CHAPTER TWO
SALVATORE
Four million one hundred and six thousand dollars.
Five years and ten months. Averaged out, that is fifty-eight thousand a month, which is not a man being clever. It is a man being frightened once and then getting used to it.
Tommaso is driving. He drives because I told him twelve years ago that I do not like being driven and he has ignored me every day since, and there is no version of this where I win it, so I sit in the front like a passenger and look at the wing mirror.
The Buick is still in the lot.
"He's not coming in," Tommaso says.
"No."
"He's been there since a quarter past ten."
"I know how long he's been there."
We pull out onto 18th and the lights are with us all the way to the parkway, which never happens, and I count them anyway. Six greens. I count things. It is not a superstition. It is that if I am counting, I am not doing the other thing.
Tommaso lets it run about four miles.
Then he takes his hands off the top of the wheel, one at a time, and puts them back in the same place, which is what he does instead of clearing his throat.
"You went in yourself," he says.
"I did."
"You haven't gone in anywhere yourself since Genovese."
"No."
"We have people for going in."
"We do."
"So."
I look out the window. Gowanus. The gas tanks. A man on a bicycle with a mattress on his shoulder, which is a thing I have now seen three times in my life and cannot explain any of them.
"So I went in," I say.
Tommaso takes his glasses off.
He does not do that in a moving car. He does that across a table, in a room with a door shut, when he has to tell somebody something he would rather not say, and he does it now, on the Gowanus, at one in the morning, with one hand on the wheel.
"Vincenzo's people reconciled the transport books," he says. "Last month. The whole ledger, six years back."
There it is.
"They found the hole."
"They found the hole."
"How wide are they saying."
"Four point one."
"That's the number."
"That's the number," Tommaso says, and puts his glasses back on. "So it's not us finding it any more. It's them finding it and watching to see what we do about it."
I sit with that for a mile and a half.
Here is the arithmetic, and it is not complicated, and I have already done it four times tonight.
If I collect, in public, with a body, the table sees a man who runs his house.
If I collect quietly, the table sees a man who covered a hole for six years and wonders what else he covers.
If I do not collect, I am compromised, and the table does not discuss a compromised man, it replaces him, and the replacing takes about nine hours.
There is no fourth column.
There has not been a fourth column since I was seventeen and I have never once minded that until this month.
"Salvatore."
"Mm."
"Ask me the question you want to ask me."
"I don't have a question."
"You have one."
"Then I'm not asking it."
He drives. The BQE opens up and he takes us across and the city stands up on the right the way it does, and I have lived here my entire life and it has never once done anything for me.
"You knew four years ago," Tommaso says.
And there it is, the other one.
"Yes."
"Four years, and I sat in the room while you signed those manifests, and I never said a word, because I assumed you had a reason, because you have always had a reason.
" He is not angry. Tommaso has never been angry in front of me.
He explains things. He is explaining this one.
"But now Vincenzo Barone's accountant has the same paper I have, and in about a week somebody is going to ask me, in a friendly way, whether the Devil knew. "
"And what will you say."
"I'll say no."
"Don't."
"I'll say no," he says again, and that is the end of it, and I look at the side of his face and think about what it costs a man to decide that in advance and mention it once and never bring it up again.
I have four people. I have had the same four for eleven years.
That is one of the reasons the table has never given me a seat. A man with four people does not need a seat. A man with four people is a problem you keep pointed at somebody else.
The office above Rosso smells like my brother.
Cologne, and cigarettes he says he has quit, and whatever they mop the club with, coming up through the floor with the bass. It is ten past one and the place downstairs is at capacity and Nico is somewhere in it being the reason it is.
Tommaso puts the file on the desk and stands.
"Sit down."
"I'm fine."
"Tommaso."
He sits.
I open it. I do not need to open it. I could recite the Silvestri file from the top and I have never once put that in front of anybody, including him, including the four.
Cosimo Silvestri. Fifty-two. Made in 2004 under Nunzio Ferraro, which means Ferraro's problem, except that the money he has been taking is mine, which makes him my problem, which is the kind of overlap the table exists to adjudicate and which the table has not been asked to adjudicate because nobody has raised it.
Nobody has raised it because I did not raise it.
Wife, deceased, 2017.
Three children.
I turn that page faster than the others and I am aware of turning it faster and so is Tommaso, because he does not miss anything, and he does not say a word about it, and that is worse than if he did.
"What do you want to happen," he says.
"I want the hole closed and I want the table to watch me close it."
"That's what you want to happen. I asked what you want."
"Those are the same sentence."
"They're really not."
I close the file.
Through the floor, the bass changes. Somebody downstairs has done something worth cheering about.
My brother's voice, probably. My brother's voice has been getting people to cheer since he was six years old and I have never understood how he does it and I have never once been able to be in a room where he is doing it.
