Chapter 13Massimo
Massimo
The photograph slides under the study door at two in the morning, a canal-colored image of something I recognize before I bend down to pick it up.
I know the water before I know the body.
Gowanus. That particular green, the way the surface holds light like spoiled milk.
Then the angle of her hair on the slick, both lobes bare where the gold drops used to be, and the rest of her, what's left of the rest of her, arranged the way Rocco arranges things when he wants the photographer to get the shot.
I pick it up. Flip it.
The bride confirms the pages by noon Saturday or the priest gets a name instead of a blessing.
His handwriting. The g's are his. The period at the end is his, because Rocco puts a period on a threat like a man closing a door he wants you to hear close.
I read it once. Set the photograph face down on the desk. Sit. Do not sit long.
Noon.
I have been running the Sunday plan for nine days.
Sacristy before the procession, the six minutes the priest leaves him alone.
Drive out of the safe after. Caterina on a train out of Oyster Bay by dark, Chiara on a second out of Hicksville, Nonna in a car to Astoria before midnight.
Nine days of math and the bastard has just torn the front off it on a piece of postcard stock under my goddamn door.
I roll the chip across the knuckles once. Twice. Pocket it.
I go.
Pino's door first because Pino sleeps with his boots by the bed and answers a knock in one. I knock. He opens. He sees my face and does not ask. Puts the boots on.
Chiara's door. Two knocks. She opens in the cardigan she's been wearing since Tuesday, hair off her face, eyes already working. I do not say anything in the corridor. I tip my head. She follows.
Three of us in the study with the door shut and the lamp on the desk the only light.
I turn the photograph over. Chiara looks at it for half a second and looks away.
Pino looks at it longer. Pino has known Rocco since Bay Ridge had two pizza places worth the trip, and he looks at the photograph the way a man reads a postcard from a country he has been to.
"Noon," I say.
"Tomorrow."
"Today. It's tomorrow already."
Chiara sits down on the edge of the desk. She does not put her hand on the photograph. She puts her hand near it. "Move the sacristy."
"To when."
"Noon."
"Same window."
"Same window. Different clock. He shows us his clock, we show him ours."
Pino is already nodding. "Groom's dinner is six. House thins out by five. Cosimo's at the church for the rehearsal walk-through from four to five-thirty. He's gone from the safe by four."
"Nonna."
Chiara answers without looking up. "Astoria. I'll have her in the car by three. She doesn't pack heavy. I'll tell her at breakfast."
"Tell her now."
"Now is two-fifteen in the morning."
"Tell her now."
She does not argue. She stands.
"Wait."
She waits.
"Drive comes out of the safe tonight. Caterina opens it. Not me. Her hand on it first."
Pino looks at me.
I do not look back.
"Got it," Chiara says.
"Pino. South gate at noon, your car, engine warm. You take her out. I take the dinner. We don't see each other again until Astoria."
"Yeah."
"Go."
Chiara goes. Pino goes. The door clicks. The lamp keeps doing what lamps do.
I take the corridor to her room last because that is the order I have to do it in.
The runner is quiet under the boots. Sallie is not on the landing because Sallie is twenty-three and asleep in the chair at the far end with his head tipped back and his mouth open, which is the only reliable thing about Sallie.
I do not knock at her door. I slide the photograph under it, picture side up, message side down, so the green of the water is the first thing she sees.
Thirty seconds.
The door opens. She is dressed. Sweater. Dark trousers. Flats. The camera pin already at her collar where my hand put it yesterday. Hair up. Hands clean.
She does not look at the photograph in her hand. She has already looked at it.
"Combination," she says. "Before noon."
"Yeah."
"Now."
"Now."
She steps out. Eases the door to its frame without a sound, holding the latch so it doesn't catch. We take the back stair the way Pino showed her. Treads three and seven. Skip them. She skips them without being told and I clock that and do not say it.
Study. Door shut. Lamp.
The gun safe is behind the Calvino. I pull the row of books off the shelf, set them on the desk in the order they came off because Nonna will notice if they go back wrong even at her age. The keypad is the original from '89. The numbers are worn down to ghosts on the four and the seven.
"Two-two-four-seven-one-nine. Press hard on the second digit. The pad's old."
She steps in. Punches.
The pad chirps the wrong chirp.
She exhales through her nose. Punches again.
Wrong chirp.
" Porca puttana di un cazzo di tastierino del millenovecento. "
It comes out of her in one piece. Roman, full Roman, the kind of Roman you hear at four in the morning out of a cab driver who has just been cut off by a Vespa, and her mouth makes the shape of the words like she has not said them out loud in a year and is glad to have them back.
I laugh.
Once. Short. The kind of sound that gets out before you decide to let it.
She looks at me over her shoulder. The almost-smile, the one she never quite finishes.
"Press hard on the second digit," I say.
"I am pressing hard on the second digit."
"Harder."
"If I press harder I break my thumb."
"Break your thumb."
She presses. The pad chirps right this time. The handle turns under her hand.
"The Fiorettis do have olive groves," I say.
"What."
"The Fiorettis. They have them. I went once. Cosimo took me when I was eleven, the year he was trying to figure out whether the father was lying about the press. They're very ordinary. Some olives. Some dirt. A dog with one ear that bit me on the ankle."
