Archive of Our Own ^beta

When someone sent a man to catch Bernardo in the back room, Bernardo didn’t trouble himself about who the someone was. A little less than a year in the ring, but he knew that he’d won enough by then to make the bookies angry, and then make them afraid. The anger had been a victory, but the fear had seeped into the crowd, made the rooms cold and solitary when he wrapped up and washed off alone. Not his fear to carry, of course. Nothing for him to be afraid of, no blow he couldn’t dodge, but he’d be stupid not to understand that there were Irish or Italians with deep pockets and heavy cudgels betting against him. Men that didn’t like to lose.

Let them get a taste of it, he figured. What mattered was the money on his name, enough that Anita could pull in a tidy profit betting on him night after night. Money that goes to the same bank account as María’s Gimbels paycheck or the profit from the dresses Anita sold, washed clean with proximity and intention. That’s what this is for—not the way the world goes black at the edges when he lifts his fist. Not the way the promise of America only makes sense when he’s tasting blood.

 Even the cops had switched to betting on him. This, he figured, was the meaning of American citizenship.

So it didn’t matter to him that the first man in was from the Lortons, because he didn’t know that the Lortons were a west-side racket that worked for cheap under Mulligan’s umbrella, because he didn’t track the difference between corned beef and pork those days. It only mattered that the man, really the boy, was the stringiest smirking piece of shit Hell’s Kitchen could dredge up, his shirt unbuttoned and the undershirt filthy around the neck. Sweat-damp under his arms, hair loose to his forehead, ropy arms crossed. All of him a wad of spit aimed toward the world’s shined shoe, watching Bernardo step out of a lukewarm shower, the look in his eyes like he was ready to tug at the towel.

“Thought your people only watched the matches at the Boys and Girls Club,” Bernardo said, and the shitheel grinned around a toothpick.

“They send me in when they’re feeling adventurous. When they’re tired of pretending to be good little boys.”

The envelope the errand boy had held up was as thick as two of his fingers and his thumb. A plain-dealing expectation: of course these men thought he could be bought. There was no pleasure they figure they can’t buy, no offense they couldn’t bribe around, and they wanted him to lose. They wanted to see him lose, wanted to see it like their girls wanted fur coats and silk dresses at Gimbels. Things they could point to and walk out with, easy as that. They wanted to see him dance to a tune they set.  

 “Easy now,” said their lightweight heavy when he told him what he thought of dancing the fucking Irish jig for them, lifting his hands—empty of the envelope—in the air. “You think you’ve got too much pride to buy? Seems like you don’t know your value, buddy.” And this was the last thing the piece of shit said, before his head hit the metal of the nearest locker hard enough to make it ring. 

“Don’t ever presume you know my value,” Bernardo said through his teeth.

But shitheel just grinned back at him, like they both knew it was too late to avoid that.

And it was. The minute there’s a price sticker on your head, people assume you’re on the shelf. There was never going to be any convincing them that it wasn’t on purpose—that fucking match. For the rest of his life, he’ll taste blood in his mouth and remember it. For the rest of his life they’ll assume he went down on his knees willing.

End of the day, the champion they’d asked him to lie down for wasn’t even a mick—it was a Pole, blond, long legs and long reach and a rich-boy sheen that has no place in a basement ring. Someone’s son, maybe. The kind of kid whose path to glory can only be borrowed or bought.

It was a sweet thing to make him bleed. A righteous thing to bring him down.  

In hindsight, he knows better than to want it that bad, so badly it makes him shake. Takes the clarity out of his landings, and he’s always been better with precision than weight. The kid got too close—crooked in one long arm, and he saw stars. For a moment he thought it was heaven, and he was ready, he was willing.

But when he woke up and found that the match was over, and another envelope was in his locker, he remembered fast enough about hell.

He and Anita are off the West Side now, but every week on their new block there’s a black car idling at the corner and some new gringo inside to tell him the work.  

No more shows, but there’s always a job for a fighter, even a disgrace. Work for a well-aimed fist, work that pays better than he dreamed. Pays dividends. Pays enough to put María in school, and thank the Virgin she’s not in the house to see him like this. He’d rather she think he’s driving the cars than sitting in the back next to these men, knife in his boot, will at the ready. The drivers are honest.

Not Mulligan’s drivers. The Sicilians had paid double, when they’d heard there was already a bid in. He could pretend to himself that there’s some kind of comfort in the hatred they share, some kind of vindication in working for the men that hate the first ones who tried to bend him, but it doesn’t matter in the end—they’re cut from the same cloth. The work smudges the boundaries; there are traitors on both sides, kindred spirits across the lines. They use their money to fight like he fought in the streets, once, and when they can’t use the money—they do worse than he ever did. And they ask his hands to carry it out for them.

At home in their new apartment, Anita counts fresh bills with nails red as lit cigarettes, with hands so practiced he almost never sees them shake.

The latest job’s in a swank part of town, an East Side hotel that gleams like it’s dipped in gold. The job is simple, security during a game where the pot is sweet enough to draw flies from all territories. Paying customers, of course, so the sweaty hands grabbing for the pot run pale on all sides, but other than that it’s no different in its soul than the street brawls. There’d be more dignity if they came with knives, not money, but that’s why they pay men like him.

He has no illusion about why some coño in a suit would pay a man like him. To do their work, sure, but to kick once it’s done, too. To stand back and watch with their hands raised: what can you expect from a dog like that?

The Italians bought him away from the Irish to make a point; he let himself be bought because the part of him that had once believed this could never happen had been stuffed in a sack full of mick money. Dago money is no different. In some ways, taking it is its own revenge—a dignity in disloyalty, a masterless scrap. Besides, they have more of it.

In the back of the long black car, they tell their secrets in their own language, where he can pretend not to understand. They tell him just what he needs to know: he’s got no money to lay down, sure, they don’t expect that from him. That’s not the job. For this kind of work, they need eyes. They need bodies at the table, watching. They need hands that are willing to take action, should action need to be taken.

He’s not a counter—not like Chino, but Chino’s in for six years now, consequences of running the numbers for a neighborhood game that got too big for the neighborhood. That’s the price of trying to start something on your own. Bernardo remembers dreaming of something like that, remembers what it felt like before it got knocked out of him. And Chino was smart, see. Was working with his brains, would have been the kind of man who could watch the cards and follow where they went.

But they don’t need a counter. They need someone with nothing invested in the pot, with hands free to act fast if something goes wrong.

Even so, it’s a suit-and-tie game, something to shine up for. “Bring your girl,” the boss says, smiling like a pig that thinks he’s a wolf. “Dress her nice.”

Not for the first time, Bernardo dreams of sticking the pig. But he keeps his hands still and steady, until he’s told not to—such is the nature of the work.

“Well, sure,” Anita says later. “Why shouldn’t you bring me?”

It took him a long time to get round to telling her, same as it used to take a while to tell her about street work. Not the same as lying: he has no illusions about that. The truth hangs off him like a loose string, waiting for her to tug it out and cut the excess away. Less and less eager is she to see it unravel these days.

But in the dark, sweat cooling on their skin, it’s something close to easy. The way the moonlight burnishes her bare shoulders, makes her shine like the sea at night. He’s never told her anything she didn’t know before he said it, from you’re beautiful to I love you to this is what they pay me to do now.

“You don’t like the work,” he says. “You didn’t even like watching me in the ring.”