"Thursday," I say. "The back room at Da Gio. Eight o'clock. Gio closes it and he doesn't take a reservation and Cosimo comes alone."
"Da Gio."
"Yes."
"His brother's place."
"Yes."
"Where the girl works," Tommaso says.
I look up.
He is not accusing me of anything. His face does not do that. He has taken his glasses off again and he is polishing them on the end of his tie, and he is looking at a spot on the desk about four inches to the left of the file.
"It's neutral ground," I say. "It has been neutral ground for thirty years. Ferraro can't object to it and Vincenzo can't object to it and Cosimo can't bring anybody into it."
"That's all true."
"Then that's the answer."
"It is not the answer to the question I asked," Tommaso says, "but it is a very good answer, and I'm going to write it down in case anybody asks me."
He gets up. He puts his glasses back on. At the door he stops, because he always stops at the door, because he has two daughters and he has learned that the real conversation happens in a doorway.
"The boy," he says. "The Silvestri boy. Nine years old."
"What about him."
"Cosimo's going to offer him to you."
"I know."
"He starts with the house, and the house is mortgaged.
Then Gio's restaurant, which is not his to offer.
Then the oldest girl, who is married. And when you don't take any of it he will sit there and think about it for a while, and then he puts the boy on the table, because a boy is twenty years of leverage. "
"I know, Tommaso."
"I'm saying it out loud so it's out loud," he says. "Because when he does it, the room is going to be watching you and not him."
He shuts the door behind him.
Nico comes up at half past one with somebody else's drink in his hand and eats four olives out of a dish on the filing cabinet that has been there since Tuesday.
"Those are old," I say.
"They're olives. They were old when they came off the tree." He sits on the desk. He has never once sat in a chair in this room. "Tommaso came through the kitchen with his face on."
"Tommaso has one face."
"Tommaso has two faces and tonight it was the other one." He drinks. He puts his feet on the arm of my chair, which nobody living does. "So what did we do."
"Nothing happened."
"Sal."
"Go downstairs."
"You know how I know something happened," Nico says. "Because Frankie says you took the car out at ten and you came back at one and you went out again at ten to two, and you drove yourself, which you do not do, and you went south, which is not a direction we own anything in."
I look at him.
He is twenty-six and he has our mother's mouth and none of the rest of it, and he has been talking to me like this since he was old enough to talk, and the number of people who have ever got away with it is one.
"Frankie talks a lot," I say.
"Frankie talks to me because I pay Frankie more than you do."
"You pay Frankie with my money."
"Which is how I know the amount." He gets off the desk. He takes the last olive, and he takes it deliberately, and he looks at me while he does it. "Thursday. The back room. Gio's."
"Who told you that."
"Nobody told me that. You just did." He goes to the door and swings on it, one hand on the frame, the way he did when he was twelve and our mother had been dead nine years and he wanted something and was working out how to ask. "Want me to come."
"No."
"Sal."
"No."
"Okay," he says.
And then, on the landing, out of sight, not quite quietly enough:
"He's going to offer you one of the kids, you know."
I do not answer him. Everybody in my life is a professional.
I sit in my brother's office for forty minutes and do not turn the light on.
There is a window that looks down on Twenty-Seventh and I stand at it for some of that and the rest of it I sit, and at ten to two I take the stairs down the back and out through the kitchen so that nobody sees me leave, and I drive myself.
I do not go to Oyster Bay.
I go south, and then east, and it adds nineteen minutes, and I know it adds nineteen minutes because I have done it before.
Seventy-fourth Street, between Fifteenth and Sixteenth. There is a hydrant three doors down and you can sit at it as long as you like at two in the morning, and I put the car in park and I turn the engine off.
Second floor. Third window. The light is on.
It has been on every time.
She works until midnight and then she drives her brother home and puts him to bed and then she does not sleep, and that light stays on until somewhere around half past three, and I have never once found out what she is doing in there.
Tonight there is a shape moving across it. Back, and forward, and back.
She is walking.
She is walking up and down a room at two in the morning because a man came into her uncle's restaurant tonight and asked her how old her brother was, and she is going to do that until half three, and then she is going to sleep for four hours and get up and take him to school.
I put both hands on the top of the wheel.
Her father sat in a parking lot tonight and did not go in.
I am sitting on a hydrant on Seventy-Fourth Street and I am not going in either, and I have made a great many careful distinctions in my life about what separates me from men like Cosimo Silvestri, and I would like one of them to hold up right now.
None of them do.
The light goes off at three forty-one.
I sit there for another eleven minutes, and then I drive home, and in the morning I send Tommaso a message that says one line.
Tell Gio to lay a table for six. She doesn't work Thursday.