CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
ADELINA
He is pleasant for the entire forty minutes.
I want that on the record first because of what everybody assumes. Nobody puts a hand on me. Nobody says one word to me that you could not say in a church. Elio Castellano sits on the far side of the back seat of his own car with his coat folded on his knees and asks me whether I have eaten.
"Where's Frankie," I say.
"Your driver is at a gas station on Sandford Boulevard with the keys in his pocket and a very sore head, and he is going to be extremely embarrassed about it, and I would like it noted that I said not the face and they did not listen."
"You hit him."
"I did not hit anybody." He looks out of the window.
"I am forty-one years old and I have not hit anyone since 2011, it is a disgusting thing to do to a person and it gets you nothing.
Two men who work for a man who works for me put your driver in a Sunoco toilet.
That is not the same thing and you will have to take my word for it. "
We go down the Bruckner.
"Why am I in this car," I say.
"Because you came out of a door with something in your coat."
We stop in Maspeth.
It is an industrial unit on a street with forty other identical industrial units on it, and there is a roller door and an office with a glass front and a yard at the side with a van in it on four flat tyres.
Inside it is one room, high, cold, with a strip light halfway down.
There are four men in it.
That is the whole thing, and I am going to describe it properly because for four hours it was my entire world.
A strip light. Four men, none of whom look at me.
A card table. A hotplate on a shelf with two rings and a kettle.
A sink in the corner with a mirror above it that somebody has put up with two screws.
And a bag of onions on the floor by the door, a full one, the big red net, and a box of tomatoes going over next to it.
Elio Castellano puts my bag on the card table.
"May I," he says.
And he does not wait, and he takes the four sides of notepaper out of the pocket of my coat himself, with two fingers, while I am standing there, and unfolds them.
He reads all four sides.
It takes about ninety seconds and he reads it properly, not skimming, with his head slightly on one side, and at the end of it he looks up at me with an expression I have thought about a great deal since.
It is respect.
"You got him to sign it," he says.
"Yes."
"How."
"He's my father."
"Signora." Elio Castellano taps the paper against his thumb. "I have had two men on Cosimo Silvestri since Monday morning, and one of them has been drinking with him every night in a yard house in Mount Vernon, and we got a great deal out of him and not one word of this."
"You were asking him."
"Yes."
"That's the difference," I say. "You were asking him."
Here is where I try to lie.
I try it twice and I want to write down exactly how both of them went, because I have replayed them about four hundred times and it has stopped being humiliating and started being useful.
The first one.
"That's a draft," I say. "There's a second copy."
And I go red from the throat up.
Not pink. Red, in a blotch, up the side of my neck and into my face, which is a thing my body has done since I was about six years old, and Elio Castellano watches it happen with genuine sympathy and says nothing at all, and waits, and then says, kindly:
"There isn't a second copy."
The second one.
"My husband knows where I am."
And I cannot even get to the end of it. My mouth actually stops working halfway through husband, which I have been told about by other people and have never felt from the inside, and I stand in a cold room in Maspeth with four men in it and hear my own voice fail.
"No," says Castellano. "He thinks you went to a bank."
He explains it to me at ten past twelve and he does it because he wants to.
That is the part nobody believes. He is not taunting me and he is not recruiting me. He explains it the way a man explains a thing he has built and is proud of and has not been able to show anybody, and I am the first person in four months who is both safe to tell and worth telling.
"Vincenzo will be dead by February," he says. "Possibly Christmas. When he goes, the oath your husband took in 2008 goes with him or passes to whoever takes that chair, and nobody knows which, including Vincenzo, including the priest who was there.
"That is not a small piece of property, signora. That is the best weapon in North America and it is about to be in probate.
"So the only question that matters between now and February is whether Salvatore Marchetti still takes an instruction."
He folds my father's statement in half.
"And until eight weeks ago," he says, "the answer was yes, obviously, always, without thinking.
Eleven times in eighteen years. And then he walked into a restaurant in Bensonhurst and took a wife, and now there is a thing on the other side of the wall, and nobody on this earth knows what he does now, and he does not know either. "
"So you're finding out."