“I loved the matches,” she replies easily. “Who wouldn’t like watching someone try to smash their favorite face in the world over and over? Not to say, amor, that you were less than majestic, but now—” Her fingertip trails lazily from his forehead to his nose. “Less risk of seeing my fine china thrown to the floor.”

“How delicate you think me, Anita Josefina.”

She raises an eyebrow. “I think they won’t smash anything where there’s witnesses. Fine lady witnesses, no less, with our delicate hearts!” Her mouth on his is slow and luxuriant. “I’m not afraid, if I’m there.”

He almost believes her; it almost makes him laugh. “Your fine china,” he says, and she says, “Yes, mine, all of it,” and means it, her hands greedy but not jealous, simply certain that everything she touches belongs to her.

And it’s almost worth it to see her in the velvet and damask of the hotel on Fifth Avenue, heels sinking into the plush carpet underfoot. There’s a room paid up for the weekend, deep gold satin floor to ceiling, a leather desk and a bed with four posts and a low-draped canopy that casts a long shadow over the gifts he lays out on the bed. Gifts, or maybe tools, not that it makes a difference nowadays. She’s brought her own dresses, of course, that’s not his business, but the rest—he knows where the men’s girls shop. He walked past Luz cleaning the floor and pretended it didn’t shame him. It was worth it for this: the shine inside of the jewelry box, the way she gasps when it opens. The soft fur waiting for her inside its thin plastic and the way she sighs when she touches it. A familiar sigh. A good sigh. For a minute, this is the better life that he promised her.

“Who is this for?” she laughs, and he says, “You tell me.”

She slides her fingers through the nap of the mink idly, relishing it as she considers her option. He can’t look away from her hand, the way it strokes. “Carmen Margarita,” she says at length. “I told you, Josefina Beatriz for when I need them to look past me, Carmen Margarita for when they can’t look away.”

“You like being one better than the other.”

“None so well as I like being Anita.” She takes her hand from the fur and reaches for him, wrapping her arms around the back of his neck and pulling herself in, languid and tight.

She does like it, likes it so much he could worry about it if he let himself. But she’s always had the knack for details: her hair up in a neat bun the day she came back with a complete list of the event’s guests, a dress borrowed from Luz in a shade of green she never wears. Higher heels when she went to get information at the dance hall—that he noticed, the way they stretched her legs, the way they brought her up to eye level. The distinctions are meaningless to him. She’s his Anita, hair up or down, in green and yellow and red and nothing. But that’s why she said to leave this part to her.

We all look the same to those men, she’d said in a way where he couldn’t tell what side of we she meant, women or boricuas or outsiders or all of it, or anyway, they don’t look in the face. So you can put on anything, and the wrapping sells the gift.

Her voice had been dark, but she tilted her head at the end and smiled a shopgirl smile, which he can distinguish easy from a real one. But he’s not immune to the story she’s telling, even if he can make out the differences. He’d wanted to tear the borrowed dress off her, the way it tied tight around her throat and clung to her down through the calf, and she’d laughed and said, Hey, Luz will never forgive me if you wreck this, this cost her two paychecks. And he’d watched her undo the buttons careful and slow, maybe even a little slower than she had to, smiling over her shoulder, until underneath she was the same as always. The same woman he’d know in any country, under any name.

“You tell me,” he says now, his hand stroking over her waist like she’d stroked the mink. “Anyone in that room does anything to you—says anything—thinks anything—I’ll take care of them. Doesn’t matter what they do to me.”

Her eyes flicker dark for a moment. “It should matter, mi vida,” she says. “It does matter.”

This isn’t a room for the careful. This is a game that’s supposed to happen in back rooms, in secret, played under a chandelier the size of the sun. One card game, one dice game: the cards are for the patient marks, the ones who think they’re smart, and the dice are for the men who want to get straight to losing. It’s barely afternoon and the room is already full of smoke.

Bernardo plants himself at the edge of the long bar skirting the room, where the clear liquors are imported from England and France at a premium and the rum is watery and from nowhere in particular. He drinks whatever they give him and casts an eye around the room, running the lists of names in his head. Who’s disposable, who’s compromised, who’s sitting at the dealer’s left hand at table three. Who belongs to who.

Leaning against the nearest craps table, a long shape he recognizes, a smile he last saw with its teeth rattling. “Hey,” says the kid the Irish sent with their envelope. “Look at you shined up.”

The velvet drops away underfoot, the damask peels off the walls. There’s not one person in the room between him and that smirking piece of shit, and every muscle in his body is goading him forward. The kid’s wearing a tie and a shirt with buttons in a way that says fuck-off to the concept of buttoning up, the tie knotted low and loose around his neck as if he’s baiting the hangman. Pale throat and a dirty beater beneath, wisps of fine hair visible. Bernardo remember what it was like to take him by the throat and feel his teeth rattle. He remembers he never fully wiped off that grin.

He’s on his feet and he doesn’t remember how he got there. He’d be three feet forward and the table would be on its side, if it wasn’t for Anita’s hand in the crook of his arm. “¿Quien carajo? Stay cool,” she breathes.

“Looks like you found your value after all,” the kid says idly around a toothpick. His eyes cut to Anita, and the pick flicks up between his teeth. “And then some.”

What must it be like, thinks Bernardo, to crawl out of a gutter and still walk into a room like you own it. “Beyond your price, muchacho.”

“Muchacho, huh? Thought you were in with the amicos now.” He hits the c hard, skids on it wrong. “No never-minds to me, though. Never could tell the difference.”

“Riff, shut your mouth and go make the rounds,” says some nearby stack of broken capillaries, and Riff goes slouching toward the card table, half a strut and half a shamble and all apparent that he’s not trying at all.

Bernardo looks back at Anita’s raised eyebrow, answers the question. “He tried to buy me,” he says. “He was first in the door.”

“Kid doesn’t look like he has the money to get his shirts pressed.”

“He’s an errand boy,” says Bernardo, almost says same as me.

“You want me to tail him?” Anita asks. Then she smiles, slow and devious. “Want me to bring him back to you? I can bait the hook.”

“He’s no fish worth catching,” Bernardo says, and doesn’t say I don’t know what kind of bait hooks him, anyway. There’s a cool nothing behind those eyes, not the kind of ember Anita usually coaxes to smoke. “Just keep an eye. I want to know where he is.”

“Eyes open. And you keep yourself together.” She catches him by the chin. “Stay cool,” she says again, one fingernail pressing sharp into his chin. “Wait for me. I’m gonna make the rounds.”

Nowadays he comes home weighed down in the pocket and weighed down in the ears. This was the advantage of picking the Sicilians, not just that they’d come with a bigger offer after he’d resigned himself to being sold for scrap: sitting in the back of the black car, there’s little difference between dio and dios, dadi caricati and dados cargados. He can follow along, and so he comes home with twice as much as fits in the envelope. And as always, Anita counts what he brings home.

Sure, she was afraid at first. For him, for them, but she’s never been afraid for herself for very long. So there was the space left behind inside her that the fear cleaned out, and the question of how to fill it. His part, he keeps the space inside of himself intact, lets it carry all the rage he doesn’t know what to do with. But she’s not like that. She hates an empty shelf, an unadorned dress, money on the table. She sees the big picture.

She remembers that the dice at table seven are loaded and the third hand at table five will always be a flush of aces. And she thinks about how to fill the space for hands one and two.

