The car bounced, Lucca's neck swayed like that of a spaniel on a spring, his spastic finger was wrapped around the trigger. "The guns get loaded," he said, "I'm gonna kill that has-been fuck. Leave 'im right there in the slime. You give a shit?"
The deliberate Mendez tried to frame a tactful answer.
Lucca saved him the trouble. "I don't care you give a shit or not. I just thought you oughta know."
He raised the pistol, aimed for practice at the back of his driver's head, narrowed down his eyes and made a popping sound with his dry and twitching lips.
47
"Sal Martucci," said Paul Amaro.
He was sitting on the bed, maybe twelve feet from the door. His knees were wide apart, his elbows rested on them. His head hung down between his shoulders, and he was shaking it, but he did not seem angry at that moment, more bemused, bewildered, like a beaten fighter who's the last person in the stadium to realize that he's lost. "The bitch of it?" he resumed. "I think, deep down, I knew it all along."
"Deep down," said Angelina. She'd pulled a chair over, right next to the door. The gun was in her lap, her right hand absently rested over it. "Where no one ever looks if they can possibly avoid it."
Her father said, "But what he did to me, Angelina. My world, that's the absolute worst thing a person can do."
Angelina said, "There's other worlds, Pop. I guess there's a worst thing you can do in each of them."
"And still you trust him," Paul Amaro said. "More than you trust me."
She didn't answer that. She didn't know how to. How did you compare smithereens with smithereens?
There was a silence. A near silence, marred by the buzz a building makes, air sliding through ducts, wires humming in conduits.
Then Paul Amaro said, "Whatever I did, Angelina, I tried to do the best for you."
Even to himself it sounded lame, and no less because it happened to be true. But it was what every parent felt when looking at his child and seeing the wounds, the disappointment; when looking at the world and knowing that one had done nothing to make it any less unkind, any less fickle or grudging in its comforts. Paul Amaro looked at his daughter and understood that for every pain he thought he'd spared her, another had been heedlessly inflicted; for every opportunity he'd yearned to give her, some other path had been closed off. Suddenly he felt very very sorry. Not for her, exactly. Not for himself. Not even for anything he'd done. Just sorry, like regret was taking him over the way spores and lichen take over the fibers of a tree that's dying from the inside out.
He tried to smile. It came out wrong— tormented, cloying. He said, "I have this stupid daydream. I had it every day in prison. That I'd come home and things'd be like they used to. You'd meet me at the door, we'd hug. We'd go for rides, remember? Restaurants, parties, everybody'd make a fuss over you, blue dress, you were so pretty."
Angelina said, "Like I'd be ten years old forever . . . And never know my father was a criminal."
He said, "You hate me that much?"
She said, "I don't want to. I don't know."
He said, "Sal Martucci, he's not a criminal?"
"He's trying not to be. Besides, where I come from—who else understands?"
Her father said, "So now you found 'im, now you're gonna be with 'im?"
Instead of answering, she said, "He hasn't asked me.
Paul Amaro nodded, almost calmly. But with every labored heartbeat, calm regret was losing ground to sorrowful fury, to reckless desperation. If he'd truly lost his daughter, if he'd repulsed forever the one person who really mattered to him, then he had to cling to something else, to business, or danger, or oblivion, or revenge. In a moment his expression hardened, the jaw clenched, there was a tightness at the corners of his eyes. He said, "I'm going to that meeting now."
Angelina wasn't ready for the sudden change of subject, didn't answer.
Blood was roaring in Paul Amaro's ears, there was a searing glare at the edges of his vision. He said, "A bust. That's crap. You don't understand nothing, Angelina."
She'd almost forgotten the gun was in her lap. She remembered now, her fingers clenched around it.
Her father went on with a defiant rage he half-knew was aimed at self-destruction. "Sal Martucci's with Lucca now. I see it. They're tryin' to cut me out, put me inna wrong."
"That's not what it's—"
"Enough! I'm late already."
"We're staying here."
"Don't try to stop me, Angelina."
He stood up very fast, an invisible but heavy wake of air spread out around him.
The gun was in Angelina's lap and the door was at her back and she barely had time to swallow as she watched him rise. She measured the distance between them with her eyes, and wondered exactly how much time she had, and exactly how much nerve.