At Home in the Dark Read online

  “What about your bosses?”

  “Fuck ’em.”

  She looked at him, weighing it. “Why should I trust you?”

  “You got the guns. What do I have?”

  “A lot of balls, rip off your own people that way.”

  “Money’s money.”

  “Half is too much for just a ride.”

  “A ride and a lie. You held a gun on me, was nothing I could do. I let you out somewhere up the road, don’t know where you went. Part of it’s true, right?”

  “You think they’ll believe that?”

  “They’ll have to, won’t they?”

  “Or I could just shoot you and take your ride. Not give you anything.”

  “You could do that. But I don’t think you will.”

  In the console compartment, a cellphone began to buzz.

  “They’re looking for me already,” he said. “Soon they’re gonna know what happened.”

  He was right. It would only be a matter of time before someone found them.

  “Put it in Park,” she said.

  He did, turned to her. “What do you say?”

  “Get out.”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Out.”

  He opened the door, stepped down. With the Glock still on him, she climbed over the console and into the drivers seat.

  “They’ll never stop looking for you,” he said. “And when they find you . . . You’ll be begging them to kill you. But first you’ll give up the money. And then you’ll have nothing, puta. Not even your life.”

  She thought about Adler and Martinez and Lopez. The cab driver. Everything she’d been through tonight.

  “It’ll be bad for you,” he said. “And it’ll go on for a long time.”

  “I believe you,” she said, and shot him.

  • • •

  She left the Tahoe on a dark street in Bay Ridge, two blocks from the Verrazano, keys still in the ignition. She walked down to the bayfront, squeezed through a hole in a chain-link fence, reached the cracked seawall. She tossed the two guns out into the water. The sky to the east had lightened to a pale blue.

  She walked until she found a subway station, took the R train into Manhattan. Three hours later, she was home.

  • • •

  “Slow down up here,” she said. “But don’t stop.”

  She powered the Towncar’s rear window halfway down. The tire shop was ahead on the right. More people around now, more traffic, but a lot of the storefronts were still dark, riot gates in place, businesses that were gone for good.

  Luis, the driver, looked at her in the rearview. “This isn’t a good area. Even in the daytime. I know. I used to live here.”

  “Go around the block again.”

  She looked at the shop’s recessed entrance as they passed. No one inside she could see, the door still closed.

  She’d waited two days to come back, taken the train up from home. At Penn Station in Manhattan, she’d called a car service from a burner cell, used a fake name.

  They circled the block, came back around.

  “Pull up here,” she said.

  He steered the Towncar to the curb. She looked at the shop door, the darkness beyond it, wondered what waited for her there.

  Three possibilities. The money was still here, hadn’t been found. Or the Dominicans had searched the building and roof, taken it. Or they were there in the tire shop now, or somewhere close by, watching, waiting for someone to come back.

  The Towncar stuck out here. It would look wrong to have it standing outside the shop too long.

  “Wait five minutes,” she said. “Then come back to get me.” She opened her door.

  “Maybe you should tell me what this is all about.”

  “Five minutes,” she said. “That’s all it will take. One way or the other.”

  She shut the door behind her. Her gloved right hand went to the .32 Beretta Tomcat in the pocket of her leather car coat. She limped into the doorway of the tire shop. Behind her, the Towncar pulled back into traffic.

  She tried the knob. It was still unlocked. Inside, she eased the door shut behind her, drew the Tomcat.

  The office was as she’d left it. In the bay, a shaft of light came through the roof hatch, lit dust motes. She went to the ladder, listened. No voices, no footsteps.

  Up the ladder to the roof. It was empty. To the west, an airliner traced a white line across the sky.

  She made her way to the air conditioning unit, pulled back the flashing, and there was the gear bag. She knelt, unzipped it. The money was inside, along with Martinez’s gun, and the empty magazine. Her mask. Everything there.

  She zipped the bag back up, slung it over her shoulder, stuck the Tomcat in her belt, climbed down the ladder.

  Back in the office, she stood just inside the door, watched the street, the cars going by, feeling exposed. She glanced at her watch. Five minutes since Luis had dropped her off.

