Chapter 7Caterina
Caterina
Four hours ago I walked into a boathouse with a wire on my sternum and a man on the other end of it who pays me to bring back pages.
I walked out with no answer given and the page in my head instead of in my hand, which is not what Rocco sent me for and not what Massimo offered me either, and somewhere between the workbench and the gravel I stopped being the woman either of them thought they were handling.
Nobody made me do anything in that room. He laid the trade flat and stepped back from it. I crossed the floor. I put my hands on his lapels. I pulled.
I would do it again. That is the thing I am keeping for myself this morning, the small clean fact under everything else: I would do it again, and I would still not say yes, and I would still walk out without turning around.
Now Rocco.
5:00 a.m. The chapel's east alcove smells like cold wax and the inside of a tin can, which is what stone does at this hour when nobody has lit anything.
I count exits before I sit. Side door behind the sacristy curtain.
Nave door I came in by. The little carpenter's hatch in the floor under the kneeler that I do not think anyone has opened since 1962. Three. Mouth moving. Lips dry.
I dial.
Rocco's clean phone rings three times. Long enough that I think about hanging up and shaving a year off my life.
He picks up on the fourth and there's traffic behind him, a horn, the wet hiss of tires on a road that has just been salted, which means he is not in his kitchen in Bay Ridge.
He is in the city. He has been in the city since at least 4:00 a.m.
"Talk to me."
"It's me."
"I know it's you. Talk."
I press my back against the stone. The cold goes through Gemma's cardigan and Gemma's slip and settles into my vertebrae, one by one.
"I need until Sunday morning."
"You've got till noon Saturday."
"Sunday was the plan."
"Saturday's the plan now. Pickup's moved. I've got Pino and another at the south gate by tonight. You hand off the pages and the closed notation by twelve sharp Saturday, you're out the building before the groom's dinner sits down, you're in a car by sundown."
A car horn behind him. Not a New York horn. Shorter. European. I file it without meaning to.
"The book's not where I thought."
"Find it."
"Rocco."
"Find it."
I close my eyes. Open them. The candle in the alcove is out and the wick is bent the way wicks bend after they've burned long; somebody was in here last night and prayed and went to bed and did not light a new one. Old woman habit. I do not know which old woman.
"Listen," I say. "I'm telling you the book isn't on the desk. It isn't in the safe behind the morocco binding. He moved it. I need until Sunday to find where, because if I show up at the gate Saturday with three years of nothing you are sending me back in and I am not getting back in."
"Caterina."
"Don't."
"I didn't send you out there to negotiate."
"I'm not negotiating. I'm telling you what's possible."
A pause. The kind Rocco does on purpose, where you can hear him deciding which tool to pick up off the bench. I have known the sound since I was eleven and I do not flinch from it the way I used to.
"You want me to remind you what's on those pages."
"No."
"Antonio Amato."
"I said no."
"Closed. In Cosimo's hand. You want me to remind you what closed means to the family when it surfaces in the wrong room, kid.
You want me to walk you through who eats what and who doesn't, when a bookkeeper's name comes out of that book in a federal indictment and the rest of the column comes out with it.
Because I will. I'll walk you through it on this call. Just say the word."
I do not say the word.
The thing about Rocco is he does not raise his voice. He talks in the precise quiet of a man who has never, in his life, needed to. He has the cadence of someone who's been obeyed since he was eight and is offended by the very existence of the question.
"Saturday noon," he says.
"Saturday noon."
"Out before the groom's dinner."
"Out before the dinner."
"Good girl."
I let that one go. I have been letting it go since I was twelve.
There is a thing I have not asked him in seventeen years and I have not asked him because I knew exactly what shape his answer would take, and the shape would tell me what I did not want to be told.
This morning I am told already, by other mouths, and so I ask.
I keep my voice the voice I would use to ask the time.
"Gemma Fioretti."
The pause is half a second too long.
Half a second. The width of a rehearsed lie.
"What about her."
"Was she ours."
"She was Valenti business, Caterina."
"Was she ours."
"Casualty. Of Valenti business. Nothing to do with what you're doing now."
"Got it."
"You hear me."
"I hear you."
"It's not the file you're carrying. Don't drag it in."
"Understood."
