“Right. ”

“First thing you know, you got forty or fifty gin mills in this town. Then I might move out here. Or if they need me in New York, I could still come out here weekends.”

“They tell me some places to make a deal to get a machine in you got to pay the liquor license, six hundred bucks a year,” Conte says.

“That’s all right, forget about it. Let me tell you something. Once you pay it, you got him. Jesus Christ can’t stop you. Remember that there. Donnie, I wish to hell you could stay here, give Tony a hand, answer questions he can’t answer, ‘cause he ain’t got the head for it.”

I had told Lefty I was going back to California to visit my “injured girlfriend.” I was getting desperate to get home to see my family. Lefty resented it anytime I said I wanted to go to California. So now I had come up with the story that my girlfriend had been in a car crash. So he had to agree to let me go. “Monday I’ll come back,” I say, “just three days. I’ll keep in touch with Tony every day from L.A.”

“It ain’t the question, keeping in touch. Question of what are you gonna do out in L.A.?”

“Once I see that she’s all right and everything ...”

“Donnie, let’s not kid ourselves. She lasted this long, she’s gonna be all right. Let’s hope she’s not disfigured. I happen to like that girl.” (He had never met her, of course.) “Listen, she can’t go back to work for a couple weeks, right? So why don’t you bring her over here and help Tony set it up? Use your noggin, Donnie. She’s going on a plane, she’ll be happy. And you got the most beautiful place, this is gorgeous over here. So you spend a week or two out here.”

“That’s what I’ll do, then.”

“The thing is, Donnie, I can’t see you laying out there because the girl’s in the hospital. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that it’s ridiculous.”

When Lefty spotted a situation and a mark, energy poured out of him. Conte was handling him perfectly, using just the right touch of innocence to suck him in.

“Once everything is set out over here,” Lefty says, “then we can branch out someplace else. Because Mike is very sincere. You know what he likes about me? I was on the balls of my ass when I gave him my speedboat. I coulda sold it, he knew it.”

“Does he like the speedboat?” I ask.

“Forget about it. It goes seventy-two on the water. Imagine going seventy-two miles on the water. It’s a fucking jet. Shooo! I would like to take that boat to New York from here.”

“How would you do that, Left?”

“Hug the shoreline. Tell me one thing. I seen all kinds of land where we drive. Where’s the ocean around here?”

“There’s no ocean,” Tony says. “There’s the lake.”

“There’s no ocean in this town, Milwaukee?”

“A lake.”

“I don’t like lakes. I like the ocean.”

“This is a pretty big lake, Lefty.”

“Let’s go see that lake.”

We drive down to the shore of Lake Michigan.

“That’s a lake?” Lefty gapes. “That looks like a fucking ocean. Look at the boats out there! Ships! How the fuck can that be a lake if them kind of things go in there?”

“It’s a big lake,” Tony says. “Ships can come in from Europe through the Saint Lawrence Seaway.”

“I don’t believe it. You ever see anything like this, Donnie? What’s the name of this lake?”

“Lake Michigan. On the other side is Michigan, maybe fifty miles away.”

“You sure it’s not the ocean and they just call it something else? Un-fucking-believable. Now let’s get a fucking pair of trunks, because we’re gonna sit outside by the pool; we’re going to iron this whole fucking thing out.”

Lefty needed a “cabana set,” which meant that somebody else was to provide it. “My waist is thirty-three,” he told Conte, “and I wear a 9½D shoe.” Conte went over to the Southridge Shopping Center and bought the items for Lefty. We sat by the pool at the motel. Lefty drank his usual white-wine spritzers, and chain-smoked his usual English Ovals, as he had been doing all day in the car.

“The town is nice,” Lefty says, “I like it. I gotta tell them when I go back, I’m all for this project. I’ll get a green light all the way through. This is easy living, Tony. It’s a clean town. You can breathe the air here. You’re gonna be very successful out here. You’re gonna make it. You’re gonna be very contented.”

“You don’t know me yet,” Conte says. “When you know me, you’ll find out that I make a plan, I work it hard until I get what I want. You’ll find out someday.”

“I ain’t saying different,” Lefty says. “Now, as soon as I go back, I’ll probably have to shoot right back here again to meet the people over here who he is finding out about by entertaining in his restaurant over there.”

The next morning Tony and Lefty dropped me off at the Milwaukee Airport for my trip to “California” to see my “injured girlfriend.” Tony took Lefty on to O‘Hare for his trip back to New York.

“You think Donnie might end up marrying this girl?” Tony asked.

“I know he’s crazy about her,” Lefty said. “But Donnie ain’t the type to settle down.”

I hadn’t been home in three weeks. When I called to say I was coming home, my wife told me that the house across the street from ours had burned to the ground. There had been a strong wind and sparks had gone everywhere. She had been out helping people water down nearby roofs where the embers were landing, including ours. Everybody had been scared to death.

It was Friday, June 23. She would pick me up at the airport as always. My flight was due in at 3:45 P.M. She never made it.

10

THE ACCIDENT

I arrived at the airport that served my new home-town. My wife was not at the gate. I was met by another agent whom I knew only slightly. He said, “Your wife has been in an accident.” He said it was a head-on car crash; both drivers were women, similar in appearance except that one was younger. The younger one had been killed. He wasn’t sure which one that was. He said other stuff, but that’s all I remember.

We went to the hospital. My wife had not been killed. She was in intensive care, in critical condition, attached to machines and tubes. Her eyes were covered with bandages. Both her corneas had been lacerated. Her face was a web of gashes. She had a collapsed lung, a broken wrist, a broken collarbone. She was hooked up to a lung machine. She couldn’t see. She could barely talk. She squeezed my hand.

My daughters were there. The youngest, who was nine, had gotten sick at the sight of her mother and gone into the bathroom to throw up. I hugged the others, who were fifteen and thirteen, and tried to smile and act like everything was okay.

My wife told me that on her way to the airport a car coming toward her had veered out to pass another car stopped in that lane and hit her head-on. My wife climbed out of the car somehow and ran to the side of the road, afraid the cars were going to blow up. She heard bubbling in her chest, and as a nurse she knew that her lung was punctured. There were two women who had witnessed the accident. She asked if she could please lay her head down in the lap of one of them, because it would help her breathe. Her contact lenses had been smashed into her eyes. She thought she had lost at least one of her eyes. She told the women that in her car was a notebook and her husband’s flight number. She asked them to call the FBI and ask for an agent to pick me up at the airport and to call a friend’s house where the girls were staying. And then the ambulance came and she was brought to the hospital.

She was in terrible pain and scared. When I saw her, she didn’t know that the other driver was dead, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. Her friend Ginny was there. I went out in the hall. Later my wife said that Ginny had told her I was crying, and she said, “I told Ginny, ‘I’m sorry I missed that, I’ve never seen Joe cry.’ ”