The Greyhound

What we stole was a greyhound. Her name was Coco and she belonged to Rocco Giaccalone, president of the local chapter of the women's garment union. Giaccalone was a dime-store mafioso, a fat old man who wore sweaty suits and sharp-toed shoes and who supposedly once snipped off the thumbs of a driver who'd stolen a few cartons of cigarettes from one of his trucks.

That story about the thumbs was the first thing my roommate, Evan, and I learned when we moved to the North End of Boston. The second thing we learned was that everyone hated us. We couldn't leave because we'd signed a one-year lease ("Old World charm," the ad said), and so there we were, two pallid young college grads trapped in the land of the swarthy people.

Giaccalone's racing dog was as skinny as a runway model, with a face like Sophia Loren's and eyes like big saucers of milk, and when she walked down Hanover Street, I swear those foolish guineas would stand aside and start to whisper. Coco had been a big champion at Seabrook and Wonderland. I won $90 on her once, before Giaccalone took her in payment of a gambling debt and made her sit by his table in his Caffe Tripoli like a slave begging bits of pastry.

"It's fucking disgusting," I said, watching Coco snap a piece of chocolate-covered pizzelli from Giaccalone's hand, which glittered with gold rings the size of walnuts. "A dog like that, a racing dog--you can't keep it as a pet."

"What," Evan said, "they should build it a shrine?"

Evan is a software programmer, like me, and like me he is not a geek. He reads Freud and Campbell and cyberpunk novels, and once, at a party, I saw him drive an earnest, hairy-legged Cambridge girl to tears by insisting that he no longer believed in anything. The next morning I walked into the living room and found her sitting on the couch, wearing Evan's Star Trek T-shirt and drinking a cup of coffee.

"I won ninety dollars on that dog once," I told Evan.

"You thought I forgot since the last time you told me?"

I called for our bill and, sure enough, the fucker tried to cheat us; he'd charged us four dollars instead of three.

"Amigo," I said.

"That's Spanish," Evan said.

"Whatever. Hey. Waiter."

He pretended he didn't speak English and insisted we pay four bucks. I tried to make myself clear: "No fucking way," I said.

University of Michigan

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Meanwhile, Giaccalone had turned in his chair and was taking an interest. The waiter ran back and whispered to him, and then the fat bastard started calling us faggots and had his nephew Tony throw us out.

We went to the water and got wasted on fog cutters. When we got back, every parking space in the North End was taken, so I moved the barrels out of the space reserved for Giaccalone's Fleetwood and put my Toyota there.

"Fuck him," I said. "I live here, too."

"I love it when you get all drunk and Catholic and indignant," Evan said.

We staggered up the four flights to our apartment and crashed. In the morning, when I stepped outside to get the newspaper, I found the Corolla slumped on the pavement with all its tires slashed.

•

Giaccalone, being the fat prick that he was, said he didn't know anything about any tires on any faggot's car. The waiters stood behind the counter washing dishes. The old guineas in back looked up from their game of dominoes, then kept playing.

"So nobody here saw anyone near my car," I said.

"Nobody here saw nothing," Giaccalone said.

•

The desk cop at the police station--whose name was Incorpora, which is, of course, Italian--gave me a report to fill out and said there was nothing they could do. I asked why they couldn't look around a little, maybe pressure an informer. "What do you think this is," he said, "Starsky and Hutch?"

That afternoon, when a crew from the garage came to replace the tires, a crowd gathered on the sidewalk, and Mrs. Ronsavelli, our neighbor from across the hall, clucked her tongue and shook her head and whispered to the other old ladies in Sicilian.

"What could you possibly have been thinking?" said Maria Colon, the Puer to Rican girl (continued on page 165)The Greyhound(continued from page 128) who worked in the laundry on the first floor of our building.

I wanted to tell her that in any other city, in any other place, this would not have happened. Nowhere else in America, I wanted to say, would a greasy, shit-filled crespelli like Rocco Giaccalone be allowed to tyrannize a neighborhood. But it was a hot day, I was still woozy from the fog cutters and there was no use making speeches.

"It was late," I told her. "I was tired."

"And drunk, too, probably." She smiled and pulled her curly brown hair away from her face. "You Irish, you shouldn't drink."

