Hawk enters Sammy’s apartment lightly, though there’s no need to be sneaking around. Who could be up there? Just shy of 1:30 A.M. by his Rolex. He phoned from the loft to check. Then phoned the weather out of habit. He looked up at Sammy’s place for lights from the street. Still, he’s nervy. You could be making a mistake when you try to set a previous mistake right. You ever try putting money back into an ATM at your favorite casino, as if the night never happened?
No hurry, no worry, Hawk tells himself. It’s too late for Flo to come pottering around, watering the plants, cheating the gods at solitaire. Harold, the only other one with the key, is sweeping up the pieces in New Orleans. Once the money’s in the safe there won’t be anything to look guilty about. He was in the neighborhood and dropped in to water the plants and have a Fresca. This warm and kind impulse just came over him. Hawk can lie back against Sammy’s cushioned couch, ice to his pulsing eye.
Now he takes out his dinky pen flashlight, puts it in his mouth like some kind of cat burglar. Some burglar. He’s a guy who puts money back in safes. He makes his way from the couch to the TV. He fingers the little sponge pad on Sammy’s desk next to the adding machine. The old man dabs his finger on the sponge each time he ruffles a bill when counting out, so he won’t accidentally pay more than he owes.
Now that Hawk has made up his mind he wastes no time, pushing aside P. T. Barnum’s face before the poster can wink at him again, raising the key to the safe. The door pops open, and he reaches into his seersucker for the money. Then he puts the packets in neatly, the way he remembers finding them, a queasy remorse like letting go of something he suffered for as he replaces them—one packet, two packets, three, four—and he’s quits.
And then he hears a noise, and he freezes.
The bedroom door opens and before he can move the lights click on and there’s old Sammy. He’s wearing a white Hanes T-shirt and Mount Sinai hospital pj’s, and he raises one withered arm and points an accusation he can’t yet shape into words. His legs are so skinny out of the bottom of the pj’s that it looks like it would take him five minutes to walk from his bedroom to the living room. There’s a look of stricken incomprehension on his scrunched face, wounded, perplexed, shaken, like he might have a relapse.
“Sammy, I thought you were in the hospital,” Hawk says, imagining the fool look on his face.
“Hawk?”
Sammy sees perfectly well who it is.
“Is that you?”
A puzzled frown deepens the creases of the old man’s face.
“Hawk, what in the world …?”
Sammy’s look flickers between confusion and outrage.
“Jeez, hey, Sammy, it’s you. I thought I saw a ghost. You don’t know how glad I am that you’re home from the hospital and okay,” Hawk says, shutting and locking the safe. “I never doubted you’d be back on your feet.”
Hawk looks down at his tall-ships key ring, winds out the safe-key duplicate, lays it on the TV under a framed display case of Kennedy buttons. The buttons are arranged like a family tree in all sizes. Every Kennedy who ever ran for office.
“I was going to go see you tomorrow in the hospital. I had no idea you were out. They said in New Orleans you went back in for another follow-up procedure.” He half turns his face, tears welling. “We called the hospital every day.”
“I heard about that,” Sammy says, and nods.
Having accomplished what he came to do, it’s like Hawk has forgotten that he’s standing in the man’s apartment by his safe, choking his little plastic pen flashlight in his hand.
“Hawk, what are you doing with your flashlight in my safe?” Sammy asks. “I don’t understand.”
Hawk gulps, face flushed.
It might be one of those rare occasions you hear about when the truth is safer than a fairy tale.
“I was putting money back in the safe, Sammy.”
“In my safe you’re putting money back?”
“I overheard about the safe when you were talking to Harold. In the hospital.”
“You overheard?”
Hawk can’t look the old man in the eye.
He shifts from foot to foot, not sure what to do with his hands.
“I heard where the key was when you told Harold. I didn’t mean to hear but I couldn’t unhear it. I was just standing there with the plant and the Cuban. You know, it was rolled by Cubans but is it a Cuban cigar?”
“In my safe.”
“Sammy, I needed the cash, as back-up. In case.”
“In case of what you needed it?”
“I thought maybe I could improve my odds with a short-term loan and you’d be no worse off. Believe me, it was an emergency, a contingency plan. I couldn’t bother you about it until you got better. I had to do something.”
“What emergency?”
“The kind where you gotta have money. You’re desperate. My foot. The guy made me cut off my own toe.”
“Your toe?”
“With a small shears, Sammy. I owed him.”
“You mean a loan shark?”
Like the man had heard they existed but couldn’t get his mind around the fact that one of his boys had dealt with one.
Hawk nods.
The old man has on his irritating sour expression. His head shakes involuntarily. His eyes twitch.
“It was that Earth Day show. I borrowed for it.”
“I thought … I thought that maybe you had put something aside from your hard work over the years. I advised you about investing so much in that show.”
“I should have listened.”
Hawk nods again, looks at the ceiling with his palms up.
“This gangster, he makes you cut off your own toe?”
Hawk points to his foot. “New Orleans—you know, we get thrown in the can. Then the FBI and Norman. You heard about it. ‘Fiasco’ is what one of the Feds called it. I couldn’t make payment.”
“So you steal from me? After all these years of working together you would steal from me?”
“Borrowed, Sammy. You were in the hospital. No one would know the difference. I borrowed what I needed and now I paid it back.”
“I always told you not to associate with those people.”
“You were right.”
“Look at yourself.”
“Sammy, I wouldn’t steal from you, you know that,” Hawk says. “I came here and put the money back. Every cent. You can count it.”
“I’m in the hospital,” Sammy says, his head rocking on his neck, “and you’re here, in my apartment fooling with my money, walking around with the key to my private safe in your pocket.”
“Sammy, there’s the key”
“Now you return it. No, I can’t accept this.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry because you’re caught. I don’t accept your apology.”
Hawk’s exhausted, drained from the night.
He thinks of the look Nelson gave him when he left, like someone who’d always believed he couldn’t be hurt in a real way. Banged up, battered, yes, but threatened with death by slow leakage, no. Fitz will be beginning a long evening, maybe getting the freckles removed from his face one by one. Carla may have walked clean out of his life.
Hawk’s throat constricts.
“You always said you wouldn’t lend me money.”
“Now you understand why,” Sammy says, coughing heavily.
“Take it easy, Sammy.”
“I should take it easy. You associate with criminals and the next thing you’re a thief. You think, why not? It’s an emergency. The drug addict robs a store because it’s an emergency.”
“Come on, Sammy.”
“You’re so desperate you ‘borrow’ from your friends without asking them. You’re not a bad guy, Hawk. The drug addict isn’t a bad guy either. Next thing you’re locked up in the penitentiary for twenty years. You were a boy selling slices of pizza for nickel and dime tips and I told you these things. It must be very painful to you.”
“My toe hurt like crazy during the show.”
The old man’s eyes smile sadly, pouches of flesh under them, and the skin slack around his working jaw.
“I mean, to have become this way.”
“What way? Look, I put the money back.”
“The money you’d stolen.”
“I was always going to put it back, Sammy. Give me a polygraph,” Hawk says.
“Polygraphs are for animals. You can’t look a guy in the eye, what are you?”
“I’m looking you in the eye.”
But in truth Hawk can’t look the old man in the eye.
Of course Sammy believes Hawk and of course it doesn’t matter.
Even back from the brink of death, and after all their wheeling and dealing together, Sammy can’t turn his head on this. They both know it and know that Sammy has to say what he does.
“Hawk, you know I can’t have anything more to do with you. Just get out.”