EVENING VISITING HOURS AT a hospital are the worst. The quiet is preternatural, pointed up by the occasional squeak of rubber gurney wheels on buffed linoleum and the dry slither of a paperback book page being turned over by the nurse at the desk. Without the ungodly racket of the daytime bustle there is nothing to distract the visitor from the smell of carbolic or the sight of restless figures stirring under green sponge-rubber blankets in the half-lit rooms with their doors standing open. I wondered why the architects bothered with doors at ail.
The nurse in charge of Oncology, thirty and plump, with powdered cheeks and the red lacquered lips of a geisha, informed me politely that Mr. Ballista was in Intensive Care and that only members of his immediate family were allowed to see him. When I mentioned that Mr. Brock had suggested an exception might be made in my case, she didn’t blink but gave me directions to ICU. On the way I passed a metal plaque listing the names of the hospital’s founding board of directors. Albert Brock’s was fourth from the top.
Nobody accosted me as I pushed through the swinging doors into Intensive Care. The carbolic odor was strongest here, covering the stench of human corruption, and the suck and wheeze of life-support paraphernalia created the impression that the room itself was breathing. There was, in fact, an organic quality about the whole place, from the carefully maintained temperature approximating human body heat to the click-bleep-click pulse of the electronic monitors. I felt as if I had entered a living artery.
Screens hung with gauze separated the beds. I asked a young resident or something in a white coat and sneakers with pimples on his neck for the whereabouts of Anthony Ballista. He finished reading the page on the clipboard he was holding, looked up at the ceiling as if committing something to memory, and hooked a hulking blonde nurse on her way past carrying a tray heaped with bloodstained cotton. “Ballista?”
“Second from the end.” She passed on.
The resident or whatever had an afterthought. “Are you a relative?”
I said, “I’m his Uncle Guido.”
It satisfied him as much as it had to. Nurses run hospitals. Doctors come and go like disposable gloves.
Tony Balls lay cranked into a semi-sitting position, entirely devoid of movement. The tubes running from his wrists to the IV bottle strapped to the stand next to the bed, and from his nose and penis to the draining apparatus underneath, might have been thick cobwebs. Picturing him as the identical twin of his hyperkinetic brother was like trying to match a stripped hulk rusting in the weeds of a neglected field to a well-preserved antique speeding down the highway. The naked polished-ivory scalp that was their most prominent feature had in Tony’s case puckered and gone yellow and resembled nothing so much as a squash forgotten on the vine. The meaty lips had thinned and withdrawn to his gums, exposing teeth that seemed to have outgrown his mouth. Only the vulpine eyes the brothers shared had remained; bright, swollen, and yellow—those, and the uptilted nostrils, now dehydrated by the drain tube, cavities in a dry gourd. His one visible arm was just veneered bone. The thick calcium of an old break, improperly set, stood out on the wrist like a shackle.
“Tony?” I was whispering, God alone knew why. The big room was full of noise, human and mechanical. I wasn’t disturbing anyone.
The eyes grated my way. Into them came that glad hand expression that people who work with people turn on everyone, regardless of whether they recognize him. “That’s me. The good-looking one, I used to say.” He laughed carefully. His voice sounded like a snow shovel scraping a sidewalk.
“I’m Connie Minor. We never met, but you might remember the name. I wrote for the Banner.”
“Sure. I remember.” It was clear he didn’t. “Fetch me a drink of that water, will you, son? I think I got a jute mill stuck in my throat.”
I handed him a half-filled glass with a jointed straw from the table by the bed, not flinching when his dry puckered fingers brushed my palm. The weight of the glass bent his wrist. His lips closed around the straw and he sucked until there was nothing but air. The dry gurgle set my teeth on edge. I accepted the glass and put it back.
“I got a hose hooked up to my phizz,” he said, looking down at the Y where the sheet had sunken into his crotch. The water didn’t seem to have lubricated his vocal cords any. “Fine-looking nurse picked it up in her hand and hooked it up. Time was when just the thought of it’d give me a honey of a hard-on, but it stayed limp as linguini. Guess it’s time to dig a hole.” He laughed again, even more carefully than the first time. In the days before the Ballistas had latched on to the simple tactic of separating to confound eyewitnesses, Tony had been the charmer, the brother who distracted the marked ones with jokes while the other came up behind and slipped the wire around their throats.
“Albert Brock got me in to see you,” I said.
“How is Al? I ain’t seen him since—well, water over the dam. I sent a nice present when his boy got married, one of them console TVs, and not a Tele King, neither. I never got a thanks.”
“Maybe it got lost in the mail.”
“Maybe. Them Brocks never did think much of Charlie and me. Too bad. They had a lot of nice nookie handing out coffee and sandwiches on them picket lines.”
“What about Walter and Victor Reuther? Get along with them?”
“You better fetch back that glass, son. I don’t want to spit on this here floor. They mop it regular.” He made a ghastly grin. “Al Brock treated Charlie and me like rich uncles compared to them Reuthers. They run us off with truncheons during that Kelsey-Hayes strike. Frankie only sent us to help out.”
“What did Frankie say?”
“Oh, Frankie didn’t talk much except to tell us where to go and what to do when we got there. But he was pissed, I can tell you. I think that was the start.”
“What was the finish?” My hand ached. I was gripping the tube frame of the gauze screen.
He started to cough, a rolling convulsion that started with little explosions in his chest and wound up shaking the bed to its frame. I thought at first he was faking, stalling for time to think after having said too much, but then jets of pink appeared in the clear tubes stuck in his nostrils. A slender nurse with a flushed face materialized, studied the green blips on the heart monitor, fiddled with the IV bottle, and placed a hand on Tony’s chest. The fit had subsided and he lay sucking air with the whites of his eyes showing.
