enough to you, Hal, and too important. Both. You clung to me as if I was your only contact with the world. But that was all I was, a rope to hang onto. If the rope didn’t support you enough, wasn’t perfect, throw it away!”

Hal said, “Don’t go to him, Diana. Stay. I’ll-”

“I have to live for myself, Hal.”

“With a gangster? A cheat and conniver? A dirty-”

Her face was white. Her coat lay on a chair. She got it, walked through the kitchen and out. I heard her footsteps going fast down the stairs. Hal Wood seemed to listen to them.

“Will he marry her, Dan?”

“He says he will,” I said.

“You know him? Personally? What’s he like? I mean-”

“He’s all she says he is, and everything Gazzo and I say he is, too. Racketeer, terrorist and killer. But not with his own hands anymore. He’s not crazy. He won’t hurt her.”

“He just buys murders, orders them? Like a general?”

“Hal,” I said, “don’t fight him. I mean it. If Diana wants what Pappas can give her, you’ve lost her already.”

I wanted to say-forget her, she’s not worth it, she’s not for you. But love doesn’t depend on the nature of the person loved, it depends on the nature of the one who loves. He wanted her because of what he was, it didn’t matter what she was.

“Just let him ride roughshod?”

“That’s the way it is.”

“Are you afraid of him, Dan? Is everyone?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I’d fight him if it’d help. It won’t. It’s not Andy, it’s her. Let her go.”

He nodded. “If it’s what she wants. For her.”

“Good,” I said. “Hal, take a vacation. Go somewhere.”

“You think I’m in danger, Dan?”

“No, I don’t, but you never know. Take the vacation, find an interest. There’s a girl in your office, Emily Green, she likes you. Give her a break. A woman who wants you is better than one who doesn’t. It’s not easy, but try.”

Hal grinned, at least his mouth did. “Maybe I will.”

I left.

Gazzo was waiting for me in his car. He leaned out.

“You get anything?”

“No,” I said. “You going to talk to Mia Morgan?”

“You mean because Sid Meyer wanted to talk to her? She’d only deny meeting him, and for Pappas’s kid I’d need a court paper I can’t get on what I have. You want a ride?”

I got in, and Gazzo told his driver to go to my address. As we drove, I watched the cold city in the night, the snow all but gone now. Gazzo watched me.

“You think Mia Morgan is more than a crazy daughter, Dan?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you look into that?”

“I think I will,” Gazzo said.

He dropped me at my tenement, drove off. I heard the car door open, and saw the short man. Yellow-gloves Charley this time. I saw now that his face was swarthy, with small, neat features like a cat-cruel and arrogant. A strutter, without Pappas’s finesse. Or maybe he was just unsure of his status.

“Come on,” he said.

The black car drove to the East Side and stopped in front of Morgan Crafts. We went up to Mia Morgan’s apartment. The girl stood in the center of all her sleek, bright plastic, her pale-olive face looking younger than usual. The big, dark eyes and full mouth were a study in mixed emotions-uneasiness, an impotent rage, and defiance.

The cause of it was Andy Pappas seated in a red plastic chair. He waved me in.

“Take a seat, Dan.”

Little Max Bagnio was against his usual wall, and Levi Stern sat near Bagnio, watching them all as if in some zoo. My escort, Charley, crossed to the only other person in the room. She was a delicate-boned woman in her late forties, dressed in expensive ladies-luncheon clothes that didn’t suit her. Plump and awkward, she looked like she’d be happier in a kitchen cooking pasta.

“Maybe you never met my wife, too, Dan?” Andy said.

It was an introduction, statement, and slap. He knew Mia had hired me, I should have told him, and his wife was here.

“Mrs. Pappas,” I said.

My voice seemed to startle her. In all the years I’d never met her, and if she had a name, it wasn’t important. Andy’s wife, period. Her colorless face must have been pretty once, like a doll, but it was permanently subdued by some force around her-Andy. He smiled at her, and at me.

“Mia paid you, Dan?”

“She paid me.”

“Smart girl, my Mia. Only twenty-two, runs her own business. The job she hired is over, Dan?”

“Yes,” I said. “She fired me.”

“She got her money’s worth? You did the job she wanted?”

“She fired me before I finished.”

Andy shook his head. “That’s bad business, right? What do you figure she was going to do with what you dug up?”

“I wouldn’t know, Andy.”

“Sure you do. She was going to fix my wagon, right? I think she ought to get her money’s worth. Only save time, Dan, tell what you’ve got to report to my wife straight out.”