CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
SALVATORE
The house on Seventy-Fourth Street smells of a place nobody has cooked in for a month.
I have never been inside it.
I put that down because of what it does to me standing in that hall at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning.
Six years of a car on a hydrant three doors up, and a light in a third window, and I have never once been through that door, and now I am, and there is a coat hook with a child's scarf on it and a mark on the wallpaper at exactly the height of a nine year old's shoulder.
Tommaso is on the landing.
"It's clean," he says.
"Define clean."
"There's no forcing anywhere. Front door, back door, both windows on the ground floor, the coal hatch. Nothing." He has his glasses on. "So either somebody had a key or somebody is very good, and the boiler cupboard is standing open and the towels are on the floor in a stack."
"In a stack."
"In a stack, Salvatore. They were lifted down and put in the corner, and then they were not put back."
I go up the stairs.
It is a very small landing.
Four feet across. There is a window at the end that is swollen in the frame, and a bathroom, and two bedrooms, and a cupboard with a boiler in it and one shelf above head height.
The shelf is empty.
There is an elastic band on the carpet, about four inches from the skirting, and a dozen towels in a stack in the corner of the cupboard floor, and there is dust on that shelf with a clean rectangle in the middle of it about the size of a bread bag.
I stand there for a while.
"How many people knew," Tommaso says.
"Three."
"Three."
"My wife, who found it on the sixteenth of October and put it back exactly where it was and did not tell one single person, including me, for a month.
" I do not touch anything. "Her father, who put it there.
And whoever Cosimo has told since six o'clock on Sunday night in Nunzio Ferraro's yard house. "
The drive back takes forty-one minutes and thirty of them go by without a word.
Then Tommaso says, "You have to tell her."
"She was on the phone to her sister when I left."
"That is not telling her."
"Tommaso."
"You have to tell her what is on that paper," he says, "because there are six hundred altered freight dockets in her father's handwriting somewhere in this city this morning, and every one of them is on a lane you signed, and when that lands on the table on Thursday it lands with her name attached to it, because she is a Silvestri and she found it and she kept it in her house. "
I look out of the window at the Belt.
"She did not keep it," I say. "She put it back on a shelf and left it in a house nobody was living in."
"Salvatore, that is exactly what keeping it looks like on paper."
The Council opens a question on Tuesday morning.
It does not come in a car. It does not come with four men and it does not come at three in the morning. It comes in an envelope, by hand, delivered to the gate at twenty past eight by a boy of about twenty who says for Don Marchetti and gets back on a scooter.
One sheet. Typed.
A question has been raised regarding the Marchetti transport schedule of 14.10.20 and the conduct of C. Silvestri, soldier, Ferraro. The table will hear it. Thursday, 1pm, the house at Todt Hill. You will attend alone.
No signature.
There has never once been a signature on one of these in forty years, and there does not need to be, and I am standing in my hall at half past eight on a Tuesday morning with a piece of paper in my hand that opens a question about me.
Eighteen years.
Eleven Dons in the ground and four of them friends and not one single question, not one, not even in 2019 when it went wrong in Yonkers and three men died who should not have, and nobody asked, because the Devil does not get asked.
The Devil got asked this morning.
Bruna is at the far end of the hall with a basket.
"Salvatore."
"It's nothing."
"Mm," says Bruna, and goes into the laundry, and does not sing.
Nico comes at seven and I finally let him say it.
He has been trying since Mount Vernon. He has left three messages and turned up twice and I have put him off both times, and this morning he comes into the study carrying two cups, sets mine down, keeps hold of his own and does not sit, which is his entire vocabulary for I am serious.
"Say it," I tell him.
"Now you want it."
"Nico."
"Eleven days in a bar in Bayside," my brother says, and sits on the desk after all. "Barone's nephew. Vincenzo's sister's boy, Danilo, the one who brought the box here on your wedding morning."
"I know who he is."
"He's been meeting Elio Castellano since August."
The radiator is not on. The room is cold and I do not put it on.
"Define meeting."
"Not a sit-down. Not a table, not a restaurant, nothing anybody would write down.
" Nico turns his cup round. "A car park behind a garden centre on Northern Boulevard.
Eleven times since the twelfth of August, always a Tuesday, always between four and half four in the afternoon, and Danilo drives himself and leaves his phone in his own car. "
I sit down.
"How do you know it's eight."
"Because the man who cuts the grass at that garden centre has been counting," Nico says, "and he has been counting because he is seventy-one years old and bored, and he told me for nothing on a Thursday because I bought him a drink and asked about his knee."
Here is what that means, and it takes me about four seconds.
Vincenzo Barone is dying and has been dying since July.
His sister's boy, who carries for him, who brought a christening gown to my hall with a card in it, has been getting into a car in a car park behind a garden centre with the youngest man at the table, every Tuesday, since nine days after the diagnosis.
Elio Castellano has been positioning since August.
And everything that has happened to me since the third week of October, the typed list, the question about whether the boy is actually her brother, the nephew at Ferraro's on a Wednesday, the seat that got put on a table in a warm room on Saturday, all of it sits on top of a car park on Northern Boulevard.
