CHAPTER FORTY
ADELINA
Bruna makes me eat at seven o'clock and it is the worst meal of my life and I have never been so glad of anything.
She does not say one word about any of it. She puts a plate down and stands there, and when I have eaten it she takes the plate away and comes back with a second one, and when I look at her she says, "Mangia," in a voice that is daring me, and I eat the second one.
Then she sits down.
Bruna Sabbatini sits down at that table opposite me with her hands flat on the wood, at seven o'clock in the evening, with a house full of men outside and the lights on in the yard, and she does not say anything at all for about three minutes.
"I am not going to ask you," she says eventually.
"I know."
"In this house nobody asks." She turns her hands over and looks at them. "Forty years, signora. Nobody has ever once asked me anything either."
And then she goes back to the range.
At half past eight I call Paola.
Matteo is fine. Matteo is watching something and has been told nothing and will be told nothing, and my sister says, "Are you all right," twice, and the second time she says it properly.
"Adelina. Are you all right."
"I'm all right."
"Because Michael said there were cars on your road this afternoon and I've been."
"Paola."
"Fine," she says. "Fine. Don't tell me." And then, after a second: "He's fine here. He's fine for a week if you need it. He's actually being quite good about the boys."
"Thanks."
"You look really good on the phone," my sister says, which is not a thing, and which is the kindest thing she has said to me since 2019.
At half past nine there is nothing left to do.
That is the whole of it. The men are fed. The house is locked. Frankie has finally been made to sit down, in the kitchen, with an ice pack and a plate, and Bruna has gone up.
And my husband is standing in the doorway of the boot room with his coat still on, at half past nine at night, on the wrong side of a doorway in his own house.
"Salvatore."
"Mm."
"How long are you going to stand there?"
"I don't know," he says.
Here is what that man has been doing since six o'clock.
He has been in every single room on the ground floor.
He has walked the wall. He has stood at the gate with Beppe and then come back and stood at the gate again forty minutes later.
He has been up the east stairs twice to look at an empty bed, and I know that because I heard him, and because he came down both times faster than he went up.
He is not going to stop.
"Come here," I say.
"Adelina."
"Come here, take your coat off and sit down, because in about four hours you're going to have to do something extremely difficult and there is nothing in this house that needs checking again."
"There's."
"There is nothing in this house that needs checking again," I say.
And Salvatore Marchetti takes his coat off in his own boot room at twenty-five to ten and hangs it up, and comes and sits down at his own kitchen table.
He puts both hands flat on the wood.
They are not steady.
I have known that man for five weeks and I have watched him hold a nine year old's chest on a bathroom floor and put a hand round a Don's throat in Maspeth and stand at the end of a table at Todt Hill, and his hands have been steady for every single second of it, and they are not steady now.
I do not say anything about it.
I go round the table and I get down on my knees on the floor in front of the chair, which is a thing I have not done since I was a child, and I take both of his hands off the table and hold them in mine in my lap.
"Look at me."
"I can't."
"Salvatore."
"Give me a minute," he says.
So I give him a minute.
I kneel on a kitchen floor at twenty to ten holding a man's hands and I do not say one word for a whole minute, and at some point in the middle of it his head goes down, and his forehead comes to rest on the top of mine, and that is as far as he can take it.
"I sat in a car," he says.
"I know."
"Four hundred yards. For two hours."
"Tommaso told me."
"You were inside that building and I sat in a car and did arithmetic."
"And you were right," I say.
"Say it again."
"You were right. If you'd gone in at ten past three he'd have been in Whitestone eating lunch with nine witnesses and by Monday you'd have been a man who did a murder over a woman, and that is exactly what he wanted, and you worked it out in nine seconds sitting in a car with your wife in a shed.
" My hands are around his. "And it cost you two hours of the worst thing that has ever happened to you, and you did it anyway, and it worked. "
He does not say anything.
"I need you to hear that from me and not from Tommaso," I say. "Because Tommaso will tell you about the last four seconds for the rest of your life and he is right about those. But he was not in the car."
We go up at ten o'clock.
Nothing gets said about it. He does not ask and I do not offer and there is not one word about it in that hall, and we go up the front stairs and past nine doors and into his room, and the door goes shut behind us with both his hands on it, without a sound.
