his desk supported a house of cards. You bent over and looked in, you saw something that
looked like a hive of triangles. ‘Cimi had seen these houses fall over hundreds of times
(Claudio had also seen it happen from time to time, but not so frequently, because he was
thirty years younger than ‘Cimi, who expected to soon retire with his bitch of a wife to a
farm they owned in northern New Jersey, where he would devote all his time to his
garden. . . and to outliving the bitch he had married; not his mother-in-law, he had long
since given up any wistful notion he might once have had of eating fettucini at the wake
of La Monstra, La Monstra was eternal, but for outliving the bitch there was at least some hope; his father had had a saying which, when translated, meant something like “God
pisses down the back of your neck every day but only drowns you once,” and while ‘Cimi
wasn’t completely sure he thought it meant God was a pretty good guy after all, and so he
could hope to outlive the one if not the other), but had only seen Balazar put out of temper
by such a fall on a single occasion. Mostly it was something errant that did it—someone
closing a door hard in another room, or a drunk stumbling against a wall; there had been
times when ‘Cimi saw an edifice Mr. Balazar (whom he still called Da Boss, like a character in a Chester Gould comic strip) had spent hours building fall down because the bass on the
juke was too loud. Other times these airy constructs fell down for no per- ceptible reason at
all. Once—this was a story he had told at least five thousand times, and one of which every
person he knew (with the exception of himself) had tired— Da Boss had looked up at him
from the ruins and said: “You see this ‘Cimi? For every mother who ever cursed God for
her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him | away
from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this
is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a I
reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.”
Carlocimi Dretto thought this the most profound state- ment of the human condition he had
ever heard.
That one time Balazar had been put out of temper by the collapse of one of his structures
had been twelve, maybe four- te n years ago. There was a guy who came in to see him
about booze. A guy with no class, no manners. A guy who smelled like he took a bath once
a year whether he needed it or not. A mick, in other words. And of course it was booze.
With micks it was always booze, never dope. And this mick, he thought what was on Da
Boss’s desk was a joke. “Make a wish!” he yelled after Da Boss had explained to him, in the way one gentleman explains to another, why it was impossible for them to do business.
And then the mick, one of those guys with curly red hair and a complexion so white he
looked like he had TB or something, one of those guys whose names started with O and
then had that little curly mark between the O and the real name, had blown on Da Boss’s
desk, like a nino blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, and cards flew everywhere around Balazar’s head, and Balazar had opened the left top drawer in his desk, the drawer
where other businessmen might keep their personal stationery or their private memos or
some- thing like that, and he had brought out a .45, and he had shot the Mick in the head,
and Balazar’s expression never changed, and after ‘Cimi and a guy named Truman
Alexander who had died of a heart attack four years ago had buried the Mick under a
chickenhouse somewhere outside of Sedonville, Connecti- cut, Balazar had said to ‘Cimi,
“It’s up to men to build things, paisan. It’s up to God to blow them down. You agree?”
“Yes, Mr. Balazar,” ‘Cimi had said. He did agree.
Balazar had nodded, pleased. “You did like I said? You put him someplace where
chickens or ducks or something like that could shit on him?”
“Yes.”
“That’s very good,” Balazar said calmly, and took a fresh deck of cards from the right top drawer of his desk.
One level was not enough for Balazar, Roche. Upon the roof of the first level he would
build a second, only not quite so wide; on top of the second a third; on top of the third a
fourth. He would go on, but after the fourth level he would have to stand to do so. You no
longer had to bend much to look in, and when you did what you saw wasn’t rows of triangle
shapes but a fragile, bewildering, and impossibly lovely hall of diamond-shapes. You
looked in too long, you felt dizzy. Once ‘Cimi had gone in the Mirror Maze at Coney and he
had felt like that. He had never gone in again.
‘Cimi said (he believed no one believed him; the truth was no one cared one way or the
other) he had once seen Balazar build something which was no longer a house of cards but
a tower of cards, one which stood nine levels high before it collapsed. That no one gave a shit about this was something ‘Cimi didn’t know because everyone he told affected
amaze- ment because he was close to Da Boss. But they would have been amazed if he had
had the words to describe it—how delicate it had been, how it reached almost three
quarters of the way from the top of the desk to the ceiling, a lacy construct of jacks and
deuces and kings and tens and Big Akers, a red and black configuration of paper diamonds
standing in defiance of a world spinning through a universe of incoherent motions and
forces; a tower that seemed to ‘Cimi’s amazed eyes to be a ringing denial of all the unfair
paradoxes of life.
If he had known how, he would have said: I looked at what he built, and to me it explained
the stars.
10
Balazar knew how everything would have to be.
The Feds had smelled Eddie—maybe he had been stupid to send Eddie in the first place,
maybe his instincts were failing him, but Eddie had seemed somehow so right, so perfect.
His uncle, the first man he had worked for in the business, said there were exceptions to
every rule but one: Never trust a junkie. Balazar had said nothing—it was not the place of a
boy of fifteen to speak, even if only to agree—but privately had thought the only rule to
which there was no exception was that there were some rules for which that was not true.
But if Tio Verone were alive today,Balazar thought, he would laugh at you and say look,
Rico, you always were too smart for your own good, you knew the rules, you kept your
mouth shut when it was respectful to keep it shut, but you always had that snot look in your
eyes. You always knew too much about how smart you were, and so you finally fell into the
pit of your own pride, just like I always knew you would.
He made an A shape and overlaid it.
They had taken Eddie and held him awhile and then let him go.
Balazar had grabbed Eddie’s brother and the stash they shared. That would be enough to
bring him . . . and he wanted Eddie.
He wanted Eddie because it had only been two hours, and two hours was wrong.
They had questioned him at Kennedy, not at 43rd Street, and that was wrong, too. That
meant Eddie had succeeded in ditching most or all of the coke.
Or had he?
He thought. He wondered.
Eddie had walked out of Kennedy two hours after they took him off the plane. That was
too short a time for them to have sweated it out of him and too long for them to have
decided he was clean, that some stew had made a rash mistake.
He thought. He wondered.
Eddie’s brother was a zombie, but Eddie was still smart, Eddie was still tough. He wouldn’t
have turned in just two hours . . . unless it was his brother. Something about his brother.
But still, how come no 43rd Street? How come no Cus- toms van, the ones that looked like
Post Office trucks except for the wire grilles on the back windows? Because Eddie
really had done something with the goods? Ditched them? Hidden them?