Red on Red by Edward Conlon

him.
    “No kidding!” he said, beaming. “My name means something!”
    Never was someone prouder to learn of a bastard ancestor. But Nick understood that what appealed to Esposito was the idea that he was self-made, self-invented. He had no brothers, and his father was not loved and long gone. His life was the work of his own hands, he felt, and so the fortune-cookie factoid took on an oracular depth.
    As it was, neither had shown any particular gift for friendship before then. Nick was too self-contained, Esposito too competitive for lasting fellowship of any depth. Nick knew that his own unmoored state played some part, how he was both sinking and floating, and the greater effect of his betrayal, his pre-betrayal, had been to inspire in him a dedication to ensure there would be no need for further betrayal to occur. He stuck close to Esposito, listened and learned with true esteem, and his cautious counsel was accepted more often than not. He didn’t know why Esposito had taken to him, but he was glad for it. They pulled off the highway at Twenty-third and headed back up First. Here they were, in the city.
    “Why don’t you ever work down here, Espo?”
    “The city? Didn’t you hear, they made crime against the law down here. Nothing happens. And if it does, the butler did it. What fun is that? I mean, I know shit happens sometimes, but half the time you’re running around because some millionaire, some politician, their silverware was stolen. What I like about uptown is nobody’s important. Nobody’s important until they kill somebody or get killed.”
    Though Nick dismissed the casual slander of their downtown colleagues, the last assessment had a measure of cruel truth. Still, Esposito’s contentment was not absolute.
    “You think it’ll be in the papers, last night?” he asked. “My homicide, I mean.”
    “I don’t know, maybe a line or two.”
    “Amazing, isn’t it? We have three dead last night, and there wasn’t one reporter. Not a single picture that wasn’t taken as evidence.”
    Nick struggled to frame his comment so he wouldn’t snap under the weight of its irony. “No pictures? Not a single snapshot of me knocking a body out of a tree, you splashing the mud puddle on the hustlers, the old lady’s face before she died? That’s fine by me. You know the deal—you’re out of the limelight, but you’re also off the radar. It’s the better way.”
    Esposito grunted, unwilling to concede that he couldn’t have both privacy and publicity but he didn’t bring it up again.
    At the medical examiner’s, the lobby had a security desk in front of a marble wall inscribed with an ominous Latin quotation: TACEANT COLLOQUIA. EFFUGIAT RISUS. HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE . They both stared at it for a moment, as they grasped for ID to show the guard, who nodded them past. Nick had looked up the quote before and memorized it. There was a dignity here that was lacking in the Bronx morgue, where you went in the back of the building, through the loading dock. In the elevator, Esposito scratched himself as they waited for it to go downstairs; he seemed somewhat discomfited. Nick had never been to an autopsy with him, and quite a few detectives, even veterans, tried to avoid the procedure. More were troubled by the gore than the ghosts, he guessed, and Esposito seemed immune to haunting.
    “I wonder what the hell that means, on the wall there.”
    “It’s Latin.”
    “Duh.”
    “Do you want to know?”
    “I got a feeling you’re about to tell me.”
    “ ‘Let conversation cease. Laughter, take flight. This place is where death delights to help the living.’ ”
    The elevator stopped, and Esposito pursed his lips. “What’s the first bit again?”
    “ ‘Let conversation cease.’ ”
    “In other words, ‘Shut up already.’ ”
    Nick had fallen for it. His own vanities had not passed completely unnoticed. Esposito began to shake with laughter, and made little effort to