Do Not Go On. Bryan Furuness

easy confidence: the answer came to her after she refused his offer and the Eldorado was disembarking from the curb. “He’s a gangster,” she whispered. From her stoop she cried out, loud enough for the neighbors to hear over the V8 bellowing down the street, but not loud enough to stop a damn thing. “You gangster, you gangster!”

      Chapter 7

      ALL OR NOTHING

      DINER, PIGTOWN. Ceiling tiles toasted from cigarette smoke and flaming plates of saganaki. The smell of lemon rice soup couldn’t have been stronger if they’d mopped the floors with it.

      It was the belly of the afternoon, only a few people around. At the counter, an old guy stared at the Sun, wearing a plaid tam that looked like a thumbtack pushed into his head. In the kitchen, the wait staff horsed around, shouting over the crash of the dishwasher. Kate was in a booth near the back, watching the door, absently running her fingers over the rosary beneath the table, reminding herself there was no reason to be afraid.

      She was not the mark. She was in public. Ergo, no danger.

      So why was her heart pinging around like a lotto ball?

      Maybe because the meeting was with Zeeshan. She remembered the look that had come over Ben’s face when the marshals mentioned that name. He looked stricken. Blind with terror.

      So there was that.

      At four o’clock, a man limped in the diner. Thin, almost frail. Tweed blazer. Was that—? No way. Kate was craning to see if anyone else was coming up the walk when the thin man caught her eye. “Kate?”

      Her head dropped an inch in disbelief. He must have taken this as confirmation, because he limped toward her booth. The waitress toddled after him with her carafe. It took about eight years for them both to reach the table. Kate straightened the sugars and jellies and butters until she noticed her fingers were trembling, then she put her hands in her lap.

      What was wrong with her? She should be relieved. He wasn’t exactly intimidating. Plus, her expectations for this meeting were low. Super low. Almost nonexistent. Ana wanted her to broker a deal to allow Ben to come home. Privately, Kate thought this was the longest of shots—Veedy wasn’t exactly known for letting bygones be bygones, after all—but she couldn’t say no to her daughter. Not when Ana was finally talking to her. Not after her daughter had lost so much. Not when it was Kate’s fault.

      The good news was that this meeting didn’t have to work. She just had to show Ana she was making an effort. That she was not, after all, a monster. Then they would keep in touch until Kate figured out some other way to bring her daughter home.

      At last the waitress finished pouring the coffee and left their table with an elephantine sigh. Kate tapped her fingernails on her mug. “Zeeshan,” she said. “What kind of name is that?”

      It was supposed to be casual, a light conversational opener, but it sounded confrontational. This happened when she got nervous: everything came out snappish.

      Luckily, Zeeshan didn’t seem to take offense. He smiled at a sugar packet before tearing off the top.

      “I’m from Kashmir,” he said. “It’s between India and Pakistan, up in the—”

      “Himalayas,” she finished. “Under constant territorial dispute. I’m not an idiot.”

      Easy, Katydid, her old man used to say when she got jumpy. Put that dog on a leash. She gave a lame shrug. “I mean, I read National Geographic.”

      Zeeshan kept his smile. “Most people hear Kashmir, they want me to knit them a sweater.”

      Was this a ploy? The limp, the blazer, an awkward joke—was it all designed to get her to lower her guard? With his hands wrapped around his mug, steam rising to his face, he looked as harmless as an actor in an International Coffees commercial, but Kate couldn’t tell if he was smiling or smirking. Either way, she decided, she wanted that look off his face.

      “I have enough sweaters,” she said. “What I’d really like is to bring my family home safely. So tell me—can we make that happen?”

      Zeeshan set down his cup, looking relieved. “That’s what I want, too,” he said. “Let’s sort out this misunderstanding.”

      * * *

      Sorting. In the months since her daughter had left, that had been Kate’s main occupation. She’d spent countless hours sifting through her life, looking for the turning point that had set them on this awful trajectory. Sometimes she traced it to the night of the bomb. Other times she went all the way back to the day she met Ben. (Who would Kate have been if she’d finished high school? In those days she had stolid dreams of being a pharmacist. But then she wouldn’t have had Ana at all. That was the problem with alternate paths: it was an all or nothing deal. You couldn’t smuggle the good stuff from your current life with you.) More often, though, she traced the trouble to the days in her early twenties when she started to think about leaving Ben. The problem between them—the main problem, as she saw it—was the lounge.

      The lounge hadn’t always bothered her. When she was eighteen, the Tip Top Lounge was a pure boon. In a snap, it had transported her from childhood to Real Life, complete with a ring, a house, a daughter. Yes, she knew her husband laundered money for a man named Veedy, but how bad was that, really? It was a paper crime. At worst, tax fraud, and who didn’t commit a little of that? Her mother was wrong: Ben wasn’t a gangster, he was a businessman and a gentleman. He was never anything but courteous to Kate. Chivalrous, you could say, though he wasn’t around the house much. If the deal was all or nothing, in those days it felt like she’d lucked into all.

      Back then, Kate was a rote Catholic, going through the motions in a mechanical way. She attended Mass at Transfiguration, the same church where she’d been baptized, even after she and Ben moved across the harbor to Fells Point. She went to confession in the same way her old man had picked up his lunchbox from the kitchen counter with a sigh every morning for forty years. Everyone has a job. You do what has been given you to do.

      Then two things happened, bang bang. Ana went off to elementary school, leaving Kate alone during the day. That fall, her old man plowed his Cutlass Supreme through the brick wall of a liquor store. By the time the firefighters cut away his door, the old man was cold, dead of a massive coronary.