CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
SALVATORE
They have taken the plastic off the furniture.
That is the first thing I see in that house at one o'clock and it goes through me like cold water. Sixteen years of fitted covers on a three piece suite that nobody sits on, and this afternoon they are off, and folded, on the arm of the chair by the window.
Angela does not take my coat.
She does not take my coat because the table is not in the dining room this time. It is in the back room, the warm one, and they have brought the old man down in a chair with wheels on it and put him at the head of it with a blanket over his knees.
Five seats and one standing place.
There has never been a chair for me in eighteen years.
Teresa D'Amico is in black.
Rocco Agnelli has a folder in front of him that he does not open once in the entire ninety minutes.
Nunzio Ferraro is on the far side with his hands flat on the cloth and he does not look at me when I come in, and he has aged about four years since Tuesday morning in Mount Vernon.
And Elio Castellano is on Vincenzo's right.
On his right. That is a seating plan and it is the whole afternoon and everybody in that room reads it in the first second, and the only person who gives any sign of having read it is Teresa, who moves her glass about an inch.
"Salvatore," says Vincenzo Barone.
His voice has gone in nine days.
Castellano runs it.
He does not appear to. That is the skill. Vincenzo opens it, because Vincenzo is still the head of that table and will be until he stops breathing, and he says four sentences about a transport schedule in a voice you have to lean toward.
And then he is tired.
And Elio Castellano says, "Don Barone, may I," and from that moment on it is his room, and he does it so gently that even I nearly do not mind.
He puts a box on the table.
A produce box, cardboard, and in it, in six rubber-banded bundles, are six hundred and eleven pink carbon freight dockets with two signatures on each one and a weight written over a weight.
"These were given to me on Monday morning," he says.
"By whom."
"By a man who was frightened, which I don't think is a reason to name him at this table," Castellano says, "and I have had them for four days, and I have not shown them to Nunzio, and I want the table to note that I brought them here instead of to the person they most obviously hurt."
Nunzio Ferraro looks at the cloth.
And I understand, standing at the end of a table in a warm room, that I have been beaten by about ten days.
"Did you know," Teresa D'Amico says.
There it is.
Four words, from the only person at that table I have ever respected, and she asks it flatly and without any theatre at all, because she knows exactly what she is doing, which is getting to it before Castellano can ask it in a way that has a hook in it.
"Yes," I say.
The room does something.
"Since when."
"The fourteenth of March 2022. Tommaso Greco put the name in front of me at half past ten in the morning in my own office and I have known every day since."
Rocco Agnelli's hand goes onto his folder.
"Four years," Teresa says.
"Four years."
"And you did not bring it to this table."
"No."
"Why not?"
So I tell them.
I want that on the record, whatever happens to me afterwards, and I am aware that the record is one exercise book in a shed and my own memory.
I tell them all of it.
That the lanes were mine and the schedule was mine and that it was a coincidence, which is the weakest word in the language, and that I know exactly how it looks.
That I found out in March 2022. That the man was a Ferraro soldier and that going through Nunzio would have taken six weeks and ended with the money gone and the man in the ground.
And that there was a girl.
"There is a house on Seventy-Fourth Street," I say, "with a nine year old in it with asthma and a girl of twenty who had been running it since she was fourteen, and if I collected on Cosimo Silvestri in 2022 they lose the house in about twelve weeks."
Nobody says anything at all.
"So I paid it," I say.
Rocco Agnelli opens the folder.
That is how I know it has landed. The money man opens a folder for the first time in ninety minutes and puts his reading glasses on.
"Say that again," he says.
"Four million one hundred and six thousand dollars out of my own end, through the linen company in Middle Village, quarterly, since June of 2022.
My consigliere knows. Nobody else. It is not written anywhere and I made sure it was not written anywhere, because if it was written anywhere then this table would have asked me in 2022 why the Marchetti books were short and I would have had to answer it. "
"So you lied to us," Teresa says.
"I did not report a shortfall in my own house that I had covered out of my own pocket. Call it whatever it should be called."
"That is lying to the table, Salvatore."
"Yes," I say. "It is."
