Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(40)

“Did you have that colonoscopy yet?” Vic asked Saturday night when they were having a whiskey nightcap after Vic’s fiftieth birthday dinner down in D.C.

“Did you?”

“I just turned fifty. Your birthday was last spring, and Ange said—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what Ange said. Ever since Katie Couric did that damned colonoscopy on the air last year, she’s been after me.”

“Who’s been after you? Katie Couric?” Vic asked, deadpan.

“Yeah, me and Katie, we got a thing.”

“She’s cute—but can she make a decent meatball? Because Ange’s meatballs . . .” Vic shook his head. “No one makes them better. Not even your mother.”

“Don’t ever say that to my mother.”

“You think I’m nuts? I won’t. I know your mother.”

He sure does, and has for forty-five years. Rocky, Ange, and Vic started kindergarten at P.S. 77 in the Bronx together in 1955, and graduated James Monroe High School together in 1967. By then, Rocky and Ange had been going steady for two years. They were engaged in ’68, but their plans were put on hold when Rocky was drafted. He got back from Vietnam in ’72, and Vic was best man at their wedding the following year.

Now look. Fifty years old, all three of them. Graying hair, weathered faces, grown kids . . . stupid medical tests.

“Look, the colonoscopy is scheduled, okay?” Rocky told Vic. “For this Tuesday. So Monday, I don’t get to eat anything at all, I get to drink down some stuff that’ll make me shit my brains out, and then Tuesday I get to go to the hospital and someone’s going to—”

“I know how it works, Rocky.” Vic made a face.

“Yeah? You schedule yours yet?”

“Not yet. Tell me how it goes, and I’ll consider it.”

“It’ll go fine. They’re not going to find anything because there’s nothing wrong with me and this whole thing is a waste of time!”

But when Rocky came to after the colonoscopy late that morning, he was sure he was going to eat those words. He could tell Dr. Lee was disconcerted when he came into the recovery room to talk to him and Ange, who’d been reading magazines in the television-less waiting room for the last two hours, her cell phone turned off in compliance with hospital regulations.

“Great news,” the doctor said.

“I was out for a month and the Sox won the World Series?”

Dr. Lee didn’t even crack a smile; it was as if he hadn’t even heard Rocky’s quip.

“Your colon is clear,” he said simply, and briskly went over the report and showed them some pictures that made Rocky squirm. Then he said Rocky could get dressed, shook his hand and Ange’s, and left.

“I really thought he was going to say he’d found something,” Rocky told Ange as she handed him his gold wedding band, which she’d worn for safekeeping while he was under anesthesia.

“I thought so, too,” Ange said. “He wasn’t his jolly self. And even the nurse was acting funny when she came out to the waiting room to get me.”

As soon as they got into the car and turned on the radio, they knew why.

Rocky’s impulse was to get the hell downtown, but Ange, who was at the wheel, insisted he was in no condition—after all that anesthesia and two days without food—to go anywhere just yet.

She was right, of course.

She had been right, too, when she discouraged their three sons from following in their father’s footsteps, as Rocky had.

That’s how it works in this city, or at least in the blue-collar Bronx neighborhood where Rocky grew up and still lives. Sons follow their fathers into the NYPD or FDNY, whichever is the so-called family business.

Rocky’s father and grandfather had been cops; he expected his own boys to join the force. But Ange insisted on sending them all to college first. The boys balked at that as much as Rocky did, but Ange was boss. They went away to school, even Donny, their youngest, who’d worn a toy police badge and gun belt for about as long as he’d been walking and talking.

One by one, to Ange’s relief and Rocky’s disappointment, their sons had broken with tradition and settled into lives that didn’t revolve around law enforcement in New York.

Donny, the one who’d had his heart set on being a cop, grew his hair down to his ass, started a band, and plays the bar scene in Austin. That wasn’t okay with Rocky until today. No one is flying planes into bars in Texas.

Unlike several of their childhood friends, especially those who had followed their fathers into the FDNY, the Manzillo boys were all safe in distant states when the World Trade Center collapsed.

When Rocky got out of the car back at home after the colonoscopy, he was so light-headed he nearly passed out. By the time he’d finally pulled himself together and was feeling strong enough to head downtown, it was mid-afternoon. Before leaving the Bronx, he stopped off at his church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, to light a couple of candles.

Over one votive, he prayed for all those lost souls, sensing—though he didn’t yet know for sure—that some of his friends and their sons were among them.

Over the other, he offered a prayer of thanks. He might have been lost, too, had he not been at the hospital when the buildings collapsed.

That damned colonoscopy had saved his life—but not in the way it was intended.