CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
ADELINA
He comes up the drive at twenty past six and I am in the kitchen.
Matteo is home and asleep by six because the steroids take it out of them for about two days, and Bruna has gone up, and there is a chicken in the oven that nobody is going to eat, and I am standing at the counter in the place where he stands.
He comes in through the boot room with his coat over his arm.
"Hi," I say.
"You're in the kitchen."
"I said I would be."
And Salvatore Marchetti stands in the doorway of his own kitchen at twenty past six on a Thursday evening, and his face does a thing I have seen exactly twice, and then he comes in and sits down at the table, which he has never done in four weeks.
He tells me all of it.
He does it in the order it happened, with nothing left out, the way he does everything now. The plastic off the furniture. The chair with wheels on it. The box with six hundred and eleven dockets in it.
Teresa D'Amico asking him the question before Castellano could.
And the truth, out loud, at that table, in front of five people, including the four point one.
"Rocco Agnelli laughed," he says.
"Agnelli."
"He said it in front of all of them. He paid a dead man's debt for four years so a waitress could keep a house."
I have to hold on to the counter.
"That's."
"And Teresa said, God help her," Salvatore says, "and I have been in a car for two hours working out what she meant by it, and I think she meant it kindly, and I think she is right."
Then he tells me about Sunday.
And that is where the kitchen stops.
"Say it again," I say.
"One o'clock. Todt Hill. I bring your father to that table and he says in front of the five of them whether he was carrying for me or stealing from me, and whatever he says, it finishes on Sunday and nobody raises it again."
"You bring him."
"Yes."
"You. Personally."
"Yes."
"You said no."
"I said no," Salvatore says, "and then Vincenzo Barone put his hand flat on the cloth and said six words, and I said yes, because I have said yes to that sentence eleven times in eighteen years and I did not know until this afternoon that I could not stop."
I sit down at the table opposite my husband.
"What's the sentence?"
"Adelina."
"What is the sentence, Salvatore."
And he tells me what it is, and what it means, and what it has meant since a cellar in Red Hook when he was seventeen years old with another man's blood on his shirt and five old men deciding whether he was worth a bullet.
The Council's debts are the Devil's debts.
Eighteen years. Sixteen times. Never once refused.
And I sit at a scrubbed kitchen table in a house with a nine foot wall round it and I understand, about four weeks too late, that I have been living inside a fortress that has a door in it, and that the door does not lock from this side, and that it never has.
"So he owns you," I say.
"Yes."
"And if you'd said no this afternoon."
"Then it stops being a question about a transport schedule," he says, "and becomes a question about whether the Council's blade takes an instruction, and that question has one answer, and it takes about nine hours."
He goes up at eleven.
I do not.
I sit in that kitchen from twenty o'clock on Thursday night until ten past four on Friday morning with a pad and a pen and the extractor off, and I do the arithmetic, and it is the last piece of arithmetic I ever do on that counter.
Here it is.
My father sits at that table on Sunday at one o'clock.
Five people can hurt him. One person brought him. He has forty minutes, and he is frightened, and he is a weak man with a loud voice who has not once chosen a child over a room in his entire life.
He is going to lie.
He is not going to lie because he hates Salvatore, or because he is on anybody's side, or because somebody has paid him.
He is going to lie because there will be four seconds in that room when he understands that the version where Marchetti is his partner makes him a man with a partner, and the version where Marchetti is his creditor makes him a man who was carried for four years by somebody who despises him.
And my father cannot be that in a room.
He has never been able to be that in a room. He sat in a parking lot at Maimonides rather than be that in a room.
So he will lie, and Salvatore will stand at the end of that table and not contradict him, because there is no way to contradict it that does not end with my father in the ground, and my husband has spent four years keeping my father out of the ground.
That is the whole thing.
That is what I have on a pad at ten past four in the morning.
And underneath it, at the bottom of the page, I write the only thing I can do about it.
He will tell the truth to me.
Because he will.
Not out of love and not because he is good.
He will tell the truth to me because I am the only person on this earth he has never had to perform for, because I have been picking his coat up off a floor since I was about thirty, and because there is nothing left for him to protect with me.
