Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

PART TWO

Chapter 1

1949

Dominic Joseph Agostino sat at the little desk in his office behind the gym with the newspaper spread out in front of him to the sports page, reading about himself. He had his Ben Franklin reading glasses on and they gave a mild, studious look to his round, ex-pug’s face, with the broken nose and the small, dark eyes under the heavy scar tissue. It was three o’clock, the mid-afternoon lull, and the gym was empty, the best time of day. There wouldn’t be anything much doing until five o’clock when he gave a calisthenics class to a group of club members, middle-aged businessmen most of them, fighting their waistlines. After that he might spar a few rounds with some of the more ambitious members, being careful not to damage anybody.

The article about him had come out the night before, in a box on the sports page. It was a slow day. The Red Sox were out of town and weren’t going anyplace, anyway, and they had to fill the sports page with something.

Dominic had been born in Boston, and had been introduced in his fighting days as Joe Agos, the Boston Beauty, because he lacked a punch and had to do a lot of dancing around to keep from getting killed. He had fought some good lightweights in the late twenties and thirties and the sportswriter, who was too young ever to have seen him fight, had written stirring accounts of his matches with people like Canzoneri and McLarnin, when Canzoneri and McLarnin were on the way up. The sportswriter had written that he was still in good shape, which wasn’t all that true. The sportswriter quoted Dominic as saying jokingly that some of the younger members of the exclusive Revere Club were beginning to get to him in the sparring sessions in the gym and that he was thinking of getting an assistant or putting on a catcher’s mask to protect his beauty in the near future. He hadn’t said it all that jokingly. The article was friendly, and made Dominic sound like a wise old veteran of the golden days of the sport who had learned to accept life philosophically in his years in the ring. He had lost every cent he’d ever made, so there wasn’t much else left but philosophy. He hadn’t said anything about that to the writer and it wasn’t in the article.

The phone on his desk rang. It was the doorman. There was a kid downstairs who wanted to see him. Dominic told the doorman to send the kid up.

The kid was about nineteen or twenty, wearing a faded blue sweater and sneakers. He was blond and blue-eyed and baby-faced. He reminded Dominic of Jimmy McLarnin, who had nearly torn him apart the time they had fought in New York. The kid had grease-stained hands, even though Dominic could see that he had tried to wash it all out. It was a cinch none of the members of the Revere Club had invited the kid up for a workout or a game of squash.

“What is it?” Dominic asked, looking up over his Ben Franklin glasses.

“I read the paper last night,” the kid said.

“Yeah?” Dominic was always affable and smiling with the members and he made up for it with non-members.

“About how it’s getting a little tough for you, Mr. Agostino, at your age, with the younger members of the club and so on,” the kid said.

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking maybe you could take on an assistant, kind of,” the kid said.

“You a fighter?”

“Not exactly,” the kid said. “Maybe I want to be. I seem to fight an awful lot of the time …” He grinned. “I figure I might as well get paid for it.”

“Come on.” Dominic stood up and took off his glasses. He went out of the office and through the gym to the locker room. The kid followed him. The locker room was empty except for Charley, the attendant, who was dozing, sitting up at the door, his head on a pile of towels.

“You got any things with you?” Dominic asked the kid.

“No.”

Dominic gave him an old sweat suit and a pair of shoes. He watched as the kid stripped. Long legs, heavy, sloping shoulders, thick neck. A hundred and fifty pounds, fifty-five, maybe. Good arms. No fat.

Dominic led him out to the corner of the gym where the mats were and threw him a pair of sixteen-ounce gloves. Charley came out to tie the laces for both of them.

“Let’s see what you can do, kid,” Dominic said. He put up his hands, lightly. Charley watched with interest.

The kid’s hands were too low, naturally, and Dominic jabbed him twice with his left. But the kid kept swarming in.

After three minutes, Dominic dropped his hands and said, “Okay, that’s enough.” He had rapped the kid pretty hard a few times and had tied him up when he came in close, but with all that, the kid was awfully fast and the twice he had connected it had hurt. The kid was some kind of a fighter. Just what kind of fighter Dominic didn’t know, but a fighter.

“Now listen, kid,” Dominic said, as Charley undid the laces on his gloves, “this isn’t a barroom. This is a gentlemen’s club. The gentlemen don’t come here to get hurt. They come to get some exercise while learning the manly art of self-defense. You come swinging in on them the way you did with me, you wouldn’t last one day here.”