And then he stands in the middle of his own bedroom and does not move.
"Salvatore."
"I don't want to."
That stops me dead.
"You don't."
"Not like this." He has his hands at his sides. "I have had a very bad day and you have had a worse one, and if I put my hands on you tonight I will not be able to tell afterwards which of those I was doing it about, and I have spent five weeks trying to be a man you can check the arithmetic on."
And I stand in a doorway and I love him so much I cannot breathe.
That is the sentence. That is the whole book of it, if anybody ever asks me. Not the roses. Not the shed. A man in the middle of a room at ten o'clock at night with his hands at his sides.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"Then don't put your hands on me," I say, and take my cardigan off. "I'll do it."
And I do.
I take about an hour and a half over it because he took an hour and a half over me, and because he is the one who is shaking tonight, and because I have worked out over five weeks that this is the only language he has ever been able to receive anything in.
He tries to turn it round twice.
Both times I get a hand down on his chest and push him back onto the bed, and both times he goes, immediately, a man of six foot three and two hundred and forty pounds, and the third time he stops trying and just lets me, and puts his forearm over his eyes.
"Take it off your face."
"Adelina."
"Take your arm off your face and look at me, because I am going to be here in the morning and you are not going to have to check."
He takes his arm off his face.
And after that he does not look away once, not for any of it, not even at the end, and he says my name twice, and the second time it does not come out properly at all.
Afterwards I am lying on my back and he is on his side with his hand flat on my stomach and his face somewhere in my hair.
The lamp is on.
I turned it on at about ten and nobody has mentioned it.
"I'm going to say something," I say.
"Adelina."
"You told me to say it on a Tuesday when nothing had happened."
"Yes."
"Well, something's happened," I say, "and I'm going to say it anyway, because if I wait for a day when nothing has happened in this family I am going to be about sixty."
His hand does not move.
"I chose it," I say.
And this time he does not say don't.
He is quiet for so long that I think he has gone.
Then he gets up on one elbow, and reaches over me to the drawer in the table on his side, and takes something out of it, and I know what it is before he has got it out because I have watched that man turn it over in his hand in the back row of a chapel at four in the morning.
He does not sit up. He does not make a thing of it.
He lies on his side in the lamplight with a nineteen dollar ring from a shop on Graham Avenue in 1989 in the flat of his hand, and he says:
"Is today a different day?"
I put my hand over my mouth.
I do it and I take it down, and I do not hide the chipped tooth, and I am crying, which is not a surprise to either of us at this point.
"You remembered."
"You said if there was ever a day that wasn't that one, I could ask you again," he says, "and you said it in this room on the twenty-fifth of October with a phone on the table and a cardigan of Bruna's on, and you closed my fingers over it with both hands, and I have had it in a drawer nine inches from my head for four weeks. "
"Salvatore."
"Is today a different day."
"Yes," I say.
He puts it on my right hand.
Not the left. My mother's is on the right and there is a gold band from the chapel on the left, and he takes Rosaria Marchetti's ring and puts it on the same hand as Renata Silvestri's, side by side, without saying anything about it at all, and then he holds my hand in both of his on the sheet and looks at it for quite a while.
"Say the thing," I say.
"What thing."
"Whatever the thing is. The one true sentence. I have been waiting five weeks and I have earned it, and if you make me wait for a Tuesday I will genuinely put you out of this house again."
And Salvatore Marchetti lies in a lamplit room with his wife's hand in both of his.
"There isn't a sentence," he says. "I have tried to build one since 2020 and there is no sentence, and I am going to say four things instead and you will have to put them together yourself.
"I have never wanted anything.
"I saw you through a window in a restaurant in October 2020.
"I have been awake since.
"And if they take you off me I am going to burn this entire thing to the ground, and I do not mean that the way men say it. I mean I have looked at what it would cost and I have the arithmetic and I will do it."
The lamp is on.
"That's four," I say.
"That's four."
"It's not a sentence."
"No," he says.
"It'll do," I say.
I sleep.
I sleep properly, all the way through, on my front, with a man's arm across my back and the lamp still on, and I do not dream about a warehouse or a strip light or a hotplate.
