CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
SALVATORE
Frankie calls me at twelve forty from a gas station on Sandford Boulevard.
He has a broken cheekbone and one eye shut and he is standing in a Sunoco forecourt in Mount Vernon with a phone in his hand, and the first thing that boy says to me, before anything else, is:
"Boss, I've lost her."
I am in a car within ninety seconds.
It takes three hours and forty minutes.
I am going to put down what those three hours and forty minutes were, briefly, because everybody who has ever talked about that Saturday talks about the last nine minutes of it and nobody talks about this part, and this part is the actual work.
Tommaso makes five calls in the first forty minutes.
Nunzio Ferraro tells us everything on the second one, immediately, without being asked twice, because he is sixty-six and frightened and because a woman in a coat stood on his pavement that morning and told him she would take the blame.
He gives us the green car. He gives us the plate.
He gives us the two men on the corner who are not his.
The plate is a lease out of a company in Astoria that belongs to a company in Whitestone that belongs to Elio Castellano's wife's brother.
At twenty past two we have a street in Maspeth.
At three we have a unit on it.
And at ten past three I am sitting in a car four hundred yards down that street with binoculars, and every single thing in me wants to go through that roller door, and I do not, and that is the hardest two hours of my life.
Because she is inside and he is not.
Here is the arithmetic and I did it in six seconds and it was correct.
If I go in at ten past three I get my wife out and four men go in the ground and Elio Castellano is at his mother's house in Whitestone eating lunch with an alibi and nine people who will say so.
And then it is over. He sits down at that table on Sunday with his hands clean, and I am a man who did a murder in Maspeth over a domestic matter, and whatever is left of me lasts about a month.
If I wait, he comes back for her.
He has to. He took a signed statement off her this morning and he is not going to leave the only person who can describe that conversation in a shed with four men he does not entirely control.
He will come himself. Because he is forty-one and he is careful and he is also, underneath all of it, a man who enjoys the part where he explains things.
So I sit in a car for two hours.
"Salvatore," Tommaso says, about the ninetieth minute.
"Don't."
"I am going to say it once."
"Say it."
"If you are wrong about him, and he does not come," Tommaso says, "then you have sat in a car four hundred yards from your wife for two hours, and you will be living in that car for the rest of your life."
"I know."
The green car comes up that street at twenty past four.
He comes on his own. Two in front, a driver and one more, and Castellano out of the back with his coat over his arm, and he goes in through the office door at the side like a man calling in on a supplier.
Tommaso puts his hand on the door handle.
"Generator first," I say.
The unit has its own generator because the whole row does.
There is a cage on the outside of the building at the north end and a fuel line and a transfer switch, and Beppe, who is fifty-eight and was an electrician for eleven years before he was anything else, opens that cage with a screwdriver in about forty seconds.
At twenty-five past four every light in that building goes out.
We go in at twenty-six minutes past.
There is a thing that happens to me and I have described it once already in this account and I am not going to dress it up any better the second time.
I am not there.
Something takes the room over and it is patient and it is quick and it does not hurry, and I get the room handed back to me about four minutes later with everything done.
But I remember all of it, the way I always do.
And there is one part of it I am going to be turning over for the rest of my life.
When we come through that roller door there are four men in the dark and one of them is standing in front of my wife.
Not holding her.
In front of her.
He is about fifty and he has a bad knee and he has put himself between the door and a woman he has known for six hours, in a blackout, with four men coming in, and he has both hands out at his sides and he is saying, loudly, into the dark, over and over:
"She's behind me. She's behind me, she's all right, she's behind me."
He is not doing it for us. He does not know who we are. He has heard a roller door go up and he has put himself in front of her before he knew whose men were coming through it.
I do not touch him.
That is the only decision I make in those four minutes and I made it in about a third of a second, and out of everything I have done in my life it is the one I would keep.
The other three go down.
Elio Castellano is in the office with the glass front.
He has not run. There is a door at the back of that office into the yard and it is ten feet from where he is standing and he has not gone anywhere near it, and when Beppe brings the lights back up at twenty-nine minutes past he is standing in the middle of the floor with his coat over his arm.
I take four sides of notepaper out of his inside pocket myself.
Two fingers. While he is standing there.
"That's fair," says Elio Castellano.
And then I have him against the glass.
I have my hand round his throat and his feet are not properly on the floor and there is a man who runs a family and has a seat at that table making a noise that nobody in this business has heard him make since he was about nineteen years old.
I have never done this to a seated Don.
