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"You tell this guy you shoot a little craps at this place from time to time, and they sent you the comp coupon, and you can't use it, so he can have it."

"Right."

"Don't fuck this up, Joe. Mr. S. is personally interested in this."

"You tell Mr. S. not to worry."

"He's not worrying. I'm not worrying. You should be the one that's worrying."

****

Antoinette Marie Wolinski Schermer had moved back in with her parents when Eddie, that sonofabitch, had moved out on her and Brian, which was all she could do, suspecting correctly that getting child support out of Eddie was going to be like pulling teeth.

That hadn't worked out. Her mother, especially, and her father were Catholic and didn't believe in divorce no matter what a sonofabitch you were married to, no matter if he slapped you around whenever he had two beers in him. What they expected her to do was go to work, save her money, and wait around the house for the time when she could straighten things out with Eddie.

No going out, in other words.

She had met Ricco Baltazari in the Reading Terminal Market on Market

Street. She had gone there for lunch, and so had he. She decided later, when she found out that he owned Ristorante Alfredo, which was before she found out that he was connected with the Mob, that he had probably got bored with the fancy food in his restaurant and wanted a hot Italian sausage with onions and peppers, which was what she was having when she saw him looking at her.

She had noticed him too, saw that he was a really good-looking guy, that he was dressed real nice, and that when he paid for his sausage and pepper and onions, he had a wad of fifties and hundreds as thick as his thumb.

It probably had something to do, too, with what people said about opposites attracting. She was blonde (she only had to touch it up to keep it light, not dye it, the way most blondes had to) and fairskinned, and he was sort of dark olive-skinned with really black hair.

The first time she noticed him, she wondered what it would be like doing it with him, never suspecting that she would find out that same night.

The first night, he picked her up outside work in his Cadillac and they went first to a real nice restaurant in Jersey, outside Cherry Hill, where everybody seemed to know him, and the manager or whatever sent a bottle of champagne to the table. Ricco told her right out that he was married, but didn't get along with his old lady, but couldn't divorce her because his mother was old and a Catholic, and you know how Catholics feel about divorce.

After dinner, they went to a motel, not one of the el cheapos that lined Admiral Wilson Boulevard, but to the Cherry Hill Inn, which was real nice, and had in the bathroom the first whatchamacallit that Antoinette had ever seen. She had to ask Ricco what it was for.

The truth of the matter was that when he was driving her back to her parents' house she thought that she had blown it, that she had been too easy to pick up, that she had gone to the motel with him on the First Date, and that once there, she had been a little too enthusiastic. She hadn't been with anybody in months, and the two whiskey sours and then the champagne and then the two Amaretto liqueurs afterward had put her more than a little into the bag.

Antoinette figured, in other words, that Ricco had got what he wanted (probably more than he expected) and that was the last she would ever see of him. She could have played it smarter, she supposed, but the vice versa was also true. She had got what she wanted too, a nice dinner, a nice ride in a Caddy, and then what happened in the motel, which she had needed and wanted from the moment she first saw him trying to look down her blouse.

But then a week later, when she walked out of the building after work, there he was at the curb, looking real nice, and smiling at her, and holding the door of his Caddy open for her.

He told her that he would have called her sooner, but his wife was being a bitch, and he couldn't arrange it. She told him that she understood, she had been married to someone like that herself, a real bastard.

He told her he would like to show her his restaurant, but that she understood why he couldn't do that, with his wife and all, and she told him she understood. The second night, they had gone to the bar in the Warwick Hotel, and then across the street to a bar that had a piano player, and then back across the street to the Warwick, to a nice hotel suite he said a business associate kept all the time so he could use it when he was in town.

When she went home that night, her father and mother were waiting up for her like she was sixteen or seventeen, instead of a woman who was twenty-three and had a kid, and said she looked like a whore and smelled like a drunk and they weren't going to put up with that. And who was the Guinea in the Cadillac, some gangster?

The next time she saw Ricco, three days later, she told him what had happened, and that if they were going to do anything, they would have to do it early, so she wouldn't get hell when she got home.

He asked her why she still lived at home, and she told him about Eddie and Brian, and how Eddie, that sonofabitch, wasn't paying child support. He told her maybe something could be worked out; he would look into it.

The first thing that happened was that Eddie, out of the goddamned blue, sent a Western Union money order for four hundred bucks, which wasn't all he owed, of course, but was four hundred Antoinette didn't expect to get.

And then she heard from her mother that she had heard from Eddie's mother that Eddie had gotten mugged going home from work, that two white guys had done a real job on him, knocked out a couple of teeth, and broken his glasses and a couple of ribs, and taken all his money.

Antoinette wasn't stupid. She knew that the last thing Eddie would have done if he had got mugged and they took all his money would suddenly decide to send child support. And three days after the Western Union money order came, there was one from the Post Office, what he owed for two weeks child support, plus twenty dollars on account.

The only way Eddie would suddenly decide to start doing what was right was because somebody had convinced him that he better do right, and Antoinette suspected that Ricco was that somebody.

Ricco wouldn't admit it, of course, but what he said was that bastards who won't support their own children deserve whatever happens to them, like losing a couple of teeth.

The second thing that happened was that Ricco said he knew where she could get a nice apartment, a couple of blocks from the Warwick, the only problem being she couldn't have a kid in there. Antoinette told him it didn't matter whether she could have Brian or not, on what the phone company was paying her, she couldn't afford it. He said he would be happy to help out with the whole thing.