Willie splashed water on his face. From outside, he heard laughter, and a voice that sounded like Arno’s giving his opinion on the Mets, an entirely negative view that seemed to involve only the word “Mets” and a seemingly infinite series of variations on a second word that Arno, who prided himself on his sophistication when he wasn’t on his fourth double vodka, liked to refer to as “the copulative.” Arno was funny like that. He might have looked like an aging rat, but he knew more words than Webster’s. Willie had been to Arno’s apartment only once, and nearly had his skull fractured when a pile of novels came toppling down on his head. Every available space seemed to be occupied by newspapers, books, and the occasional car part. On those rare occasions when Arno was late for work, Willie was tormented by images of him lying unconscious beneath an entire stack of encyclopedias from the 1950s, or smoking away like a piece of fish beneath layer upon layer of smoldering newsprint. Well, maybe “tormented” was putting it kind of strongly. “Mildly bothered” might have been closer to the mark. Someone had written Jake is a male slut in lipstick at the bottom right-hand corner of the glass. Willie hoped that the culprit was a woman, although homosexuality didn’t bother him so much now. Love and let love, that was his motto. Anyway, that black gentleman who had saved his business (and, let’s face it, his life, because he’d always had a weakness for booze, and by the time the divorce was reaching its filthy nadir he was putting away a bottle of Four Roses a day, and say what you like about Four Roses but gentle it ain’t) had a partner named Angel, and while it wasn’t as if there were wedding bells in the offing, or an announcement in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, they were just about the closest-knit couple that Willie had ever encountered. “The couple that slays together stays together,” as Arno had once put it, and Willie had instinctively looked over his shoulder in the quiet of the garage, half expecting to see a black figure looming unhappily over him, a smaller one beside him looking equally discontented. It wasn’t that they scared him, or not much—that feeling had passed a long time ago, or so he liked to tell himself—but he hated to think that their feelings might be hurt. He had said as much to Arno, and Arno had apologized and had never issued a similar utterance since, but sometimes Willie wondered if Arno had been so far off the mark, all things considered. The door of the men’s room opened. Arno’s head popped through the gap.
“The hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Washing my hands.”
“Well, hurry up. There’s a party waiting for you out here.” Arno paused as he saw the writing on the mirror. “Who’s Jake?” he asked. “Hey, did you write that?”
He ducked just in time to avoid being hit by a wadded paper towel, and then Willie Brew, sixty years old and sometime associate of two of the most lethal men in the city, went out to join his birthday party.