Nobody has. Not in forty years. Not once, not in this city, and there is a reason for that and the reason is that the table is the table, and it is the only thing standing between this thing and a war that ends with everybody's sons in the ground.
I know all of that.
I have known it since I was seventeen years old in a cellar in Red Hook.
And I am going to do it anyway, and I am about a second and a half from doing it, and there is one thing in my head, which is a woman on a bathroom floor with her arms gone, saying sit down and take him.
"Salvatore."
She says my name once.
From about fifteen feet away, through an open office door, in a completely ordinary voice, the way you would say it across a kitchen.
"Don't."
I do not turn round.
"Adelina."
"I know," she says. "I know all of it. He told me what he wants and he wants that, he wants you to do exactly that, he has been building it since August and he told me so himself at ten past twelve.
" Her voice does not go up once. "And there are seven people in this building and every single one of them is going to describe it. "
Elio Castellano's hands are on my wrist.
"So don't," my wife says. "Not for him. He isn't worth what it costs and I am not having it done because of me."
I stand there for four seconds.
Four seconds, in a glass fronted office in Maspeth, with a Don off the ground and nine of my own men and four of his watching, and I am going to write down honestly what was in my head, which was nothing at all.
Not the table. Not the war. Not the eighteen years.
Just her voice saying don't, from a doorway, in the tone she uses to say there is a plate under a cloth.
I put him down.
I take my hand off his throat and I straighten his collar, because that is the single most insulting thing available to me, and I step back, and Elio Castellano stands against a glass wall in his own building coughing and looking at me with an expression I am still not finished with.
It is not fear.
He has got what he came for and both of us know it and he could not have bought it for four million dollars.
"Signora," he says, when he can, to her, in the doorway, and he means it. "Thank you."
There is one more exchange and it takes about nine seconds.
He straightens his own collar after I have straightened it, which is the only time all afternoon he does anything that is not calculated, and then he picks his coat up off the floor.
"Tomorrow still stands," he says.
"I know it does."
"Vincenzo will not move it. He hasn't got the days." He puts the coat over his arm. "One o'clock. Her father in that room. And if it helps at all, and I don't imagine it will, I would rather it were anything else."
"You've spent four months on it."
"Yes," says Elio Castellano, "and I have not enjoyed one hour of it, and I would like the record to show that I asked Vincenzo in September to make it about money."
"There is no record."
"No," he agrees. "There never is."
Outside, in the yard, Tommaso is standing by the van that has not moved in a long time.
"Four of his are on the floor in there," he says.
"Three."
"Three, then. What do you want done with them."
"Nothing." I am looking back at the roller door. "The one with the knee is called Sal. He put himself in front of her before he knew who was coming through. He goes home tonight and he goes home intact and somebody drives him."
"Salvatore, he was holding her."
"He was not holding her," I say. "That is the entire point and I am not going to explain it twice. Get his address off him and send a man to his daughter's place at Hunter on Monday and find out what she needs."
Tommaso looks at me for a second.
"She's got to him as well," he says.
"Who has."
"Your wife," says Tommaso. "Four hours in a shed."
I carry her out.
She is completely fine. She does not have one mark on her and she has been warm for four hours and she has eaten, and she is perfectly able to walk, and she tells me so twice on the way to the door.
I carry her out anyway.
And I do not put her down for forty minutes.
I do not put her down in the yard or at the car, and Tommaso drives, and I sit in the back of my own car on the Long Island Expressway with my wife in my lap and her face in the side of my neck and both arms round her, and I do not say one single word for the entire journey, and neither does she.
At the gate Frankie is standing with one eye shut.
He is standing. Somebody has told him to sit down about eight times and he is standing at that gate with a broken face, and when the car comes up he opens the door himself.
"Signora."
And Adelina Marchetti gets out of my lap and stands on her own gravel and puts both hands on that boy's face, very carefully, on the side that is not broken, and says:
"It was me. I made you. I'm going to say that in front of everybody until you believe it."
The last thing.
At six o'clock that evening, in the kitchen, with Bruna crying at the range and Adelina sitting on a chair for once in her life with her shoes off, Tommaso Greco comes and stands in the boot room doorway and waits until I look at him.
He takes his glasses off.
"That was a mistake," he says.
"Which part."
"All of it is defensible except the last four seconds.
You had him. Whatever comes after that is a thing we could have managed.
" He holds the glasses in his hand. "But eleven people watched the Devil take an instruction from his wife, Salvatore, out loud, in a room, and it is on a street in Maspeth by now and it will be at Todt Hill by nine. "
"Tommaso."
"And tomorrow is Sunday," he says.