“Sure,” the kid said, “I understand. But I wanted to show you what I could do.”

“You can’t do much,” Dominic said. “Yet. But you’re fast and you move okay. Where you working now?”

“I was over in Brookline,” the kid said. “In a garage. I’d like to find something where I can keep my hands clean.”

“When you figure you could start in here?”

“Now. Today. I quit at the garage last week.”

“How much you make there?”

“Fifty a week,” the kid said.

“I think I can get you thirty-five here,” Dominic said. “But you can rig up a cot in the massage room and sleep here. You’ll have to help clean the swimming pool and vacuum the mats and stuff like that and check the equipment.”

“Okay,” the kid said.

“You got a job,” Dominic said. “What’s your name?”

“Thomas Jordache,” the kid said.

“Just keep out of trouble, Tom,” said Dominic.

He kept out of trouble for quite some time. He was quick and respectful and besides the work he had been hired to do, he cheerfully ran errands for Dominic and the members and made a point of smiling agreeably, at all times, with especial attention to the older men. The atmosphere of the club, muted, rich, and friendly, pleased him, and when he wasn’t in the gym he liked to pass through the high-ceilinged, dark, wood-paneled reading and gaming rooms, with their deep leather armchairs and smoked-over oil paintings of Boston during the days of sailing ships. The work was undemanding, with long gaps in the day when he just sat around listening to Dominic reminisce about his years in the ring.

Dominic was not curious about Tom’s past and Tom didn’t bother to tell him about the months on the road, the flophouses in Cincinnati and Cleveland, and Chicago, about the jobs at filling stations, or about the stretch as a bellboy in the hotel in Syracuse. He had been making good money at the hotel steering whores into guests’ rooms until he had to take a knife out of a pimp’s fist because the pimp objected to the size of the commission his girls were passing on to the nice baby-faced boy they could mother when they weren’t otherwise occupied. Thomas didn’t tell Dominic, either, about the drunks he had rolled on the Loop or the loose cash he had stolen in various rooms, more for the hell of it than for the money, because he wasn’t all that interested in money.

Dominic taught him how to hit the light bag and it was pleasant on a rainy afternoon, when the gym was empty, to tap away, faster and faster, at the bag, making the gym resound with the tattoo of the blows. Once in awhile, when he was feeling ambitious, and there were no members around, Dominic put on the gloves with him and taught him how to put together combinations, how to straighten out his right hand, how to use his head and elbows and slide with the punches, to keep up on the balls of his feet and how to avoid punches by ducking and weaving as he came in instead of falling back. Dominic still didn’t allow him to spar with any of the members, because he wasn’t sure about Thomas yet and didn’t want any incidents. But the squash pro got him down to the courts and in just a few weeks made a fair player of him and when some of the lesser players of the club turned up without a partner for a game, Thomas would go in there with them. He was quick and agile and he didn’t mind losing and when he won he learned immediately not to make the win too easy and he found himself collecting twenty to thirty dollars a week extra in tips.

He became friendly with the cook in the club kitchen, mostly by finding a solid connection for buying decent marijuana and doing the cook’s shopping for him for the drug, so before long he was getting all his meals free.

He tactfully stayed out of all but the most desultory conversations with the members, who were lawyers, brokers, bankers, and officials of shipping lines and manufacturing companies. He learned to take messages accurately from their wives and mistresses over the telephone and pass them on with no hint that he understood exactly what he was doing.

He didn’t like to drink, and the members, as they downed their post-exercise whiskies at the bar, commented favorably on that, too.

There was no plan to his behavior; he wasn’t looking for anything; he just knew that it was better to ingratiate himself with the solid citizens who patronized the club than not. He had knocked around too much, a stray in America, getting into trouble and always finishing in brawls that sent him on the road again. Now the peace and security and approval of the club were welcome to him. It wasn’t a career, he told himself, but it was a good year. He wasn’t ambitious. When Dominic talked vaguely of his signing up for some amateur bouts just to see how good he was, he put the old fighter off.

When he got restless he would go downtown and pick up a whore and spend the night with her, honest money for honest services, and no complications in the morning.

