Chapter 2Massimo
Massimo
I take the south corridor instead of the north because the south one passes the kitchen, and Lucia has a mouth on her when she's been at the wine. A mouth on her is information.
She's not at the wine yet. She nods. I nod. I keep moving.
Dining room's empty. Good. I wanted it empty.
The table's set for six. Cosimo at the head, Nonna at his right, Chiara across from her, Pino down at the foot because Pino sits where the door is, always.
The Fioretti girl on Cosimo's left. Me beside her.
Bread basket between us, left side of her plate, where the waiter put it because the waiter is twenty-two and follows a diagram.
I move the basket. Across her plate. Right side now.
I set it down without a sound and step back and pour a half-finger of Barolo into my own glass and don't drink it.
Test number one. Small fucking test.
Right-handed woman reaches for bread with her right hand. Gemma Fioretti is left-handed.
I never spoke to her. The arrangement didn't allow it. No calls, no faces. The old men's rule, and I kept it because keeping it cost me nothing.
But I don't sign my life to a stranger sight unseen. So I watched her the way I watch anyone. Eighteen seconds of video of her signing a guest book at a cousin's christening, the pen in her left hand, knuckles cocked back the way a left-hander holds a pen.
If the woman who walks in here reaches across her body for that basket, she's left-handed and she's Gemma. If she reaches with her right and doesn't notice the basket moved, she isn't.
Aperitivo's the window. Cosimo takes forty minutes in his study before dinner. I have maybe six before he comes down.
I drink the half-finger after all. It tastes like a thing my brother used to like.
She walks in at 6:58 p.m.
Blue dress. Pearls again, different strand, shorter.
She crosses to her chair without looking for it. Sits.
Right hand goes to the napkin, unfolds it across her lap. Right hand picks up the wine glass I haven't poured for her yet. Sets it back down because it's empty.
Then the right hand again, easy, unconscious, reaches past the centerpiece, finds the bread basket on its new side, breaks a piece of bread, sets it on her plate without looking at it.
She doesn't look at it.
Right-handed. Comfortable. Hasn't clocked the basket moved because to her it didn't move; the basket goes where the basket goes.
I pour her Barolo myself.
Three fingers on the bowl, thumb on the stem, the way a woman drinks who's had wine in her hand at a lot of tables. Not the way a girl from Salerno drinks who Instagrams her Aperol with both hands on the glass like it's going to fly away.
" Salute ," I say.
" Salute ."
I don't smile. She doesn't either.
The bread sits on her plate untouched and that is the second thing.
Cosimo comes down at 7:00 p.m. on the dot.
White shirt, collar open, no jacket; that's for me, for the table, an old man telling his son's woman she's family enough that he doesn't dress for her.
He kisses her on both cheeks. He holds her shoulders.
He says something in dialect, low and quick, the kind of Sicilian his mother taught him in a kitchen sixty years ago, full of swallowed vowels and a verb that means both welcome and watch yourself depending on the breath under it.
She smiles. She answers in Italian.
Roman vowels, soft, a Roman aunt, she says, summers in Trastevere, her ear never took to the dialect, she's sorry, she's working on it.
Smooth. Already had the line ready before she got in the car this morning.
Cosimo laughs. He pats her cheek. He sits.
I file it.
Gemma Fioretti's mother is Sicilian on both sides. Gemma grew up in her grandmother's house in Catania until she was nine.
There is no Roman aunt. There is a Roman cousin nobody likes and a summer house in Sperlonga and that is the whole geography of Gemma Fioretti's Italian.
The woman across the table is not Gemma Fioretti.
I knew it before she sat down. I knew it before she walked in.
I knew it in the foyer this afternoon, when I held her wrist and her pulse didn't move. A girl whose pulse doesn't move when an enforcer touches her wrist is a girl who has been stood over by someone with a gun before.
Now I have it twice, the basket and the dialect, and I'm going to have it a third time before the meat course.
That's the rule. Three.
Cosimo steers the table where he always steers it. Politics. Roma versus Milan as a metaphor for everything. The minister who's about to be indicted.
He likes a woman who can keep up. He tests them with it the way I test them with bread.
She keeps up. She keeps up like a fucking train.