Maria was wearing a pair of cutoffs. The puffy white crescents of her ass were peeking out beneath the fringe. I thought again about asking her out. She worked for the guy who owned our building, and every once in a while she'd sneak up to our place for a cup of tea. One time. I'd made plans to have dinner with her, but then I found out she had a daughter, so I canceled. Told her I had the flu. But now, with my car up on jacks and my luck running off in a dozen crazy directions, I saw in Maria the promise of a sane life. I saw Sunday dinners and afternoon screwing, a little bedroom with floral wallpaper and a crucifix hanging over the door. I pulled Evan over beside the tow truck and asked him if he thought she'd give me another chance. "Give me some advice," I said.

Evan adjusted his glasses and eyed the crowd. "Move your car," he said.

•

For days 1 paced back and forth between the kitchen and living room, cooking up schemes for revenge. The good plans, like smashing the windows in Giaccalone's Fleetwood, were too dangerous. The safe ones, like waking him with phone calls in the middle of the night, were so silly that to carry them out would only humiliate me further.

And then, on Friday night, while we were out on the fire escape with a bottle of White Label, we saw a dog wandering down Hanover Street, poking her nose into the trash bags on the sidewalk.

"Is that Coco?" I said.

"No," Evan said, "it's the world's tallest rat."

"Fucking Giaccalone. The guy should be shot. A dog like that, out eating garbage."

"Someone should give her a good home," Evan said. I smiled at him and he smiled at me, and before we knew it, we'd staggered downstairs and opened the door. Then Coco was in our apartment, wolfing a piece of New York strip that we diced up and placed in a bowl for her. She darted around the apartment, sniffing at the furniture. Then, without so much as a whimper, she curled up in an armchair and fell asleep.

I balanced myself on the arm of the chair and stroked her neck. "The great Coco," I said.

Evan lay on the couch. "The great Coco," he muttered.

"Did I tell you I once won ninety dollars on this dog?"

He began to snore.

I lay on my bed in my shorts. "Ninety dollars."

Next morning, as ever, the white cups gleamed in their racks behind the counter at Caffe Tripoli, the pastries lay in rows in the cases and the air had that wonderful, bitter taste of espresso.

But anyone could see that something terrible had happened to Giaccalone. There were dark circles around his eyes. His hair had not been combed. He was chain-smoking. He ignored his sweet roll and coffee. He picked up the paper and put it down, then sat wringing his hands and looking out the window like a zombie.

Tony ran in and whispered into his uncle's ear. The old man said something. Tony shook his head. The old man cuffed him and said, "Then try again," and Tony ran out.

I held the Globe up in front of my face. "This is better than sex," I said.

"I can't remember what sex feels like," Evan said.

"Like your hand, only warmer. You think he suspects us?"

"This guy?" Evan stirred sugar into his cappuccino. "This guy couldn't suspect his way out of a broom closet."

We took a cannoli home for Coco. She met us at the door, wagging her stumpy tail. "Look, she actually likes this fucking dump," Evan said.

She had finished the bacon and eggs that I'd put out for her, and there was a fresh loaf of dog crap on the newspaper under the kitchen table. I rolled up the paper, tossed it into the trash and set out a new sheet.

Evan bent over. "Wait a minute--my mother's soup bowl? A dog is eating out of my mother's china?"

"Relax. A dog's mouth is way cleaner than a human's. Everybody knows that."

"I don't know that." He picked up the bowl and put it into the sink.

There was a knock at the door. I looked out the peephole. Mrs. Ronsavelli was in the hallway, craning her neck up at me. "Christ." I said, "it's the Bride of Frankenstein again."

"Has she got Gus with her?"

"No," I said.

Gus, the neighborhood plumber, visited the Bride two or three times a week. He carried his toolbox as if he had come to fix something, and in a way, I guess he had because he always came out after an hour or so with his hair messed up and a spring in his step.

"What the fuck does she want?" Evan said.

"What, I'm a mind reader? Get the dog out of here."

She knocked again.

I said. "Just a minute."

"It's Mrs. Ronsavelli. I need to talk to you."

"OK," I said. "Just a minute."

Evan took Coco into his room. "Ask her if she's wearing any underwear." he said.

The Bride spidered into the room. "You boys were playing that music again last night. I asked you not to play that music."

"That's a nice dress, Mrs. Ronsavelli."

She clicked her tongue against her teeth, then spied the newspaper on the floor. "You have a pet?"

"Our pipes leak. Maybe you could send Gus over next time he's here."

She scowled. "There are no pets here. They bring fleas."

"We don't have a pet."

"You've heard about Mr. Giaccalone's dog?"