I dream about the kitchen at Da Gio.
Nothing happens in it. My mother is at the pass and she is saying something about the specials and I cannot hear any of it, and somewhere in the middle of that I half wake up at about five and he is asleep.
Actually asleep. On his back, mouth slightly open, one arm still across me.
Six hours.
I lie there in the dark next to a man who has not slept six hours in twelve years and I am so pleased with myself that I have to put my face in the pillow.
At six o'clock in the morning the gate intercom goes.
I am on the stairs before he is. I am on the stairs because I am always on the stairs, and Bruna is in the hall in her dressing gown, and through the glass by the front door I can see the lights coming up the drive.
Three cars.
Not four. Three, in a line, at walking pace, with their headlights on in the grey.
Salvatore comes down behind me pulling a shirt on.
And Tommaso Greco is already in the hall, which means he has been here since before six, which means somebody called him first, and he is standing at the bottom of the stairs with his coat on and his hands folded in front of him.
He takes his glasses off.
"Tommaso," Salvatore says.
"Vincenzo Barone died at ten past four this morning."
The hall clock does the thing it does before it strikes.
"Say that again," my husband says.
"At ten past four. At the house. Teresa is there and Rocco is on his way and the doctor has been." Tommaso is holding his glasses in one hand. "The table sat at five o'clock. Five in the morning, Salvatore, with the body still in the house."
"They can't sit before the funeral."
"They sat."
"They cannot sit before."
"They have sat," Tommaso says, "and Elio Castellano is in the chair, and the first thing that table did at five o'clock this morning was issue a summons."
The three cars stop on the gravel.
Doors.
Four men get out of the first one and two out of the second and nobody gets out of the third, and one of them comes up the front steps with something in his hand and rings the bell of a house he has been to twice.
Bruna opens the door because Bruna always opens the door.
He is about thirty. He has a black tie on at six in the morning and he has a card in his hand, and he does not come in, and he reads off the card the way a man reads off a card when he has been told to say it exactly.
"By order of the Council," he says.
And I am standing on the fourth stair from the bottom with a dead woman's ring on my right hand, and my husband is two steps above me, and I am not frightened, because in fourteen seconds this man is going to say Salvatore's name and there are four men on that gate and a wall and a house and eighteen years of nobody ever asking.
He does not say Salvatore's name.
"Signora Adelina Marchetti," he reads. "One o'clock. Todt Hill. Alone."
Nobody in that hall moves.
Not Tommaso. Not Bruna, with her hand still on the door.
Not my husband.
TO BE CONTINUED…
NEXT BOOK: Where Lilies Die.
ADELINA
We made each other a promise in a glasshouse in October and it was two lines long.
No lying. And no not-saying.
I have kept mine. I have kept it through a funeral and a hospital corridor and a kitchen with fifty men in it, and there is one thing I am holding back, and I have written down exactly why.
He is holding back one as well.
I am twenty-three years old. I run a house with a wall round it and forty men in and out of it, I feed all of them twice a day, and every single one of them calls me signora and means it.
They tell you a woman in this world gets smaller.
Nobody tells you what happens when she does not.
I was sold to this family on a Thursday in October.
By March I was the one they came to.
SALVATORE
There is a thing I have been for eighteen years and I have been extremely good at it.
I am the one who does the arithmetic. I am the one who decides who carries what, and how much, and when they are told, and nobody in this city has ever been hurt by me getting that wrong.
Then I sat down at my own kitchen table on a Friday night in February and made a small, sensible decision about what my wife could stand to hear.
It worked. Nothing happened. She slept.
And the next one was easier.
Everybody wants to talk about April. Everybody wants the glasshouse and the four houses and the one sentence I said with her hands on my coat.
It does not start there.
It starts at a table with a plate on it, with a man who promised her he would not do this, deciding that he knew better than she did what she could carry.
She was right about all three of the things she said to me that morning.
And I am still going to have to stand at the bottom of that hill and let her walk up it.
This is the second book in The Devil's Garden Series. Reading order:
Where Roses Bleed.
Where Lilies Die.
Where Orchids Burn.
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