Chapter 15Caterina
Caterina
Rocco. Not a call. A forward.
The chain opens in three taps. The names down the thread are the ones I expected and one I did not.
Piero Allegri, Cosimo's underboss, the one who wears the gray suit at every christening and does not eat the cake.
Rocco. Cosimo himself, twice, near the top, in the short flat font he uses when he is giving an instruction and not having a conversation.
Dates run down the left margin in the small gray font my eye has trained itself to read first. Five days before I landed at JFK. Four days. Three.
Gemma's been removed. Window's open.
Piero asks whether the window gets an Amato or a Marra. Rocco answers Amato, because the Amato girl is the one who burns sources who lie to her, and because nobody would ask after her twice. The window gets an Amato. Four days before I walked in.
The window. The window is me.
I sit down on the closed lid of the toilet because the toilet is the only chair in the room and my knees unlock without asking.
I read the chain twice. The second time slower, because the first time my eye slid past the last message, the one forwarded up from another thread and pasted in under the rest, dated not before I landed but after.
His hand. The g's are his. I have read his hand on a folded sheet of paper in a hallway and I have read his hand on a scrap of receipt at a boathouse table and I know the g's the way I know my own.
He had me made across a veal course and a Calvino line, and the next morning he wrote Piero four words.
She's the Amato. Useful. And he let it run, and he said nothing to me for nine days.
I do not throw up. I file that under things I did not do.
I get up. I rinse my mouth at the tap because the mouth has gone dry and flat, and I look in the mirror and the mirror gives me a woman in Gemma Fioretti's coat with Gemma Fioretti's pearls on Gemma Fioretti's throat and a half-moon dent in her left palm where her thumbnail has been pressed in without her telling it to.
I go down the back stair. Treads three and seven. I skip them without thinking.
I find the chapel the way Ottavia directed me: through the yew hedge at the bottom of the kitchen garden, the third gate where the gravel ends, the stone step down.
The door is the only door on the estate with a lock whose key sits in my pocket.
Ottavia's brass key, long-shafted, heavy-headed, set on the bureau without explanation and without an opening to ask for one.
The lock turns. I go in. I lock it from the inside.
Cold wax. Tin cold. Six pews, two candles, one altar rail of dark wood worn pale at the kneeler edge. I stand in the middle aisle and I count exits. Door behind me. Side door to the left, sacristy beyond. One window above the altar, leaded, too small for a body. Three.
I walk to the pew where I taped the gun the first night I had Ottavia's key.
I had knelt on the kneeler that night and run my hand under the seat until I found the lip of duct tape, and I had peeled it back, and I had taped the Glock to the underside with three fresh strips because the woman I was that night had not yet been forwarded the chain but had been raised by a man who had put his name in a ledger for someone else to find.
The tape comes loose cleanly. The gun is cold. I check the magazine because that is what you do. I do not chamber a round. I walk to the altar rail and I stand at it with the gun in my right hand, barrel down against my thigh, and I do not look at the door.
The small clock above the sacristy door ticks to 3:00 a.m. without ceremony.
The side door opens.
I do not turn.
His step on the flagstone is the step of a man who knows exactly how loud he is and has decided not to be quiet. He walks up the aisle behind me. He stops where the rail begins. He does not come closer.
"Yes," he says.
I do not move.
"Cosimo ordered Gemma killed five days before you flew. Piero handled the logistics. I knew."
He waits.
"Letting the substitution stand was the play. I needed someone with your skill set. No debt to my father. Inside this house, doors open. Only way that works is you walk in thinking you've got the advantage. Thinking you're running it. You wouldn't have come otherwise."
The candle nearest the altar bends its wick. Old wax. Ottavia's prayer from last night, still bent the way she left it.
"That's the whole of it," he says.
He does not say sorry. He does not say I had to. He does not say if there had been another way. He gives me the facts and stops talking.
I turn.
I lift the gun. Slowly, because slow is what the hand wants. I put the barrel against his right temple, the soft skin in front of the ear, where the hair is just long enough to brush the back of my knuckle.
He does not move.
His hands are at his sides. The chip is not in either of them. He has come unarmed and alone, in a jacket too light for November, the wind still sitting on the shoulders of it.
I count.
One. The barrel is steady. Two. His eyes do not look at the gun.
They look at my face. Three. The candle pops once at the wick.
Four. His pulse moves in the vein above the collar, slow, the slow of a man who has already decided how he feels about dying.
Five. I am thinking about Renzo. Six. Renzo on his knees in the boathouse, hands shaking, eyes going to that middle distance they go to.
The gun came up for a reason I was certain of.
Seven. This would also be a reason I am certain of.
Except he is standing here, and Renzo did not stand. Eight.
I lower the gun.
Not because I have forgiven him. I have not. There is no word yet for what I am doing instead.
I lower it because I have already done it once, and I need to know whether this is that or something else, and a woman who pulls a trigger to find out which is a woman I am not going to be in this room tonight.
The barrel comes down against my thigh. His pulse stays where it was.
"Caterina."
"Don't."
