CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SALVATORE
Four days in a room above a nightclub.
There is a couch in my brother's office that has been there since he bought the building and I have slept on it for four nights, and I have not slept on it well, and on the fourth morning Nico comes up the stairs with two coffees and puts one down on the desk and does not give me the other one.
"You look like a bag of laundry," he says.
"Thank you."
"I want you to know that Bruna called me last night to ask if you were eating, and I lied to her, and I have never lied to Bruna in my life, and I am going to be paying for that at Christmas." He sits on the desk. "Sal."
"Don't."
"You've been thrown out of a house you own."
"I wasn't thrown out."
"You were asked to leave by a girl from Bensonhurst who weighs about a hundred and twenty pounds and you said all right, which is not a thing you have said to a human being in fifteen years." He drinks his coffee. "Tommaso told me about the binder."
"Tommaso should not have."
"Tommaso is frightened, Salvatore. I have known that man since I was a kid and I have never once seen him frightened and he came into my club on Monday and sat at the bar and had a drink, which he does not do, and said four sentences to me about a ledger."
I put my hands flat on the desk.
"She thinks I built it," I say.
"Of course she thinks you built it."
"Nico."
"She read the paper. That is what the paper says." He puts the cup down. "There is exactly one thing on this earth that is not in that binder and you have decided not to say it, which, honestly, is the most you thing I have ever heard."
Here is the thing that is not in the binder.
I am going to set it down properly, once, in the right order, because I have never said it out loud to anybody and I am fairly sure now that I am not going to.
It was the fourteenth of October 2020.
It had been a bad month. I do not want to put the details here and they are not relevant and they belong to other people.
What is relevant is that on the afternoon of the thirteenth I did something at the Council's instruction that I had never done before and have not done since, and it was correct, and it was necessary, and it has been in my head every day for six years.
I did not go home.
I drove for about nine hours. I went out to Montauk and sat in a parking lot and looked at the water and came back, and at seven in the evening I was on Eighteenth Avenue because a man I needed to talk to ate there, and he did not come, and I stayed.
I sat in a corner booth in Da Gio from seven o'clock until twenty past sixteen.
I ordered coffee.
She refilled it four times.
I did not ask. She came past with the pot and did it, and the first three times she said nothing at all, and I did not look up, and I was not there in any meaningful sense.
The fourth time she put a plate down.
I had not ordered it. It was a plate of the pasta with the sausage in it and there was bread on the side of it and she put it on the table between my hands and said:
"You've been here since seven and you haven't eaten. It's on me, don't argue."
And she walked off before I could say a single word.
That is it. I have turned it over for six years and there is nothing else in it. A seventeen year old waitress put food in front of a stranger who looked bad and then removed herself from the situation so that he would not have to perform gratitude.
Nobody had done that since my mother.
I want to be precise, because this is the part people would get wrong.
It was not kindness. There are kind people everywhere and they are mostly unbearable about it.
It was that she did not make it a transaction.
She did not stand there. She did not want anything and she did not wait to be thanked and she did not come back to check that I had eaten it, and when I put money under the plate at the end she put half of it back in my hand at the door and said, "I told you," and was gone before I could do anything about it.
And then, on the way out, a girl on the floor said happy birthday to her.
And she said, "Don't. It's fine."
I got to the gate at Oyster Bay at half past midnight.
I did not go into the house.
I went down the side of the drive in a suit at half past midnight in October and I stood at the east wall in the dark, where my mother put the roses in 1993, and where six men have been in the ground since the spring of 2010, and I took the secateurs off the nail in the shed.
I cut one.
Then I got back in the car and drove forty-one minutes to Bensonhurst and put it on the bar at Da Gio at twenty past one in the morning, because the side door of that restaurant does not lock properly and has not locked properly since 2014, and Gio has never once had it fixed.
I did not leave a card.
There was no version of a card. You do not know who I am and I have had a month you would not survive an hour of and you put a plate down. You cannot write that.
So I did not write anything, and I drove home, and the next year I did it again, and the year after that, and by the fourth one it had stopped being a thing I decided and had become a thing I did, and I have never been able to explain it to a single person, including my brother, who worked it out in 2023 and has never once let me off it.