The dice are loaded at table seven, run by a big fuck-off Calabrian with half of his little finger gone. Most of the Irish are clustered around table three for cards and six for dice, but it’s table five where where there’s a seat saved for the big guns, where they want him to sit on the right and keep an eye. Make sure the right seats stay free and the right ones get filled. And no matter what, that everyone keeps calm, even when they lose, especially when they lose.

And that’s right where Riff’s planted himself—on the left. Holding his cards like it’s a joke, but the laugh doesn’t hit his eyes. He’s not there to win.

When she comes back, Bernardo slides a hand to the curve of her neck, fingertips grazing her curls, and whispers in close: “He’s not a player. He’s a watchdog.”

“He’s not watching the big dogs, though,” Anita points out, and when Bernardo looks up, she’s right. “He’s watching you.”

The last thing they need is extra eyes. They’ll need to be careful.

But table five is too big to push right out the gate. Table seven is a better bet, easier: it doesn’t matter if they win so long as the right people lose.

Bernardo’s English gets a little worse at the table. His hands gesture a little broader. Pino with the nine and a half fingers runs an east-side circuit for a different boss—it’s a big family, they don’t all have to be close. Stupid figures for stupid. There’s that flare of angry pride when Pino rolls his eyes and turns away, but Bernardo kicks it back before it can open its eyes back up. There’s no pride in this room.

Except here: where Anita sidles up next to him, pours the curve of her hip into the crook of his arm. “Luck?” she asks, just like she promised she would.

“Siempre,” he says, and lifts the loaded dice to her red mouth and watches her blow.

It’s for show, but it’s for him, too, real because he’s seeing it, real because she’s there where he can touch her. Real where her lips, after, brush the curve of his jaw. Real, too, because he watches the shadow that crosses the eye-line of every man at the table, and he remembers faces, and Josefina Beatriz has a list of names, if he needs them, coaxed from a hotel secretary. These particular men are nothing to him, nothing to the boss or the boss’s boss. If he needs to—if he wants to—he could follow them home, make them sorry. Make it just as real when he catches up to them.

Eyes on the table first. Anita squeals when the dice come up the right way, more girlish than usual, and claps her red-nailed hands. This is a language the men that hold the leash and the purse think they understand: generosity to a girl with a mink slung low beneath bare shoulders. They’ll forgive one little win, not too many, to make her leap and shiver and smile like that, just once. She’s another diamond in the room, something that shines where it’s set.

But there in the corner Riff is leaning against the wall, no longer locked into table five, and not playing. Just watching, watching, and the light of the chandelier and Anita’s laughter doesn’t touch him at all. Somehow that’s an insult worse than any of the sweating pigs around them; somehow that’s the first repayment Bernardo wants to collect.

He doesn’t have to wait for it. Riff catches up to him at the bar. “I know what you’re doing, you son of a bitch,” he says.

“Hello to you too.”

“You think because you bring a slice of cherry cake to the table I’m going to forget about what you are?” Riff snaps. A faint splotch of red rises up the base of his throat, like it remembers Bernardo catching him there, like it’s begging for seconds. “You forget who first tried to cut you in, muchacho.”

Bernardo’s fist clenches, but he keeps it in his pocket. “I don’t forget,” he says.

He never has. It’s Riff’s face that floats behind his eyes when he carries steel or pig-iron. When he thinks about what he used to be—before his dreams of family and neighborhood and righteousness went down in the ring and this second self sat up to spit out the blood—he thinks of Riff, first through the door, who caught him without his clothes and without his skin. He saw what was coming down the line. Bernardo will never forgive him for that.

“You’re wound tight,” says Anita that night, letting the gold satin sheet slide down from shoulder to hip. “Listen, don’t worry so much. I can handle myself out there. No one’s going to do worse than stare, and remember, we want them to stare.”

Most of them, sure, he wants to say. There’s one set of eyes he’s sure won’t budge, no matter how bright she shines, and he can’t explain the certainty or the fish-hook in his gut about it. “Did you think I gave up?” he asks instead. “That match, with Wyzek—”

She pulls back. The blinds soften the moonlight in the room. Her bare skin shines with it, but he cannot see the look in her eyes.

 “I’ve never seen you like that night,” she says. “I never want to. You were fighting to die out there.” 

If it wasn’t for her, he’d believe he’d managed it. As it is, she leans back in, her dark hair soft against his mouth, her lips touching his throat. “Never again,” she says. “This wasn’t the dream, sure, but it’s one of the ways in. I can handle any number of these rooms. Here I don’t have to watch them try to break you.”

There’s nothing left to try, he’d say, but here and only here that’s a lie. Any bed they share is a whole and perfect home, anywhere in the world.

But he didn’t tell her about the time he’d gone home. Walked all the way to West Sixty-Seventh, let his feet take him all the way back to the gym. Inside was empty but for the candle burning beneath the board of clippings, faded María behind the glass sending her smoke up to bless Ortiz and Basilio and Kid Gavilán and that picture of Chago’s grandma, Dios la bendiga, next to that poster of him that they won’t take down. Vasquez versus Wyzek, two ghosts curling at the edges. He’d bent his head toward the candlelight, kisses his knuckles.

No idea how long he’d considered the prayer that didn’t come, only that eventually the door had banged open behind him. Quique, fresh off the streets. A little more curled around the edges himself, or maybe that’s just how everything looks now. “Hey, man.” His hand familiar and heavy on Bernardo’s shoulder. “What, you don’t have enough luck, you have to come begging la Virgen for more?”

“I get it.” The poster and the flame—it hurt, but it made sense. You mourn those that leave you; you pretend not to hate them for it, and you hate the world that took them. “One of the dead, right?”

“Nah, man, nah—one of the greats.” Quique landed a finger on the board, a grey clipping of no boxer at all. The boss, and Bernardo behind him, wearing a nice suit before it got spoiled. Would be so easy to miss him in the back of the shot, face blurred as a thumbprint. He doesn’t know how anyone could have known it was him, only that it meant there’s people who can’t stop looking even now that he’s left them behind. “Look at you, walking tall. In the papers and everything. You always knew you were going to be the big man.”

The part of him that knows to look over his shoulder at every turn had looked twice into Quique’s face, but there was no spite to be found. Just a hunger bigger than him, that changed what he saw when he looked at Bernardo.

Not a brother any longer, that’s for damn sure. Not a relic on the Virgin’s altar. Something closer to a saint.

The kind of legacy that makes a man want to do the unforgivable.

“Here,” Bernardo had said, low, and tugged at his wallet.

“Hey, no.” Quique shoved at his hand. “Get the fuck out of here with that, what are you doing?”

But what else could he do, walking around loaded down with this shit like it belongs to him? It shouldn’t, they should have been waiting around the corner to roll it off him like the white boys used to do in the parks at dark, prowling for anyone soft or lazy or new. They should have torn him to pieces for leaving them, to say nothing of where he went. They should have burnt his name off their wall. At least that blank love was gone from Quique’s face, even if the thing that came to replace it wasn’t what he wanted either. “You don’t want to pocket it yourself, fine, slip it in your brother’s till, send it home to Mayagüez. It’s for the family. You don’t gotta tell them where it’s from.”

