CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
SALVATORE
I go at eleven in the morning.
I go alone, which Tommaso argues about for nine minutes in a car and loses, and I go without a coat so that everybody in the room can see there is nothing under my arm, and I go in through the front door on the street like a man delivering something.
There are six of Ferraro's people in there.
Two at the front, one behind the counter with the coffee machine, three at the back table with the cards out, and every single one of them stops.
"Nunzio," I say.
He is at the back table.
Nunzio Ferraro is sixty-six and he has been sitting in that chair for twenty-two years and he has a cardigan on, and when he sees me his face does something I have been waiting for since Sunday lunch.
It is pleasure.
That is the whole morning, right there. In eighteen years no man at that table has ever been pleased to see me walk into a room, and Nunzio Ferraro is delighted, and a man is only that delighted when he has something.
"Salvatore Marchetti," he says. "In my club."
"Can we sit."
"We're sitting."
"Can we sit somewhere else."
He takes me into the back.
There is a room behind the bar with a fridge and a sink and a table with a cloth on it, and there is a door at the end that goes through to a yard, and that door is shut.
I know who is behind it before I sit down.
You can smell it. Amaro and a coat that has been slept in and the aftershave he has worn since 1996, and it is coming under a door in a social club in Mount Vernon at ten in the morning, and Nunzio Ferraro watches me clock it and says nothing at all.
"So," he says. "You came about Petey Villano."
"No."
"Because that was very bad, Salvatore, that was out of order, that was a man of mine on a deck with his arm."
"That was a man of yours on a lease for a building in Rockaway that had a fifteen year old in the back of it in August," I say. "Ask him. He'll tell you. He knew what he was in the hospital for when he went in."
Ferraro's face flickers.
"I don't know anything about a building."
"No," I say. "You don't. That's why you're still sitting down."
We do forty minutes.
Most of it is nothing. Most of every one of these is nothing, that is what people do not understand about it, it is two men talking about a permit in Mount Vernon and a cousin's restaurant and whether the Belt is worse than it was, and underneath it there is one sentence coming and both of you know it.
At twenty to twelve he gets to it.
"Your father-in-law came to me Sunday night," Nunzio Ferraro says.
"I know he did."
"He's a very talkative man."
"He is."
"He told me a story about eleven transport lanes," Ferraro says, "and a lane schedule out of October 2020 that you put your own pen on, six weeks before he lifted the first dollar.
And he said the arrangement was sanctioned.
He said he was told which trucks and which weeks.
He said he was carrying for Marchetti the whole time and he thought I knew. "
The fridge hums.
"And is that true," Ferraro says.
Here is the shape of it, and it is the neatest thing anybody has ever built around me, and I do not think Cosimo Silvestri is clever enough to have built it, and that is the part that keeps me awake.
If I say no, it is false, then I am a Don who did not know that a soldier in another family was eating four million dollars off his own lanes for six years, and that is not a thing a man survives at that table.
If I say yes, it is true, then I have been running a made man inside the Ferraro family without permission since 2020, which is the oldest offence there is, and which the table cannot let go even if every man at it privately admires the arithmetic.
And the one document in the world that shows what actually happened, that shows four years of Marchetti money quietly going into a hole to keep a waitress's father out of the ground, is the document that also proves I have been lying to the table about the state of my own books since 2022.
It clears me of the wrong thing.
"He's behind that door," I say.
"He's sleeping in my yard house, Salvatore, he's got nowhere else."
"Nunzio."
"He came to me," Ferraro says. "On foot. At eleven at night. He walked from the station."
And then he does the thing that tells me who is actually driving this.
He leans forward across the table with the cloth on it, and he pats my forearm, twice, and he says, in an entirely different voice:
"Take him."
"What?"
"Take him with you. Now. Out the back, in your car, he's your wife's father, it's a family matter, and I never had him here." He is not looking at me. "And whatever you do with him after that is between you and God."
I sit very still in a back room in Mount Vernon.
"Why," I say.
"Because I don't want him."
"You've got the best card anybody's had on me in twelve years sleeping in your yard house," I say, "and you're offering to hand it to me at fourteen in the morning for nothing. Why."