She straightened, looking at me. “You won’t stay long.” It wasn’t a question.
“I just want to ask him something and then I’ll be going.”
Her eyes said a great deal of what she knew or had guessed about her patient. Then she was gone as abruptly as she’d come. It was all so brisk and without waste that I wasn’t sure afterward if she’d been there at all. Hospitals breed hallucinations. It’s the medicated air.
Tony’s amber gaze was fixed on me. “Who the fuck are you?”
I told him again, although I was sure he hadn’t forgotten. It meant nothing to him. I said again I was there on Albert Brock’s ticket. That didn’t seem to mean anything either. If I’d hoped he’d be out of his head and susceptible I was disappointed.
I had run out of time for euphemisms and diplomacy, not that they had ever been my long suit. “I always heard you were the smart brother,” I said. “Smart enough anyway to know you won’t leave this place through the front door. Frankie’s in Sicily, and you and I know he isn’t coming back, whatever Charlie thinks. Nobody has much to lose if you tell me who put up the bounty on the Reuthers back in forty-eight. You least of all.”
“Charlie always was a dreamer. He kept saying Prohibition was on its way back right up until the Japs hit Hawaii.”
I waited for him to take that somewhere, but he seemed to have finished. I tried another door. “You know Anthony Battle? Your brother’s backing his wrestling career.”
“Sure I know that boy. Us Tonys got to stick together, even if he don’t look Italian.” He laughed, not carefully enough. It brought on another coughing fit, but it was over quickly. No hemorrhages this time.
“Anthony’s in trouble. He’s got a politician on his back calling him a Communist.”
He grinned the ghastly grin that made me wish he were coughing instead. “Shit, that boy ain’t red. He’s blacker’n a cast-iron skillet.”
“Even so he’s going to be thrown to the wolves if I don’t give the man something better. I need the name of the man who pulled the string on Walter and Victor Reuther.”
“What’s your angle? Everybody’s got a angle.”
“I’ve got people on my back too. It isn’t every day you get to climb out from under and drag someone else out with you.”
“Yeah, I figured it was something like that. So what’s my angle? You gonna fix me up with a new pair of lungs?”
“No. And if I could I wouldn’t. You earned this a long time ago. You’re as bad as they come, Tony.”
“I ain’t sorry for a thing I done. Charlie ain’t neither. Our old man sold shoes to fat ladies to live. You know what they done to him at the store when his knuckles got too stiff and swoll up to pry size sevens onto size ten clodbusters? Stuck a mop in his hands and cut his pay by half. I guess he’s in heaven now. He should be, it’s all he ever talked about. I’m telling you what I told that stick-shaking priest come to see me the other day to hear my confession: If that’s what I got to do to make the cut, I’d just as soon shovel coal for Old Nick. At least I’d get to see all my friends.”
“You don’t have any friends. None that wouldn’t roll over on you for a plea to a lesser charge.”
He reached up and curled his fingers around the IV stand. The gray flesh under his arm hung like a washcloth. “If I push this thing over, half the floor will come running. You won’t wait for it if you want to leave on your own two feet.”
“I’ll leave as soon as you take a look at this.” I shook loose a fold of butcher paper from my jacket pocket and held it in front of his face.
He didn’t look at it right away. After thirty seconds or so he took his eyes away from mine and focused on the sheet. He let go of the metal stand, took the paper from me. “What’s this? Letters and numbers.”
“Any of them familiar?”
“I know the alphabet. I can do my sums. Charlie and me got through third grade.”
“They’re license plate numbers. The second one from the top’s the one I want you to look at. It belongs to a green Lincoln Continental. This year’s model.”
I caught the glint, although he covered it quickly. I might not have, in the full bloom of his health. Weasels are sly survivors. “I don’t look at cars much. Charlie, he likes ’em big with plenty of flash. He had an Auburn once but he wrapped it around an Edison pole. I just drove whatever got me from here to there.”
“This one belongs to the Ford Motor Company. Israel Zed drives it.”
“If you knew that, why ask me?” He held out the scrap of paper, but I didn’t take it. He let it drift from his fingers. A current of air took it and spun it to the floor.
“That list was made from cars parked at the Highwayman’s Rest on Lone Pine Road. The people who drove them all had business with your brother not connected to the customer’s side of the roadhouse. What’s Zed got going with the Ballistas?”
“Nothing. Now.”
His eyes were closed. He was so near to a skeleton I got panicky, but the monitor continued to beep rhythmically. I moved closer.
A hand touched my shoulder. I jumped six inches and looked into the flushed face of the slender nurse. She moved on a cushion of air and struck like a fuse blowing.
“You’re going now,” she said.
“Five minutes.”
“You’ve had twenty. I don’t care whom you represent, you have to go.”
“I like the company.”
The nurse looked at him. His eyes were open. Their feral amber color was always a shock.
“Five minutes.” She vanished again.
I rested my hands on the bed rail. “Okay, that’s now. What about then?”
“When?”
“You’re not that far gone, Tony.”
“Okay. I don’t owe the son of a bitch nothing. Getting him to stop around and pay his respects is like pulling teeth with your toes. I told Frankie he’d live to regret throwing in with a Jew.”
“Zed knew Frankie?” I leaned in. We were breathing the same air now. I thought I could smell the medication through his skin, the morphine or whatever that was dripping into him to curb the pain.
He made that death’s-head grin. “What’s the matter, you never hear of the Frankie Orr College Scholarship Fund?”
I absorbed that. Before I could frame another question he went on.
“Old Izzy, I guess he didn’t neither, but he had a good excuse. Him being the first.”
For the time remaining to us I listened to him talk against the mechanized eternity of that floodlit room.