He’d kept his hands focus-mitt flat, refusing to take any of it back. For a moment, he’d figured Quique might hit him, and figured that might be good for both of them. Instead, he’d backed away, shaking his head, looking like he’d seen a stranger or a ghost, and Bernardo had been free to leave the streets he’d called home undisturbed. Same as always, no one ever stood in his way back here.

Next day the big dogs are meant to circle. In the brief reprieve of the morning, Bernardo watches Anita work her magic: rolling on silk stockings, pouring herself into some satin thing that hugs her like a glove, tugging the fur beneath her shoulders. At the end, he clasps the necklace from Gimbels around her throat. The diamonds are as colorless and cold, every American girl’s dream.

“I want to see you in it,” he says.

She tips her throat obligingly. “See.”

His mouth finds the curve of her neck, tasting the dark flower of her perfume. “Only in it.”

“Later,” she laughs. “I don’t want to go down with sweat in my hair.”

She’s always been able to keep things in order; that’s why she’s the counter. “What do you say, then,” he asks, arms sliding over the satin tight to her waist. “Worth about five girls and a storefront?”

“I haven’t stopped wanting the five girls and a storefront,” she laughs. “Don’t think I’ve gone soft just because you take me nice places. Ten girls. Five storefronts. This is a nice block, this Fifth Avenue, maybe I’m scoping it out for the future.”

“Exactly,” he says. “You see the value. You got security for the future, if something happens.”

All of a sudden, she goes mannequin still in his arms. “Don’t you dare talk like that,” she says, so low and furious he can hardly hear her. “You think I need some kind of treasure to sell when you die? What did I just tell you? If you’re so afraid I’ll think you gave up, maybe stop making plans for what happens when you do.”

She spins back around and stabs a finger into his chest. “This isn’t a kid’s game. You want to quit this life, cariño, fine, you slip your neck from the yoke and we’ll find a way to make a life without all this. Don’t you dare pretend like we need this to make a life for ourselves.”

“A life in America,” he clarifies, “comes at a cost.”

Her nostrils flare. “I know the costs. Better than you, maybe—who runs the numbers? You think I need you to give me this, any of this? I loved you with your pockets empty and I’ll do it again but I can’t stand you acting crazy. You tear this down the middle because you miss getting hit, you leave me with nothing. Less than nothing.” She tears herself away from him so quick her skirts bell out. He feels the brush of her anger in silk and crinoline, against his legs, his hands. “Come down when you’ve got yourself together,” she says, pausing at the vanity to fix her lipstick with hands she pretends aren’t shaking with anger, “and if you see some yanqui buy me a drink, don’t interrupt him. They’re pigs, sure, but let the pigs snuff their way over me and see what I can’t get out of them. Remember what we’re doing here. It’s work—it’s just work.”

“Nos vemos, Carmen Margarita,” he calls at her back, and when she turns in the doorway, her eyes are bright and wet. He recognizes his mistake instantly.

“You know better,” says his Anita, before she shuts the door.

Ten minutes later, some Mulligan is buying her a drink, and Bernardo grits his teeth tight as he makes his way to table five. Riff has already claimed a seat, and he’s draped himself in a bleached blonde while he’s at it, like he thinks he’s funny. Funnier than yesterday.

The blonde thinks he’s funny enough, or pretends to. Puts her hands on his shoulders, peers over his shoulders, peeps with excitement or dismay. She’s got a voice like a baby chick in the nest and little twig legs, but Bernardo recognizes the moves. Seeing them done backwards, worse, is an offense. It has to be a deliberate one.

Riff puts down a pair of twos, best of the morning, and the blonde coos with delight. She kisses him flat on the closed mouth, hard enough to leave a smear of lipstick. “That’s Wyzek’s girl,” says Riff as she walks away at the end of the round, not turning to watch her go. “Remember him?”

Like hell Bernardo will give him the satisfaction. “Doesn’t look like your type.”  

“Oh yeah, spitshine? What’s my type?”

Bernardo gives him the flat, unyielding smile he’s learned to dole out in these conversations and stands. When he drops his hand and walks away, he knows he won’t walk away alone. “You keep a lot closer eye on the tables than you do on her,” he says low as he walks. “You didn’t spare a second look for my girl. Maybe you’re looking for something more like Wyzek.”

A fair fight is one thing, but sometimes it feels better than anything to kick them where they’re soft. The grin slips off Riff’s face, and what’s left behind is dead and dark and cold. Good. “Say that shit to me ever again and I’ll find a time for you to say it to me in the dark, alone.”

“Promise?” asks Bernardo. “I’ll be waiting.”

The Mulligan is laughing at the bar. Hands splayed broad on his knees, looking down the satin expanse of Anita like it belongs to him. Before Bernardo can move—and he’s ready on his feet—Riff’s hand is on his sleeve. His fingers are wet from a gin glass he was holding but not drinking. He leaves prints.

“You try anything, I have license to put you down,” he says.

“Now that’s got to be a promise,” says Bernardo. “Words too big for your mouth otherwise.”

The fingers peel from his sleeve, and he leaves, before he can do what Anita’s afraid of—what that looks like, he doesn’t know. Only that he knows what it feels like when the mouth of the world opens up underfoot. He recognizes the feeling of darkness ready to swallow him up.

Five minutes solo, he figures, take a breath outside—no—a closed door, better that way, the room. Inside, Bernardo shuts his eyes and clenches, unclenches, his hands until the fists are gone from them, though the spring-coil of the fight in his body is still wound to snap. The curtains are shut, the air heavy and still, and even the dust seems gilded in the shadows.

A knock. Of course, Anita must have seen him go. Bernardo opens the door.

“Left the game half through, buddy boy,” says Riff.

And the spring tightens. “You here to make good on those promises?”

Riff doesn’t wait to be invited in. “Sure,” he says, slouching in through the doorway, looking around. Eyes on the rumpled sheets, scraps of Anita’s lace. He picks up a piece of blank notepaper on the writing-desk, puts it back down. Doesn’t pretend to read the nothing written on it. He’s smirking, like the trespass is the point.

“Stop wasting time,” Bernardo snaps. “You think you can hit me when nobody’s looking? Try. I’m ready. I’ve been ready.”

“Easy, muchacho,” says Riff, laughing. He spreads his arms. “I see you. You’ve got it made since the last time I seen you. Never figured I’d cross paths with you in this kind of gig. Clearly you took to it, or it took to you. They told me the Bianchis had a street dog, but I never figured it’d be your teeth snapping at the end of the chain.”

For a moment, Bernardo doesn’t recognize himself. It is one thing to be talked about in the rooms he’s left; another to be talked about in rooms he’s never been in, rooms of people that hated him before they knew him. “And you?” he asks. “What are you good for? They don’t say shit about the Lorton lightweight. They don’t seem to need you for much of anything.”

“Sure they do. They need someone who’s not afraid to get down in the mud.”

And Riff kneels. Knees to the grainy red carpet, worn thin by too many feet, hands moving broad and easy and no-threat slow. That wide, easy grin with nothing behind it never leaves him as he reaches out, as his hand makes its way to Bernardo’s zipper.

The back of Bernardo’s hand lands crooked against his face. He feels Riff’s teeth knock into his lip, hard on the back of his knuckles. “What the fuck is this?” he asks. “Blackmail, now?”

Riff’s grin is red at the edges, but the shape is the same. “How would that work?” he says. “Who’s watching? You think they’d take my word for it?”

Bernardo doesn’t hit him again. Not even when he opens his mouth.

