Chapter 7: The Shallow End

"Not here," I said.

Santo looked up at me. "You said no to leaving. Now you're saying no to this?"

"I'm saying no to this pool."

I crouched beside him on the stone.

"First lessons go wrong. You'll panic, you'll grab, you'll swallow half of it. You want to do that eleven feet over the place your mother died?"

He looked down at his feet in the water.

"No."

"And you want your men watching from the cigar room?"

"God, no."

"Then here's how it works."

I held up one finger, the way I do with the eight-year-olds.

"We do it at the bathhouse, after closing. Nobody sees. Nobody knows."

"Nobody," he said. "A Don who can't swim is a Don they laugh at. A Don they laugh at doesn't last the winter."

"Two. In the water, I'm in charge."

His eyebrow went up, the one with the scar through it.

"You'll do what I say when I say it," I said. "If I say float, you float. If I say get out, you get out."

"And three?"

"Three is what you do for me."

He took his feet out of the water and dried them on his rolled trousers.

"Name it."

"You find out everything about Torrisi Construction. Who they paid at the city. Where the bid money comes from. Everything that could kill it."

"Done."

"And you keep me alive until Labor Day."

He looked at me for a long moment in the moonlight.

"That one I was doing anyway," he said.

We drove to Red Hook at one in the morning.

He drove himself, a black car with leather seats, no driver, no men.

I'd never been in a car alone with Santo Cavallaro in my life.

He drove fast and quiet and with no wasted moves.

Over the Verrazzano, the whole harbor lay black under us, the Narrows on the right.

I looked at it and thought about a yacht.

He saw me looking.

He reached over and turned the radio on, low, so I'd have something else to hear.

The bathhouse was dark.

I let us in the side door and flipped on one row of lights, the ones over the shallow end.

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