CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SALVATORE
Petey Villano parks on the fourth level of a structure on Liberty Avenue because the fourth level is where the cameras stop.
Tommaso and I are on four at twenty past nine.
I am sitting on the low wall at the end with my coat open and the rosary already on, round twice, beads in, cross flat against the inside of my wrist where nothing can catch it, and Tommaso is standing about fifteen feet away doing absolutely nothing, which is the most frightening thing Tommaso does.
Petey comes up the stairs with a coffee.
He gets nine steps out onto the deck before he sees us.
"Oh," he says.
"Sit down."
"Don Marchetti."
"There's a wall. Sit down on it."
He sits down on the wall.
I want to put something in here before it happens, because if I do not put it here I will be telling it afterwards with the ending already in it, and that is how men make themselves into something.
I do not enjoy this.
That is not a defence and I am not offering it as one. There are men in this city who like it, who get something out of it, who have a face they make afterwards, and I have watched them do it for twenty years and I have never found the part of myself that would join in.
What I have instead is worse.
I am simply not there. Something takes the room over, and it is efficient and it is patient and it does not hurry, and then it hands me back the room about four minutes later with the arithmetic done, and I remember every second of it with total clarity and no feeling at all.
I was eleven the first time it happened.
It happened under a sink.
"Who asked Nunzio about my wife," I say.
Petey Villano holds his coffee with both hands.
"Boss, I."
"You were in my brother's club last night and I gave you everything you came for. All of it, free, in front of a witness. So we're square on the asking. Now I want the other direction."
"I can't."
"You can."
"Bobby'd."
"Bobby Serra runs a car wash," I say. "Look at me. You have spent your whole life being frightened of the wrong men."
He looks at the concrete.
Tommaso, fifteen feet away, does nothing.
"It came down," Petey says.
"Down from where."
"Down. That's the word Bobby used, it came down, that's all I."
"Who brought it to Nunzio."
He does not answer.
I let the silence go for about twelve seconds, which is a very long time in a parking structure, and then I say it, because I already know, and because the only thing left to establish is whether he will say it out loud.
"Was it the nephew," I say.
And Petey Villano's whole body says yes about a second before his mouth does.
"Don Barone's nephew came out to Nunzio's on the Wednesday," he says. "The Wednesday before the wedding. He sat down twenty minutes. And after he went, Nunzio had us out asking, and the list was already written, boss, that's the thing I keep, it was on a paper, it was typed."
"Typed."
"It was a typed list about a girl from Bensonhurst," he says.
So there it is.
Vincenzo Barone put a christening gown in my hall on the Saturday morning, and on the Wednesday before it he put a typed list about my wife on Nunzio Ferraro's table, and he did those two things in that order deliberately, and anybody who has sat at that table for eighteen years knows exactly what that order means.
It means: here is a gift.
And: here is what we already know.
And underneath both of them, the actual sentence, the one nobody has to write down: there is nothing out there that is yours.
He spared me in a basement in Red Hook when I was seventeen years old.
He put his hand on the back of my neck afterwards and he said now you belong to something, and I was a kid who had been belonging to nothing for six years at that point, and I went home and I could not stop shaking and it was not fear.
It was relief.
That is the thing I have never said to anybody.
I was glad.
"Can I go," Petey says.
"In a minute."
"Boss, I gave you."
"You did. And I want you to understand that I know what it cost you, and that there isn't a version of tonight where I hurt you for the thing you just did."
He lets his breath out.
"Thank you."
"The car wash," I say.
"What?"
"Bobby Serra's car wash on Rockaway. Your name's on the lease. It's been on the lease since March." I stand up off the wall. "Why is your name on the lease, Petey?"
He goes grey.
And I watch a man on a parking deck at twenty to ten at night work out that he has walked up four flights of stairs with a coffee into a conversation that was never about Nunzio Ferraro at all.
"It's just paper," he says.
"It's a lease on a building that had a girl in the back of it in August," I say, "and she was fifteen, and she was not from here, and the man who drove her there works for you and has worked for you since 2019, and I have known about that building since the second week of September and I have been waiting for a reason to be on this side of the river. "
Petey Villano puts the coffee down on the wall.