And Nunzio Ferraro, who is sixty-six and has been at that table for twenty-two years and who is not, whatever else he is, a stupid man, looks at his own hands on a tablecloth.
"Because somebody came and asked me about him on Monday," he says.
"Who."
"That's not."
"Nunzio. Who."
"It doesn't matter who asked," Ferraro says. "It matters that I was asked on Monday morning, and your father-in-law walked into my club on Sunday night, and nobody in this world knew he was here except six men who work for me."
The fridge shuts off.
"Somebody knew inside twelve hours," I say.
"Somebody knew inside twelve hours," says Nunzio Ferraro, "and I have been sitting in that chair out there since Monday lunchtime trying to work out which of my own six it is, and I am sixty-six years old and I do not want this in my house."
I do not take Cosimo Silvestri.
I want to put down exactly why, because there are three reasons and only one of them is good.
The first is that if I put that man in a car on South Fourth Avenue at noon on a Tuesday, in front of six witnesses, then whatever happens to him afterwards is mine, and it will be discussed at that table for nine years, and my wife will hear a version of it from somebody who wants her to.
The second is that he is more dangerous to me in a yard house in Mount Vernon than he is anywhere else on earth, because in Mount Vernon he is Nunzio's problem and everyone can see him.
The third is a sentence I have been carrying since Sunday night, which my own consigliere said to my wife on my own gravel at twenty past midnight, and which she repeated to me on Monday morning at a kitchen counter without being asked.
What is he going to be on Wednesday.
I am not going to find out this week.
So I stand up.
"Keep him," I say. "Feed him. And when whoever asked you about him on Monday asks you again, tell them exactly where he is and exactly what he's saying, and do not leave a word out."
Ferraro looks up at me.
"You want me to help them."
"I want you to be the most useful man they've got," I say, "because a useful man is a man they come back to, and I would like you to still be somebody they come back to in three weeks."
He sits with that for a second.
"Salvatore."
"Nunzio."
"When this goes," Nunzio Ferraro says, "and it is going, you understand that, you understand that it is already going. I have four grandchildren in New Rochelle."
"I know how many you've got."
"I am not a brave man."
"No," I say. "You're not. That's the only reason we're both still sitting down."
There is one more thing and I do not get it out of him until I am at the door.
"Nunzio."
"What."
"On Sunday you sat at Vincenzo's table and you said my father-in-law's name in front of my wife."
Ferraro looks at the tablecloth.
"That was a test," I say. "You were told to do it. Somebody wanted to see whether she'd break."
"Salvatore."
"Was it the same person who asked you about him on Monday morning?"
And Nunzio Ferraro, sixty-six years old, in a cardigan, in a back room off his own social club, does not answer me, which is the answer, and then he says the only brave thing he says all morning.
"She didn't break," he says. "I want you to know that I was glad. I've got a daughter in New Rochelle and I sat there and I was glad."
Nico is on my car.
He has got himself up against the front wing of it, out on the open street, in a coat I have never seen, with his phone in his hand and a paper bag of something in the other, and he is grinning at me from forty feet away, and there are two of Ferraro's people watching him from the door of the club.
Everything in me goes cold.
"Get in the car."
"Sal."
"Get in the car, Nico."
"I've got something," my brother says. "I've got something really good and I've been standing here for twenty minutes not texting it to you because you don't like it on the phone."
"How did you know I was here."
"Frankie." He pushes off the wing. "Sal, listen to me. Barone's nephew. The one who brought the box to the house. I found out where he drinks and I have been buying drinks in it for eleven days and on Sunday night a man told me something that is going to."
I have him by the front of the coat.
I do not decide to do it. I have my brother up against the side of my own car on a public street in Mount Vernon with two of Nunzio Ferraro's people forty feet away, and my hand is in the front of a coat I have never seen before, and Nico is not fighting me, he is just looking at my face with his eyebrows up.
"There it is," he says.
"Do you know what you've done?"
"I've found something out."
"You've put yourself in front of it," I say.
And my brother, twenty-six years old, with a paper bag in one hand, says:
"Yeah. Now you know what it's like."