I already know exactly what he is. He found that out in a booth on a Tuesday when I said no to him three times.
In a room with five Dons in it he has to be somebody.
In a room with me he is already nothing, and it costs him nothing to be it.
If I get to him first, on my own, with no witnesses, and I make him say it to me and I write it down and he signs it, then on Sunday there is a piece of paper in his own beautiful handwriting with the sevens crossed through, and it does not matter what he says at that table.
I go out at nine on Saturday morning.
Matteo is at Paola's until Monday, which was arranged on Wednesday for completely different reasons. Bruna thinks I am going to the bank. Salvatore left at half past seven for Rosso with Tommaso.
I stand in the hall and put a dead woman's coat on.
And here is the thing I am going to have to live with, and it is not the warehouse and it is not the four hours and it is not any of the rest of it.
I do not lie to him.
I want that on the record because it is the thing everybody got wrong afterwards. I never lied. I could not have lied, I have never once managed it in my life, I go red from the throat up and my mouth stops working.
I just did not say.
I stood in a kitchen at half past seven in the morning and watched my husband put his coat on and said, "What time will you be back," and he said, "Six," and I said, "Okay," and that was all.
That is the difference between us, in the end.
He has never once told me a lie.
And I have never once told him a thing he did not ask about.
"Where to, signora," Frankie says.
I get in the back.
"Mount Vernon," I say. "South Fourth Avenue. And Frankie, I need the other thing."
The car does not move.
I watch the back of that boy's neck in the mirror and I know exactly what I am doing to him and I do it anyway, and that is on my account and not on his, and I have said so to everybody who has asked me since.
"Signora."
"I know."
"You know what you're asking me."
"I know exactly what I'm asking you," I say. "And you can say no, and I'll get a cab from the gate, and I will tell him myself tonight that I got a cab from the gate and that you refused me and that you were right."
Frankie has both hands up on the wheel and does not move them.
"I'd rather drive you," he says.
The social club on South Fourth Avenue has a green awning and a sign that says MEMBERS ONLY.
There are three men in it at half past ten and one of them comes out onto the pavement when the car stops, and he looks at Frankie, and then he looks at me, and then he goes back inside very quickly.
Nunzio Ferraro comes out in a cardigan.
He stands on the pavement in front of his own club with his hands out at his sides like a man in front of weather.
"Signora Marchetti," he says.
"Don Ferraro."
"You cannot be here."
"I know."
"Your husband was in that room on Tuesday and if he finds out you."
"He is going to find out at about six o'clock tonight," I say, "because I am going to tell him, and he is going to be extremely angry with me and not with you. I want forty minutes with my father and then I will get in that car and you will never see me again."
And Nunzio Ferraro, sixty-six years old, with four grandchildren in New Rochelle, stands on a pavement in Mount Vernon looking at me.
"There's a yard at the back," he says.
It takes fifty minutes, not forty.
My father cries twice, both times at the wrong moment. He tells me three stories. He tells me about my mother and I let him, this time, all the way to the end of it, because I have decided in the car that I am going to let him have that one.
And then he tells me the truth.
All of it. Dates, routes, the man in Howard Beach, how frightened he was in 2021 when nobody came, how he worked out in 2023 that somebody was filling the hole and how he never once said so to anybody because if he said it out loud it would stop.
I write it down on four sides of a notepad from the bar.
He reads it back. He corrects two things, which is how I know it is true.
And he signs it at the bottom, with his beautiful handwriting, and he does the sevens with the line through.
"Sunday," I say. "One o'clock. You say exactly this."
"I'll say it."
"Pa."
"I'll say it, sweetheart," my father says, and he takes my hand across a plastic table in a yard in Mount Vernon, and his eyes are completely clear. "You have my word."
I come out onto South Fourth Avenue at twenty past eleven with four sides of notepaper folded in my coat pocket.
The green awning. The sign. The kerb.
And a car.
It is a dark green one, parked nose out, two spaces down from where Frankie put ours, and Frankie is not in our car, and our car is not there at all.
The back door of the green one opens from the inside.
"Adelina," says Elio Castellano.