He does not.
I set the gun on the altar rail. The wood is worn pale where a hundred years of hands have rested. I rest the Glock there the way the hands rested. Carefully. Grip toward me. Barrel toward the window above the altar that is too small for a body.
I reach up to my throat.
Gemma's pearls. Shorter strand than her mother's, because Rocco had bought them off the second cousin and the second cousin had sold the long one to a man in Bensonhurst and had kept the short one because the short one looks like more around the throat.
The clasp is a fishhook the size of a grain of rice.
My nail finds it. My nail does not shake.
The pearls come off in one motion. I set them on the rail next to the gun. They make the small dry click pearls make on wood, the click my mother's used to make on her dressing table in Astoria when she would take them off after Sunday Mass and lay them down before she made the coffee.
He watches the pearls. He does not watch me.
The first thing all night that has cost him anything.
"Sunday," I say.
"Sunday."
"It happens on my terms or it doesn't happen."
He waits. He waits because he is going to wait until I am done. He has not earned the next sentence and he knows it.
"You don't tell me what Cosimo knows. I tell you.
You don't put a man at my elbow. I pick the man.
The drive opens in my hand or it doesn't open.
The pages get read by the priest you don't know, in the room I don't tell you about, and the priest goes home to a parish you do not own.
If the day asks me to choose between you and the door, I take the door, and you do not put a body between me and it. "
"All right."
"Don't say all right like that. Say you understand the part about the door."
"I understand the part about the door."
"Say it about Gemma."
A pause. The candle bends further.
"Cosimo ordered her. I let her stay ordered. Didn't put my hand on her neck. Didn't stop the hand that did. Same goddamn line in the ledger. You can write it that way."
"It is the same line."
"Yes."
"Good."
I look at him for the first time since he came in. His eyes are not the eyes of a man asking for anything. They are the eyes of a man receiving a verdict and noting which clause of it he intends to live up to.
I step back from the rail and leave him in the aisle with both.
At the side door I stop. I do not turn.
"If you follow me into the garden I will know it is not Sunday on my terms."
"I won't."
I unlock the door from the inside. The cold comes in off the lawn with the iron of the Sound underneath it and the grass already crunching where my flats will land. I step out.
The frost crunches once under my heel. The chapel door closes behind me and I do not hear the lock turn, because the lock is mine and the key is in my pocket and he will leave the door the way he found it, which is open the way I left it for him to walk back out of.
I count the steps to the rose arch because counting is what the hands do when the hands have nothing else.
I do not look back to see if he is standing at the rail.
I know he is.
The third-floor door is the one over the boathouse.
I go up the back stair and I turn the key behind me and I stand with my back against the door the way I have stood against doors in this house for nine days, except there is no one on the other side of this one to hold the line for, and that is the problem, because holding the line for someone is the only thing that has been holding the rest of me up.
It comes up through me without asking.
My hands go first. They are shaking on the hem of Gemma's coat and they do not stop when I tell them to, so I take the coat off to give them a job, and it does not come off clean.
The sleeve catches at the cuff button. I pull harder than the button has earned and the thread lets go, and I am standing in the middle of a dead woman's room holding her coat by one ruined cuff, and the sound that wants out of me is one I have not let out since I was twelve, at a graveside in Queens.
I do not let it out. I get my teeth into the side of my hand and hold it there until it goes back down.
The room gives it to me anyway. Gemma's sweaters folded in the drawer I have been living out of.
Gemma's shoes in a row I have been stepping into every morning.
Gemma's brush on the dresser with two of Gemma's dark hairs still caught in it that I have not been able to make myself pull free, because pulling them free is a thing the family did to her and I am not the family.
I have been wearing a dead girl for nine days and I let myself forget she was dead.
I let myself forget what she was to them, and what I am to them, which is the same word.
Disposable. I have always known the word.
I let a man's mouth in a corridor talk me out of remembering it.
That is the part that takes my knees. Not him. Me. The wanting.
I get to the edge of the bed before it can put me on the floor, and I sit, and I put my head down between my knees the way you do when the blood drops.
My breath comes in pieces I cannot stack.
I let it come in pieces, and I count the ten I allow myself, because I have never once allowed myself more than ten, and I am not going to start tonight in a dead woman's room with her hair still in her brush.
At ten I sit up.
I press my thumbnail into my left palm until the half-moon sets, the old dent, the deep one, and I breathe against the small clean fact of the pain until the breath comes back in one piece.
I fold Gemma's ruined coat over the back of the chair.
I put my shaking hands flat on my own knees and wait them out, and they steady, because I make them.
The window over the desk has the only clean line in the house on the chapel roof. He is down there or he has gone. I do not get up to look. Looking is a thing I will not give him, even with him not in the room to see me withhold it.
I am not the Amato crew's woman. I am not the Valenti bride. I am not Gemma Fioretti. And I am not, as of tonight, a woman who gets to want a thing before she has made it safe.
I wash my face at the little sink. I put the composed one back on, the way you put on a coat that fits.
Then I go down and finish what the night still has in it.