With contempt, she said, “There’s no juju in you, boy, and there never was. No juju in the fetishes you keep in that candy box.”
I almost reached to touch the Lucite heart that I wore under my pajamas, but I stopped myself, for I knew that she would understand and find the pendant and take it from me.
“Get in your chair, crip!”
103
Mr. Smaller reached the fifth floor without encountering anyone. At Apartment 5-C, the passkey smoothly opened the deadbolts of the double locks.
His remaining concern was that the security chain would be engaged. Using his fingers, he should be able to reach through the gap and, with enough time and patience, finesse the slide bolt out of the doorplate, but it was likely to be a noisy effort. He smiled to find the chain hanging loose from the retainer. How careless. He eased the door open.
He knew that Yoshioka left early for work, even before sunrise in winter, and that by now he must be sleeping. Expecting darkness, Smaller came with a flashlight, but in the living room, the ivory carving of the court lady in her elaborate kimono was brightened by a light from above. The ivory babe was probably some sacred thing that had to be kept lit around the clock, according to whatever alien religion the weird little tailor embraced.
A faint light came from the kitchen, too, but no sound issued from there, no suggestion that Yoshioka might be preparing a late night snack.
Silencer-equipped pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left, softening the beam with two fingers over the lens, Smaller crossed the living room to the hall. He’d been here several times to deal with plumbing problems, a stuck window.… Yoshioka’s bedroom was behind the first door on the right, which stood open.
A small lamp about ten inches tall, with an amber glass shade, stood on an altar table against one wall, another 24/7 deal to keep lit the photos of a middle-aged Japanese man and woman, another of a teenage girl. When he’d seen them before, Smaller had assumed they were relatives, but he hadn’t cared enough to ask.
The tailor lay sleeping.
104
“Here comes the hero,” Fiona Cassidy said as she wheeled me fast out of the bedroom that had been a dining room. “Savior of bankers and other low types.” She pushed me into the living room, where the shades had been drawn at the windows. A single lamp burned low, next to Grandpa’s armchair, its light glimmering in puddles of rainwater on the hardwood floor.
I was relieved to see Mrs. Lorenzo alive, sitting on the sofa in a kind of muumuu that she evidently wore to bed. She looked terrified but also embarrassed.
Standing near to her, Lucas Drackman was recognizable in spite of his jet-black hair. And standing beside the piano, my father.
“You’re a troublesome boy,” Drackman said to me. “How can such a skinny-minnie twerp like you be so much trouble?”
I could breathe again, but I still couldn’t speak. I suspected that silence was the best response, anyway.
“Your Jap friend will be dead by now, skinny minnie. What do you think about that?”
I felt sick and weak and defeated, but I bit my tongue to keep from crying. I wouldn’t give him tears.
To my father, Drackman said, “I think you should do it,” and indicated the pistol that Tilton held at his side, muzzle toward the floor.
No matter what he was or what he had become, no matter how often he’d abandoned my mother and me, even if he could love only himself, I thought he would shoot Drackman then. I knew he would.
Instead, avoiding my eyes, Tilton said, “Do we have to do this? Why do we have to do this?”
“We’re known now,” Drackman replied. “Because of this skinny minnie. We’re known, and we’re hunted, and we have nothing to lose. The one advantage still available to us is terror. Everybody needs to be scared shitless of us, afraid to speak against us, because we’ll do anything. Keep them so scared that when they come looking for us, they’ll be nervous, not fully in control of themselves, so maybe they don’t really search for us as hard as they could. Terror, man. It’s our friend. You made this skinny minnie, you erase him.”
My father shook his head. I thought again he would shoot Lucas Drackman. He shook his head once more.
Drackman said, “You wanted to get rid of him before he was born. She wouldn’t do it, your Sylvia, but you wanted to. If you wanted to have the little bastard scrubbed away before he was born, what’s so hard about doing him now?”
My father would not look at me, would not, and I knew then that he would never shoot me—nor would he shoot Drackman. In spite of all his talk about owning a chain of restaurants and being boss over an army of employees one day, there was no such capacity in him. He was not a leader, which was in the end the reason his dreams were always beyond his reach. He was a follower, and he would follow whoever made him feel useful and knew how to manipulate him.
When Tilton put his pistol on the lid of the piano and sat on the bench, his posture wasn’t that of defeat, only that of a weary man who wanted this moment to be over so that he could get on to something better.
Lucas Drackman stepped close and let me peer down the elongated barrel of the silencer-equipped pistol.
Mrs. Lorenzo sobbed and pleaded with them and prayed all at the same time. As scared as I was, I also thought how terrible it would be for her to see me shot in the face.
I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn’t. He would just call me skinny minnie again or something worse.