I shook my head. "You mean Coco?"

"Gone." The old lady nodded.

"The people from the race track took her?"

She peered up at me through her thick glasses, which magnified her eyes and made her look like a creature from outer, space. "Where is your roommate?"

"Doing errands. I was just running out myself."

I opened the door. She began to step out, then stopped and wagged her finger. "Pets bring Heas," she said.

The original plan was to hold Coco hostage for the weekend, just long enough to put old Giaccalone into the cardiac unit at Mass General. But on Sunday morning I opened the Globe and found he'd placed an ad offering a $5000 reward for the return of his dog.

"Well, folks," I said, "it's a whole new ball game."

Evan, of course, had to pretend that he had morals. It's a Jewish thing. King Solomon and all that crap. Catholics, we just swing away, like Wade Boggs with a three-and-two count, and when the sinning's done, we go to confession and have our souls wiped clean.

"I don't know," he said. "I mean, it's one thing to pull a hack, but this--this would be stealing."

I reminded him that I had gone along with his idea to put the Jerusalem B virus in the sales department's computers and that I'd shared the blame with him when he couldn't clear it from the server. "You owe me," I said. "Besides, the fusker ruined my car. He owes me for those tires."

"What if they catch us? They'll cut off our fucking thumbs. How do you type without thumbs?"

"You tap the space bar with your stump."

In the end he came around, as I knew he would. He wanted to do it as much as I did. Who wouldn't? The clincher was when I reminded him that his $3200 Visa balance was going to cost him $576 in interest alone this year. "You pay it off. you can start all over again." I said.

"OK. OK. I'm in." he said. Now that we were partners he was all excited. "The neighborhood's talking about it," he said. "They've got posters up everywhere and they've got all the little kids out hunting around. It's fucking crazy. By the way, I saw Maria."

"Did she say anything about me?"

"She said you're a fag and you wear your pants too high."

"Blow me."

"I'm off baby food."

We rented post-office boxes in Andover, Newburyport and Boston, all under false names, and arranged to have the mail to the Boston box forwarded to Andover, and the mail to Andover forwarded to Newburyport. This was my plan. "Clean, simple, elegant," I said.

Evan smirked. "Childish, low-tech, thoroughly unworkable."

"Hey," I said, "we're not dealing with rocket scientists here."

But when we called Giaccalone's reward hotline and Evan said, in his Squeaky the Clown falsetto, that we wanted the money mailed to us, the guy laughed. "It's those fucking kids again," he said. "Hey. mail this, motherfucker." Then he hung up.

"Look," Evan said, "why don't we just take the dog down there, tell them we found her and collect the money?"

"Golly, Evan, why don't we jump in front of trucks on 1-93? Why don't we wander around Roxbury at night? They won't pay us--they'll fucking kill us."

He lay down on the couch and adjusted his glasses, which he'd repaired with black electrical tape so that they made him look like someone who'd escaped from an asylum. This was appropriate, since outside our little hostage den the city was going crazy.

On Salem, on Prince Street, on the door of St. Anthony's Social Club--the whole North End was papered with Coco posters, and up on Bunker Hill, little packs of children spent their evenings running through the backyards calling for Coco. Reward posters filled the grocery store windows; the ushers at St. Stephen's handed them out at Mass, stapled to the parish bulletin. At night, Gus snuck down the alley behind our building, calling to the dog, then ran up the back stairs and gave the Bride the high hard one.

On Wednesday Giaccalone raised the reward to $10,000, and the Herald ran a story on the front page with a picture of the old crook looking distraught and holding a framed photograph of Coco. The headline read, Lost Dog Brings $10,000 Reward: "She's Like my Child." Café Owner Says.

"Café owner? That's like calling Charles Manson a youth-club director," I said.

"I didn't know he owned the café," Evan said.

"Christ only knows what he owns." I tossed the paper onto the coffee table. "Anyway, ten thousand bucks. I feel like goddamn Julius Rosenberg."

"What?"

"You know, with the Lindbergh baby. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg."

"The Rosenbergs didn't steal the Lindbergh baby."

"Well, that's what you say. But from what I've read, there was proof."

"The Rosenbergs were convicted of spying."

"What?"

"It was a different case. The Lindbergh baby was taken by someone else."

"Well, whatever." I picked up the paper. "That's what I feel like."

"You're going to feel like Jimmy Hoffa if we wait much longer."