He even liked the city of Boston, or at least as much as he had ever liked any place, although he didn’t travel around it much by daylight, as he was pretty sure that there was an assault and battery warrant out for him as a result of the last afternoon at the garage in Brookline, when the foreman had come at him with a monkey wrench. He had gone right back to his rooming house that afternoon and packed and got out in ten minutes, telling his landlady he was heading for Florida. Then he had booked into the Y.M.C.A. and lain low for a week, until he had seen the article in the newspaper about Dominic.

He had his likes and dislikes among the members, but was careful to be impartially pleasant to all of them. He didn’t want to get involved with anybody. He had had enough involvements. He tried not to know too much about any of the members, but of course it was impossible not to form opinions, especially when you saw a man naked, his pot belly swelling, or his back scratched by some dame from his last go in bed, or taking it badly when he was losing a silly game of squash.

Dominic hated all the members equally, but only because they had money and he didn’t. Dominic had been born and brought up in Boston and his a was as flat as anybody’s, but in spirit he was still working by the day in a landlord’s field in Sicily, plotting to burn down the landlord’s castle and cut the throats of the landlord’s family. Naturally, he concealed his dreams of arson and murder behind the most cordial of manners, always telling the members how well they looked when they came back after a vacation, marveling about how much weight they seemed to have lost, and being solicitous about aches and sprains.

“Here comes the biggest crook in Massachusetts,” Dominic would whisper to Thomas, as an important-looking, gray-haired gentleman came into the locker room, and then, aloud, to the member, “Why, sir, it’s good to see you back. We’ve missed you. I guess you’ve been working too hard.”

“Ah, work, work,” the man would say, shaking his head sadly.

“I know how it is, sir.” Dominic would shake his head, too. “Come on down and I’ll give you a nice turn on the weights and then you take a steam and a swim and a massage and you’ll get all the kinks out and sleep like a babe tonight.”

Thomas watched and listened carefully, learning from Dominic, useful dissembler. He liked the stony-hearted ex-pug, committed deep within him, despite all blandishments, to anarchy and loot.

Thomas also liked a man by the name of Reed, a hearty, easy-going president of a textile concern, who played squash with Thomas and insisted upon going onto the courts with him, even when there were other members hanging around waiting for a game. Reed was about forty-five and fairly heavy, but still played well and he and Thomas split their matches most of the time, Reed winning the early games and just losing out when he began to tire. “Young legs, young legs,” Reed would say laughing, wiping the sweat off his face with a towel, as they walked together toward the showers after an hour on the courts. They played three times a week, regularly, and Reed always offered Thomas a Coke after they had cooled off and slipped him a five-dollar bill each time. He had one peculiarity. He always carried a hundred-dollar bill neatly folded in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. “A hundred-dollar bill saved my life once,” Reed told Thomas. He had been caught in a dreadful fire one night in a night club, in which many people had perished. Reed had been lying under a pile of bodies near the door, hardly able to move, his throat too seared to cry out. He had heard the firemen dragging at the pile of bodies and with his last strength he had dug into his pants pocket, where he kept a hundred-dollar bill. He had managed to drag the bill out and work one arm free. His hand, waving feebly, with the bill clutched in it, had been seen. He had felt the money being taken from his grasp and then a fireman had moved the bodies lying on him and dragged him to safety. He had spent two weeks in the hospital, unable to talk, but he had survived, with a firm faith in the power of a single one-hundred-dollar bill. When possible, he advised Thomas, he should always try to have a hundred-dollar bill in a convenient pocket.

He also told Thomas to save his money and invest in the stock market, because young legs did not remain young forever.

The trouble came when he had been there three months. He sensed that something was wrong when he went to his locker to change after a late game of squash with Brewster Reed. There were no obvious signs, but he somehow knew somebody had been in there going through his clothes, looking for something. His wallet was half out of the back pocket of his trousers, as though it had been taken out and hastily stuffed back. Thomas took the wallet out and opened it. There had been four five-dollar bills in it and they were still there. He put the five-dollar bill Reed had tipped him into the wallet and slipped the wallet back in place. In the side pocket of his trousers there were some three dollars in bills and change, which had also been there before he had gone to the courts. A magazine which he had been reading and which he remembered putting front cover up on the top shelf was now spread open on the shelf.