"That's not," he says. "That's not mine, that's."
"I know whose it is."
"So."
"So I'm going to go and see him on Thursday," I say. "And you're going to spend tonight in Jamaica Hospital, and tomorrow you're going to tell everybody that the Devil did it because you asked about his wife."
"But that's not."
"No," I say. "It isn't."
It takes four minutes.
He is on his feet for about nine seconds of it.
The rosary is not a weapon and I do not use it as one.
It goes round the hand so the fingers close properly and so the second and third knuckles, which have been broken four times and reset by nobody, have something to shut against. That is all it is.
Bruna gave it to me in a paper bag in a hospital corridor when I was fourteen and I have worn it working since I was nineteen, and I am aware, entirely aware, of what it looks like, and I have never managed to make myself stop.
It is my mother's.
She would have hated all of it.
There is a thing I do afterwards that nobody has ever seen.
I sit in the car with the engine off and I say the names.
Not the man on the deck. I do not know his mother's name and I am not going to find it out, because that is the kind of accounting that turns into a hobby.
I say the six.
Vito Aiello. Gaspare Aiello, his brother. Renato Console. Michele Falvo. Aldo Trapani. And the one who drove, whose name was Peppino Vasta, and who was nineteen years old in 2002, and who cried in my mother's kitchen in front of four men, and who is under the ninth rose from the south end.
Six names. Fourteen months. I was eighteen.
I say them because they are the only six I have ever done for myself, and if I ever get to the point where I cannot say all six in order without stopping, then I have become something, and Tommaso has instructions.
Tonight it takes eleven seconds.
Tommaso does not ask me what I am doing. He has been in the car for this about forty times over fifteen years and he has never once asked, and in a minute he will start the engine, and neither of us will mention it.
I leave him sitting up against the wall on the fourth level with his right arm across his lap and his phone in his left hand, and Tommaso calls it in himself from the ramp, and we wait in the car at the bottom until we see the lights come up Liberty Avenue.
"You didn't have to give him the last part," Tommaso says.
"Which part."
"That it wasn't about the wife."
"He should know what he's in the hospital for."
"No, he shouldn't," Tommaso says. "That's a luxury. You gave a man an accurate account of his own situation because you couldn't stand him being confused about it, and that is going to cost you nothing tonight and it is going to cost you something one day."
I put my hand in the towel from the glovebox.
The second knuckle is open and the third one is fine and there is nothing in it that will not be closed by Friday. This is the eleventh or twelfth time and the skin over that knuckle does not really repair anymore, it just goes back over.
"The nephew," I say.
"Yes."
"Barone had a typed list about my wife in Ferraro's kitchen sixteen days before that box came up my drive."
"Yes."
"So what is he doing."
Tommaso drives up the ramp and stops at the barrier and puts the ticket in, and the barrier goes up, and he does not move the car.
"He's a man with about nine months left," he says, "and he is going round every single thing he owns, checking the locks."
"I'm not a thing he owns."
Tommaso takes his glasses off.
He holds them in his hand for a while, at a barrier, with the arm up, on Liberty Avenue at eleven at night.
"Salvatore," he says. "You need to be very careful about how loudly you say that, and who is in the room when you do."
I get home at ten to one.
There is a light on in the kitchen.
I come in through the boot room with a towel round my hand and I can hear the extractor going and I can smell bread, actual bread, at one in the morning, and I stand in the dark of my own boot room with my coat on for about thirty seconds working out whether there is any way at all to get up the front stairs without crossing that doorway.
There is not.
There has never been. I have lived in this house for thirty-five years and the front stairs are through the kitchen, and I have crossed that floor at this hour four thousand times and it has never mattered once.
I look down at the towel.
Then I put my hand in my coat pocket, which does nothing, because the towel is still in it, and I stand there like an idiot, and I hear her put a tray down.
"Salvatore," Adelina says, without turning round. "It's twenty to one and there's a thing on the counter, and I can hear you breathing."