Coco was not just a dog, she was the über-pet, and I hated the fact that we had to keep her cooped up, because she had way too much dignity for that. Take the TV remote. She knew that when I watched TV, I didn't play with her, so she used to hide the remote. Only after I'd played with her for a while would she lead me to it. I had nine credits toward a master's degree and this dog was teaching me tricks. And then, as if to insult me, right in the middle of playing she'd drop into an armchair and fall asleep, and I'd be standing there with a chew toy in my hand, feeling like a fool.

She'd been spoiled. When we brought her bones from the butcher or toys from the pet store at the mall, or when we covered her armchair with a comforter or gave her one of my sneakers to chew--never, not once, did she show any appreciation. She used our gifts and played our fetch game and let us pet her, but she kept us at a distance. I was never sure whether she loved us or despised us.

"She reminds me of a girl I went out with in college," Evan said. "Beth Heidelman from Shaker Heights. Total JAP."

"Be serious," I said. "You went out with a girl in college?"

Like fools, we competed for Coco's affection. We fed her steak at night, bacon and eggs in the morning, and at lunch we took turns driving home to feed her hamburger and give her fresh water. I mean, it was sick. A lot of times I'd stop on the way and pick up a cannoli, just so I could stand there, enraptured, and watch as she snapped up the chunks of ricotta cheese with her long, muscled tongue.

At night, when we got home, she met us at the door. We started calling her the Wife. She watched movies on the VCR with us, she hid behind the armchair and peeked out, and if she slept in Evan's room, I felt--well, I felt jealous.

We worked at a place called lonic Software, developing (I use the term loosely) a groupware program called Nectar. The project was two years past deadline, the fake-tan assholes in marketing were screaming for code and we were nowhere near done. The thing was crawling with bugs; every time we fixed one, we created two. It was insane. We'd long ago decided that Nectar would never actually work and that we were simply biding time until marketing caught on and fired us. "Who gives a shit about group ware, anyway?" Evan used to say. "I mean, why do these people want to work in groups in the first place?"

Now, with a dog held hostage in our apartment and the Mob ready to drill us new assholes, neither of us could concentrate long enough to even look for bugs in Nectar, let alone fix them. Evan spent his days going for coffee and hovering around the girls in the sales department. I played video games, and in the evening I found excuses to visit Maria at the laundry.

"We've got a pool going." she said. "Pick the day that Coco comes back and you win the money."

"What if she doesn't come back?"

"We give the money to the church. We're selling Coco T-shirts, too." She held up a shirt with a picture of Coco and the words Have You Seen Me? silk-screened on the front. "Blue or white. Ten dollars. You want one?"

I bought two--white, extra large--and took them upstairs and showed them to Evan. "This whole fucking neighborhood is out of its mind," I said.

He was in his bedroom at his computer, trading e-mail on one of the X-rated bulletin boards. Coco was asleep on his bed, muzzled and leashed to the bedpost.

"Look at this shit," he said.

I leaned over and read the semicoherent ravings of some fool talking about his hard-on to a woman named Gloria and following her orders to put an ice cube up his ass.

"Who are these sick fucks?" I asked.

"The guy is an account executive in New York."

"What about Gloria?"

"C'est moi."

"What?"

A line appeared on the screen: What Should i do Next?, it read.

Evan typed: Take a Paper Clip and Clip it to Your Right Nipple. Then Do the Left.

A line appeared: You're Vicious, Gloria.

Evan typed: That's Mistress Gloria to you. Scum.

"This is disgusting," I said. "Even for you."

"Last week I made him singe the hair off his balls with a lighter."

A line appeared: I'm Bleeding.

I flipped off the computer, grabbed Evan by the shoulder and reminded him that we might be bleeding ourselves, and bleeding profusely at that, if we did not come up with a way to ransom back the dog.

"Fuck off," he said. "You're the mastermind here."

We went to Caffè Tripoli. "We can't stop going," I had said. "If we do, we'll look like suspects."

"Good thinking, Raskolnikov," Evan had said.

No sooner had we ordered coffee than Tony appeared at our table. "Hello, ladies," he said. "How're those new tires?"

"Great," I said. "How's the missing dog?"

He snickered. "Why, you got her? You fucking her in the ass? You're sick of doing it to each other, is that it?"

"You sound jealous," I said.

"Fuck you. You know what I think?"

"I didn't know you did think."

"I think you wouldn't know what to do with that dog because it's a girl."

"Tony," Evan said, "what is that perfume you're wearing?"

