“No.”
“Vague about?”
“No, Mr. White.”
Albert White crossed his arms and nodded, looked at his shoes. “You got anything lined up? Any jobs I should know about?”
Joe had spent the last of Tim Hickey’s money to pay the guy who’d given him the info he needed for the Pittsfield job.
“No,” Joe said. “Nothing lined up.”
“You need money?”
“Mr. White, sir?”
“Money.” Albert reached into his pocket with a hand that had run over Emma’s pubic bone. Gripped her hair. He peeled two ten spots off his wad and slapped them into Joe’s palm. “I don’t want you thinking on an empty stomach.”
“Thanks.”
Albert patted Joe’s cheek with that same hand. “I hope this ends well.”
We could leave,” Emma said.
“Leave?” he said. “Like together?”
They were in her bedroom in the middle of the day, the only time her house was empty of the three sisters and the three brothers and the bitter mother and angry father.
“We could leave,” she said again, as if she didn’t believe it herself.
“And go where? Live on what? And do you mean together?”
She didn’t say anything. Twice he’d asked the question, twice she’d ignored it.
“I don’t know much about honest work,” he said.
“Who said it needs to be honest?”
He looked around the grim room she shared with two sisters. The wallpaper had come off the horsehair plaster by the window and two of the panes were cracked. They could see their breath in here.
“We’d have to go pretty far,” he said. “New York’s a closed town. Philly too. Detroit, forget about it. Chicago, KC, Milwaukee—all shut to a guy like me unless I want to join a mob as low man on the totem.”
“So we go west, as the man said. Or down south.” She nuzzled her nose into the side of his neck and took a deep breath, a softness seeming to grow in her. “We’ll need stake money.”
“We got this job lined up for Saturday. You free Saturday?”
“To leave?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to see You Know Who Saturday night.”
“Fuck him.”
“Well, yeah,” she said, “that’s the general plan.”
“No, I mean—”
“I know what you mean.”
“He’s a bad fucking guy,” Joe said, his eyes on her back, on that birthmark the color of wet sand.
She looked at him with a mild disappointment that was all the more dismissive for being so mild. “No, he’s not.”
“You stick up for him?”
“I’ll tell you he’s not a bad guy. He’s not my guy. He’s not someone I love or admire or anything. But he’s not bad. Don’t always try to make things so simple.”
“He killed Tim. Or ordered him killed.”
“And Tim, he, what, he made his living handing out turkeys to orphans?”
“No, but—”
“But what? No one’s good, no one’s bad. Everyone’s just trying to make their way.” She lit a cigarette and shook the match until it was black and smoldering. “Stop fucking judging everyone.”
He couldn’t stop looking at her birthmark, getting lost in its sand, swirling with it. “You’re still going to see him.”
“Don’t start. If we’re truly leaving town, then—”
“We’re leaving town.” Joe would leave the country if it meant no man ever touched her again.
“Where?”
“Biloxi,” he said, realizing as he said it that it actually wasn’t a bad idea. “Tim had a lot of friends there. Guys I met. Rum guys. Albert gets his supply from Canada. He’s a whiskey guy. So if we get to the Gulf Coast—Biloxi, Mobile, maybe even New Orleans, if we buy off the right people—we might be okay. That’s rum country.”
She thought about it a bit, that birthmark rippling every time she stretched up the bed to tap ash off her cigarette. “I’m supposed to see him for that new hotel opening. The one on Providence Street?”
“The Statler?”
She nodded. “Supposed to have radios in every room. Marble from Italy.”
“And?”
“And if I go to that, he’ll be with his wife. He just wants me there ’cuz, I dunno, ’cuz it excites him to see me when his wife’s on his arm. And after that, I know for a fact he’s going to Detroit for a few days to talk to new suppliers.”
“So?”
“So, it’ll buy us all the time we need. By the time he comes looking for me again, we’ll have a three- or four-day head start.”
Joe thought it through. “Not bad.”
“I know,” she said with another smile. “You think you can clean yourself up, get over to the Statler Saturday? Say, about seven?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then we’re gone,” she said and looked over her shoulder at him. “But no more talk about Albert being a bad guy. My brother’s got a job ’cuz of him. Last winter, he bought my mother a coat.”
“Well, then.”
“I don’t want to fight.”
Joe didn’t want to fight either. Every time they did, he lost, found himself apologizing for things he hadn’t even done, hadn’t even thought of doing, found himself apologizing for not doing them, for not thinking of doing them. It hurt his fucking head.
He kissed her shoulder. “So we won’t fight.”
She gave him a flutter of eyelashes. “Hooray.”
Leaving the First National job in Pittsfield, Dion and Paolo had just jumped in the car when Joe backed into the lamppost because he’d been thinking about the birthmark. The wet sand color of it and the way it moved between her shoulder blades when she looked back at him and told him she might love him, how it did the same thing when she said Albert White wasn’t such a bad guy. A fucking peach actually was ol’ Albert. Friend of the common man, buy your mother a winter coat as long as you used your body to keep him warm. The birthmark was the shape of a butterfly but jagged and sharp around the edges, Joe thinking that might sum up Emma too, and then telling himself forget it, they were leaving town tonight, all their problems solved. She loved him. Wasn’t that the point? Everything else was heading for the rearview mirror. Whatever Emma Gould had, he wanted it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. He wanted it for the rest of his life—the freckles along her collarbone and the bridge of her nose, the hum that left her throat after she’d finished laughing, the way she turned “four” into a two-syllable word.