Red on Red

by Edward Conlon

  There was never any argument between Nick and Esposito, but there was a chill—little fissures in the bond, like ant-eaten rifts on the edge of a leaf. Despite everything, Nick’s refusal to assent to the scheme with Malcolm made him feel small. Since they’d begun working together, Esposito had yanked him along at any number of junctures. Always Nick had resisted, and always Esposito had been right—from the first dinner with Daysi, to staying with his family, meeting Lena, the children, and the rest. Nick would have known none of those experiences had he followed his instinct instead of his partner. Cowardice and conscience both held him back, as they had during his suicide idyll. As then, he tried the idea on in his mind, looked in the mirror to see how it fit him. He couldn’t see it; the mirror was dark. It was the complexity that troubled him most, the excess of ambitions and the softness of assumptions; the plan was like an arcane financial instrument, with Esposito giddily speculating on murder futures, buying up options on fratricides. Nick lacked the math for it more than he lacked faith, though he hadn’t an excess of the latter. He wouldn’t give Esposito his last penny for the magic beans. Nick felt smaller still when he realized that he hadn’t been asked for the penny; all he had to do was keep his mouth shut, his specialty. A small man but soundless, like a good child, not heard.

  When there was a lull in work on Malcolm’s leads, Nick and Esposito tended not to linger in the office. The distance between them would be noticed, and both became increasingly on guard against any kind of scrutiny, however well-intentioned. They took to driving around, looking for something to happen, for an adventure, a distraction. They listened to the police radio more often, ready to jump in on heavy street jobs. One evening, Esposito jerked the car to the side of the street. “Wouldja?” The old game they had, whether she was as pretty as the first glimpse, the first guess, believing before you saw.

  “No,” Nick said, out of habit, but also out of confusion—he didn’t see a soul on the street. Esposito rolled down the window and took a mug shot from the glove box. Nick couldn’t see who he was looking at. No one was on the sidewalk, no figure emerged from the lane of barren-limbed ginkgos. The block was desolate, eerily so for the time and place. Esposito just stuck the picture back into the box, crumpling it, and lurched back into the street, speeding ahead. “Nah, forget it.” The episode was trivial, but the worry stuck with both of them. Esposito without an eye for this, shut out from his old luck, was not Esposito. Nick turned on the radio to a news station, so they could hear about traffic jams and gas prices, window-washers who had fallen from scaffolding.

  As with Allison, when it started to go, there was a drift, and then it quickened. There was so much goodwill; the reserves were deep—so many debts back and forth that neither knew which account was red or black. For a while, there was a parody of elaborate deference, and whether the issue was whether to be tough on a shifty witness or where to eat, positions were quit at the first signs of conflict. Nick didn’t have the heart to finish arguments, even if they were only in his head. Neither of them made a joke at the other’s expense anymore; they didn’t know if they had the credit. No one in the squad saw its degree. Or rather, they saw a change, but did not assume that things were so bad. Nick and Esposito worked with each other, day and night, and when one of them vanished, the other did, too, to keep up appearances. Nick grieved to see it. Esposito was his last and best tie to life, the living, but Nick would let go before he went along. If you’re drowning, do you swim to a sinking ship?

  Nick wondered what Esposito had done with the tapes. Magnets were supposed to work. He wanted to look it up on the Internet, but then he figured it was better not to have a record of the search. Substitution was easier, a distraction in the evidence room at the DA’s office and a switch. Easier still if the DA asked Esposito to pick up the tape for her to view. The system was weakly defended against sabotage, challenge from within. Malcolm hadn’t written anything down. The tape was all there was—a few feet of magnetic film, two spools, a plastic box. Micro-fine layers, millions of dots. In one arrangement, it’s static, white noise. In another, it’s The Godfather, the face of Pacino after he kills Fredo, even the music: Da, da-da-da, dot da-da … “Say a Hail Mary before you throw the line in the water. That’s my secret. That’s how you catch a fish.” That was what Nick was thinking when they left a bodega robbery, grainy surveillance tape in hand. He wondered if they’d ever talk about it, when Esposito asked an unnerving question. “What’s your favorite movie?”