She looks at me with her hand still on the safe handle, head turned back over her shoulder. Her mouth does the thing at one corner.
"A dog with one ear."
"Both of us were eleven."
"You and the dog."
"Me and the dog."
She opens the safe.
The drive is on the second shelf where my father put the things he had not decided about. Small. Black. Unlabeled. She lifts it out with two fingers and turns to hand it to me.
I take the drive and her wrist in the same motion. I set the drive on the desk shelf without looking at it. Look at her.
She does not pull her wrist back.
The safe is still open behind her.
I walk her backward until the door of the safe meets her shoulders. Steel through the blouse. Cool. She doesn't flinch.
I kiss her.
Slower than the linen room. Slower than anything I have done in this house since I stopped counting the cost of things. The clock outside the door does not stop. I stop listening to it.
Her hands at my jacket. Two pulls. The jacket goes off the shoulders and she drops it on the desk chair without looking.
I take the first button of the blouse between my thumb and finger and undo it.
The second. The third. Slow, because I want to remember the order.
Her chest rises under my knuckles. The notch at the base of her throat: I want to put my mouth there and do.
The blouse falls open and her hands come up at my shirt. I do not catch them. I watch. She works the buttons faster than I did hers and spreads the shirt open and puts both palms flat against my chest, and something in my chest releases that has been locked in since the photograph hit the floor.
Her mouth does the thing at one corner again. She has it under her hands.
I get her by the hips and lift. She wraps her legs around me and the open safe door takes her weight at her back, steel cold at her shoulder blades, the shelf level with her head where she set the drive down.
She fists my open shirt and does not let the cold show on her face, because she is the one who decides what shows.
"You came in here for the drive," I say, against her jaw.
"I came in here because you put a photograph under my door at two in the morning."
"That's not a no."
"It's not."
I put my mouth at her throat. The pulse is going there, fast, faster than the flat voice she is using on me, and I stay on it while I get my hand under the skirt.
She is already wet, already open, already past the part where either of us pretends this was about the safe.
I push two fingers into her and her head goes back against the steel and the sound she makes is low and she does not swallow it, because the house is asleep and she has decided she does not have to be quiet for it tonight.
I work her slow. She tries to take the pace off me. I keep it.
"Don't make me wait, Valenti."
"You'll wait."
She does not wait well. She comes on my hand with her teeth set and her fist tight in my shirt and her eyes on mine the whole way, because I have not looked away and neither has she, the whole of her pulling tight and then breaking apart in waves I have against my fingers while the steel holds her up where my arm does not.
The drive is on the shelf. Level with her head. Six inches from her right hand.
"It's right there," I say.
"I can see it."
"Rocco's whole noon deadline. Six inches from your hand."
She turns her head and looks at it. One beat. The reporter's beat, where she clocks a thing and prices it. Then her hand goes up into my hair instead of toward the shelf.
"Then he can keep waiting."
That is the thing I take out of this room. Not the drive. That.
She gets a hand between us and works my belt, my zip, takes my cock in her hand, and the breath I lose is the first thing I have not kept on a leash all night.
"Found him," she says. Dry, even now. "The one who isn't running a clock."
"Give me a minute and I will run yours."
"Promises."
I take her by the hip and press in. All the way, one slow push, and she takes all of it, and for one second the clock and the photograph and the nine days of math go quiet and there is nothing in the room but the heat of her around me and the pulse still going under my mouth.
I say her name against her temple. The real one. Low. It is the one thing I do not keep on a leash, and it lands, because her hands go tight in my hair.
"Massimo." Hers, back. Out loud, here, with the door shut.
I move.
Slow does not hold. She is climbing again and I have it in the short of her breath and the dig of her heels at the backs of my thighs, and I get a hand between us and put my thumb on her clit and keep my hips even while I work her. The safe door takes our weight and does not swing.
"Let go," I say, against her jaw.
"Bossy."
"You like it."
"I didn't say I didn't."
She goes over a second time, my name in her mouth and her open lips at my throat, her body wringing tight around me, and the pull of her is what undoes me.
I push all the way in and stop there, pinning her to the open steel, and I come like that, still in her, and what leaves me is low and rough and without a plan, the first ungoverned sound I have made in this house since the postcard came under the door.
After.
We do not move off the safe door right away.
Her forehead against my collarbone. My hand at the small of her back.
The other flat on the steel above her shoulder, keeping the door from swinging shut.
The breath she lets out against my shirt starts ragged and finishes steady, the way breath goes when the body catches up to what the mind did not plan.
I put her collar back where it was. The pin has turned on its bar; I set it flat with a thumb and it sits. She does my cuffs, right then left, the way she does everything, in an order.
I pick up the drive. Pocket it.
Neither of us says anything. The drive is in my pocket. The safe is still open behind her. That is the whole sentence.
I cross to the door. I crack it. I listen. The corridor is empty. I step aside.
Two knocks at the threshold. Pino.
He does not look in. He knows better. He waits with his eyes on the runner.
Behind him in the doorway, in her good wool coat already buttoned to the throat, the silver braid down her back, the traveling bag held in one knotted brown hand the way a woman holds a bag she packed herself, is Nonna.
She looks past Pino. At me. Her pale dry eyes do not move off mine.
"I've been packed since Wednesday," she says.