It feels good, first thing. Obliteratingly fucking good, wet and dark and warm—the kind of good where you know something’s wrong with it. Bernardo doesn’t let himself sink into it, as bad as it so badly wants him to. Riff is watching him the whole time, staring up as he takes him deep, the crooked edges of his mouth curling up around Bernardo’s cock. He can feel the shape of that deathless, unfunny grin just as clear as he can feel the flinch as he hits the back of Riff’s throat. Even that doesn’t shake it off. 

He wants to take Riff by the back of his neck, by the hair, wants to make it hurt. That’s a kind of satisfaction he doesn’t let himself chase—he knows the difference between a clean and a dirty fight,  now more than ever. So he keeps his hands flat to the desk and stays so straight up the back that Riff has to dig his hands in at the hips, has to hold onto the folds of Bernardo’s pants and tug himself forward, knees rough on the rug, not the first to wear it thin. Has to cling like he’s begging for something.

It takes no time. No time at all.

Riff leans back, wipes his knuckles over his shining red mouth. He stands up and grabs the cup on the desk, shaking out the pen and pencil before he spits into the shavings. “There you go,” he says. “How’s that for peace talks.”

“Fuck your peace,” says Bernardo, from the base of his throat, and Riff laughs, coughs.

“I’ll pass it along.”

“Hey,” says Bernardo, only half knowing what he’s asking. “What happened to Wyzek?”

“Dead,” says Riff. He doesn’t blink. “Wouldn’t play. You know, maybe you would’ve seen eye to eye, if you’d’ve stood on a box. He didn’t bend neither, even when it would’ve done him good to do it.”

He doesn’t look back when he shuts the door behind him. On the desk, Bernardo studies the eight neat half-moons in the wood, the splinters under his nails.

The trussed pig from the bar pulls the score of the night at table five. Not in the plans, or even if it is, the Sicilians don’t love to see him walk away with it. Unspoken, Anita slides up to Bernardo’s side, leans the whole satin-swathed weight of her into the crook of his arm. “I’ll forgive you later,” she murmurs. “Since you did just what I asked. It’s no trouble for me, you know. You don’t need to look like that.” Her eyes widen fractionally, and her hand goes up to a stray lock of his hair, unslicked and falling over his forehead. “Why do you look like that?”

Bernardo thinks about what to say. What he says is, “I think the micks have a crack in their operation.”

She starts. “¿No jodas?”

Same as there is in this one, he thinks, but he hates to think of sharing a job or an instinct with Riff—as if they’re twin fractures spoking out from the same shattering point. They’ve never come from the same place; they never will.

The door is locked when he tells her, and the night is dark. They might sleep. Instead they talk, in the aftermath, the cold room warming with the scent of sweat and Anita’s perfume. These are the hours when secrets are easiest to say, secrets that might change their lives. The first time she said What if we go? she said it into the nape of his neck, by moonlight, in a small home where in the quiet he could hear the sea. They are older now, if not wiser, and the water that surrounds the island of Manhattan is nothing like the one at home, but the moon is the same. The warm languor in her voice and her body, that’s the same too.

It’s easy and bold at the start, something they can use, can you believe it. A weakness. And then it isn’t. He doesn’t kneel to her—the carpet’s seen too much traction—but he confesses all the same, bending his head to the lit flame of her in the dark and waiting for, if not penance, then benediction.

He can never tell what will shock her: the money doesn’t anymore, and the blood never does, so long as it belonged to someone else. Perhaps this is like that. End of the day, it’s just another card laid on the table.

“Can we use it?” he asks at last, and she hums, amused, into his skin. He can’t see her face.

“Sure we can,” she says. “Take what he’s offering. Take everything. It’s what we came here to do.”

She pauses and unfurls slowly around him. “You watch me put on the dresses, and you like it, don’t you? You like the look of me when I put myself on for that room even when you’re ready to break some pendejito in half about it. It feels good to be here, right here, doesn’t it? Like it feels good to touch mink, to touch satin.”

The satin is on the floor. He knows how it feels in his hands. Still, the admission edges up on something he doesn’t like. “What do you mean?”

“Only that even the work—even bad work, on their dime—it doesn’t change the way things really feel, when you get your hands on them.”

“I know what I feel,” he says, hands proving a point on the flare of her hips, and she laughs.

“Ah, ah. There’s always the other thing.” Her first two fingers slip beneath his chin so she can look at him, steady-eyed in the dark. She kisses him like she’s drawing something out of him, slow and sure. He thinks of watching her work back in the shop, of how she’d catch an end of bright ribbon between her teeth, unspooling it long before making the cut. It’s been a long time since the things she makes were made by hand, were things he can see, but she hasn’t stopped the making. “It’s always been the same, no matter where you seek it out. At least your unhooked fish is honest about the nature of it.”

“And what’s that?”

“You know perfectly well.” She draws his hand to her mouth, lets her lips linger. “You come home with bloody knuckles, eager for me—I don’t mistake that for you wanting to bloody me up.”

He jerks his hand back. “What? Never.”

“I’ve never thought it.” She takes it again, kisses it again, mouth open on the back of knuckles that have split and healed more times than he can count. “You know the value of what you’re touching, when you touch me. See?” She’s smiling, right where he can touch it. His thumb draws slow over the lush swell of her lower lip, where the last of her rouge is not entirely kissed away, and her mouth parts to let him in.

Desire overwhelms him completely—every time, it shocks him with how total it is. Tireless and enormous as the sea, since he was a know-nothing kid standing in the wake of it. Her fingers twine with his as she draws his hand down, steady and slick, between her thighs.

“This isn’t all you want,” she says as she reaches down to guide him home.

It’s a backwards thing to say, when he wants this so wholly, but she just laughs. “If you wanted peace, you’d have it. You want blood in your mouth and you want to call it justice. You want to break that boy open, don’t you?” she asks, and it licks up his spine like lightning, shuddering through his hips as he sinks into her.

“Don’t,” he says, already close to the edge, and he can see the edges of her smile still, can catch the shape of it against his mouth. He closes his eyes as he drives in deep, but he can feel her fingers curling in the chain of his medallion, the faint scratch of her nails on his chest. The press of her skin, everywhere. 

“We are here to get what we want,” she breathes into his ear. “Yes, even you, my love.”

She’s out of bed before him the next day, satin-swathed and pristine and halfway out the door. The edge of Bernardo’s hunger hasn’t sanded down any, and not the smoke nor the watery rum nor three bad hands of cards do a damn thing to settle it. The game has stopped being played for fun, that’s for sure—the air is wire-tight and ready to trip. Or maybe it’s just him.

Maybe not, though. Yesterday left a hangover. An Irish hand sweeping a Sicilian table’s not nothing, even in a room that’s supposed to be for bargaining, even between men who might as well be indiscriminately American. But America is a lie, just like the peace is a lie, and Bernardo is keen and even hungry to the banked threat of war. At least it would be honest if they started throwing each other over the tables.

At least no men seem to be lingering around Anita. She’s somehow snarled herself up into conversation with that blonde, nursing something clear one seat down and looking lost without her wire-hanger to drape over. Anita touches her arm light and she giggles shrill enough to be heard from across the room. Not for the first time, Bernardo wonders when Anita got so comfortable in this room, marveling at her ability to be easy in any room she’s dressed for.