  A dark SUV with smoked windows pulled up outside. She backed farther into the office shadows, took out the Tomcat. The SUV stayed there. She waited for someone to get out, come inside. She raised the gun.

  Horns blew. The SUV drove on. Two minutes later, the Towncar slid to the curb.

  Deep breath. She put the gun away, opened the door. The front passenger window came down. Luis leaned over. “Sorry. Traffic. Everything okay?”

  She went out quickly, ignoring the pain in her ankle. There was no sign of the SUV. She opened the rear door of the Towncar, tossed in the gear bag, climbed in after it, and pulled the door shut.

  She met his eyes in the rearview.

  “Just something that belonged to me,” she said. “Something I had to leave behind.”

  “And now?”

  “Let’s go back to Penn.”

  He waited for a break in traffic, then made a U-turn across both lanes, headed back the way they’d come. She looked out the rear window. No SUV, no one following them.

  They passed the all-night restaurant, crowded now, a line at the counter. She’d ask Rathka, her lawyer, to find out the cab driver’s name, if he had family. If so, she’d figure out a way to get part of the money to them. It was all she could do, but it wasn’t enough. No amount would ever be enough.

  “Luis, do me a favor?”

  “Sure. What?”

  She took four hundreds from her pocket, leaned over the seat and held them out. “Tell your dispatcher when you got the call to pick me up, there was no one there.”

  He looked at the bills.

  “You never brought me out here. You never saw me at all,” she said. “Can you deal with that?”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Can you?”

  He hesitated. “I think so.”

  “Then that’s good for both of us. Take it.”

  He did.

  She sat back, looked out the window at the streets passing by, kept one hand on the gear bag.

  “Glad you didn’t hang around too long back there,” he said. “That’s a rough neighborhood.”

  “I know,” she said.

  The Cucuzza Curse

  Thomas Pluck

  The flames danced in Vito Ferro’s rheumy eyes as the intense heat blistered the skin black. The brick beehive of the Neapolitan pizza oven at full fire was as hot as a crematorium, and cooked a pie to perfection in under seven minutes. This gave the crust a crispness on the teeth but left chew in the dough, and melted the sliced rounds of bone-white mozzarella without boiling the bright acidity out of the tomato sauce, like a steel oven would.

  “Looks about done, right Uncle Veet?” His grandnephew Peter worked runnels into his soft knuckles with his thumbs, kneading invisible worry beads.

  Peter was smart, a college boy—unlike Vito’s stronzo sons—but he chattered when outside of his element.

  Vito snapped callused fingers, and Peter slid the wooden paddle, the pizza peel, beneath the pie and brought it to the work counter, where he cut it into une
ven eighths with jerky, hesitant thrusts of the roller.

  Vito studied the pie solemnly.

  His family proudly called themselves Catholics, but their true religion was food. Pizza, in particular. Vito had made a covenant with the god of the oven paid for in toil. In the oven he had built with his own hands, a transfiguration occurred, turning a little flour and water topped with tomato sauce and cheese into a meal that made customers line down the block for hours, and his family lived like barons had in the old country.

  Vito slapped Peter on the shoulder. “Bene. Mangia.”

  The kid pulled off a slice and bit into it with pride. “It’s good!”

  Vito remembered when he’d made his first pie back in Napoli, and felt a little twinge in his chest. He took a slice and noted the droop of the the triangle. The center was the hardest to get right. Too often they were soft and watery. He closed his eyes and chewed slow.

  The burning began as a small pill of pain at the back of his throat, then blossomed into fiery agony, as if he’d eaten a spoonful of hot coals from the oven. He ran for the galvanized sink and drank from the faucet like a dog to quench the grease fire in his mouth. Sweat ran down his face and he collapsed to the floor.

  • • •

  He woke to Peter fanning him with an apron. When he could talk without agony, he dialed the phone. Hoping he would get no answer. Vito didn’t know what frightened him more—the curse or Aldo Quattrocchi, the mafiosi who’d lent him thirty thousand dollars to open the restaurant, even though he was of an age where he shouldn’t buy green bananas.