"I am finding out on Sunday," Elio Castellano says, "at one o'clock, in a warm room, in front of five people, using the only instrument that will actually tell us."
"My father."
"Your father." He puts the paper in his inside pocket.
"Cosimo Silvestri is going to sit down in that room on Sunday and say that he and Don Marchetti were partners for six years, and your husband is going to stand at the end of the table and know it is a lie, and he will have a choice.
He can contradict it, which means producing the linen company accounts, which means proving he lied to the table in 2022, which is finished either way.
"Or he can let it stand, and lose everything, and keep a weak man alive.
"Or."
He stops, and he genuinely waits, to see if I will say it.
I do not say it.
"Or," says Castellano, "he can do what he has done in every room he has ever been in, which is take the problem off the table himself, in that room, in front of the Council, without being told to."
The strip light hums.
"And if he does that," he says, "then the Devil kills his own wife's father in front of five witnesses, and everybody in this thing finds out on Sunday afternoon that he is exactly the same man he was in 2008, and nothing has changed, and the instrument still works."
I stand in that room for a while.
"You've thought about this a lot," I say.
"Since August."
"And what if he doesn't do any of the three?"
Elio Castellano puts his coat on.
"There isn't a fourth one, signora," he says. "That is what I have spent four months making sure of."
"There's always a fourth one."
"No."
"There's always a fourth one," I say, "because you have never once worked a Saturday. There is always something in the walk-in that you have not thought of, and I have run a service with no ice out of a bathtub."
And for about half a second, behind all of it, that man looks at me and is not certain.
"Keep her warm," he says to the room, and goes.
They leave me in there for four hours.
Nobody touches me. Nobody speaks to me. There is a chair and I do not sit in it for the first hour, and then I do, because my legs have gone, and because I have already made the decision I am going to make and it does not require me to be standing.
Here is the decision.
I am not going to be frightened at them.
I have got four men in a cold room and a strip light and about four hours, and if I sit in that chair with my arms round myself and my face down then at half past four I am a thing in a chair, and things in chairs go in vans.
So at ten past one I stand up and go over to the hotplate.
"Signora."
"Is this yours?"
The one nearest the door is about fifty and has a bad knee and has been shifting his weight off it every ninety seconds for an hour. The one by the roller door is maybe twenty-five. The other two are at the card table with a phone between them.
"Is what ours."
"The onions. The tomatoes by the door. Is anybody taking them home or are they going to sit there and go over."
Nobody answers me.
"Because there's about eleven pounds of onion there," I say, "and they're already starting at the neck, and if nobody's going to do anything with them by Monday you may as well have put them in the skip on Thursday."
The one with the knee looks at the bag.
"They're for the place next door," he says. "It's a job lot."
"Have you eaten?"
It takes about twenty minutes to break them, and it takes twenty minutes because they are frightened of doing something wrong and not because they are hard men.
There is a hotplate, two rings, a kettle, a sink and a mirror.
There is a bag of onions, a box of tomatoes, four tins in a drawer that somebody left there in about 2019, half a bag of rice, a jar of something, oil, and a knife that would not cut a peach.
I do it with a knife that would not cut a peach.
It takes an hour and forty minutes and by the end of it there is a pan of something on a hotplate in an industrial unit in Maspeth that would honestly not disgrace my uncle, and four men eating it out of whatever they could find, and the one with the bad knee is sitting down for the first time in five hours and telling me about his daughter who is doing nursing at Hunter.
His name is Sal.
Not that Sal. A different one. There are about nine hundred of them.
I am not brave. That is the thing I would like understood. I did it because I could not sit in a chair, and because there has never yet been a room I could not find the need in, and it was the only move I had.
But I will say this.
At twenty past four, when the one at the roller door got up to take the pan off the ring so that I would not have to, something had changed in that building, and everybody in it knew, and nobody said so.
At twenty-five past four the lights go out.
All of them. The strip light, the light over the sink, the little red one on the hotplate.
And the four men in that room go absolutely still, and the one with the bad knee puts his bowl down on the floor very slowly, and says, into the dark, in a voice that has nothing in it at all:
"That's not possible. This building's got its own generator."