Sixty-Four

SIXTY-FOUR

HE DOESN'T PARTICULARLY LOOK like a gangster. But I'm not quite sure what that meant any longer, not since internet nerds looking like past presidents of the Science Club came along and started acting as if they ran crime families.

Salvatore is tall, broad, tanned, a lot of wavy gray hair, striking against the royal-blue shirt and pocket square he's paired with a cream-colored summer suit and the white-rimmed black leather sneakers now accepted as formal wear.

"What if I don't want to walk anywhere with you?"

"Come on, counselor," he says. "You had to know we were going to meet sooner or later. It's just me who picked the time and place."

"You had no way of knowing I'd be here."

"You'd be surprised at what I know." He chuckles. "And what you don't."

If there's a New York accent going on here, he's either hiding it pretty well or has lost most of it along the way. Maybe just a splash of Brooklyn.

"Come on," he says. "You'll be back with your date before you know it."

We start walking in the general direction of the barn area.

"Sorry to hear what happened to him," Salvatore adds.

"I'll bet."

"You got me all wrong."

"Somehow I doubt that."

We pass another ring, the riders inside looking like children.

"I got a granddaughter who rides," he says. "Sport's not cheap."

I stop briefly and look up at him. He has the darkest eyes I've ever seen, the color of night.

"This is how we're gonna do it, Bobby? Really? Making small talk about horses?"

"Just trying to break the ice."

"How about we have a conversation instead about all the dead people I've encountered who seem to have had some connection to you, all the way back to Hank Carson and your old friend Artie Shore?"

He grins. "What can I tell you? It's a dangerous world out there."

We arrive at an empty ring, the jumps already stacked against each other off to the side.

"Let me ask you something?" he says, his voice mild. "What's it like, knowing you're going to die?"

You'd be surprised at what I know.

I'm not sure what kind of reaction he expects. But I don't give him one.

"My father loved boxing, that's something I'm sure you don't know," I say. "And loved old fight films just as much. His favorite was Body and Soul, starring the guy he called the great New York actor John Garfield. Dad let me watch it with him when I was old enough. At the end, maybe you saw it yourself, Garfield doesn't take a dive and guys like you threaten to kill him."

He nods. "Guys like me."

"And you know what the great New York actor John Garfield says? ‘Everybody dies.'"

Salvatore nods again. "But we all want the same thing, whether we got the cancer or not. We're looking for it to be later rather than sooner. Am I right?"

I hear a voice in the distance, an announcer calling the names of riders and horses to assemble at the Grand Prix ring. I know it's thoroughbred racing they call the sport of kings. But that's what it feels like here. Kings and queens.

And me.

And Bobby Salvatore.

"You think you know me, but you really don't," he says. "You think you know where I figure in all this, but you don't."

"So educate me."

He smiles. "My education, at I guess what you could call the school of hard knocks, came from a man named Sonny Blum."

"You still work for Blum? I heard you'd moved on long ago."

"I did. But before I did, he taught me well."

"I'll bet."

"And one of the things he taught me was to understand where you fit in the grand scheme of things. That no matter how big you think you are, there's always somebody bigger. Like Sonny, for example."

I was about to thank him for his crash course in the mob but thought better of it. Our date was going so well.

"What do you really want to tell me?" I ask, even though there's so much more I want to ask him.

In the next moment, he reaches over with a big hand and gently strokes my cheek. His touch makes my skin crawl. I want to recoil. Or give him a good slap. But I don't want to give him the satisfaction. And the last thing I want to do at the Hampton Classic, with media everywhere and a cell phone in every hand, is make a scene.

He takes his hand away as quickly as he put it there, then leans down to whisper in my ear.

"It's not me you're after," he says. "No matter how much you want it to be."