Эд Макбейн: ’Til Death

And the tall one, the redheaded one with the white streak in his hair — sangue della maruzza! He was enough to frighten all the bridesmaids in Riverhead. And Tony was sure he had seen a gun under the redhead’s coat when he stooped down to tie his shoe. A big black revolver sticking out of a shoulder holster. All right, it was a good thing for his son to be a cop, but did his friends have to carry weapons to a peaceful Christian wedding?

And then Angela had started. At one-fifteen, exactly one hour and forty-five minutes before the wedding, she had begun to cry as if the world was trying to rape her. Louisa had come running out back, wringing her hands.

“Stevie,” she said, “go up to her. Tell her it’ll be all right, will you? Go. Go to your sister.”

Tony had watched his son go upstairs. That wailing from the upper-story bedroom window had not ceased. Tony sat with his daughter-in-law Teddy — com’é grande, he thought, povera Theodora! — and the three strangers, Mr. Hawes, Mr. Kling, and Miss Maxwell, drinking wine and ready to shoot his wife, strangle his son, disown his daughter, and call off the whole damn wedding!

He fumed and fretted until Teddy patted his hand. And then he smiled at her, and nodded his head, and rested his hands on his paunch and hoped — please, dear God! — that everything would turn out all right and that somehow he, Antonio Carella, would survive the day.

Standing in the corridor outside Angela’s bedroom, Carella could hear his sister sobbing beyond the door. He knocked gently and then waited.

“Who is it?” Angela said, her voice breaking.

“Me. Steve.”

“What do you want?”

“Come on, Slip, open up.”

“Go away, Steve.”

“You can’t chase me away. I’m a police officer investigating a disturbance of the peace.” He wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he heard his sister stifle a laugh on the other side of the door. “Slip?” he said.

“What?”

“Do I have to kick it in?”

“Oh, wait a minute,” Angela said. He heard footsteps approaching the door. The bolt was slipped, but Angela did not open the door for him. He heard her footsteps retreating and then the bedsprings creaking as she hurled herself down. He eased the door open and entered the room. Angela was lying full length on the bed, her face buried in the pillow. She wore a full white slip and her brown hair tumbled to her shoulders in a riot of disarray. Her slip had pulled back to reveal a blue garter taut around her nylon.

“Pull down your dress,” Carella said. “Your behind is showing.”

“It’s not a dress,” Angela said poutingly. “It’s a slip. And who asked you to look?” but she pulled it down over her leg instantly.

Carella sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s the trouble?”

“There’s no trouble.” She paused. “There’s no trouble at all.” And then she sat up suddenly, turning her brown eyes toward her brother, surprisingly Oriental eyes in a high-cheekboned face, the face a refinement of Carella’s, pretty with an exotic tint that spoke of Arabian visits to the island of Sicily in the far distant past. “I don’t want to marry him,” she said. She paused. “That’s the trouble.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t love him.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Carella said.

“I don’t like swearing, Steve. You know that. I never could stand swearing, even when we were kids. You used to swear on purpose, just to annoy me. That, and calling me ‘Slip.’”

“You started the ‘slip’ business,” Carella said.

“I did not,” Angela told him. “You did. Because you were mean and rotten.”

“I was telling you the truth,” Carella said.

“It’s not nice to tell a thirteen-year-old girl that she’s not really a girl because she still wears cotton slips.”

“I was helping you on the road to maturity. You asked Mama to buy you some nylon slips after that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and she refused.”

“It was in the right direction.”

“You gave me an inferiority complex.”

“I gave you an insight into the mysterious ways of womanhood.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Angela said, and Carella laughed aloud. “It’s not funny. I’m not going to marry him. I don’t like anything about him. He’s a worse boor than you are. And he swears more. And besides...” She stopped. “Stevie, I’m afraid. Stevie, I don’t know what to do. I’m terrified.”

“Come on,” he said, “come on,” and he took his sister into his arms and stroked her hair and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Steve, he’s killed people, do you know that?”

“So have I.”

“I know, but... we’re going to be alone tonight in... in one of the biggest hotels in the world... right in this city... and I don’t even know the man I’m about to marry. How can I allow him to... to...”

“Did you talk to Mama, Slip?”

“Yes, I talked to Mama.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said, ‘To love is to fear nothing.’ I’m translating loosely from the Italian.”

“She’s right.”

“I know, but... I’m not sure I love him.”

“I felt the same way on my wedding day.”

“You didn’t have all this church hullabaloo.”

“I know. But there was a reception. It was just as nerve-wracking.”

“Steve... do you remember one night... I was sixteen, I think. You’d only been a cop a short time. Do you remember? I’d just come home from a date, and I was sitting in this room having some milk before I went to sleep. You must have had the four-to-midnight shift because it was pretty late at night, and you were just coming in. You stopped in here and had milk with me. Do you remember?”

“Yes. I remember.”

“Old Birnbaum’s light was burning across the way. We could see it through the window there.”

He looked across at the window and through it over the long expanse of his father’s back yard to the gabled house belonging to Joseph Birnbaum, his father’s closest friend and neighbor for forty years. He could remember that spring night clearly, the sound of insects in the back yard, the single light burning in Birnbaum’s attic room, the thin yellow crescent of a moon hanging listlessly over the sharply slanting roof of the house.

“I told you what had happened to me that night,” Angela said. “About... about the boy I’d dated and... what he’d tried to do.”

“Yes, I remember”

“I never told Mama about that,” Angela said. “You were the only one I ever told. And I asked you if this... happened all the time, if this was what I could expect from boys I dated. I wanted to know what to do, how I should behave. Do you remember what you told me?”

“Yes,” Carella said.

“You said I should do whatever I felt was right. You said I would know what was right.” She paused. “Steve... I’ve never...”

“Honey, shall I get Mama?”

“No, I want to talk to you. Steve, I don’t know what to do tonight. I know that’s awfully silly, I’m twenty-three years old, I should know what to do, but I don’t, and I’m terrified he won’t love me any more, he’ll be disappointed, he’ll—”

“Shhh, shhh,” he said. “Come on now. What do you want?”

“I want you to tell me.”

He looked into her eyes and he took her hands and said, “I can’t do that, Slip.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not a baby in cotton slips any more, and you’re not a little girl who’s suddenly puzzled by her first kiss. You’re a woman, Angela. And there isn’t a man alive who can give a woman instructions about love. I don’t think you’ll need them, honey. I really don’t think you’ll need them.”