Perfect timing at Phil’s.
They’re just clearing the dinner plates, the house is Italian-American chaos with about fifty-seven cousins running around, the men gossiping by the television, the women chattering in the kitchen, and Phil’s dad somehow managing to sleep through all of it in the big easy chair in the den.
“The fuck you been?” Phil asks. “You missed dinner.”
“Got a late start.”
“Bullshit,” Phil says, showing him in. “You been out doing that Irish brooding thing, you dumbass donkey. Come on, Donna will fix you a plate.”
“I’m saving room for the cannoli.”
“Yeah, well, you’re going home with Tupperware, don’t even try.”
Phil’s twin boys, Paul and Mark, come up to say hello to their uncle Denny. They’re typical South Staten Island Italian teenage boys with the gelled haircuts and the muscle shirts and the attitude.
“They’re spoiled assholes is what they are,” Russo once said to Malone. “Spend half their time in the mall, the other half playing video games.”
Malone knows that isn’t true, that Donna spends all her time chauffeuring them around to hockey and soccer and baseball. The boys are good athletes, maybe scholarship good, but Russo won’t brag about them.
Maybe because he misses so many of their games.
Their daughter, Sophia, is something else. Russo has even talked about moving across the river because she wouldn’t have a chance of winning Miss New York, but she might have a crack at Miss New Jersey.
Seventeen, she looks like Donna, tall and leggy and with charcoal-black hair and surprising blue eyes.
Freakin’ gorgeous.
And she knows it. She’s a sweet kid, though, Malone thinks, not as conceited as she could be, and she adores her dad.
Russo downplays it. His line is “I just gotta keep her off the stripper pole.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s a concern,” Malone said.
“And not knocked up,” Russo said. “It’s easier with a boy, you just got one dick to worry about.”
Sophia comes up and gives Malone a kiss on the cheek and with a disarming show of maturity asks, “How are Sheila and the kids?”
“They’re good, thanks for asking.”
She gives his hand a sympathetic squeeze to show she’s a woman and understands his pain, then she goes into the kitchen to help her mother.
“It go okay this morning?” Russo asks.
“Yeah.”
“We should grab a minute to talk.” Russo shouts, “Hey, Donna! I’m taking Denny down to the basement, show him that tool kit you got me!”
“Don’t be long! Dessert’s coming out!”
The cellar’s as clean as an operating room, a place for everything and everything in its place, although Malone doesn’t know when Russo finds the time to actually be down here.
“It’s Torres,” Russo says. “On Carter’s pad.”
“How do you know?”
“He called this morning.”
“To wish you a Merry Christmas?” Malone asks.
“To bitch about Fat Teddy,” Russo says. “I’m betting that fat pig went crying to Carter, who jerked Torres’s chain. Torres says we need to let him eat.”
“We don’t keep him from earning,” Malone says.
If a guy earns outside the borough, he keeps 100 percent. But if he or his team earn inside Manhattan North, they kick ten points into a fund that everyone shares.
Kind of like the NFL.
Any of the teams can range anywhere, but as a matter of practicality, Washington Heights and Inwood are Torres’s team’s profit center.
But now it looks like he’s on Carter’s pad.
Malone won’t go on a pad. He’ll rip drug dealers, work the system with them, but he don’t want to be an employee or a wholly owned subsidiary.
Still, he ain’t going to war with Torres. Life is good right now, and when life is good, you leave it the fuck alone.
Malone says, “Piccone will take care of Fat Teddy. I’m meeting him later.”
Malone has this random thought that Torres is setting them up, wearing a wire, but tosses it out of his head. They could squeeze his shoes until his bones break and Torres wouldn’t give up a brother officer. He’s a wrong, brutal cop and a greedy prick, but he’s not a rat.
A rat is the worst thing in the world.
They’re quiet for a second, then Russo says, “Christmas, it don’t feel the same without Billy, does it.”
“No.”
It was always a thing at Christmas, to see what woman Billy would bring over that year.
A model, an actress, always some hottie.
“We better get upstairs before they think you’re sucking my joint,” Russo says.
“How come they won’t think you’re sucking mine?”
“Because no one would believe that,” Russo says. “Come on.”
The cannoli is as good as advertised.
Malone has two of them and sits out a debate about the relative merits of the Rangers, Islanders and Devils, because Staten Island is right in that triangle where you could legitimately root for any of them.
He’s always been a Rangers guy, always will be.
Donna Russo catches him in the kitchen scraping his plate and takes the opportunity to ambush him. She’s no fucking bullshit. “So, your wife and kids. You going back?”
“Yeah, I don’t see that in the cards, Donna.”
“Get a fresh deck,” Donna says. “They need you. Believe it or not, you need them. You’re a better person with Sheila.”
“She don’t think so.”
Malone doesn’t know if that’s true. They’ve been separated for over a year, and while Sheila says she’s good with getting divorced, she keeps dragging her feet on the paperwork. And he’s just been too busy to push it.
What you tell yourself, anyway, Malone thinks.
“Give me that plate,” Donna says. She takes it and jams it into the dishwasher. “Phil says you got something on the side in Manhattan.”
“It’s not on the side,” Malone says. “It’s in the center, I’m not married anymore.”
“In the eyes of the church—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit.”
Malone loves Donna, known her all his life, would die for her, but he’s not in the mood for her housewife hypocrisy. Donna Russo knows—she has to know—that her husband has a gumar on Columbus Avenue and gets strange every chance that comes up, which it does a lot. She knows and she chooses to ignore it because she wants the nice house and the clothes and the kids in college.
Malone don’t blame her, but let’s keep it real.
“I’m sending food home with you,” Donna says. “You look thin, are you eating?”
“Italian women.”
“You should be so lucky,” Donna says. She starts filling large plastic containers with turkey, mashed potatoes, vegetables and macaroni. “Sheila and I are taking pole-dancing classes, she tell you?”
“She left that out.”
“It’s great cardio,” Donna says, filling his hands with the containers, “and can be very sexy, too, you know? Sheila might have some new tricks you don’t know about, buddy boy.”
“It wasn’t all about the sex,” Malone says.
“It’s always all about the sex,” Donna says. “Go back to your wife, Denny. Before it’s too late.”
“You know something I don’t?”
“I know everything you don’t,” she says.