“Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“What happened?”

“I survived is what happened. And we’re going to need to find ourselves a new clientele.”

I looked over to Caroline, still leaning on the car, looking at me, her arms wrapped so tight against her chest it was a wonder she could breathe.

“How is she?” I asked softly.

“Shaken,” said Beth. “Tired. Mute.”

I let go of Beth and walked hesitantly up to Caroline.

She looked at me for a long moment and then took two steps forward and put her arms around my neck and kissed me.

“Is it over?” she asked in a voice as soft as a whisper.

“That part at least.”

“What now?”

“I have something more to show you, back at the apartment.”

“I’m still shaking.”

“Just this one thing more.”

“I haven’t slept.”

“It’s back at my apartment.”

“Let’s just pretend it’s over, everything is over. Please?”

She looked at me with pleading eyes but I just shook my head. I didn’t tell her just then what was most pressing on my mind, not there, in the middle of the Naval Shipyard, with the bodies being thrown into the garbage trucks from a pier just a few hundred yards away. I didn’t tell her what Calvi had said about her father, how he was Calvi’s patron, the one who had paid for Jacqueline’s death and for Edward’s death and for the retrieval of the box and for her protection. I didn’t tell her that, not there, not yet, and I wasn’t sure I ever would. I just told her we needed to see something at my apartment and that she should get into the car.

Morris had hot-wired the Lincoln’s engine, which was why it was still running. He and Beth had followed us to the Naval Shipyard in Morris’s Honda but it was Caroline and I who followed Morris and Beth out, alongside the dry docks, back across the lift bridge that forded the mouth of the reserve basin, under I-95 and through the gate to Penrose Avenue. Morris took a right onto Penrose and then another right onto Pattison and we followed that to the Spectrum, where the Flyers win and the Sixers lose. Morris stopped the Honda right in front and I stopped behind him. The sign said “TOW AWAY ZONE,” which was fine by me. Let the car sit in a police lot while they tried to figure out what had happened to its owner. I pulled apart the wires to kill the engine, wiped down the steering wheel and door handles to obliterate my prints, and flipped up the inside lock of the trunk. The Cuban leaped out and, without saying a word, ran, arms pumping like an Olympic sprinter. Raffaello might have had different plans for him, but I didn’t work for Raffaello anymore.

As soon as Caroline and I entered my apartment I opened all the windows to air the place out. The metal box still sat on the table. As I was putting the cushions back on the sofa, Calvi’s black cat, Sam, leaped from underneath a lamp. I had forgotten it was still there. It no longer had a master, it no longer had a home. It stood between Caroline and me and inspected us, haughty, still, in its impoverishment.

“It’s an orphan now,” I said. “What are we going to do with it?”

She lit a cigarette and looked down at it for a while and then, giving it a wide berth, she walked around it and into my kitchen. I thought she might be looking for a cleaver to butcher it to death but what she took out instead was a can of tuna fish from my pantry and a carton of milk from the fridge. She set out two bowls onto the floor. The milk clumped like loose cottage cheese when she poured it but the cat didn’t seem to mind. Caroline stood back and watched it eat from afar and I watched her watch it.

“I never thought I’d see you be nice to a cat,” I said.

“After what we’ve just been through, the little monsters seem almost benign. Almost.”

When we were both showered and dressed in fresh clothes, me in jeans and a white tee shirt, her in a pair of her leggings and one of my white work shirts, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup, we sat down together on the couch, leaning into each other, as if both of us at that moment needed the physical presence of the other. Thinking of her as she fed the cat, the first act of kindness I had ever seen from her, I wondered, maybe, if after everything, maybe, we might actually be right for each other. Maybe we could make whatever was going on between us work. We were both lonely, I knew that, and we were together now and maybe that was enough. And she was stinking rich, so maybe that was more than enough. We sat quietly together, not so much embracing as leaning one on the other, watching the cat as he sat near our feet and licked its paw. Then I reached down and pulled my pack onto my lap.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” I said, drawing from the pack the bundles of letters I had found in the locked drawer of the breakfront. “I found these at the old Poole house.”

“All right.”

“I think we should read them.”

“All right.”

“We can do this later if you want.”

“No, let’s do it now.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to run away anymore?”

“Of course I want to run away. I’m desperate to run away. But wherever I ran I’d still be a Reddman. I can’t control who I am, can I?”

“No.”

“And I can’t control who wants to kill me because of it, can I?”

“Apparently not.”

“It’s funny what you learn at the wrong end of a gun. You told me the men who killed my sister and brother are dead, but we still don’t know who hired them. Maybe the answer is somewhere in these letters.”

“Maybe.”

“And maybe the one good thing I’ve been looking for is in there, too.”

“Maybe.”

She waited a moment, looking down at Sam the cat, steeling herself. “Or maybe it’s just more shit.”

“Probably.”

She waited a moment more and then, hesitantly, she reached for one of the bundles. She untied the old ribbon carefully and looked through the letters, one by one, before passing them, one by one, to me. “These are love letters,” she said. “From an Emma.”

“They must be from Emma Poole. Who are they to?”

“They are each addressed ‘To My Love,’ without a name,” she said. “Listen to this. ‘To feel your hand on my face, your lips on my cheek, to feel your warmth and your weight surround me, my darling, my love, my life can hold no more meaning than this. You swear your devotion over and over and I place my fingers on your lips because to speak of the future leaks the rapture from our present. Love me now, fully and completely, love me today, not forever, love me in this moment and let the future be damned.’ ”

I took one of the letters she had passed to me and began to read aloud. “ ‘If we are cursed with this passion, then let the curse torch our souls until the fire consumes itself and is extinguished. I fall not into happiness with you, my beloved, for that is impossible for cursed souls such as we, but instead in your arms I rise to the transcendent ecstasy of which the great men sing and if it be necessarily short-lived than still I wouldn’t treasure it any less or bargain even a minute’s worth for something longer lasting but tepid to the touch.’ ”

She dropped the letter in her hand and picked up another. “ ‘Glorious, glorious, glorious is your breath and your touch and the rich warm smell of you, your skin, your eyes, your scar, the power in your legs, the rosy warmth of your mouth. I want you to devour me, my love, every inch of me, I lie in bed at night and imagine it and only delirious joy comes from the imagining. Lie with me, now, this instant, wait no longer, come to me and lie with me, now, your arms around me, now, your mouth on my breasts, now, the wild smell of your hair, now, your teeth on my neck, now, devour me my love my love my love devour me now.’ ”

I stared at Caroline as she read the words and was not surprised to see a tear. At least some of what she was feeling I felt also. I moved closer to her and put my arm around her.