A hand smacks Bernardo’s arm and he’s turning, lifting his hand, ready to break fingers, longing for it. But it’s Riff’s hand he catches, and he drops it like it burns. Riff, not smiling, looking pissed as anything. “The fuck business is your girl running on Grazie?” 

“She doesn’t run anything,” says Bernardo, low. “Keep your voice down. Say whatever bullshit you want, but people hear you and then it becomes my problem.”

“I have every interest in making it your problem,” Riff says. “She’s a good girl but she can’t keep her mouth shut. You want to see that lamb get slaughtered?”

Bernardo laughs. It’s funny, even. “I wouldn’t have brought her to the lion’s den, if I was so concerned.”

“You’ll have forgotten the feeling,” says Riff. “Your girl gets along fine. Sharp teeth on her. Taste for blood.”

“Mind what you say about her.”

“Oh, is that the trick?” Bernardo hasn’t turned to look at Riff headlong but he can see him in the corner of his vision, can keep him there like a warning. “I say the wrong thing about girlie-girl over there and you take me upstairs and wring my neck?”

The answer is yes—his hand itches for it—but Riff’s voice is dangerously soft around the edges, soft like wet ground is soft before it gives way underfoot. Yes is the wrong answer, any yes in any language. He knows better than to lose his footing in a game like this.

You want to break him open, murmurs Anita’s voice in his ear, and he does, bone by bone, like it means nothing, or like it means victory, but certainly not like it means anything underneath the meaning, “I don’t have to take you anywhere,” he says, and that grin that so itches Bernardo’s skin is back tugging the edges of Riff’s mouth.

“Sure. You don’t have to do anything.”

Then the grin flickers, his focus going. The blonde’s made a beeline from Anita all the way to yesterday’s winning hand. She touches the broad breast pocket of his suit, all smiles and no subtleties, and Riff mutters a curse under his breath before he leaves.

Not long after, one of the Bianchi bosses collars Bernardo in another room. Seems like one of the men from the West Fifties knew just where to sit to pick up a flush. There’s no such thing as luck—not good luck, anyway. Bad luck, sure. Bad luck like breaking your fingers on the last night of a winning streak, for example. Hey, incidentally, Vasquez, we’ve got a door for you to fix. Upstairs, 21B—a real open and shut case.

Why do you think we have you fellas bring the girls? the boss asks, and doesn’t wait for an answer: They don’t know how to keep their mouths shut. It was some canary we heard singing over the bar. He wasn’t even the one that brung her.

He makes it down to the room late with his jacket in his hands. His hands hurt, but that’s only his body. When he has to go to work, really work, he’s learned to leave his soul behind. There’ll be a reckoning someday, sure, but that’s business with Heaven, and he’ll be a while getting there. Anita told him not to rush, after all.

So everything that matters waits in the room below. It’s like it never happened, which is always what it’s like. The body remembers, but the body remembers everything.

Anita’s hasn’t taken off a minute of the day when he opens the door: still in the day’s satin, still wearing the diamonds collared around her neck, fur flung over the back of the vanity chair. Everything about her sheds light. Seated like this with her face to the mirror, she might be posing for a black-and-white picture, the kind that made its way home to San Juan to be thumbed-over and creased, but she’s alight with color. All the color Rita Hayworth scrubbed off, alive in this room.

She stands up as he closes the door, her back to him. “Unzip me,” she says, not asking where he’s been, and then, “Your hands are shaking.”

“They’re not.” The dress peels back from her shoulders, all the way down to the waist. Beneath, the lace is thin enough that he can feel the warmth of her skin. “See? Steady.”

“You were gone for an hour,” she says, though she says it light. “Anywhere special?”

“Didn’t leave the hotel.”

It’s the truth—he only ever gives her the truth. The rest she can fill in. Asking him to say it out loud wouldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, of course: if she was to press, it would be because she needed to hear it. He’s never denied Anita anything she needed, but she hasn’t needed this yet.

She turns in his arms and her hands play light with his buttons, unfastening one after the other. It hadn’t occurred to him to check his cuffs. Still hasn’t, when she unfastens them—gold plate over tin, she’d told him what shape looked smartest, richest, when he started taking jobs like this—and spends a little longer on the left one, flecked with red. He should have rolled up his sleeves.

“Say you’re safe,” she murmurs, instead of asking, and he peels out of the dress shirt and wraps his bare arms around her, sinking deep into the feeling of skin on skin until he’s most of the way back to himself.

“I’m safe,” he says. “You’re safe,” which is the more important thing.

Then a pounding at the door, like the world’s determined to make a liar out of him. Anita leaps back, tugging her sleeves back up her shoulders. All at once there’s a prayer behind Bernardo’s lips, reflex like when some pendejo breaks the rules of the fight and kicks you in the shins. He saves it for later and hopes not to need it at all. For now he tilts his chin to the bathroom and Anita slips through and pulls the door shut after without a word. So he knows she’s afraid, the kind of afraid that makes you fast and quiet and, worse, obedient.

But there’s nobody on the wrong side of the peephole. Or just Riff, anyway, fist slamming down and down.

“Coño,” says Bernardo aloud. He opens the door. “What do you want?”

It’s not an invitation. Hell, the door might be open but it sure isn’t a welcome. All the same, Riff ducks in under Bernardo’s arm like it’s nothing, long body weasel-swift, and then he’s inside and there’s nothing to do but shut the door tight so no one can see it walking by. He’s left his jacket somewhere, and his tie swings loose around his neck, looking as always like it couldn’t wait to unravel the minute it touched him.

“I thought you understood the terms,” Riff’s saying. “I mean, shit, I never mistook you for a player, but I thought you had your thumb on the pulse.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It ain’t your battle,” says Riff. “That’s plain. I know you ain’t loyal. You don’t gotta be. You need to sit back and keep your mouth shut. You step in, you fuck it up for guys like us.”

Bernardo’s eyes narrow. “There’s no guys like us.”

“Oh, yeah?” The usual grin tries to make its way home, but it’s slipping at the edges, and Riff’s eyes are flat and empty, the color of the dirty river on a cold day. “You think you’re the only one sitting wound up on the sidelines? I don’t give a damn what your angle is, buddy boy. Shit, I even hope you enjoyed yourself, pulping the big guy. Bet you told yourself it was payback. Hope it felt like it, even. But you compromise my girl, you compromise me.”

Several words in an order, but they don’t add up to a meaning. Some of them less than others. “Your girl?” And Bernardo lets himself feint the first blow light. You don’t always have to go in for the kill. Even if you want to—when you most want to, that’s when you pull back. “Thought she was Wyzek’s.”

“Coño.” The bathroom door swings open hard enough to hit the wall. Anita’s dress shrugs around her shoulders; she hasn’t bothered to tug it all the way on. “What are you doing here?” She snaps her polished fingers and points to the door. “Get out.”

It’s like watching her and the blonde, or before that, the mug: she’s comfortable with anyone, anywhere. There’s no throwing her off-balance. Only Bernardo’s off-balance, and he can’t tell right now what’s keeping her on her center.

“I’m not going anywhere until—”

“Until what?” Anita’s lip curls. “You want to talk about your girl? Let’s talk. Sit and stop rattling the room,” she says, and—remarkably—Riff sits, perched on the edge of the bed like he’s ready to spring. “She was repeating back what had been said to her. That he knew where to sit, that he knew where the score was.” She gives the words her best Brooklyn, broad and borrowed in her mouth. “Simple enough. Not her score and not her secret. Nobody thinks she’s trouble. I bet she’s in her featherbed, sleeping sound.” Anita raises her eyebrows. “And all alone”

“Repeating, sure,” says Riff, “but said to her by who? Not the big guy, for sure.”