It is not the Council.
It is one man at it, moving early, with the old man's own blood carrying the paper, and the table has been asking my wife's name for a month without ever knowing who put it in their mouths.
"Sal," Nico says.
"Yes."
"Your face is doing a thing."
"Who else knows you've been in that bar," I say.
"Nobody."
"Nico."
"It's a bar in Bayside. I'm a man in a bar. I've been in about nine hundred bars." He gets off the desk. "Nobody knows. The gardener doesn't know who I am, he thinks I sell something."
"Danilo Barone has seen you before."
"Danilo Barone has seen me at four funerals in a suit."
"He would know you," I say.
And my brother stops by the door and looks back at me, and he is twenty-six and he has been handed the only piece of actual information anybody in this family has got in a month, and he is completely delighted with himself, and under that, about an inch under it, he is waiting for me to say one particular thing.
So I say it.
"That's good work," I say.
Nico Marchetti stands in the doorway of my study.
"Say that again."
"Get out."
"No, say it again, I want it in front of Tommaso."
"Nico."
"Eleven days in a bar in Bayside," he says, going out, to nobody, delighted, "and that's good work, he said. From him. I want it read at my funeral."
I go and find Tommaso at two and put it in front of him.
He listens all the way through without moving. Then the glasses come off and he holds them in his hand and says one sentence.
"Your brother has to go to Sicily."
"He won't."
"He has to go to Sicily on Friday and stay there until March, and you have to be the one who tells him, and he is going to say no about ten times.
" Tommaso puts the glasses on the desk. "Salvatore.
He has spent eleven days in a bar asking about a man who gets into a car in a car park.
That is not information. That is a boy standing in front of a thing and waving. "
"He got it. Nobody else got it in a month."
"Yes," Tommaso says. "That is the problem. There is one man in this city who knows about Northern Boulevard who is not supposed to, and he is twenty-six and he runs a nightclub and he tells everybody everything."
I look at the window.
"He won't go," I say.
"Then make it a job. Tell him the Palermo end needs somebody, tell him it is about the shipping agent, make it sound like you are getting rid of him because he is a nuisance, because that is the only version he will take."
"And if I ask him properly?"
"If you ask him properly he will know it is bad," Tommaso says, "and he will absolutely refuse."
I try it on Wednesday at the club.
It takes forty minutes and he is nine steps ahead of me from the second I say Palermo, because he has been reading me since he was four years old, and it ends with Nico sitting on the corner of his own desk with his arms folded.
"Say the true version," he says.
"That's the true version."
"Sal."
"The Palermo end needs somebody."
"The Palermo end has needed somebody since 2019 and you have never once mentioned it to me, because I don't speak enough Italian and I'd be useless, and both of us know that." He does not drop his eyes. "Try again."
And I sit in my brother's office and I have one move left, which is to tell him the truth, and Tommaso has told me exactly what happens if I do.
So I use the other one.
"Because I'm asking you," I say.
Nico looks at me.
"That's not fair," he says.
"No."
"That's the only one you've got and you've never used it, and you've saved it for this."
"Yes."
He gets off the desk and goes to the window and stands there with his back to me for about eleven seconds.
"March," he says.
"March."
"I'll go after Christmas."
"Nico."
"After Christmas, Salvatore, or I don't go at all, and I mean that, and you can put me on a plane in a bag if you like but I am not missing Christmas in that house. Not this one." He turns round. "Not the first one she's in."
Thursday comes the way these always come.
That is how it goes. That is what nobody understands about this.
A question opens on a Tuesday morning and then there are fifty-two hours of absolutely nothing at all, and you eat dinner and you do the gutters and you sit in a kitchen with your wife and a nine year old and a housekeeper who has stopped singing.
Adelina knows.
I told her on Tuesday at noon, in the kitchen, with the envelope on the table and nothing left out. What the paper says. What the manifests are. Where they probably are. What Thursday is.
She read it twice and put it down and said, "Alone."
"Alone."
"You have to go into a room on your own and let them ask you about a thing you did not do."
"Yes."
"And if you say the true answer, the one about paying it, you go down for something else."
"Yes."
And she stood in that kitchen for about twelve seconds and then she said, "Right," and went and got the flour out, and made four loaves nobody had asked for, and did not mention it again for two days.
At four o'clock on Thursday morning I am not in the house.
I am in the chapel.
I have not been in that building at four in the morning since the December of 2002, and I do not go in there to pray, because I have nothing to say to anybody and I gave that up at eleven years old under a sink.
I go in because it is the one building on twelve acres that has nothing of mine in it.
I sit in the second row in the dark, in the seat Bruna sat in at my wedding, with my mother's ring in my hand, and I turn it over and over with my thumb, and at some point I hear the door at the back open, and it is not Father Dominic and it is not Tommaso and it is not my brother.
It is my wife, in a dead woman's coat over a nightdress.
"I woke up and you weren't there," Adelina says.