Chapter 30 Rory #2
The conversation is easy. The ease is hard-won---purchased with blood and forgery and a knife on a practice room floor---but the purchase is complete, and the ease is genuine, and the table holds it the way the villa holds the lake light: naturally, generously, with room to spare.
Alessandro discusses the Falcone legitimate business expansion---real estate, a vineyard, a consultancy.
The language of organised crime is being replaced by the language of organised commerce, and the replacement is his project, and the project is working.
Killian discusses the Kavanagh clan's withdrawal from the drug trade---a transition that has cost him allies and gained him something he would never call peace.
Rocco tells a story about a plumbing disaster in the London townhouse that requires Adrian to interrupt with corrections, and the corrections are delivered in Adrian's precise, surgical voice, and Rocco accepts them with the grinning deference of a man who has discovered that being corrected by the person you love is a form of intimacy.
I watch them. My family. The word still fits strangely in my mouth---too large, too unlikely, a combination that should not work and that works completely.
Three couples. Six men. A table on a terrace on a lake in Italy, eating lamb and drinking Barolo and arguing about plumbing, and every man at this table has killed and every man at this table has loved and the killing and the loving are not opposites but parallels, and the parallels converge at this table, in this light, on this evening.
Kazimir does not speak much. He sits at the end of the table, his grey eyes moving between the faces of the men around him.
He is observing, processing, storing. The archive of a man who has spent his life collecting things is being populated with something new: the visual catalogue of family.
Of acceptance. Of the specific peace that comes from being among men who have earned the right to violence and chosen not to use it on each other.
At one point, when the conversation has turned to wine and the specific terroir of the Piedmont vineyard, Kazimir catches my eye. The look is brief, almost imperceptible to anyone not looking for it. The look that says: this is good. The boy chose well. The boy is happy.
I smile at him. He does not smile back. The Ghost does not smile. But the man does something else---the slight relaxation of his jaw, the fractional lowering of his shoulders, the specific bodily language of a man who has allowed himself to be satisfied.
* * *
The evening deepens. The lake turns indigo. The mountains behind Bellagio go dark against a sky that is still holding the last of the light---a thin band of gold along the western ridge, the colour of raw sienna mixed with Naples yellow, the colour of endings that are also beginnings.
I stand at the stone wall at the edge of the terrace. The water below is still.
The reflected light is the light I paint by---the secondary illumination, the lake's gift, the light that enters the studio in the afternoons and turns the walls the colour of old ivory.
Behind me, Alessandro and Killian are discussing the next phase of the Falcone-Kavanagh alliance. Not a war---an integration. The legitimate businesses are expanding faster than anticipated. There may be need for additional capital.
Killian's withdrawal from the drug trade has left resources unallocated. The conversation is not intimate, but it is comfortable. This is what peace looks like for men like us: the ability to discuss strategy with a man you were prepared to fight to the death a year ago.
Rocco is attempting to convince Adrian that they should spend the summer on Lake Como instead of returning to London. Adrian, with the precision of a man who loves a bruiser and knows how to manage him, is suggesting a compromise:
six weeks in May, before the tourists arrive. Rocco appears to be accepting this. The bruiser has learned negotiation from the man who loves him.
Kazimir joins me at the wall. He stands close.
His arm touches mine---the left arm, the one that carries the scar from Dmitri's bullet.
The scar is a ridge of pale tissue that I trace in the dark when we are in bed and the villa is quiet and the lake is the only sound.
The tracing is a ritual. The ritual is a prayer.
The prayer says: you survived, and the surviving gave me this.
"The painting," he says. "The portrait. When will it be finished?"
"When I get the eyes right."
"The eyes have been right for weeks."
"The eyes have been accurate for weeks. They have not been right.
There is a difference." I look at him. The grey eyes in the fading light are the grey I have been chasing on the canvas---the grey of lake water in winter, the grey of old silver, the grey that is not cold but warm, because the warmth is behind it, held in reserve, released in doses that are precise and devastating.
"Accuracy is reproduction. Rightness is truth. I'm still finding the truth."
His hand finds mine. The hand that held a pen through Zhuk's palm and a gun in a car park and my face in a safehouse bathroom.
The hand wraps around mine---the right hand, the one that held the knife, the one that painted the Modigliani, the one that is currently stained with ultramarine because I forgot to wash after the studio.
He lifts my hand. He presses his mouth to my knuckles. The gesture is the same.
It has always been the same---the first time on the studio floor, the blood on my skin in the opera house, the paint on my skin now.
His mouth on my hand is the vocabulary of a man who does not say the word and who says it anyway, in the language of pressure and heat and the specific, deliberate contact of lips on bone.
I lean into him. His arm wraps around my shoulders. The lake is still. The terrace behind us holds the sound of Killian's voice and Alessandro's laugh and the clink of Rocco pouring more wine and Adrian saying that is enough wine, Rocco, and Rocco pouring anyway.
I look at the table. The candles. The empty plates.
The six men who should be enemies and who are a family, and the family is held together by vows---the blood vow that married Killian and Alessandro, the iron vow that bound Rocco and Adrian, and the silk vow that brought me here, to this terrace, to this lake, to this man.
The silk vow was never a contract. It was never an arrangement or a negotiation or the cold, transactional binding of a forger to a collector.
The silk vow was a promise---made in paint and skin and the specific, devastating language of a man who said good boy and meant I love you and a boy who said please and meant
I choose you.
The vow is silk because silk is the strongest natural fibre. Stronger than steel by weight. Flexible enough to absorb impact without breaking. Beautiful enough to line a cage or drape a bed or catch the north light in a studio on Lake Como. Silk does not shatter. Silk does not rust. Silk holds.
I stand on a terrace in Italy with the man who collected me and the family that came for me and the paint on my hands and the scar on his arm and the lake holding the last light, and the silk holds.
The silk holds.