For a moment Thomas thought of locking up, but then he thought, hell, if there’s anybody in this club so poor he has to steal from me, he’s welcome. He undressed, put his shoes in the locker, wrapped himself in a towel and went to the shower room, where Brewster Reed was already happily splashing around.

When he came back after the shower, there was a note pinned onto the inside of the locker door. It was in Dominic’s handwriting and it read, “I want you in my office after closing time. D. Agostino.”

The curtness of the message, the fact of its being written at all when he and Dominic passed each other ten times an afternoon, meant trouble. Something official, planned. Here we go again, he thought and almost was ready to finish dressing and quietly slip away, once and for all. But he decided against it, had his dinner in the kitchen, and afterward chatted unconcernedly with the squash pro and Charley in the locker room. Promptly at ten o’clock, when the club closed, he presented himself at Dominic’s office.

Dominic was reading a copy of Life, slowly turning the pages on his desk. He looked up, closed the magazine and put it neatly to one side of the desk. He got up and looked out into the hall to make sure it was empty, then closed his office door. “Sit down, kid,” he said.

Thomas sat down and waited while Dominic sat down opposite him behind the desk.

“What’s up?” Thomas asked.

“Plenty,” Dominic said. “The shit is hitting the fan. I’ve been getting reamed out all day.”

“What’s it got to do with me?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Dominic said. “No use beatin’ around the bush, kid. Somebody’s been lifting dough out of people’s wallets. Some smart guy who takes a bill here and there and leaves the rest. These fat bastards here’re so rich most of ’em don’t even know what they have in their pockets and if they do happen to miss an odd ten or twenty here or there, they think maybe they lost it or they made a mistake the last time they counted. But one guy is sure he don’t make no mistakes. That bastard Greening. He says a ten-dollar bill was lifted from his locker while he was working out with me yesterday and he’s been on the phone all day today talking to other members and now suddenly everybody’s sure he’s been robbed blind the last few months.”

“Still, what’s that got to do with me?” Thomas said, although he knew what it had to do with him.

“Greening figured out that it’s only begun since you came to work here.”

“That big shit,” Thomas said bitterly. Greening was a cold-eyed man of about thirty who worked in a stock broker’s office and who boxed with Dominic. He had fought light-heavy for some school out West and kept in shape and took no pity on Dominic, but went after him savagely for three two-minute rounds four times a week. After his sessions with Greening, Dominic, who didn’t dare really to counter hard, was often bruised and exhausted.

“He’s a shit all right,” Dominic said. “He made me search your locker this afternoon. It’s a lucky thing you didn’t happen to have any ten-dollar bills there. Even so, he wants to call the police and have you booked on suspicion.”

“What did you say to that?” Thomas asked.

“I talked him out of it,” Dominic said. “I said I’d have a word with you.”

“Well, you’re having a word with me,” Thomas said. “Now what?”

“Did you take the dough?”

“No. Do you believe me?”

Dominic shrugged warily. “I don’t know. Somebody sure as hell took it.”

“A lot of people walk around the locker room all day. Charley, the guy from the pool, the pro, the members, you …”

“Cut it out, kid,” Dominic said. “I don’t want no jokes.”

“Why pick on me?” Thomas asked.

“I told you. It only started since you came to work here: Ah, Christ, they’re talking about putting padlocks on all the lockers. Nobody’s ever locked anything here for a hundred years. The way they talk they’re in the middle of the biggest crime wave since Jesse James.”

“What do you want me to do? Quit?”

“Naah.” Dominic shook his head. “Just be careful. Keep in somebody’s sight all the time.” He sighed. “Maybe it’ll all blow over. That bastard Greening and his lousy ten bucks … Come on out with me.” He stood up wearily and stretched. “I’ll buy you a beer. What a lousy day.”

The locker room was empty when Thomas came through the door. He had been sent out to the post office with a package and he was in his street clothes. There was an interclub squash match on and everybody was upstairs watching it. Everybody but one of the members called Sinclair, who was on the team, but who had not yet played his match. He was dressed, ready to play, and was wearing a white sweater. He was a tall, slender young man who had a law degree from Harvard and whose father was also a member of the club. The family had a lot of money and their name was in the papers often. Young Sinclair worked in his father’s law office in the city and Thomas had overheard older men in the club saying that young Sinclair was a brilliant lawyer and would go far.

