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care of four pieces in no time and you want more, don’t you?”
    “I do, El.”
    “What happened in Troy this morning—this is the source of your binge.”
    Robinson points to the closed door of the spare room: “I’ve been coming here weekly since you moved back, twenty years ago. Know what I notice tonight that I never once saw in twenty years? I notice that that son of a bitchin’ door, which has never been closed when I visit, is closed for the first time in twenty years. This is my fuckin’ observation.”
    “Forget the spare room.”
    “Mirko Ivanovic in there?”
    “Anything is possible.”
    “Catherine?”
    “Anything is possible.”
    Robinson undoes the top two buttons of his coat. Conte’s right hand slips between the cushion he’s sitting on and the cushion beneath which he’s hidden his .357 Magnum.
    Conte says, “It’s possible that the real Osama bin Laden is hiding in there, his double having been killed, and it’s possible that you and I will do something foolish. You with what you’re packing under your coat and I with what I have under here, with the safe off—the safe is off, Robby, and I can get it out well before you get yours. I advise you to take your coat off. Carefully. Now.”
    Robinson complies, revealing what Conte had suspectedwas there from the beginning. Conte says, “Good,” and pulls out the .357 Magnum. Lays it on the cushion. Conte says, “Is the fear which we have for one another tonight well grounded? That’s the only question.”
    Conte stands. He says, “I’m going to the kitchen to bring out the entire box from Napoli’s, so that we can both feed our anxiety. I’ll leave my revolver there on the couch while I go to the kitchen. I’ll be turning my back on you. Either we are who we’ve been for each other for fifty years or we’re done. I’m gone and your life is worthless and you’ll eat your gun sooner or later with your brains on the wall.” In the spare room, .38 at the ready, Catherine Cruz peers in vain between the door’s edge and the doorjamb. Conte turns his back.
    He returns with the box and lays it on the coffee table fronting the couch. Neither will eat. Neither, tonight, will die. Conte ejects the rounds from his .357. Robinson follows suit. The woman in the spare room will feel soon the death of whatever innocence about love she’s retained at age forty-one.
    “You want to know how I knew that the man shot in Troy this morning is your pal, as I said on the phone?”
    “Yes.”
    “Because the sexy Detective Cruz casually mentioned you two go down there to have dinner with her ex-partner, whose name we already had when Catherine transferred up here. Obviously. Which proves nothing about my guilt or innocence. Obviously.”
    “Obviously.”
    “If I’m playing a game, El, I don’t tell you, as I tell younow, that I knew about Rintrona and your connection with him for a year—ever since that Saturday we went down to Troy for
Carmen
in hi def, the day you told me your kids on the West Coast had just been murdered. You disappear after the first intermission. I see you back here that night, looking like a wild man, and you tell me you destroyed a telephone booth in Troy in your impotent fuckin’ rage for your children’s death, not to mention the ton of guilt for leaving them as babies thirty years ago. You told me you were arrested for the phone booth. Naturally, curious officer of the law that I am, I check out the arrest data with my opposite number in Troy and your name, Catherine’s, and Rintrona’s show up. Tell me something, you motherfucker, do I sound like I’m trying to hide something? Several days later in the dark I do what I do, which you wanted done, you summoned me there, let’s not bullshit ourselves, you wanted him dead, El, in the company of a third party I never saw before, his face is not that clear in that dark wasteland, but clear enough. Because when I check out the Troy Police website that night on a hunch,