Seven roses.
And in 2022 Tommaso put a name in front of me on a Tuesday in March, and the name was Cosimo Silvestri, and the address on the page under it was Seventy-Fourth Street between Fifteenth and Sixteenth.
And that is why I did nothing for four years.
Because the second I moved on Cosimo Silvestri, a girl who had never done one single thing wrong was going to lose her house and her father and her brother's school, and I could not work out a way to take the money back that did not land on her.
So I paid for it myself.
Four million and change of Marchetti money, out of my own end, quietly, for four years, and Tommaso knows and has never said it in front of anybody, and it is the one thing in that binder that is not written down anywhere, because I made certain it was not.
That is the sentence.
I have been covering your father's theft out of my own pocket since 2022 because I could not think of a way to stop him that did not cost you everything.
And if I say that to her now, four days after she found a lane schedule with my name on it, it is the single most convenient sentence a man has ever said in the history of the world.
On the third night the office phone rings at ten past nine.
The office phone is a landline that came with the building and it is for suppliers and it rings maybe twice a week, and I pick it up because Nico is downstairs.
"Rosso."
"Is that the Shark," says a voice.
I have to sit down.
"How did you get this number," I say.
"Frankie." A pause, and then, defensively, "I said it was about school."
"It's not about school."
"No."
"Does your sister know you're on the phone."
"She's in the bath," Matteo says, "and she does about forty minutes, so we've got about thirty."
He talks for eleven minutes.
He talks about a boy called Dashawn who has now moved on from the moon to Jupiter and is wrong about that as well.
He talks about a test on Friday. He tells me that Bruna has started giving him a second breakfast at ten which he does not want but cannot refuse, and asks me, quite seriously, whether there is a way out of this that does not hurt her feelings.
I tell him there is not.
"That's what I thought," he says. "Okay."
Then he goes quiet for a second.
"Are you coming back," he says.
And I sit in a chair in my brother's office above a nightclub on a Wednesday night with the bass coming up through the floor and I have no idea at all what to say to that.
"That's between me and your sister," I say.
"I know it is."
"Then."
"I'm not asking whose fault it is," Matteo says. "I'm asking if you're coming back. Those are different questions and everyone always answers the first one."
I put my hand over my eyes.
"I don't know," I say.
"Okay."
"Matteo."
"No, that's good," he says. "That's a good answer. Everybody else would have said yes."
And then, because he is nine, he goes straight on to something about the weight of Jupiter, and after about four minutes of it he says he can hear the bath going out and he has to go, and he hangs up on me mid-sentence without saying goodbye, which children do, and which I have not had done to me in twenty-four years.
I sit there with the receiver in my hand for a while.
I write it down at four in the morning on the back of a stock sheet.
I write the whole thing. Dates, amounts, the March 2022 Tuesday, what Tommaso was wearing. It takes me an hour and a half and it is the longest thing I have written since school and it is terrible, and at twenty past five I read it back.
It reads like a defence.
Every line of it reads like a man in a room with a lawyer.
I put it in the inside pocket of my coat, and I do not send it, and I would like it noted that I have sat in rooms with men who were deciding whether to kill me and been less of a coward than I was at twenty past five that morning.
At six o'clock the phone goes.
Not my phone. The other one, the one in the drawer, which has four numbers in it and has rung twenty times in thirty years.
It is Vincenzo Barone.
He has not called me himself since 2024, and that was to tell me his wife had died, and the conversation lasted nine seconds.
I let it ring three times.
"Don Barone."
"Salvatore." The voice is thinner than it was. It is a very old man on a very early morning, and underneath it there is something wet in the chest that was not there two years ago. "Did I wake you?"
"No."
"No. You don't sleep, I remember." A pause. "Are you at the house?"
And there it is, in the fourth sentence, before the coffee, before anything.
He knows I am not at the house.
"No," I say.
"Mm," says Vincenzo Barone.
The clock in my brother's office goes round.
"Sunday," he says. "Todt Hill. Bring your wife."