But right now, as Thomas came down the aisle silently in his tennis shoes, young Sinclair was standing in front of an open locker and he had his hand in the inside pocket of the jacket hanging there and he was deftly taking out a wallet. Thomas wasn’t sure whose locker it was, but he knew it wasn’t Sinclair’s, because Sinclair’s locker was only three away from his own on the other side of the room. Sinclair’s face, which was usually cheerful and ruddy, was pale and tense and he was sweating.

For a moment, Thomas hesitated, wondering if he could turn and get away before Sinclair saw him. But just as Sinclair got the wallet out, he looked up and saw Thomas. They stared at each other. Then it was too late to back away. Thomas moved quickly toward the man and grabbed his wrist. Sinclair was panting, as though he had been running a great distance.

“You’d better put that back, sir,” Thomas whispered.

“All right,” Sinclair said. “I’ll put it back.” He whispered, too.

Thomas did not release his wrist. He was thinking fast. If he denounced Sinclair, on one excuse or another he would lose his job. It would be too uncomfortable for the other members to be subjected daily to the presence of a lowly employee who had disgraced one of their own. If he didn’t denounce him … Thomas played for time. “You know, sir,” he said, “they suspect me.”

“I’m sorry.” Thomas could feel the man trembling, but Sinclair didn’t try to pull away.

“You’re going to do three things,” Thomas said. “You’re going to put the wallet back and you’re going to promise to lay off from now on.”

“I promise, Tom. I’m very grateful …”

“You’re going to show just how grateful you are, Mr. Sinclair,” Thomas said. “You’re going to write out an IOU for five thousand dollars to me right now and you’re going to pay me in cash within three days.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Sinclair said, sweat standing out on his forehead.

“All right,” Thomas said. “I’ll start yelling.”

“I bet you would, you little bastard,” Sinclair said.

“I’ll meet you in the bar of the Hotel Touraine, Thursday night at eleven o’clock,” Thomas said. “Pay night.”

“I’ll be there.” Sinclair’s voice was so low that Thomas could barely hear it. He dropped the man’s hand and watched as Sinclair put the wallet back into the jacket pocket. Then he took out a small notebook in which he kept a record of petty expenses he laid out on errands and opened it to a blank page and handed Sinclair a pencil.

Sinclair looked down at the open notebook thrust under his nose. If he could steady his nerves, Thomas knew, he could just walk away and if Thomas told anybody the story he could laugh it off. But never completely laugh it off. Anyway, his nerves were shot. He took the notebook, scribbled in it.

Thomas glanced at the page, put the notebook in his pocket and took back the pencil. Then he gently closed the locker door and went upstairs to watch the squash.

Fifteen minutes later Sinclair came onto the court and beat his opponent in straight games.

In the locker room later, Thomas congratulated him on his victory.

He got to the bar of the Touraine at five to eleven. He was dressed in a suit with a collar and tie. Tonight he wanted to pass for a gentleman. The bar was dark and only a third full. He carefully sat down at a table in a corner, where he could watch the entrance. When the waiter came over to him, he ordered a bottle of Bud-weiser. Five thousand dollars, he thought, five thousand … They had taken that amount from his father and he was taking it back from them. He wondered if Sinclair had had to go to his father to get the money and had had to explain why he needed it. Probably not. Probably Sinclair had so much dough in his own name he could lay his hands on five thousand cash in ten minutes. Thomas had nothing against Sinclair. Sinclair was a pleasant young man, with nice, friendly eyes and a soft voice and good manners who from time to time had given him some pointers on how to play drop shots in squash and whose life would be ruined if it became known he was a kleptomaniac. The system had just worked out that way.

He sipped at his beer, watching the door. At three minutes after eleven, the door opened and Sinclair came in. He peered around the dark room and Thomas stood up. Sinclair came over to the table and Thomas said, “Good evening, sir.”

“Good evening, Tom,” Sinclair said evenly and sat down on the banquette, but without taking off his topcoat.

“What are you drinking?” Thomas asked, as the waiter came over.

“Scotch and water, please,” Sinclair said with his polite, Harvard way of talking.

“And another Bud, please,” said Thomas.

They sat in silence for a moment, side by side on the banquette. Sinclair drummed his fingers briefly on the table, scanning the room. “Do you come here often?” he asked.

“Once in awhile.”

“Do you ever see anybody from the Club here?”

“No.”

