“I know who it is.”
“I’m not going to keep you. I need to see you today in person.”
The clock ticked on Sal’s end of the line. “It’s Christmas Eve.”
“I know.”
“Then you know where I live,” Sal said, and hung up.
It was not a yes, but it was not a dial tone that rang out into nothing either. Miles put the phone in his pocket, told Ida where he was going, and took the subway to Queens. Sal lived in a narrow brick house with aluminum awnings, a plaster Madonna in the front yard, and a string of colored lights along the gutter that had been left up since some earlier decade. Miles stood on the walk with his hands out of his pockets. In 40 years, he had never once come to this door. He climbed the steps and knocked.
Sal opened it in a cardigan and slippers. He was 68, thick through the shoulders with a gray mustache and forearms like fence posts. Behind him, the house smelled of coffee and anise. A television murmured in another room. He did not step aside.
“You left Frankie’s funeral after 10 minutes,” Sal said. “The whole crew saw you go. 12 guys in the back pews and we watched the boss walk out the side door.”
“I know. I stood up there and said a few words. I looked at the first row. It was empty.”
Miles felt the old reflex rising in him, the reasonable voice, the let me explain. He had used it in a thousand rooms. He set it down like a heavy bag. “I’m not going to defend myself,” he said. “I walked out because I couldn’t stand in that room and know I’d never once listened to him. 30 years. He gave me a notebook and I didn’t open it for 12 months. I thought if I sat there someone would ask me what he was like and I didn’t know.”
Sal’s jaw shifted. He said nothing.
“There’s a building in Harlem, West 143rd. Old boiler. Burner controls gone. Frankie left a tag on it the week he died. Will bring part. He never got to.”
Miles kept his voice low and even. “There’s a woman on the third floor with a lung condition and a seven-year-old girl who hasn’t eaten right in a week because she’s afraid to say anything. The nurse says if that building’s cold tonight, they take her to the hospital.”
“So, write a check,” Sal said flatly. “You’re good at that.”
“I could. I’m not going to.”
Miles drew a breath. “I’m not hiring you, Sal. I don’t have a purchase order or a bonus or a plan. I’m asking. I don’t know how to do this without you, and I should have said so a long time ago.”
The words hung between them in the cold. A car passed on the street. Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed the half hour. Sal looked at him for a long time. It was the look of a man measuring a pipe before he cut it.
“Frankie said you’d never ask,” he said quietly. “He said it was the one thing you couldn’t do. He used to say, ‘Sal, the day that man asks for help is the day he finally grows up.’”
“Well,” said Miles, his voice cracking on the word, “here I am.”
Sal turned. He walked to the wall phone in the hallway, an old beige one with a long twisted cord. He dialed from memory. He didn’t say, “Hello.”
“It’s Sal. Get the crew.”
“Yeah, all of them. Harlem 143rd.”
A pause. “No, not for him. For Frankie.”
