CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SALVATORE
Tommaso comes into the office on Monday morning and puts his phone on the desk in front of me with the screen up.
"Read that."
"I don't read your phone."
"Read it today."
Eleven messages. Twelve separate men, between nine and fourteen o'clock yesterday morning, none of them to each other.
Tell the boss thank you from me.
Tomm, is it all right if we say something to the signora or is that not.
She made eggs.
Please tell him the house is very good now.
I hand the phone back.
"Vincent Nappi has worked for this family for nineteen years," Tommaso says, "and he has sent me four text messages in that time. Two of them were about a van."
"What do you want me to do about it."
"Nothing. I want you to know it's happened." He puts the phone away. "You married a girl on Saturday to close a hole in the books and on Sunday morning she fed eleven men breakfast in your mother's kitchen, and by noon every one of them had decided something about you."
"Decided what."
"That you're a person," Tommaso says.
Here is the problem with being a person.
A function does not have a wife.
A function does not have a Sunday, or a brother it worries about, or a nine year old asleep at the top of the east stairs with two inhalers, one on the table and one in the drawer.
A function is a thing the table points at things with, and the reason nobody has ever tried me is that there has never been anywhere to aim.
Fifteen men now know where.
They are the sixteen men who would die at that gate and I know that and it does not help at all, because the information is out of me now, it is in the world, and information does not come back.
I have known it since Saturday morning when Barone's nephew stood in my hall.
I married her to put her behind a wall.
I have made her the most interesting thing about me.
The rest of the morning is money.
There is a linen company in Middle Village that we have used since 1991 and that does actual linen, actual laundry, actual delivery, eleven routes, and that also happens to be entirely ours.
"Da Gio," I say.
Tommaso takes a page off the top of the stack.
"He's lost Thursday and Friday since the sit-down. Down about forty per cent. Nobody's boycotting him, there's no instruction, people just don't want to be seen in a room your father-in-law walked out of." He checks it. "He's got a linen contract with us at four hundred and ten a month."
"Cancel it."
"Salvatore."
"Cancel it and replace it with a service agreement. He supplies the crews. Every Marchetti table in Brooklyn orders its Thursday food out of Da Gio from now on and the company pays him monthly, thirty days, invoiced, and if he ever asks, he won a bid."
"There wasn't a bid."
"Then run one and lose it."
Tommaso writes.
"And she will find out," he says, without looking up.
"She won't."
"Salvatore. She worked in that building for six years. She knows what his Thursday covers look like and she will know inside a month that something has changed." He caps the pen. "You could just tell her."
"No."
"It's a good thing. Men have been forgiven worse than a linen contract."
"If I tell her, it's a payment," I say. "Everything I hand her turns into a payment the second she can see my hand on it.
That is what her whole life has been. She has never once been given anything that wasn't a transaction, and she has got very good at reading the price, and she is going to read it on this one too. "
Tommaso puts the pen in his pocket.
"So do it where she can't see your hand on it," he says.
"Yes."
"Forever."
"Yes."
"And what happens," he says, "when there's something she needs that can't be done that way."
I do not have an answer to that, so I give him the next file.
At two o'clock we get to the part I have been leaving until two o'clock.
Nunzio Ferraro has had three men asking questions in Brooklyn since Thursday week. Not about the money. Not about Cosimo, who is Ferraro's own soldier and whose whole mess this is.
About my wife.
Where she came from. Who her mother was. Whether there is anybody on the mother's side. Whether the boy is actually hers.
"Say that last one again," I say.
"That's the question they asked. Twice, in two places, which means it was on a list."
"Somebody wants to know if there's a claim on the child."
"That's how I read it."
Twelve acres. A nine foot wall. Four men on the gate at any hour and twenty more inside an hour's drive, and a boy who goes to a school on Seventy-Ninth Street in a car.
"Is it Ferraro," I say.
The glasses come off.
"No," he says. "And that's the part I didn't want to bring you at nine in the morning. Nunzio's three guys are doing it because Nunzio's been asked to do it. He's not curious, Salvatore, he's running an errand, and he's bad at it, and he's being loud about it on purpose so that somebody stops him."
"Who asked him."
"I don't have the name."
"Tommaso."
"I do not have the name," he says, "and I want it as much as you do, and I have somebody who will have it by Thursday, and he is not free and he is not safe and I am going to use him anyway."
The radiator under the window comes on and knocks twice.
"It came off the table," I say.
"Yes."
"Which is the Council asking a question about my wife nine days after the Council sent a christening gown to my house."
"Yes."
"So they're not asking whether she's a weakness," I say. "They already know she's a weakness. They're asking how big she is."
Tommaso puts his glasses back on.
"That's where I got to at four this morning," he says.
Nico has a thing at the club at six and I go because if I do not go he will send thirty messages about it.
There are two men at the bar who should not be in that building.