We were in the lab at work, reading other people's e-mail messages off the server, when the solution came to me.

"Evan," I said, as we closed another of the pathetic love letters that our boss, McTwigan, had been sending to one of the sales assistants, "can you hack into a bank?"

"Depends. If it's a 3090, like at Mass First, sure."

"You can get in and get out?"

"Reilly," he said, "on a 3090 I'm Jesus Christ. I can walk on fucking water, OK?"

I switched on his modem. "Then start dialing," I said. "I'll make coffee."

After three hours of fucking up, we tapped into the Mass First host system. We created a new account, using the name Gloria Domina; we gave her a balance of $250.

The next day I went to the branch office on Hanover Street. "I'd like to make a deposit into my wife's account," I said. "I don't have her passbook."

"No problem," the teller said.

She called up the Gloria Domina account, took my $100 and handed me a receipt that showed a $350 balance. "Have a nice day," I said, and after I walked out, Evan walked in and opened an account in his name.

That night we called Giaccalone's hotline. I listened on the extension; Evan did the talking. "Don't hang up," he squeaked. "We're serious."

"All right, Tinkerbell," the guy said. "Give me the numbers on the dog's ID tag."

"Two-seven-five-five."

"Shit." He rustled a piece of paper. "OK, what's different about the dog's left front paw pad?"

Evan looked at me. I lifted the paw; it was white. I mouthed the words It's white.

"It's white," Evan said.

"OK, pal. You bring us the dog, we pay you the money. It's as simple as that."

"It's not that simple. Get out a pencil and paper and I'm going to give you a name and a bank account number where I want you to deposit the money."

"Oh, fuck. You're not going to pull this shit again, are you?"

Evan gave me his little-kid-lost-in-the-mall look; I couldn't take it anymore.

"Look, jerky," I said, "the dog hasn't eaten in three fucking days. You make us wait another day and we're going to turn her into hamburger."

"Who the fuck was that?"

"Nobody," Evan squeaked. He waved at me to shut up. "But . . . but we'll do what he said. We'll do it, believe me."

"Hold a minute." The man went off the line; when the line opened again, Giaccalone was speaking.

"I want to hear her bark," he said.

"You what?"

"Bark, dick breath. How do I know she's still alive? Make her bark:"

I took off Coco's muzzle, wrapped my arm around her and pinched her, hard, on the neck. She yelped.

"All right, you sick fucks. Give me the account number. And if we don't see that dog by tomorrow night, we go to the bank and freeze the account. And then we come looking for you."

"It's Mass First," Evan said. "The name is Gloria Domina. D-O-M-I-N-A. The account number is one-one-two-one-three-seven-five."

"Domina?" he said. "Isn't that the broad who goes out with Angiulo? Hey, who is this? Is this fucking Angiulo?"

"Just make the deposit."

"Hamburger?" Evan said. "We're going to turn her into hamburger?"

"I had to get his attention."

"You're a deviant, Reilly. A complete and utter deviant."

At 10:30 the next morning we tapped into the Mass First system. Gloria's balance was $10,350.

"I could cry," I said.

Evan transferred the money to his account and we drove to the Mass First branch at the mall and withdrew the money. We went back to work looking as if nothing had happened, which is not an easy thing to do when you're carrying $10,350 in cash in your backpack. We tapped into the Mass First system again. We vaporized Gloria Domina and closed Evan's account.

"No fingerprints," I said. "No paper trail."

"So how do we get rid of the dog?"

"Piece of cake."

"Really? How?"

"Don't worry."

"Don't worry? Don't fucking worry? What, you don't have a plan?"

"I have a plan," I said. "It's in the gestation phase."

The problem, of course, was the Bride. She ran to her peephole whenever anyone so much as moved in the hallway. There was no way to get the dog past her.

"We could wait until the middle of the night," Evan said.

"Too risky. She might be up soaking her hemorrhoids."

We went home and sat in the apartment and tried to come up with something. Meanwhile, down on Hanover Street, a couple of Giaccalone's thugs were standing on the sidewalk in leather jackets and driving gloves, scanning the street like Secret Service men.

"By now they've been to the bank," I said. "They know the money's gone."

Evan let the curtain fall back across the window. "I can't believe I let you talk me into this." Coco pressed her face against his cheek and tried to lick him through her muzzle, but he pushed her away. "Fuck off," he said, then went to his room.