Here is what happens next and I did not expect any of it.
Rocco Agnelli laughs.
It is not a nice laugh. It is the laugh of a man who does money for five families and has been sitting in silence for ninety minutes, and he takes his glasses off and says, to the ceiling:
"He paid a dead man's debt for four years so a waitress could keep a house."
"Rocco."
"No, I want it said out loud, Teresa, because I have been listening to Elio tell us for twenty minutes that this is a man running a soldier inside another family, and what it actually is, is the single most expensive act of charity I have ever audited.
" He puts the glasses on the folder. "Four point one.
Out of his own end. On a girl he had never spoken to. "
Teresa D'Amico takes a long time over me.
"Is it true," she says. "That you had never spoken to her."
"Not one word until the fifteenth of October this year."
"Six years."
"Yes."
And Teresa D'Amico, who buried a husband to get that chair, sits back and puts both hands in her lap and says, quietly, to nobody in particular:
"God help her."
Elio Castellano does not fight it.
That is the moment I should have been most frightened and I was not, because I was still standing in the warmth of Rocco Agnelli laughing, and because I have never in my life been in a room where the thing that saved me was the truth.
He does not fight it.
He says, "Then there's no difficulty," and he smiles, and he turns his glass on the cloth.
"None of this is in dispute if Cosimo Silvestri says it," he says. "Don Marchetti has told us a story in which he is a benefactor. The paper says he is a partner. One of those is true and there is exactly one living man who can tell this table which."
Nunzio Ferraro's hands come off the cloth.
"He's in my yard house," he says.
"Then bring him here," says Elio Castellano.
"No," I say.
The room goes.
"No?"
"Nunzio brings him. Or the table sends for him. Or you go and get him yourself, Elio, you seem to know where everything is this week." My hands are at my sides. "I am not bringing that man to this table."
"Why not?"
"Because his daughter is my wife."
"Yes," Castellano says. "That is rather the point, isn't it."
And that is when Vincenzo Barone puts his hand flat on the cloth.
It makes almost no sound. A seventy-nine year old hand on a tablecloth, and the entire room stops, because there is not a man alive at that table who does not know what comes next, and I have seen this eleven times in eighteen years and I have never once been the one standing at the end of the table.
He says my name.
Not Salvatore. My whole name, the way a priest says it, the way it was said in a cellar in Red Hook when I was seventeen years old with another man's blood on my shirt.
And then he says the rest of it, in Italian, six words, in a voice with nothing left in it.
The room waits.
There is one answer. There has always been one answer, and I have given it fourteen times, and every single time a man was dead inside a week and I have never once had to think about it.
I stand at the end of that table for four seconds.
"Sì," I say.
Vincenzo Barone takes his hand off the cloth.
"Sunday," he says. "One o'clock. Bring him here and let him say it in front of us, and whatever he says, this is finished on Sunday, and nobody at this table raises it again."
"Yes, Don Barone."
"Salvatore."
"Yes."
The old man gets his eyes up to mine.
And there is something in that face that I am going to spend a long time trying to read, and I am fairly sure now, months later, that it was an apology, and that it was for a great deal more than a Sunday.
"Go home," he says.
Elio Castellano catches me in the hall.
He does it at the coat stand with both hands in his pockets, and there is nobody else there, and Angela is in the kitchen with the door shut.
"That was very good," he says. "The truth. Honestly, I did not see it coming, and I have been doing this for fifteen years."
"Elio."
"No, I mean it. Four point one out of your own end." He takes my coat off the hook and hands it to me, which nobody has ever done. "Can I say one thing and then we'll both forget I said it?"
I take the coat.
"On Sunday," Elio Castellano says, "that man is going to sit at that table and he is going to look at the five people who can hurt him and the one who brought him here, and he is going to work out which of those he can sell.
And he has already sold his oldest daughter once, and his son once, in a back room in Bensonhurst, in about forty minutes, to you. "
The clock in the hall does the thing it does before it strikes.
"So my only question," he says, "and it is a friendly one, is what you think he has left."
And he pats me twice on the arm, and goes back into the warm room, and shuts the door.