I know them both. They are Ozone Park, they are the middle of nothing, they run four sports books and a car wash and they have never been north of Atlantic Avenue in their lives, and they are sitting in my brother's club on a Monday drinking bottled beer and asking the girl behind the bar what time the boss's brother usually comes in.
Nico sees me see them.
"Sal."
"Don't."
"Sal, it's fine, I know them, the tall one's."
"Go and do your paperwork."
"You don't have paperwork on a Monday."
"Nico," I say. "Go upstairs."
And my brother, who has never taken an instruction from me in his life in a room with people in it, looks at my face and goes upstairs.
I sit down two stools away from them and order coffee I do not drink.
It takes forty seconds.
The short one gets it first. He is halfway through a sentence about a car and he stops in the middle of it, and then he very carefully does not turn his head, and then he says something to the tall one out of the side of his mouth, and the tall one looks in the mirror behind the bottles.
Nobody moves for a while.
The girl puts my cup down and goes to the other end.
"Don Marchetti," the tall one says.
"What's your name."
"Petey. Petey Villano. I'm."
"Ferraro."
"I'm with Bobby Serra, and Bobby's."
"Ferraro," I say.
"Yes."
I turn the cup a quarter inch and leave it.
"There's a girl behind this bar," I say, "who is twenty-four years old and whose mother cleans at Mount Sinai, and in about nine minutes she is going to have to tell somebody what she saw tonight, because she'll be asked, and she has no way of knowing which answer gets her hurt."
Petey Villano looks at his beer.
"So I'm going to make it easy for her," I say. "Ask me."
"Ask you what."
"You came here to ask a question about my wife. Ask me it. Out loud. Here, at the bar, with your friend listening, and I'll answer it, honestly, and then you can go back and tell Nunzio you got it from the source."
Neither of them says anything.
"Ask me," I say.
The short one, who has not spoken once, puts eleven dollars on the bar, in singles, and counts it twice.
"We're gonna go," he says.
"That's the right answer."
They get their coats. At the door the tall one stops, because they always stop at the door, and I watch him decide to be brave in a doorway, which is the cheapest place in the world to do it.
"He's going to ask us why we came back with nothing," he says.
"Then tell him this. Word for word." I do not raise my voice and I do not turn round, and I say it to the mirror behind the bottles so that the girl at the other end of the bar can hear every syllable of it and repeat it to whoever comes and asks her.
"Tell Nunzio Ferraro that the boy's name is Matteo Silvestri, that he is nine years old, that he has asthma, and that his sister is the only family he has.
Tell him I gave you all of it for free. And then tell him that the next man who puts that child's name on a list is going to have to explain the list to me himself. "
The door goes.
Nico is on the stairs.
He has come down without his shoes on again, and he is holding the bannister with both hands, and he has heard most of it.
"Sal," he says.
"Go to bed."
"You just told two mopes from Ozone Park everything they came for."
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because now it's mine," I say. "Now it came from me, in my brother's building, in front of a witness. If they'd found it out on their own it would have been worth something. I've just made it worth nothing."
My brother sits down on the stairs.
"And the last part," he says. "The part about the list."
"What about it."
"That part wasn't free," Nico says.
At twenty past forty that night Frankie calls me.
"Boss."
"Go."
"I gotta tell you something and then I gotta tell you a thing about the something." He sounds about nineteen. "The signora asked me to take her somewhere tomorrow. Nine o'clock, after the school run."
"All right."
"And she asked me not to tell you."
The car is on the Southern State doing sixty-one and I put it on sixty and hold it there.
"Then don't tell me," I say.
"Boss."
"Frankie."
"She said it to my face and she waited to see what I'd do with it." There is a long breath on the line. "And I didn't say anything, I just said yes signora, and she looked at me for a second and then she said thank you, and I've been standing out here for two hours feeling like."
"Like what."
"I don't know. Bad."
I drive.
"Listen to me," I say. "You were given an instruction on Monday the twentieth by me, in front of Tommaso, and the instruction was that if my wife asks you to take her somewhere and keep it to yourself, you take her, and you keep it to yourself.
That instruction has not changed and it is not going to change and you have not done one thing wrong. "
"So do I."
"You tell me nothing. You don't tell me where. You don't tell me who. You drive her, you stay with the car in a place where you can see the door, and you bring her home."
"Okay, boss."
"Frankie."
"Yeah."
"If anything at all happens while she's out of that car," I say, "there is no version of this where you come back and tell me it afterwards."
"I understand."
"Good."
I hang up and drive the rest of the way with the radio off.
And I want to put something down here honestly, because there is nobody to say it to.
I own a company that can find out where a woman had coffee on a Tuesday morning inside about ninety minutes. I have four men and a consigliere and a linen firm and four routes. It would take one call.
I gave her the rule and the rule is mine.
I sit in a car in my own garage at midnight with my hands on the top of the wheel, and I do not make the call, and it is the single hardest thing I have done in eleven years.