Chiara brings up the new mayor and the woman in the blue dress brings up Calvino, dry as a stone, drops the name into the conversation the way you drop a coin into a fountain and don't watch where it lands.
The Baron in the Trees, she says. The trees as exile, she says. The trees as the only honorable place to live when the ground has been bought, she says, and Pino, who was about to say something about the port authority, closes his mouth.
Pino doesn't read Calvino. Pino reads racing forms.
But the table goes quiet anyway because Cosimo goes quiet, and Cosimo goes quiet because he's listening, and he's listening because she's said the thing he himself said at this table six years ago about his own father, in nearly the same words, and I am the only one at this table other than him who remembers it.
I keep my face where it is.
Gemma Fioretti posts food. Gemma Fioretti tags handbags. Gemma Fioretti has not, in any feed my people or I pulled, ever referenced a book.
Three.
I cut my veal. I eat it.
The woman in the blue dress answers Cosimo's next question about the south, and the south, she says, is a country Rome has been colonizing since 1861.
Cosimo laughs out loud, a real laugh, the laugh he had before my brother went into the ground, and it is one of the worst sounds I have heard in two years.
I want her out of this house.
I want her in this house where I can keep my hand on her wrist.
Both things at the same time, like two dogs on the same chain, and the chain is mine.
Nonna hasn't eaten. Nonna hasn't spoken.
Nonna is doing the thing she does, which is sit very still and look at the person she has decided to look at, and tonight she has decided to look at the woman in the blue dress, and the woman in the blue dress knows it and does not look back.
The plates clear. Coffee comes.
Nonna reaches across the centerpiece, slow, and lays her hand over the woman's hand on the tablecloth. Holds it there.
"You have good posture," Nonna says, in English, "for a nervous woman."
The woman doesn't move her hand. Doesn't blink.
She lets Nonna's hand sit on hers for a count I don't measure, and then she turns her hand under Nonna's so their palms touch and she squeezes once, gentle, the way you'd squeeze a grandmother's hand when a grandmother says something true.
"I had a long drive today," she says.
Nonna nods like that's an answer. It isn't. Both of them know it isn't.
The woman excuses herself. Headache. Wedding nerves.
She thanks Cosimo. She thanks Nonna. She does not look at me.
She climbs the stairs and I count her steps: twenty-two before the third-floor door opens, twenty-four before it closes, twenty-five before the lock turns.
I sit with the men ten more minutes, because that's what sitting with the men is for.
I get up, take the back stairs down, and go out through the kitchen door, across the lawn, down to the boathouse where Tomas has been waiting since 6:00 p.m. Tomas had brought me a problem at 4:00 p.m. and I'd told him to put it somewhere quiet until after dinner.
The problem is a man named Renzo who'd taken money from the Albanians to walk my brother through a parking garage on a Tuesday.
Renzo is on his knees on the boathouse floor with his hands tied behind him and a rag in his mouth and his eyes already going somewhere else.
I take the chip out of my pocket. Roll it across my knuckles once. Twice.
"Untie his hands," I say.
Tomas looks at me.
"Untie them. I want him to know."
Tomas unties them. Renzo's hands come around to his front, shaking, fingers spread like a man checking he still has fingers.
He has them. He won't, in a minute, but he has them now.
I do it fast. Speeches are for men who need the room to know they meant it. I knew on the drive down.
After, Tomas and Beppe carry Renzo out to the end of the dock. The boathouse light is on.
The water is gunmetal at the surface, going black where the dock shadow falls.
They roll him in. He goes under and does not come back up because we have made sure he won't.
I roll my sleeves down. Left cuff. Right cuff.
I button them. The water settles. The light stays on.
I walk back across the lawn alone.
Halfway across I stop. Not because I'd planned to.
Because the third-floor window has not changed since I left it. No lamp. No movement. Curtain not drawn.
A woman who climbed the stairs with a headache turns on a lamp. A woman who climbed the stairs to watch the lawn does not.
I look up.
The window is dark and she is in it. I cannot see her. I do not need to.
I stand under her window and let her have it: the rolled cuffs, the water behind me, the fact that I walked back alone.
One beat. Two.
I go inside.
Tomorrow I find out her name. Tonight I let her sleep with mine.