By the spring of 1928, somebody had learned that Rose’s door was easier to reach than mine. I found a customer’s basket overturned on the second-floor landing, clean pillowcases sliding down the stairs. Rose stood above it with a bundle against her hip. Two strangers had stopped a woman coming for her washing and asked whether she understood whose sister did it. They had gone before I arrived. The woman had gone with them, taking neither her washing nor her bill.
I gathered the linen before a boy coming upstairs could tread on it. Rose made me shake each piece over the banister and fold it again. Her hands were red from soap, but they did not tremble. Mine kept catching on the cloth. Since 1926 I had patched together driving assignments, sometimes for men around Capone, sometimes for shopkeepers who wanted nothing beyond a sober driver. I had paid the medical advance through deductions and extra service. The truck remained at Frank’s garage.
“Give me their names,” I said. Rose shifted the bundle away from me. “I didn’t invite them to supper.” She took the pillowcases and started up. I followed with the basket, striking my knuckles against the narrow wall. At her door she stopped me. “You can carry that inside. Nothing else comes with you.” I knew what she meant. No visitors asking favors, no partner waiting in the kitchen, no promises made over her table. I set the basket down without arguing.
Bruno worked that afternoon behind a wholesale produce store, checking crates as men rolled them toward a wagon. I went through the alley and waited until he finished counting. A porter tried to move me aside with a crate against my stomach. I caught its bottom and helped him set it down instead. Bruno watched that small negotiation without smiling. “Keep your men away from Rose,” I told him. He laid his pencil across the tally sheet. “Which men?”
I described the little I knew. He neither recognized them nor offered to find them. “You promised a truck,” he said. “I lost wages putting down a deposit.” “And we lost the truck.” A wagon backed toward us, forcing me against the wall. Bruno stepped into the open and continued his counting. I followed, took the tally board from under his hand, and put it on a crate beyond the wagon’s wheels. That made him look at me. For a moment the porters stopped.
“My sister never promised you anything,” I said. He reached past me for the board. “Then don’t bring her into what you owe.” I wanted an admission, something I could carry away and punish. I had only his refusal and my own anger. I could knock him into the crates and guarantee another visit to Rose’s landing, whoever had made the first. Instead I stepped aside. Behind me, the porters began moving again. Nothing I had learned would identify the strangers.
That Sunday I took Danny Ives with me to move her. Danny was the spare driver on our runs, a little man who had to sit on a folded army blanket to see over a hood. He backed the wagon up laughing at my directions. Then a fellow stepped out of the passage with a pistol against Danny's ear. I knew him from Bruno's loading shed. Walt Sayer. He had quit Bruno to ride for Frank, a switch nobody had troubled to tell the drivers about. "Tell Bruno who took you," he said to Danny. He meant to carry off a man of ours in front of enough people that we would have to take one of theirs.
I left the tubs on the pavement and climbed onto the seat beside Danny. "You've got a better prize now." Walt took one step back to see where my hands were. Danny pitched himself straight down between the wheel and the curb. I went on top of him; a shot tore through the seat where his blanket lay. Rose pulled Danny through the open cellar hatch by his collar. Walt ran when the people upstairs began coming down, most of them with no idea a gun had gone off. We lost him. I had a mouthful of grit and Danny's blood on my teeth from hitting the back of his head. Nothing grand about it. Rose washed us both at the kitchen sink and told me where her tubs were going. By supper we had them set up behind the dressmaker's shop. I mended the table we'd cracked and gave Danny his blanket. He put his thumb through the hole. "They'll take another crack," he said. I promised him that next time I'd go to him, instead of making him come to me.
She gave me a cup of coffee at the repaired table but no key. I could visit as her brother. I could not leave parcels for collection, send men there, or use the back room while she was out. I agreed to each condition separately. When I left, she turned the new lock behind me. Leo was waiting beside the empty wagon, hat pulled low against the drizzle. He had work somewhere farther west now and looked thinner than when I had first lifted him into my car. He caught my sleeve before I passed. “Frank means to sell the truck,” he said. “Not settle. Sell it.”