  • • •

  “Calm down,” The voice chilled his ear like he’d opened the deep freeze. “I’ll send the Gagootza.”

  Stately, tanned Joey Cucuzza, resplendent in a tailored slate suit, pink shirt with its collar open to frame a red Italian horn pendant shaped like a dog dick, listened while the ancient pizza-man beseeched him.

  Vito scratched his sunken, gray-haired chest through a sweat-soaked white undershirt.

  “You burnt your tongue on a slice of pizza?” Joey fixed things for Aldo Quattrocchi, a captain in the broken family of northern Jersey crime. He had come directly from his no-work job at Port Newark, where he read the newspapers and day-traded when he wasn’t at the gym, out to lunch with the dock boss, or enjoying a nooner in the apartment he kept in Ironbound.

  Or visiting Aldo’s Newark subjects, who expected protection for their payments of street tax.

  “I explain.” Vito took a grayed rag from the pocket of his chinos and mopped his face.

  Vito Ferro was a northern New Jersey institution, the first to make Neapolitan style pies, and had paid street tax on his first shop in Hoboken long before Joey and Aldo were born. Aldo could be sentimental when he wasn’t telling you to tack someone’s fingertips to a table with finishing nails.

  He wouldn’t send Joey for that kind of job. They had apes for that. Joey was here because he knew people, and he knew people. Now touching forty, he had come up as a runner for an uncle who ran gay bars for the Jewish mob in Manhattan. He had a reputation as a reasonable if foppish good earner with an even temper, respected by men of violence and friendly enough to be a face with the citizens.

  “Got any coffee?” Joey nodded toward the shiny pipeworks of the espresso machine.

  “It’s not hooked up yet.” The nephew swallowed spit. College boy had locks of brown curls like a Greek shepherd, no ring, and a nice physique. Eyebrows tweezed, with intelligent eyes above a slack jaw. Hands too soft for labor.

  Joey wondered how the kid wound up here.

  “How exactly are you spending Mister Quattrocchi’s money?” They’d had the thirty grand for six weeks. You paid your first month on receipt, but they would be late for the next unless business picked up soon.

  “I had the oven brought brick by brick from Napoli,” Peter said. “It’s the same one Uncle Veet used in his first pizzeria. It took me a week to find the place. They don’t speak the Italian I learned in school.”

  Vito winced and sipped milk like he was nursing an ulcer.

  Joey had visited Napoli to broker a deal with the Camorra for containers half-filled with fake Gucci handbags and half with young Slovenian women, and the mangled street Italian he’d learned growing up served him well. He’d also picked up a snobbery for classic Neapolitan pizza, and after Vito retired, no one else came close. His sons were clowns in comparison.

  “They put up a wall around the oven, turned the place into some Irish pub.”

  “My sons, they do this,” Vito sneered. “I retire, give them my business, and they do this to me. Disgraciata!” He drew into himself with shame, then curled back two fingers of his right hand and spat between the horns of pointer and pinky finger. “It is the mal occhio.”

  The evil eye.

  Joey touched the cornuto, the Italian horn at his throat.

  His family was only three generations from the old country, where people were still killed over such things.

  “I tell Aldo that, and he’s gonna say ‘Old Vito is pazzo,’ and you know what they do to mad dogs, Mister Vito.”

  Vito spread the dollop of saliva into the black and white tiles with the sole of his black loafer. “I bite into the pizza from that oven, it burns me. Tell him, Pietro.”

  Peter shrugged helplessly. “He looked like he was dying, Mister Cucuzza.”

  Joey buffed manicured nails on his slacks. “Why don’t you make me a pie while you tell me the history of the world part one.”

  Vito took a risen ball of dough from a tray in the refrigerator. The short old man was bent and his skin was crepe paper, but his forearms flexed as he tossed the dough. He made quick work of it, then sat to tell the story in the seven minutes of baking.

  He wrung his apron in his hands. Embarrassed and afraid, sure of his fate.

