see Miami and she'll be happy." He grabbed Toby's face with both hands again and kissed him. "You brought me luck. Every time you play those old Napoli songs, you think of me."
The car moved on.
They ate lunch at the Russian Tea Room, and while Toby ate the Chicken Kiev almost greedily, the older man said:
"Do you see those men over there? They're New York policemen. And the man with them is from the FBI."
Toby didn't look. He just stared at the man who was speaking. He still had the gun in easy reach, though he hated the weight of it.
He knew that he could, if he wanted to do it, shoot both of the men with him, and probably shoot one of those other men before the others got him. But he wasn't going to try any such thing yet. Another, better moment would present itself.
"They work for us," said the older man. "They've been following us since we left your place. And they'll follow us now out of town and into the country. So just relax. We're very well protected, I assure you."
And that's how Toby became a hit man. That's how Toby became Lucky the Fox. But there is just a little more to the transition.
That night as he lay in bed, in a large country house, miles from the city, he thought about the girl who had crouched down and put up her hands. He thought about how she had begged in words that needed no translation. Her face had been stained with tears. He thought about how she had doubled over and shaken her head and put out her two hands against him.
He thought about her after he'd shot her, lying there, still, like his brother and sister had lain in the bathtub.
He got up, put on his clothes and his overcoat, keeping the gun in his pocket, and he went down the steps of the big house, past the two men playing cards in the living room. The room was like a great cavern. There were groups of gilded furnishings everywhere. And plenty of dark leather. It was like one of those old elegant private clubs in a black-and-white movie. You expected to see gentlemen peering at you from wing chairs. But there were only the two playing cards under a lamp, though a fire did burn in the grate giving off a cheerful flicker in the darkness.
One of the men got up. "You want something, a drink maybe?"
"I need to walk," Toby said.
No one stopped him.
He went out and he walked around the house.
He noticed the way the leaves looked in the trees that were nearest the lampposts. He noticed how the branches of barren trees were gleaming with ice. He studied the tall steep slate roofs of the house. He looked at the glint of light in the diamond-paned windows. A northern house, built for the heavy snow, built for the long winter, a house he'd only known from pictures, perhaps, if ever he had noticed them.
He listened to the sound of the frozen grass under his feet, and he came to a fountain that was running in spite of the cold, and he watched the water erupt from the jet and fall down in an airy white shower into the basin that boiled under the dim light.
Light came from the lantern in the porte cochere. The black limousine stood there gleaming under this lantern. Light came from the lamps that flanked the many doors of the house. Light came from small fixtures that lined the many garden paths of pea gravel. The air smelled of pine needles and of burning wood. There was a freshness and a cleanness he had not experienced in the city. There was a deliberate beauty.
It made him think of a summer when he'd gone for the holidays to a home across Lake Pontchartrain with two of the richer boys at Jesuit. They were nice boys, twins, and they liked him. They liked to play chess, and they liked classical music. They were good in the plays at school, which were so well done that everybody in the city came to see them. Toby would have been friends with those two boys, but he had had to keep his own life at home a secret. And so he never really became friends with them at all. By senior year, they hardly spoke.
But he had never forgotten their beautiful house near Mandeville, and how handsome the furnishings had