“Again,” Anita says with a shrug that lifts her shoulders precariously from the satin she’s holding up, “they don’t care about her. They don’t care about us.”

It’s a line drawn clear, though Bernardo can’t see why she’s drawing it—she and Riff’s peroxide brush have nothing in common.

Riff cuts his eyes at her. “One thing about Grazie, you can count on her to make noise. And I figure, maybe someone told her where to make it, without telling her, like. Sound about right?”

“Oh, is that why you’re all in a stir.” Anita laughs her throaty, familiar laugh, and the sound jars Bernardo back into the room. “I thought you just wanted an excuse to come knock on our door. You want a cut, is it?”

She’s got the money stacked inside her jewelry box, under the bracelets and their velvet bed. “Don’t give him anything,” Bernardo starts, but she’s already lifting the velvet.

“It’s all right,” she says. “We can afford to be generous, now we’re all speaking the same language. Poor gringuito who can’t afford cuff links. Is this better?” She peels a single bill from the top. “Take it. Eat it. Buy yourself a steam press and tip the poor chica who starches your collars.”

“You think I couldn’t get the leavings if I wanted to? Listen, girlie, if I was after your cash prizes all I would’ve had to do is take it to the top and you wouldn’t’ve left the room with them.”

“But we’re here.” Anita doesn’t blink. She smiles, slow, the smile she wears when she’s put together a plan. Not the same smile she gives Bernardo when they’re alone, but the one that leads to it. Seeing it trained at Riff shocks Bernardo silent. “So it’s true. You just wanted to come up.”

She lets her hands fall. The shoulders drop, but the satin lingers in place, clinging tight as hands to her skin as she walks past.

“Don’t fuck with me, girlie-girl,” spits Riff, and reaches out.

He never gets there. Bernardo has him by the arm, then by the throat. He’s flat on his back in an instant, pinned and barely fighting. It’s not defeat on his face so much as inevitability: his eyes have that same still-water look, but the weather’s not half so cold this time.

“Ah, shit,” he says. “Why not.” And he arches, the whole narrow line of him arches, his throat pressing into Bernardo’s palm and his hips canting up.

Say it’s a caution when Bernardo reaches down to palm the hard ridge brushing his thigh through Riff’s dress pants, sure, call it that. All right. No knife, no gun, just the way Riff hisses through his teeth, a short, keen sound that sounds so much like pain that Bernardo does it again. His other hand’s not going anywhere. His thumb digs into the soft edge beneath Riff’s sharp jaw, the skin fresh and razor-raw, so he can feel the next sound sound Riff makes. He wants to tear it out of him. Both hands figure they’ll give it a try.

Behind him, faintly, Bernardo can hear the zip of the last few inches of dress. The slither of satin, not much more audible than breath. Sounds he can feel on his skin. When he looks up he can see her in just the lace and stockings beneath, the diamonds around her throat. Anita turns the vanity chair around, pulls the fur around her shoulders like she’s cold. She’s shivering, all right. One hand trails up her thigh, and when he sees the muscle clench, he swears he can feel it in his hand, muscle memory. He knows what the touch of her feels like when she’s close to the edge, how her lips part wet and her eyes go dark when she wants it bad.

“I told you,” she says. “Take what you want. I want to see what it looks like when you get it.”

It’s almost enough. That alone is almost enough—he’s already there, he’s been here since he walked in, has been so close to the edge he can feel it in his skin and his teeth for a day. There’s no denying it. 

But in the moment of stillness Riff hikes up his hips again and mutters “Stop and I’ll kill you” and Bernardo brings himself back to the center, the place where there’s always a scrap of patience no matter how desperate he is.

“You don’t know what to say,” says Anita, “you know how to get him quiet,” and Riff’s hands are on the zip of Bernardo’s trousers as she’s speaking.

“Hold,” Bernardo bites out, “still,” and he moves up until his knees can anchor Riff’s shoulders, all the wiry length of Riff strung tight and waiting. He reaches down, guiding Riff’s chin up, his mouth ready again. Begging again. 

Riff digs his hands in behind Bernardo’s knees for purchase. They slip upwards as he drags him deep, the edge of Bernardo’s pants gathering at the edge of his thighs, and above them, Riff’s fingers clawing hard enough to mark. Bernardo’s hand fists tight in his hair, the head of his cock at the tight clutch of muscle in the back of of Riff’s throat, and the sounds he makes are so close to defeat, and the look on his face is nothing like it. How easy it is to fuck into his mouth like slamming the door again and again, the same easy rhythm. Except for how Riff’s eyes light up, how his hips arch plaintively beneath him.

Behind him he can hear the soft sharp catch of Anita’s breath, the little sounds she makes, not quite the same as the ones he draws out of her, and not quite the same words between them. He jerks Riff’s head back when he’s close, cock sliding wet along the surface of his lips. Riff’s eyes follow him half-shut, body still strung tight beneath him. He looks wrecked already, eyes half shut, sweat in his hair, sighing, and Bernardo’s hands can’t help but be careful. Thing is, he’s never rough by accident. Not even now, less than ever now. His thumb is light on the edge of Riff’s jaw, his fingertips pushing a damp strand of hair from Riff’s forehead, holding his face just so.

Riff laughs hoarsely. “No way you’re done.”

So maybe he hates him, maybe he still hates him, maybe he hates him worse than ever like this, but Bernardo isn’t selfish. Never has been, not for this—you don’t stay selfish long with Anita, who has always known how to chase what she wants, even before she wanted it. Look at her now, the spread of her legs, the press of her hand where he can’t see, her mouth open and the gasp in it. Mink and lipstick and diamonds glinting, wearing the American girl inside out. Riquísima. And look at Riff beneath him, the jut of his hips and the way his breath catches, even as he’s talking shit, especially then. Bernardo draws his palm down again, same as before, same as he’d go to disarm. Maybe that’s what he’s doing, as he palms Riff through his pants.

“You’re a fucking tease, muchachito,” he gasps, and Bernardo clips him across the mouth again—and the sound he makes, fuck, Bernardo has to pull himself back from the edge again.

“Don’t,” he manages. “That’s not for you.”

“Right, yeah, sure.” Riff’s cresting against his hand, fucking against it. Easiest work of his life, if his heart wasn’t beating so fast, if the blood wasn’t so loud in his head. “Heard that before. Don’t got a lot for myself, all things considered, so why don’t you give me something to walk home with, huh? Give me something I’ll feel tomorrow.”

And that’s it, isn’t it—that’s the same look as when Bernardo clipped him, when he put his hand around Riff’s throat. It’s not the same as forgiveness and it’s not the same as taking pleasure where he can find it. This is what he wants—all of it, tonguing the cut he bit into his lip yesterday, open hunger for more written all over his face.

“You came up here claiming I’d fucked you, huh,” Bernardo says. “Yeah, I get the tactic. Say it out loud and you make it real. You might as well have come in on your knees.”

“Worked the first time,” says Riff.

It’s like the way he wears his tie tugged loose and his jacket half-off in a room where everyone else is topped and tailed and peacocking about it: the way he can walk in ready to get on his back, show his belly, put his dick into Bernardo’s fucking hand, and still not come across any weaker for it.

