Read Online North River by Pete Hamill - Free Book Online Page B

said. “My father’s birthday. We all went to eat together. I’m fourteen. My brothers left after the picture, chasing girls.” Beyond the Verga family there was a bay filled with anchored fishing boats and a distant line of mountains. “Long time ago.”
    After a melancholy moment, she turned her back on the photograph and took blouses from the suitcase and started hanging them in the shallow closet.
    “You gotta get this boy some more clothes,” she said. “I know the bargain places. Or up at Klein’s, on Fourteen’ Street. And that window in his room, it don’t close right. I put the towel to close it up, see? So the boy don’t catch a cold. And you, Dottore, go down and sleep a little, okay? You look terrible.”
    Wearing a bathrobe, Delaney slipped under the covers and fell into an hour of deep dreamless sleep. He came suddenly awake, rose quickly, brushed his teeth and washed, and then, feeling refreshed, went off into the blue twilight to make three house calls. When he returned, Bootsie was waiting in the hall. The fat man rose from the bench, wheezing slightly.
    “You keep too many hours,” Bootsie said. “Even your nurse went home.”
    Delaney opened the door to his office.
    “How’s the boss?”
    “Much better. He wants to go home. He wants you to put in a word with that Zimmerman.”
    “He’ll go home when he’s ready. That’s not up to me. What can I do for you, Bootsie?”
    Bootsie took a long tan envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Delaney.
    “Mister Corso sent you this.”
    He turned to go.
    “Hold it a minute, Bootsie.”
    “Yeah.”
    “What did he say? What’s his message?”
    Bootsie smiled without humor.
    “He said, you don’t take it, he kills you.”
    He smiled again, then went out through the hall. Delaney heard the gate clang shut behind him. From the high floor he could hear the murmur of Rose’s voice, talking with the boy. He closed the office door and laid the envelope on the green blotter of his desk. He sat looking at it for a long moment. Then he used a letter opener to slice through the seal.
    There was no note. He spread the contents on the blotter. There they were: fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. Five thousand dollars in cash.
    “God damn you, Eddie,” Delaney whispered.

FOUR

    A T HIS DESK, D ELANEY HELD THE PHONE FOR A LONG TIME, WHILE off in St. Vincent’s one of the nuns went to find Zimmerman. The news on Larry Dorsey was good: no fracture, no brain damage. He’d be playing saxophone in another week. But it was Eddie Corso he wanted to know about. He heard granular rain lashing at the back window. It would either wash away the scabbed snow or glaze it with ice. He wanted the goddamned snow to be gone. He wanted to walk around the neighborhood with the boy, to give him some basic geography, to show him the North River. He wanted to tell him about springtime in New York, and how the bony trees would burst with leaves, and how the Giants would soon play ball in the Polo Grounds again. They would go together. The boy would be three on St. Patrick’s Day, a good age to begin looking at the most beautiful of sports. He would explain to Carlito what a hot dog was too, and how it wasn’t a dog at all. They would eat hot dogs while sitting together in the sun.
    “Hello?”
    “Zim, it’s Delaney. How’s our patient?”
    “He’s some tough old bastard,” Zimmerman said. “He wants to leave tomorrow.”
    “What do you think?”
    “Two more days, at least. He’s healed well, the pain is almost gone, no signs of infection, but . . .”
    “Want me to take a look?”
    “If you like, but he seems . . . I don’t know, a guy gets shot like he was, you think he’d stay in bed for a month.”
    “He’s been shot before.”
    “I know. You told me, and I saw the scars. I don’t know why you didn’t become a surgeon.”
    “Someday I’ll tell you all about it. Did he talk about anything else?”
    “Well . . .”
    “What do you mean? Well,