The waiter came over and put down their drinks. Sinclair took a thirsty gulp from his glass. “Just for your information,” Sinclair said, “I don’t take the money because I need it.”

“I know,” Thomas said.

“I’m sick,” Sinclair said. “It’s a disease. I’m going to a psychiatrist.”

“That’s smart of you,” Thomas said.

“You don’t mind doing what you’re doing to a sick man?”

“No,” Thomas said. “No, sir.”

“You’re a hard little son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“I hope so, sir,” said Thomas.

Sinclair opened his coat and reached inside and brought out a long, full envelope. He put it down on the banquette between himself and Thomas. “It’s all there,” he said. “You needn’t bother to count it.”

“I’m sure it’s all there,” Thomas said. He slipped the envelope into his side pocket.

“I’m waiting,” Sinclair said. Thomas took out the IOU and put it on the table. Sinclair glanced at it, tore it up and stuffed the shreds into an ashtray. He stood up. “Thanks for the drink,” he said. He walked toward the door past the bar, a handsome young man, the marks of breeding, gentility, education, and good luck clearly on him.

Thomas watched him go out and slowly finished his beer. He paid for the drinks and went into the lobby and rented a room for the night. Upstairs, with the door locked and the blinds down, he counted the money. It was all in hundred-dollar bills, all new. It occurred to him that they might be marked, but he couldn’t tell.

He slept well in the big double bed and in the morning called the Club and told Dominic that he had to go to New York on family business and wouldn’t be in until Monday afternoon. He hadn’t taken any days off since he’d started working at the Club, so Dominic had to say okay, but no later than Monday.

It was drizzling when the train pulled into the station and the gray, autumnal drip didn’t make Port Philip look any better as Thomas went out of the station. He hadn’t brought his coat, so he put up the collar of his jacket to try to keep the rain from going down his neck.

The station square didn’t look much different. The Port Philip House had been repainted and a big radio and television shop in a new, yellow-brick building was advertising a sale in portable radios. The smell of the river was still the same and Tom remembered it.

He could have taken a taxi, but after the years of absence he preferred to walk. The streets of his native town would slowly prepare him—for just what he was not quite sure.

He walked past the bus station. The last ride with his brother Rudolph. You smell like a wild animal.

He walked past Bernstein’s Department Store, his sister’s rendezvous point with Theodore Boylan. The naked man in the living room, the burning cross. Happy boyhood memories.

He walked past the public school. The returned malarial soldier and the samurai sword and the Jap’s head spouting blood.

Nobody said hello. All faces in the mean rain looked hurried, closed, and unfamiliar. Return in Triumph. Welcome, Citizen.

He walked past St. Anselm’s, Claude Tinker’s uncle’s church. By the Grace of God, he was not observed.

He turned into Vanderhoff Street. The rain was coming down more strongly. He touched the bulge in the breast of his jacket that concealed the envelope with the money in it. The street had changed. A square prisonlike building had been put up and there was some sort of factory in it. Some of the old shops were boarded up and there were names he didn’t recognize on the windows of other shops.

He kept his eyes down to keep the rain from driving into them, so when he looked up finally he was stupidly puzzled because where the bakery had been, where the house in which he was born had stood, there was now a large supermarket, with three stories of apartments above it. He read the signs in the windows. Special Today, Rib Roast. Lamb Shoulder. Women with shopping bags were going in and out of a door which, if the Jordache house had been still there, would have opened onto the front hallway.

Thomas peered through the windows. There were girls making change at the front desks. He didn’t know any of them. There was no sense in going in. He was not in the market for rib roasts or lamb shoulders.

Uncertainly, he continued down the street. The garage next door had been rebuilt and the name on it was a different one and he didn’t recognize any of the faces there, either. But near the corner he saw that Jardino’s Fruits and Vegetables was still where it always had been. He went in and waited while an old woman argued with Mrs. Jardino about string beans.

When the old woman had gone, Mrs. Jardino turned to him. She was a small, shapeless woman with a fierce, beaked nose and a wart on her upper lip from which sprang two long, coarse, black hairs. “Yes,” Mrs. Jardino said. “What can I do for you?”

“Mrs. Jardino,” Thomas said, putting down his coat collar to look more respectable, “you probably don’t remember me, but I used to be a … well … a kind of neighbor of yours. We used to have the bakery. Jordache?”