  Esposito had seemed preoccupied since the start of the shift, alternately smug and then cagey, waiting for the moment. Nick assumed there had been a pickup, a hookup with a new girl, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear about it. Since he’d met Lena, he had understood that part of Esposito even less, since it was such a good marriage that was risked, upping the stakes even after he’d won the bet. But mostly it startled Nick to think that his partner had heard the Godfather music in his head, as if it were audible through his skull.

  “What?”

  “What’s your favorite movie?”

  “Are you kidding me? What’s your favorite color? If you could be an animal, what kind would you be? Would you rather be able to fly, or be invisible? Espo, do you want to trade baseball cards after this? You wanna trade comics?”

  Esposito laughed at Nick’s sputtering protest, and Nick started to laugh, too.

  “C’mon. What’s your favorite movie?”

  “You know. The same as yours, the same as everybody.”

  “Yeah, The Godfather. I know. Which one?”

  “One and Two. They’re the same story, the same thing. The third, it doesn’t count. I like the first one better. It’s more in New York. When they go away—Nevada, Havana—it gets harder. They deal with different people.”

  “Exactly. But your favorite movie, it might change.”

  Nick knew what was coming.

  “There’s a tape in my locker. It’s labeled, The Godfather, Part Six. You might find another copy in your desk, same label, my handwriting, so it looks like a bootleg tape.”

  “So if I see it, I know it’s not the real Godfather, Part Six?”

  “That would be your first clue.”

  While Nick was dismayed to be in possession of incriminating evidence, he was relieved to find that Esposito was not clairvoyant, that his own mind was not so transparent. Not even a coincidence, really, given that thoughts about the tape led to thoughts about the movie, and Esposito had done the same, a few steps ahead, as was his habit. “Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever.” Stopping his partner now might have been beyond Nick’s ability. It was certainly against the tribal code, and this was not just his tribe—it was his brother, bloodier than most. The wrong that Esposito had done had been undertaken with such an honorable spirit, and such magnificent talent. It had been done to save a friend who could not rise to the occasion of his own saving.

  They drove around aimlessly for a while. Nick looked at the buildings, the five- and six-story brick apartment houses, sturdy and modest, none without some unpretentious classical ornament or variegation in the brickwork, zigzags of color and pattern. They were constructed with the subways, with them and because of them, in the teens and twenties, to relieve the sweaty densities of the downtown tenements, to make the city bigger and better, ideas that went hand in hand. There’d been a flow to it: Sandhogs had dug the tunnels for the A train, and Duke Ellington had finished the ride. New Yorkers of the midcentury, the American century, had grown up in more rooms than their parents had, with more possibilities. The can-do spirit. Let’s put on a musical, invent a vaccine. Nick tried to recall what the mood had been when he had grown up here, if it had been invested with such confidence. He couldn’t separate his own memories from the TV clip shorthand, the brassy newsreel voice-over announcing serial triumphs over breadlines, brownshirts, the moon. It didn’t seem like that now. It didn’t feel like greater heights awaited. If disaster could be averted, decay slowed, most
would think it enough. They passed the Audubon Ballroom, another of the old vaudeville palaces, where Malcolm X had been killed before a speech. The assassins had been from the Nation of Islam, which he had left for Islam. The building had been an active synagogue at the time. What to make of that one? If those walls could talk, they wouldn’t. Nick was reminded of nearer history, other chickens that might come home to roost.

  “Any word on the guy?”

  They barely mentioned the scheme with the Coles, but when they couldn’t avoid it, they slipped into mobster obliquities, careful of microphones. It sounded affected, but it wasn’t unwise. Nick considered whether it might have been better to be on speaking terms with IAB, now that real laws had actually been broken. But he could no more help Esposito with them than he could help Otegui with the Feds: the nature of his expertise made him suspect, his timing worse, like an enemy general offering to switch sides hours before the white flag is raised.