I sat down; I stood up. I lay on the couch. But for the life of me. I couldn't think of a way to get that dog out of the building. But then Gus came poking along after dark, calling to Coco in the alley behind our building.

"Out looking for Coco again?" I asked as he skipped up onto our landing with a flashlight in his hand.

"For ten thousand bucks? You bet. And, well, Mrs. Ronsavelli's been having some trouble with her kitchen sink, so since I was going by. . . ."

The Bride opened her door and glared at him. "Mr. Reilly has been having trouble with leaks in his apartment," she said. "Maybe you should have a look over there, too."

"Ours seems to have taken care of itself," I said.

"Good, then." She yanked the poor sap into her kitchen.

I ran to Evan's room. "T minus ten minutes and counting," I said. "Get your big raincoat, put it over the dog and wait here."

I ran downstairs to the laundry. Maria was getting ready to close up for the night.

"Maria, this is an emergency," I said. "Do you still have the passkey for the apartments?"

"No--it grew legs and ran away." She reached up and took the key from a nail on the wall behind her. "What's the matter? You lock yourself out again?"

"It's Mrs. ronsavelli. We heard a crash, and then she was making, like, this moaning sound, and then there wasn't any sound at all."

"Jesus Christ," she said, then blessed herself and ran up the stairs behind me.

We stood outside the Bride's door. "Hear anything?" I whispered.

"I hear a noise." She leaned closer. "There it is again."

"You go in," I said. "I'm going to call an ambulance."

Evan and I were down the stairs and opening the back door for Coco when the shouting began. The Bride was screaming in Italian, Maria was screaming back in Spanish--God knows what they were saying--and by the time Gus came flying down the back stairs with only his T-shirt on and his pants unbuttoned, Coco had raced down the alley and out of sight.

"How're those pipes, Gus?" I said.

"Go fuck yourself," he said, then ran off down the alley.

For a moment Evan and I stood looking at each other and not talking; it was one of those line, clear times when your heart seems to open up and everything good about life rushes in.

"OK, then," Evan said. "Let's get wasted."

We drank champagne, we ate lobster and we put caviar on crackers, which, after I tasted one, I threw into the sink. Evan did his impersonation of Tony. We threw the money around like confetti. We drank a bottle of Madeira and a bottle of Armagnac, and I got so loaded that at one point I was going to light a Macanudo with a $100 bill, but Evan stopped me.

"A toast," I said, lifting a glass of port. "Good guys one, guineas nothing."

Then I passed out. When I woke, it was morning and I was lying beneath a blanket, of bills, like a kid in a leaf pile. The room was strewn with ashtrays and bottles and empty boxes, and there was a smell of smoke and food gone bad. My mouth tasted like I'd spent the night going down on a menstruating monkey. Outside, a truck groaned in the alley. The sun laid a pale line along the tops of the buildings across the street; the light was still too thin to warm the air. The room seemed dead, like a beach the day after a storm.

"Evan," I said.

He turned but didn't answer. He lay on the couch with a newspaper over his face, which was just as well, I thought, because what I wanted to say might be embarrassing. I lay on the floor, unable to sit up. To move was to feel my brain slosh across my head and collide with the side of my skull.

"You know, I was thinking I might take my money and open a little restaurant. You know? Like a breakfast place."

"Reilly," he said, "fuck off."

I tried to sit up, but the room tilted and spun like a carnival ride and I had to lie back down. "Also," I said, "I'm going to ask Maria out. I'm going to make a life for myself."

"I'm going to puke," Evan said, then dragged himself off to the bathroom.

I listened to him retch, then drifted back toward sleep. Outside, a man was singing while he unloaded a truck and a boy was calling his friends out to play. Birds sang on the phone wires.

I woke to the sound of a dog barking outside. The barking was close. I opened my eyes. Evan was standing at the window, looking down at the street. He seemed as if he might get sick again.

There was pounding on the door. "Open up," Mrs. Ronsavelli said. "Somebody wants to see you."

My head felt as if it might split open. "Say it ain't so," I said.

But Coco kept, howling and throwing herself at our door, Mrs. Ronsavelli continued to knock and I, flat on my back, felt weightless and empty. Evan fell onto the couch, face down. From the street came the sound of slapping footsteps and men swearing in Italian.

I reached for the phone and managed to knock the earpiece out of its cradle. I dialed zero; there was nothing. I clicked, then clicked again. The line was dead.

"I saw in Maria the promise of a sane life. I saw Sunday dinners and afternoon screwing."