Don DeLillo - Underworld

Matt said, "But who kept other gambling interests from moving in? A couple of car dealers couldn't do that, could they? They must have imported real gangsters."

"They didn't have to. The money they paid the police was double coverage money. They paid the police to let them operate. And they also paid them to roust the competition. When competition showed up, the borough detectives or precinct detectives came down on them like a holy terror."

"Gangbusters," Matt said.

"Like gangbusters. Which is the story I started out to tell before I got involved in the fine print. The police making arrests. They even had to arrest the bookies who were paying them off. They got pressure when people complained, upstanding citizens, you know, or straight from City Hall. These were called accommodation arrests. The sergeant would apologize, he would book you at the precinct on Thirtieth Street and then you went to Centre Street, where the lawyer for the Solomons was waiting, and you said, Guilty, judge, and paid a twenty-five-dollar fine and went back to work. And the day you were born," she said to Matt, "your father was arrested twice. Confusion inside the precinct. They arrested him in the morning and when he finally got released he took the subway to the Bronx, where I was in the hospital getting ready to deliver, it was one of those steamy sticky days and he came in the room and mopped my brow and fanned me with the racing form and said, Did you have it yet, and after a while he said he has to see a man, very important, be right back, and he went downtown and got arrested again, different cop, same desk sergeant, I don't know about the judge, and when he got back to the hospital, with the running around and the heat and the subway, he looked worse off than I did but he got no sympathy, you can believe it, from me."

Matt said, "Interesting day."

"It was a dizzy comedy but we had no one to share it with because it was one thing to take bets but not so acceptable to get arrested for it and I've never told this story until now."

Nick watched her carefully, absorbing every gesture and expression. A depth in her eyes that she dared her sons to interpret-the gnaw, the rankling pain that sits inside the good-natured telling. And the voice in its factual carry, vowels extended and bent a bit, a sound out of the old streets, the old demotic song gone to the near suburbs now, and a slight Irish pitch teasing the piece from somewhere deep in childhood.

There was a noise in the street, a customized car speaker bombing the night with music, a car that was all sound, a mobile sound bomb, and Nick glanced sharply at his brother, who shrugged and grinned.

"He wants you to sit on his patio, Mama. Bright stars above. Cactus outlined in the moonlight."

"Imagine me and cactus."

"No noise in the street. They arrest people for noise out there. If your front yard isn't neat and clean, your neighbor's kids won't talk to your kids."

Nick waited for her to speak again. He opened himself to everything inside her, to the past that never stops happening, and the passing minute, and what she feels when she scratches the back of her hand, pulling at the skin, then scratching. He tried to hear the rustle of her life, the fly buzzing in the room of the woman who lives alone.

One of the cats rubbed against his ankle, the orange torn his mother had found in the street. He shook it off and poured coffee all around.

They sat at the table talking in low tones.

Rosemary was in the bedroom and they talked across the dishes and cups and the flick of spilt milk.

"Where do you sleep?"

"I make up the sofa," Matt said. "Where do you sleep?"

"Park Avenue South. The Doral. You drove down?"

"Took the shuttle. Tell me in all seriousness. Do you really want to take her out there?"

"More than ever."

"Itbu have to understand this woman is not afraid. She lives a free life. People know her. They respect her. The neighborhood's still a living thing."

"Lower your voice."

"Lower my voice."

"Did you see the hallways?" Nick said.

"The hallways. These hallways? Which hallways?"

Matt stacked some dishes and took them to the kitchen.

"Listen to me. Stand at the elevator. Look to your left. Then look to your right. What do you see?"

"I don't know What do I see?"

"You see the longest, saddest, scariest, most depressing-that feeling, you know?"

"It's a hallway," Matt said.

"It's that feeling. A nightmare out of some Stalinist-all right, I'm overreacting."

"It's a hallway. Filled as a matter of fact with little kids most of the time."

"Lower your voice."

"Look, it is well within your experience to invent a fantasy of events as you think they transpired or are transpiring. This is not un-up your alley."

Nick could not look at his brother without wanting to pop him a shot across the mouth. Same reason as ever-the father, not the mother. The deep discordance, the old muscling of wills, that ungiv-ing thing in the idea of brothers.

"No one came for him, Nicky. No one got him and took him away. He left because of us basically. He didn't want to be a father. Being a husband was bad enough, what a burden, you know, full of obligations and occasions he couldn't handle. He was a loner, to use the romantic word, only worse than that, clinically self-involved, not out of vanity or stupidity but out of some fear, some inbred perspective, some closeness of perspective that amounted to fear. It made him unable to see other people except as encumbrances, little hazy shapes that interfered with his solitude, his hardness of being. He should have joined the French Foreign Legion when he was twenty. Not that I'm ready to renounce my existence. But speaking honestly and realistically. That's what he should have done."

"You know a lot. How do you know so much?"

"She tells me things. She tells me things she never told you."

"I'm looking at you saying this."

"You're looking at me."

"That's right."

"You're giving me the look."

"That's right, I am."

Matt was at the sink doing dishes now, running the tap at low volume so they could hear each other, and he didn't turn to check his brother's look.

"He had some trouble. Some sharpshooter hit a long shot on him. A big bet at long odds. Jimmy had his own operation by then, independent of the Solomons. I even know the horse's name."

"You know a lot. How come I'm not impressed?"

"It was the final weight, the final pressure, and it pushed him out the door."

"Listen to me. I'm confused here. Help me out. First he leaves because of us. Then he leaves because somebody hits a long shot and he can't pay off."

"Terra Firma. Jimmy hadn't laid off the bet with bookies who could handle those sums. Maybe it was a late bet and he didn't have time to shop it around."

"You know this and I don't?";

"She protects you."

"I am completely fucking unimpressed. Why is that?"

"There was no drama of men pushing him into a car and speeding away. He owed money he couldn't pay. He was a small operator. He paid a buttonmaker ten dollars a week to help figure out his tally. He dealt in small numbers."

"Listen to me. This is not an invitation to violence? When you owe money to someone and can't pay off? In that environment?"

"What environment? You heard her. They didn't need enforcers."

"No, they had cops. But not for this kind of situation."

"He left before a situation could develop. He had one foot out the door for years. You heard her. He left her once before. He was looking for an excuse to make it permanent."

"You know all this. And I don't. And yet I'm remarkably unimpressed. Help me out. Explain this to me."

Matt turned off the tap and looked at his brother, who sat leaning over the table.