  “The other one says he’s down south.”

  “That’s a little easy.”

  “Nothing wrong with easy, my friend. Everything doesn’t have to be inventing the wheel.”

  Nick couldn’t believe Michael would simply do as he was told, pack up and settle down amid the peach trees. Things worked out for Esposito, Nick knew, but this would have been ridiculously accommodating. If anything, Nick would have bet on another exceptional clearance, that the Dominicans would get Michael first. Miguelito’s funeral would not be forgiven; Kiko’s people would not let that pass unanswered. Nick knew he could trust their hate, but not their efficiency, and he did not know if he could wait. Still, there was something sly in Esposito’s voice, something superior that incited Nick’s curiosity even as his misgivings remained. It would have been hard enough to talk if they could have spoken openly, frankly, without the absurd codes.

  “How long?”

  “Can’t say. I’m in touch, on top of it.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Maybe it’ll agree with him—the weather, the pace.”

  “People don’t change.”

  “No? I’ve seen it happen.”

  Nick couldn’t tell if there was affection or annoyance in the mild barb, if Esposito wanted to tease him into talking more, or if he wanted him to shut up. And if Nick couldn’t read his partner, how could he hope to understand Michael? Nick couldn’t picture Michael’s mind any more than he could the rapist’s, the furnace of alien hungers and hates. The mother’s death had to have been the catalyst, but Nick had lost his mother as well, and it had not driven him to such galloping fantasy and fanaticism. And he had been younger when it had happened, when it should have been more formative. It had made him a little more solitary, a little more saturnine, sometimes a lot. Anything else? Not really, no. Grace, too, it must have changed her, even though Nick hadn’t known her before. She found solace in homework and orgies, the scholarship slut. For what it was worth, she had the best take on death and disaster of the three of them, refusing revenge and despair. Nick pictured himself in a silken bed with Daysi and Allison, reading poetry, all of them feeding one another grapes. Esposito mistook his peaceful expression for a degree of reconciliation.

  “Say a kid steals a car, gets into a crash,” he began in a professorial tone, pleased with the opportunity to show off his thought. “The other driver runs away. Cops come, they find a body in the trunk of the second car. Do you lock the kid up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. Say it’s not a body—it’s a lady tied up, taped up, in the trunk. She’s alive. The kid saved her life. He’s a good kid, never been in trouble before. Do you still arrest him?”

  Nick hesitated, resistant to accept the terms of the analogy. The role reversal was as touching as it was troubling. It showed how close they’d grown, how much they’d rubbed off on each other, but if Esposito could play the hypothetical game, Nick was all the less necessary. The theme of unintended consequences did not reassure him, and his answer was churlish.

  “Nobody ever just goes out one day to steal a car, just once.”

  “This one did. It’s my story, Nick. I get to say what happens.”

  Nick snapped back—“Do you?”—harsher than intended, brittle and volatile, but when he began to apologize, Esposito turned up the radio. He drove around the corner, found a quiet block—here, a school, closed for the day—and pulled over. “C’mon. Let’s get coffee.” There was no coffee shop where they’d parked. When they got out, Esposito put an arm around his shoulder, leading him down the street. More affectionate than usual, more intrusive. Reminiscent of more old mob movies, checking for the wire on the chest.

  “You okay, Nick?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not crazy about this, Espo. You know that. I can see a hundred ways it can go wrong. I can’t see one way it could go right.”

  “I know that. It’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if I can trust you.”

  Esposito slid his hand off Nick’s shoulder, patting him on the side and back. Was he feeling for a microphone? Didn’t he know they didn’t do it that way anymore? Nick stopped walking, tossed his tie over his shoulder, and began to unbutton his shirt, offering his chest for examination.

