CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SALVATORE
There is still plastic on the furniture in Vincenzo Barone's front room.
She died two years ago and the plastic went back on the week after the funeral, and there is not one man in this state who would say a single word about it.
Angela lets me in.
Angela is the housekeeper and she is about sixty and she has never once looked me in the face in eighteen years, and she takes my coat and says, "He's in the back," and goes away down the hall.
The back room is warm.
That is the first thing. It is forty degrees warmer than the rest of the house and there is a humidifier going in the corner, and the old man is in a chair by the window with a blanket over his knees and the racing on with no sound.
He is smaller than he was in August.
That is the second thing and it is the one that does something to me that I have not made peace with.
Vincenzo Barone is seventy-nine years old and in August he was a heavy man with a neck, and now the collar of his shirt stands away from his throat, and the skin on the back of his hands has gone to paper.
"Salvatore."
"Don Barone."
"Sit down where I can see you. Not there. There."
I sit where he says.
"You came a day early," he says.
"Yes."
"Because you want to ask me something before Sunday, and you want to ask it without Elio Castellano in the room, and without Teresa, and without my nephew.
" He puts his hand out to the side and finds a glass of water and does not drink it.
"You have worked for me for eighteen years and you have never asked me for one thing.
Not a favour, not a territory, not a week off. "
"No."
"Not once."
"No," I say.
"Do you know what that does to a man like me?
" Barone says. "It makes him uneasy. Everybody wants something.
It is how you know where a man is. And there is one man in this whole organisation who has never wanted anything at all, and for eighteen years I have had to keep finding new ways to look at him. "
The humidifier goes.
"So," he says. "Ask."
Here is what it costs to ask.
I have had four nights on my brother's couch to think about it. There is a man who has a wall and four men and four keys on a ring, and he is only that man for as long as the table believes there is nothing on the other side of the wall.
The second I ask, the wall has a door in it, and I am the one who has just drawn it on the map.
"Leave her out of Sunday," I say.
Vincenzo Barone looks at me.
And then he does the thing he does, the thing he has done to me since I was seventeen years old, which is that he leans forward and takes my right hand in both of his and holds it, on his knee, over the blanket.
His hands are freezing.
"No," he says.
"Listen to me," he says, and he does not let go.
"I have known you since you were a boy on your knees in a cellar in Red Hook with Michele Falvo's blood on your shirt, and you did not cry, and you did not talk, and you did not ask for anything then either.
Do you know what I said to Nunzio afterwards? "
"No."
"I said, that one will be useful for thirty years, and he will never be happy, and those are the same sentence." He pats the back of my hand twice. "And I was right about all of it, and I am not proud of it, and here we are."
"Don Barone."
"Now you have a wife."
"I have a wife."
"Eight days," he says. "Eight days, Salvatore, from a sit-down in a restaurant to a chapel. You have never done anything in eight days in your life. You took fourteen months over the Falvo business and you were eighteen."
I do not say anything.
"So I am going to ask you the question," Barone says, "and I want you to understand that I am asking it as the man who kept you alive, and not as the table, because on Sunday it will be the table asking, and the table does not love you."
"Ask it."
"Is the girl a weakness?"
There are four answers.
No is a lie and he will hear it.
Yes is the end of everything I have built, out loud, in a warm room, to a dying man who will have to pass it on.
She is a debt I collected is what I have been saying for three weeks, in rooms, to men, and it worked for about nine days and it has stopped working, because he has my marriage certificate and my bank records and a typed list.
And then there is the fourth one.
"She is the only thing I have ever wanted," I say.
The racing goes on with no sound.
Vincenzo Barone sits very still in a chair by a window with my hand in both of his, and for about four seconds something moves in that old face that I have never seen there before and am never going to see again.
It might be pity.
"Ah," he says. "Salvatore."
"Now you have it."
"Now I have it." He lets go of my hand. He sits back. He picks up the glass of water and this time he drinks some of it, and his arm shakes doing it, and he puts it down. "And now I have to do something with it, and that is your doing, not mine. You could have lied to me."
"You'd have known."
"I would have known," he agrees. "But I would have had to say I did not."
The rest of it takes four minutes.
"There is a question open at the table," he says. "Nobody has said it in a room yet. It concerns eleven transport lanes and a schedule with your name at the bottom of it, and a soldier of Nunzio's who has been eating off those lanes for six years without one single flag going up."