  Joey listened to the story, even though he’d read it in the newspaper. One son had sued the other over use of the name Original Vito’s Neapolitan Pizza. A reality show was pitched. It became a joke. Vito had enough, coming out of retirement to save his good name.

  Except he didn’t have any money.

  Like many who came over, Vito had no papers, never applied for a social security number. Everything legit was in his wife’s name, and when she succumbed to cancer, it went to their sons, Sal and Nunzio. When he retired, his boys took everything but the house he lived in, left him squeaking by on his wife’s social security check. No more new Cadillacs every year for Vito.

  “Scumbari,” the old man said.

  So he went to Aldo, who like most guys his age from Hoboken, loved Frank Sinatra, Fiore’s mozzarella, and Vito Ferro’s Neapolitan pizza.

  Vito slid out the pie and cut it with quick swipes of the roller.

  Joey folded a slice and took a bite. No fires of hell. Only fresh marinara, the tart milky taste of Fiore’s handmade mozzarella cheese, and Vito’s perfect crust. He grunted in appreciation.

  “Have one, Mister Vito.”

  Vito looked at the pie as if it were a rattlesnake coiled on the wooden pizza peel. “No, Giuseppe. I have the mal occhio on me. And it comes from my own sons.” He gripped his chest to remove the invisible knife from his heart.

  Protection was protection. “We’ll help you, Mister Vito.”

  • • •

  In the air conditioned leather confines of his red Alfa Romeo sedan, Joey called his mother.

  “Joseph.” Kitchen sounds and Animal Planet in the background. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  He’d missed two Sundays in a row. She was probably getting ready to put a mal occhio on him. “Ma. I told you, the port’s open Sundays this month.”

  It was, but Joey had been in Provincetown, eating littleneck clams and working on his tan.

  “You could come Wednesdays. Your uncle comes over for pasta.”

  They were both at the age where old stories played on repeat. Once a week more than enough. “Hey Ma, you remember the crier at great-grandpa Nick’s funeral?
Witch Nose.”

  His great-grandfather had raised goats. All Joey remembered besides the funeral was that he both looked and smelled like a billy goat, and from the family gossip, he was hornier than one.

  “Angelina. She always liked you.”

  “She still crying, or did she shuffle off to Buffalo?” Their family euphemism for death.

  “No one uses criers any more.”

  True. They’d hired them for her grandfather because he’d been a nasty old prick who gelded billy goats with knife and a pair of pliers, and beat his sons for growing bigger than him.

  The criers had been unnecessary. All his mistresses showed up, a half dozen of the heftiest Italian widows of Nutley, crying like six operas going on at once. His mother had been mortified.

  “She made the best pignoli until she got the arthritis. She’s still on the old street. Next to where Raffiola lived.” Old person directions. He knew the house.

  “You got her number?”

  “No, but where’s she gonna go? She’s all alone. Like how I’m gonna be when a crane falls on you.”

  “Thanks, Ma. I’ll be there Sunday. Unless a crane falls on me.”

  “Don’t talk like that.” She clucked her tongue. He could see her make the sign of the cross.

  • • •

  Joey’s old neighborhood of Avondale had been handed down by the Italians to the next generation of immigrants. The two-story, green or white siding homes were so close together that you could climb out one window into your neighbor’s for surreptitious infidelity. After his old man copped a croak, his mother sold the creaky hand-built house and bought a condo.

  Instead of Bon Jovi blaring from the stereo of an IROC Camaro, “Despacito” warbled from an open window, but little else had changed. The men were away at work, the kids were in school, and the women worked side hustles in the kitchens, watched toddlers, ran a sewing machine. He parked on the sidewalk in front of a house with ancient grapevines strangling a trellis over the backyard.

  The wooden front door was painted shut and dead-bolted. It had probably never been opened except to move in furniture generations ago. The skinny driveway held a lemon-colored K-car on four flat tires, cardboard boxes stuffed to the windows. Behind it, three cracked concrete steps with a railing made of lead plumbing pipe led to a storm door that left white powder on his knuckles when he rapped on it. He heard a voice, then steps.