  “C’mon. You wanna feel? You wanna go swimming somewhere, so we can strip down, or you wanna go through the metal detector at the airport, X-ray my key ring to see if there’s a bug inside?”

  Despite his anger, Nick almost smiled at the irony. He had been trusted completely when he had been a spy, but now that he had severed that contact, his loyalty was suspect. Esposito straightened his tie and patted him again, shaking his head. He kept a firm hand on his shoulder.

  “Stop it, Nick. I know. I know everything.”

  Nick looked blankly back at him, almost grateful to be exposed. Was it all over now? If he were in an interrogation room, he’d put his arms on the table, lay his head down, and sleep a guilty sleep. Almost grateful. He held back from any admission until the accusation was complete.

  “I was a little mad you didn’t tell me yourself.”

  The tone was too kind, nearly sympathetic, but maybe Esposito wanted him to lower his guard. Nick waited for him to finish.

  “Lena told me about the miscarriages, the three girls. I understand, though—some things are just easier to tell a woman. With the rest of it—your father, your wife, Daysi. Too much. And I know you went to visit … that guy … in his apartment. Fuck it. Enough games. You went to see Michael, and Malcolm told me. He didn’t know it was you, or why you went, and I didn’t put it together till later. Not even really till yesterday. And I swear to God, Nick, I almost threw up at the thought that you were gonna say goodbye to Michael Cole and not me.”

  For a moment, Nick was sick, too. He’d expected the back of Esposito’s hand, cursing at his treason; instead it had been held out to help him, magnanimous but unyielding in its grasp. He hadn’t considered what harm it might have done to other people if he’d died—there hadn’t seemed to be other people, then—only what suffering he might have spared himself. For the first time since they’d known each other, Nick felt like a man without secrets. All but one, and he almost felt clean. He just nodded, and Esposito went on.

  “I know you don’t like this play, this move, but I think it’s gonna work out. It’s you I’m worried about. You ain’t the same guy I started with. I told you, you know about my last partner. I couldn’t tell my kids—I couldn’t face ’em—if you did something to yourself. You holding up?”

  Nick nodded again.

  “If you weren’t, would you promise to tell me?”

  Nick didn’t answer, and Esposito put both hands on his shoulders, fierce in his grip, not checking for microphones.

  “You’re not going anywhere, unless I get a promise. I swear to you, I won’t let you go unless you swear to me. Your word’s enough for me, but I want to hear it.”

  “I swear it.”

  Nick nodded again, and he was released. After they went back to the precinct to sign
out, Esposito asked him if he wanted to go out for a drink. It was late, and they had to be back early in the morning. Nick was afraid that his stunned gratitude would mix like whiskey with his beer. Three or four rounds in, if Esposito asked to borrow his gun for a bank robbery, he would not have refused. “Nah, but tomorrow, definitely.” Esposito dropped him off at his apartment, without checking the rooflines or the street. Nick started to but caught himself, deciding to take his chances. Esposito had faith enough for both of them. For tonight, at least, it was more than enough.

  Nick walked out of his apartment early the next morning, groggy after a restless night of half-sleep, to see two young cops at his lobby door, putting up yellow tape. They blocked his exit, telling him he had to wait, it was a crime scene. He looked at their faces and didn’t recognize them; they had to be new. He was unused to this kind of arrival, this kind of reception. What occurred to him first was that he was in trouble, that IAB had found out he was living there, in the precinct. The petty vanity made him wince, but he decided not to say who he was to the cops at the door.

  “What’s going on?”

  They looked at each other, a stocky Spanish one with a mustache and a spindly white female with librarian glasses. They knew they should detain witnesses, control the scene, alert their sergeant to suspicious persons and facts of potential significance. They knew they should be wary about disclosing information to the public.

  “There’s been an incident, sir,” said the female, in a country accent, somewhat Southern. What had brought her here, to do this? “Do you live here?”

  “No.”

  The absence of further detail in Nick’s response provoked both curiosity and irritation. The Spanish one stepped up to him.