"I know what the question is."
"Then you know that there are two answers and that one of them is worse."
"Yes."
"Because if you did not know," Barone says, "you are a man who does not know what is happening inside his own house, and that is very bad.
And if you did know, then you have been farming a made man in another family for four years, which is not bad, Salvatore, that is not bad at all.
That is the sort of thing that gets a man a seat. "
The humidifier clicks off.
I sit in a warm room with plastic on the furniture and I understand, about a second and a half too late, that I have walked in here to protect my wife and that the old man has spent the whole conversation putting a seat on the table in front of me to see which way I lunge.
"I don't want a seat," I say.
"Everybody wants a seat."
"You said it yourself. There's one man who's never wanted anything."
"Yes," says Vincenzo Barone. "And on Wednesday that man told two of Nunzio's people in a nightclub that the next man who puts a nine year old's name on a list would have to explain the list to him."
The room is very warm.
"So he wants something now," the old man says.
Angela brings my coat.
At the door of the back room, with the blanket over his knees and the racing still going, Vincenzo Barone says my name, and I stop, because there is no version of me that does not stop when that man says my name, and I have thought about that fact a great deal since.
"Sunday at one," he says. "Nine at the table. Teresa is bringing the grandson."
"Yes."
"Your wife will sit next to Elio."
I turn round.
He is not looking at me. He is looking at a screen with horses on it and no sound, and he has his hand up over his mouth, and he is, I am almost certain, smiling behind it.
"He asked," says Barone. "Isn't that nice? He asked for her especially."
Elio Castellano is on the drive.
He is leaning on the front wing of a dark green car with his ankles crossed and his phone in his hand, and he is forty-one years old and he looks thirty-four, and he is wearing a coat that costs more than Frankie's year.
He has been waiting.
That is not a suspicion. The engine is cold. There are four cigarettes on the gravel by his shoe and Elio Castellano does not smoke, which means he has been standing there long enough to take four off somebody else.
"Salvatore."
"Elio."
"He looks terrible, doesn't he." He puts the phone in his pocket. "I sat with him Tuesday. Two hours. He told me about a horse from 1994 twice, and the second time I let him, because what are you going to do."
"How long are they saying."
"They're saying what they say." Castellano straightens up off the car. "Can I walk you to yours?"
"It's nine feet away."
"Then it'll be a short walk."
He walks me the nine feet.
"I hear you got married," he says.
"You know I got married. You sent a set of glasses."
"I sent a set of glasses, that's right, Murano, did they arrive?" He does not wait. "And I hear she's from the avenue. Bensonhurst. Silvestri."
"Adelina," I say, because he is going to say it anyway and I would rather he said it after me than before me.
"Adelina," says Elio Castellano.
And he says it pleasantly, with interest, with his head very slightly on one side, and he says it once more under his breath about a second later as if he is filing it in a drawer he will come back to.
"Sunday," he says. "I asked Vincenzo if I could sit with her."
"He mentioned it."
"I hope that isn't strange. It's only that every table I sit at is nine men and Teresa, and I have been eating the same four conversations since I was twenty-six, and a girl who has actually worked for a living is the most interesting thing that has happened to that dining room in a decade."
"She has a name."
"She does." He smiles at me. "I used it."
There is nothing in it.
That is what I keep coming back to on the Verrazzano with the window down four inches. There is not one word in that exchange I could take to anybody. He asked to sit next to a woman at a lunch. He said she was interesting. He sent Murano glasses.
If I put a hand on Elio Castellano for that, I am a jealous husband and the table gets a story it will tell for nine years.
"You're quiet," Tommaso says.
"Castellano was on the drive."
The car changes lanes.
"Waiting?"
"Four cigarettes on the gravel."
Tommaso does not take his glasses off, which means he already knew, which means it is worse than he is about to say.
"He's been asking about the Ferraro lanes," he says. "Since Monday. Not loudly. He asked Rocco Agnelli's book man what a transport schedule looks like, which is a strange thing for a Don to want to know."
"He's positioning."
"Salvatore, the old man is dying and there are five seats and one of them is about to be empty," Tommaso says. "Every man at that table is positioning. The question is what he thinks your wife is for."
I put my hand out of the window into the cold for a while.
"He thinks she's a door," I say.