He lets Riff slip an arm free from under his knees, lets him unbelt and unzip. Anita’s laugh curls around them like smoke. “Some kindness, surely,” she says, voice husky and honeyed with a satisfaction he recognizes even as he can’t claim the credit for it, and picks up a bottle from the vanity. Same coconut oil she’s always put on her hair and skin, same island scent repackaged in a plastic American bottle. “Your hand, mi vida, for luck.”

Just like at the table Bernardo raises his palm and just like there once the work is done she brings her lips low, only instead of a kiss she spits, delicate and filthy, into the slick of oil on his skin. The light fractures on the wet of her mouth before she kisses him, then, full and slow, her tongue already between her teeth as she catches his mouth. Her nails dig into the thin warp of his undershirt, dragging it over his head, and for a moment he is blind and abandoned to the rest of the senses, the scent of orchid and coconut, the taste of lipstick and the soft touch of mink trailing on bare skin. When she pulls back, Riff is watching them, unzipped and half-lidded. “Ain’t love grand,” he says before Bernardo works his hand between his legs and he says nothing after that.

Anita lays herself down beside them in the big bed, her eyes half closed, the mink sliding from her shoulders. Her hands play over herself like she has all the time in the world, breasts rising above the lace, nipples shadow-dark between her fingers. Practiced, touching where he’d touch. He thinks of how patient and expert he can be with her, and how inexpert he is here—guided by nothing but want, nothing but the worst of himself. Not that there have never been men, when there are always men around him and there is always want and anger and the coiled spring ready to break, but it has always been making do when he’s been starving, and now he can’t pretend to be starving. He has more than he deserves. Jesús, María Virgen—Riff’s fingers dig into Bernardo’s thighs again, goading him deeper, and Anita is murmuring, soft and low and clear in the language they share, My God, you know how to work him—he has almost more than he can take.

The room smells like sweat and coconut, the familiar scent with its joints bent backwards, and when Bernardo comes he leans down and bites the sound into the cord of muscle that runs from Riff’s shoulder down to his ropy arms, silencing who knows what confession.

Bernardo sleeps light, like he’s being hunted, but tonight he sleeps heavy. It troubles him to be content here—he tries to think of anywhere else he’d prefer to be, somewhere real beyond this false dream bought with dirty money, and the visions slip alarmingly through his fingers. The truth is in his body: there is nothing else he wants right now. A different world, sure, but no more than that.

He’s still mostly floating in those deep dark waters when he hears the hiss of the match and catches the soft curl of smoke. It wakes him up, like Anita’s hair in his mouth will wake him up in the night, like the discovery that Anita’s hair is nowhere near his mouth wakes him up now. Like the silhouette of her cutting a dark hourglass against the bright city night outside the window, when he squints toward the balcony.

Above her, the cigarette cherry glows near Riff’s face.

“Been wondering how he got into it,” Riff is saying. “Guy like that, I figured he’d be dead in a week.”

“You wouldn’t wonder if you’d seen him fight.”

“Sure, I seen him. It was pretty ballet, but any dog can fight.” Riff shrugs, swiveling thin white shoulders under thin white cloth. “My old man could fight. See where it got him, six feet under, same as his friends. Same as me, give or take a year, I figure, and no one’s saying there’s anything I can’t do.”

“Of course not.” Anita’s voice is lulling, amused. “So what kind of guy do you mean?”

“You know just what kind, miss cherry red.” Riff knocks his knuckles against the metal frame of the balcony, makes a jarring sound. “Guy with principles so heavy they weigh him down. All the way down to the bottom of the river, most likely. How’d he come into a racket like this, I find myself asking, and then I look at you, and I don’t gotta ask at all.”

“You know nothing about me.” All at once Anita’s voice is pressed clean of that amusement, starched and colorless. “About us.”

“No? I watch the crowds. You’re always in the right place, and he’s always got his eye on you. End of the day, sure, Mulligan and Bianchi are taking away the biggest pieces of the pie, but there’s always cream missing from the top of the bottle. They never chase it so hard when it’s a pretty girl that licks it away.”

 “I don’t care what you think you can get away with in front of me—you don’t talk to me like that.”

“Don’t worry your pretty head about it,” Riff says, pretty turning sour in his mouth like a flavor he doesn’t like. “When someone pockets change it lets me get the measure of how much loss the bosses’re willing to shut their eyes to. There’s no profit to me ratting you out.”

“Sure,” she says, and the smoke curls back into her voice, warming its edges again. “That’s all it’s about—profit. And all of this was, what, a dream?”

“Why’d you do it?” he asks. His voice is raspy at the edges, used. “Why’d you let me in?”

“Bernardo let you in.”

Riff shakes his head. “Now, that’s not going to fly. Why’d you?”

The cherry is down to the filter, sizzling. Anita squashes the last of it on the banister, then flicks it off into the city beyond. “You needed something from him, you got it. You talk a good game about peace, but this is the nearest we’re going to come to it. Besides—” And she stands up on her toes and presses her lips to his flat-shut mouth, a kiss like the blonde kissed him at the table, a kiss like a bad joke at the expense of kissing. “I, too, like to know who’s willing to make compromises.”

The moon picks out her smile, her teeth. “You come knocking, I won’t turn away. So make it worth it when you do.”

“You think you know me?”

The door to the balcony slides open; she slides in. “It doesn’t matter if I do. He does.”

Bernardo closes his eyes again before she slips back into the bed. A long shadow makes its way across the room, opens the door so quiet it’s as if he was never here, as if it never happens. In the morning, if it weren’t for the map of feeling written on his body, he’d figure it was a dream. Only he doesn’t dream in English.

The Sicilians send him home with a bonus for good behavior and an offer, like a warning, of job in the Catskills—more poker, more cigars, more back rooms and shut doors. Anita brings envelopes of cash to the bank, week after week, a little heavier than expected but nothing that would raise an eyebrow. Enough to buy real estate—at least one storefront, at least one future. The mink hangs in her closet, in the back, in the plastic. There’s no returning it, when it still smells of smoke and of her. It carries the memory of what it touches, what touches it.

The Wyzek grave is deep in Queens, deep enough that the city stops feeling like the city and starts feeling like somewhere else, the home of someone Bernardo doesn’t know and might never meet. Comfortably foreign. The cemetery is sprawling and green. He doesn’t know why he’s here, other than to get to the beginning of things: to prove that the guy he’s held to blame all this time is in the ground.

There’s nothing on the headstone other than the name and the dates, not a BELOVED SON or BROTHER or anything like that. No nods to family, no one else here. Nothing to learn from it, and Bernardo has nothing to say to him now that he’s here—that’s an old future closed. Two, really, if you’re counting the guy underfoot.

He doesn’t get all the way to a prayer, he doesn’t give those away for free, but he touches the chain at his neck and figures the Virgin, or whoever’s watching, can fill in the blanks and make her own decision.

When he turns, he sees the long narrow shadow of what might be a man, someone who might even be coming toward him if he keeps walking this path, and it feels like an answer. In any case, he knows what—who—he wants to see coming up the walk, and that tells him something terrible about himself. He’ll bury it in the same grave if he has to, he tells himself. Or it’ll bury him.

But for now Bernardo waits, and, despite everything, hopes. And the hope tells him, whether he wants it to or not, that he’s still alive.