Was there some hope? He had a long talk with Uncle Luigi about his finances. “You may not have much,” Uncle Luigi advised, “but at least increase what you have. Put your savings in the stock market. You can’t lose. It’s going up all the time. The whole country’s getting richer every day.” He grinned. “Let your little boat rise with the tide.” It seemed to make sense. But the childhood memory of his father’s savings and Signor Rossi still weighed on Salvatore’s mind, and for a while he hesitated.

It wasn’t only a question of money, either.

“Her family may want a man with a business,” he told his uncle, “but even if I had the money, what would I do?” True, the work he did was hard, physical labor, but his body was strong, and he liked being out in the open, even when the weather was cold. There was a freedom to it, too. You went to work, you did the work, you were paid, and then you were free. There were plenty of jobs for a skilled laborer like himself too. He had no worries. But if he had a business of his own to run, he knew very well that he would always have worries. He’d have to sit in an office or a store, instead of working as a real man should, in the open air.

He thought about this for a week or two. In the end he decided that if this was the price of getting Teresa, then it was worth it. Whether he could do anything that would satisfy her family, though, was another matter.

In late October, Angelo fell sick. Nobody knew what the sickness was. It began like the flu, but although his fever left him after ten days, he remained very weak, and coughed continually. Uncle Luigi nursed him by day, Salvatore in the evenings. By late November, Salvatore sent for their mother, who decided at once that Angelo should come out to Long Island.

A few days later he telephoned Teresa’s house to tell her what had happened.

“Maybe I could go and visit him,” she suggested, “if you think he’d like company. It’s not far to bicycle.” She paused. “If you came out at the same time, I could see you too.”

He grinned. She’d found a perfect excuse to see him. He promised he’d be out there before Christmas.

It was a cold December evening when the two Irish cops came to the door. There had been snow the night before and it was still lying by the roadways. Uncle Luigi was out at the restaurant. He knew he’d done nothing wrong, so he wasn’t alarmed when they asked for him by name. Then they told him why they’d come.

The morgue they took him to was up in Harlem. There was a big bare room in the basement. Maybe it was so cold because of the snow outside, or maybe they always kept it cold. There were quite a few pallets in the room, each covered with a sheet. They led him to one near the middle and pulled back the sheet.