For an instant, Tony was worried about complicating the man’s wounds, but then he knew intuitively that it no longer mattered. He sat down on the floor in the garbage and blood. He put an arm under Frank and lifted him into a sitting position. Frank coughed weakly, and his left hand slid off his belly; the wound was revealed, a hideous and unrepairable hole from which intestines bulged. From the moment Bobby first pulled the trigger, Frank had begun to die; he had never had a hope of survival.
“Hold me.”
Tony took Frank into his arms as best he could, held him, held him as a father would hold a frightened child, held him and rocked gently, crooned softly, reassuringly. He kept crooning even after he knew that Frank was dead, crooning and slowly rocking, gently and serenely rocking, rocking.
***
At four o’clock Monday afternoon, the telephone company serviceman arrived at Hilary’s house. She showed him where the five extensions were located. He was just about to begin work on the kitchen phone when it rang.
She was afraid that it was the anonymous caller again. She didn’t want to answer it, but the serviceman looked at her expectantly, and on the fifth ring she overcame her fear, snatched up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Hilary Thomas?”
“Yes.”
“This is Michael Savatino. Savatino’s Ristorante?”
“Oh, I don’t need reminding. I won’t forget you or your wonderful restaurant. We had a perfect dinner.”
“Thank you. We try very hard. Listen, Miss Thomas–”
“Please call me Hilary.”
“Hilary, then. Have you heard from Tony yet today?”
Suddenly she was aware of the tension in his voice. She knew, almost as a clairvoyant might know, that something awful had happened to Tony. For a moment she was breathless, and fuzzy darkness closed in briefly at the edges of her vision.
“Hilary? Are you there?”
“I haven’t heard from him since last night. Why?”
“I don’t want to alarm you. There was some trouble–”
“Oh, God.”
“–but Tony wasn’t hurt.”
“Are you sure?”
“Just a few bruises.”
“Is he in the hospital?”
“No, no. He’s really all right.”
The knot of pressure in her chest loosened a bit.
“What kind of trouble?” she asked.
In a few sentences, Michael told her about the shooting.
It could have been Tony who died. She felt weak.
“Tony’s taking it hard,” Michael said. “Very hard. When he and Frank first started working together, they didn’t get along well. But things have improved. The past few days, they got to know each other better. In fact they’d gotten fairly close.”
“Where’s Tony now?”
“His apartment. The shooting was at eleven-thirty this morning. He’s been at his apartment since two. I was with him until a few minutes ago. I wanted to stay, but he insisted I go to the restaurant as usual. I wanted him to come with me, but he wouldn’t. He won’t admit it, but he needs someone right now.”
“I’ll go to him,” she said.
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
Hilary freshened up and changed clothes. She was ready to leave fifteen minutes before the repairman had finished with the phones, and she never endured a longer quarter-hour.
In the car, on the way to Tony’s place, she recalled how she had felt in that dark moment when she’d thought Tony was seriously hurt, perhaps dead. She nearly had been sick to her stomach. An intolerable sense of loss had filled her.
Last night, in bed, awaiting sleep, she had argued with herself about whether or not she loved Tony. Could she possibly love anyone after the physical and psychological torture she had suffered as a child, after what she had learned about the ugly duplicitous nature of most other human beings? And could she love a man she’d known for only a few days? The argument still wasn’t settled. But now she knew that she dreaded losing Tony Clemenza in a way and to a degree that she had never feared losing anyone else in her life.
At his apartment complex, she parked beside the blue Jeep.
He lived upstairs in a two-story building. Glass wind chimes were hung from the balcony near one of the other apartments; they sounded melancholy in the late-afternoon breeze.