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He cranked the valve as far it would go in the opposite direction, and then went down the stairs to the first floor two at a time, and then more carefully down the stairs to the basement, because Mama kept brooms and mops and buckets and stuff like that on the cellar stairs.

His foot slipped on the basement floor, and he only barely kept from falling down. When he finally found the chain hanging from the light switch and got the bare bulb turned on, he saw that the floor was slick wet. Here and there, there were little puddles. And it smelled rotten too, not as bad as a backed-up toilet, but bad.

He found the place at the rear of the basement where the water pipes came in through the wall from the water meter out back. And again there was a feeling of triumph.

There's the fucking valve, and it's off!

It didn't have a handle, like the valve on the toilet upstairs, just a piece of iron sticking up that you needed a wrench, or a pair of pliers, to turn. He turned and started for the front of the basement, where there was sort of a workbench, and where he knew he could find a wrench.

It was then that he saw the water heater had been disconnected, and moved from the concrete blocks on which it normally rested. Both the water and gas pipes connected to it had been disconnected.

He took a good close look.

Well, shit, if I was the fucking plumber, I would disconnect the water heater. How the hell would an old lady know whether or not it was really busted? A plumber tells an old lady it's busted, she thinks it's busted.

And then he saw something else out of the ordinary. There were two pieces of pipe, one with a connection on one end, and the other end sawed off, and a second piece, with both ends showing signs of having just been cut, lying on the floor near the water heater:

What the fuck did he have to do tha

t for?

He picked one piece of pipe up, and confirmed that the connection on one end indeed matched the connection on top of the water heater. Then he took the sawed end, and held it up against the pipe that carried the hot water upstairs.

It matched, like he thought it would. Then he saw where there was a break in the cold water pipe, where the other piece had been cut from. Just to be sure, he picked up the other piece of pipe and held it up to see if it fit. It did. And then for no good reason at all, he put the piece of pipe to his eye and looked through it.

You can hardly see through the sonofabitch! What the fuck?

He carried it to the bare light bulb fixture and looked through it again.

And saw that it was almost entirely clogged with some kind of shit. Rust. Whatever.

That's what she meant when she said "the pipes are clogged. They got to go." Jesus Christ! What the fuck is that going to cost?

Magdelana Lanza was waiting at the head of the cellar stairs when Vito came up.

"I told you not to flush the toilet," she said. "That there's no water. So now what am I supposed to do?"

"Use Mrs. Marino's toilet," he said.

"The plumber wants two thousand dollars' deposit."

"What?"

"He says, you don't get him two thousand dollars by nine tomorrow morning, he'll have to go onto another job, and we'll have to wait. He don't know when he could get back."

"Two thousand dollars?"

"He said that'll almost cover materials, labor will be extra, but he won't order the materials until you give him two thousand dollars, and you pay the rest when he's finished."

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!"

"Watch your language!"

"And what if I don't have two thousand dollars?"

"Then sell your Cadillac automobile, Mr. Big Shot, you got to have water in the house."

"Who'd you call, Mama, the plumber?"