"Saturday."
"Saturday."
He hangs up. He always hangs up first. It is the smallest of his tells and it is the most consistent and I have been logging it since I was old enough to log anything.
I stand in the alcove with the phone warm against my palm and I do not move for a count I do not measure.
The cold in my spine has spread to my hands.
I put the phone in the inside pocket of the cardigan, against my ribs, on top of the chip that has been off since Wednesday and that I am beginning to suspect was never the thing in this house that was actually listening to me.
Gemma was a casualty of Valenti business.
Sure. And I am the Pope of Naples.
I press my thumb to the bridge of my nose. I go back through the call the way I count exits. Saturday noon. Pino at the gate. Antonio Amato's name as a leash, held out where I could see it, jingled twice. The European horn. The half second.
A half second is a long time when a man has rehearsed a lie.
"You're going to freeze."
Chiara. The chapel doorway. Wool blanket over her shoulders, the gray one from the back of the sofa in the morning room. Same cardigan under it. Hair off her face. The look on her face says she has been awake longer than I have and not by accident.
"Morning."
"Don't ask me how long I've been there."
"Wasn't going to."
"Liar."
She crosses to me. The slippers don't make a sound on the stone. She lifts the blanket off her shoulders and drops it over mine, wool, warm from her, and the warmth goes through the cardigan and the slip and picks a fight with the cold that has been in my spine since Rocco said Saturday.
"You'll want the boots," she says. "She's already out there."
"Who."
"Nonna. Garden bench. She wants you before the house is up."
"Why."
"She doesn't tell me why. She tells me to come get you and I come get you."
I look at her. She looks back. Short bitten nails. Steady hands. The brass key on the bureau in my room. Three years of her father's ledger in a folder. A girl from Brooklyn I would have kept if I'd met her somewhere that didn't end in a body.
"You don't ask," I say.
"No."
"Why."
"Because you'd lie."
"Fair."
She almost smiles. Almost. She tucks a corner of the blanket up under my jaw, brisk, the way you'd tuck a kid in, and she walks back out the way she came. No goodbye. The chapel door closes with the soft snick of a woman raised in a house where doors close quietly.
I count to ten. Then to twenty. Then I go.
The garden at 5:30 a.m. in November has already decided it is not going to cooperate. I find Ottavia's white braid before I find the bench; the rest of it, the gray boxwood, the lake past the boathouse flat as a tray, the frozen grass that registers each step, comes in behind her.
Ottavia is on the iron bench. Black housecoat over wool. Silver braid down her back. No coat.
She does not feel the cold or she does not admit to it. At eighty-one, there is no meaningful difference.
I sit. The iron is colder than the chapel and I do not flinch from it.
She does not look at me. She looks at the boathouse.
"You spoke to your uncle."
It is not a question.
"Yes."
"What did he say."
"He moved the timeline."
"Of course he did."
She lifts her hand. Brown, knotted, the gold band loose on the third finger. She points, with the whole hand, no finger, at the boathouse roof line down past the slope. The dock under it is still black water.
"My son did not order the girl drowned alone."
I do not move.
"Someone in the family told him she had been turned. Someone with a Bay Ridge phone and a name on her birth certificate."
The frost on the bench has melted under my palms; I can feel it soak into the wool of the blanket where it touches the iron. I do not look at her. I look at the boathouse. I keep my voice the voice I used on the phone.
"Who."
She turns her head. She looks at me, finally, full. The eyes are pale, dry, and old, and they are not soft about any of this. They have not been soft since 1962, when somebody else lit the last candle in that alcove and walked out of the chapel and did not come back.
She says the name.
She says it the way you'd read a utility bill.
Flat. Sicilian on the consonants. The name I have been calling uncle since I was seven years old and sitting on his kitchen counter eating olives out of a jar and waiting for my father to come pick me up, the name I said into a clean phone twenty minutes ago.
The frost crunches under my heel. I have not moved my foot.
"You're sure," I say.
She does not answer that. She is eighty-one. She does not answer questions whose answers she has already given.
I look at the boathouse. I count the windows. Two. The door. Three. The hatch in the roof I have not been told about and that I am willing to bet exists. Four.
Four.
I get to four and I do not lose the count.