Chapter 6Massimo
Massimo
I hear her on the gravel before I see her. Light step, but not light enough to be alone; she's carrying weight she doesn't want to carry, which tonight is whatever Rocco strapped under that dress before he kissed her goodbye in Brooklyn and called it luck.
I sit on the stool by the workbench. Single bulb. The lamp throws a circle that ends two feet short of the door. Outside the circle: dark wood, dark water under the dock, the smell of creosote and old gas. Inside the circle: my father's burn book, open, tabbed yellow at the page I want her to see.
I don't move when she steps in.
She stops three paces past the threshold. I watch her right hand reach for the phone. It starts; it stops. She has clocked the lamp, the book, me, the lamp again, in that order, and she does not reach.
"Door's open," I say.
"I noticed."
"Shut it if you want."
She doesn't. She walks to the workbench. Flats on the concrete, no heel. Hair down. The pearls are at her throat again. Pino said she'd come in Gemma's blue, and Pino does not guess wrong about clothes.
She looks at the page. She does not touch it.
I let her have the silence. Thirty seconds. Forty. The water moves under the floor and the boathouse breathes the way old wood breathes when rain's been promised and the pressure keeps building.
"Caterina."
She does not move. Not a hair. Not even at the throat where the pearls sit. The good ones never do.
"Amato," I add. Low. "Antonio's daughter."
Her fingertip lands on the corner of the page. Not on the name. The corner. Like she's holding the page down so it doesn't fly.
"Gemma Fioretti," I say. "Pulled out of the Gowanus this October. The eleventh. Seventeen years to the day after Cosimo put your father in a different canal. He settles his books on the eleventh the way other men keep a saint's day. Different canals. Same date. Same desk."
I tap the burn book with two knuckles, off-page. Don't point. Pointing's for men who need it.
"Red notation means the debt's open. The book closes a man and keeps collecting from his house. You're the collection."
She lifts her eyes to me. Slow.
"Cosimo ordered both," I say. "Sunday's not a wedding. It's a mechanism. Rocco's been building it for four months and he picked you because you'd walk in without breaking stride, and because if it went sideways nobody would ask after an Amato girl twice."
"The old Don in Sicily died this summer.
His own heart, in his own kitchen, before his house could agree who stood where after him.
A peace is two old men and a wax seal. One of them is in the ground now, and the other is my father, who does not keep a promise to a dead man when he can spend it instead.
Nobody called the wedding off because there is no one left across the water to call it off.
The day Gemma's father stopped being a Don, she stopped being a bride.
She became a loose end with a wedding already booked to lose her in. "
I wait.
"Wedding goes the way it's drawn, the priest gets to the second vow and you don't get to the third."
She looks at the page. Then at me. Her mouth opens a hair, closes. Her hand stays on the corner of the paper. Steady. The one I watched on the laptop loop at 4:00 a.m.
"I'm not raising my voice at you," I say. "You hear me. I know you do."
"I hear you."
"Good."
I reach into my coat. She does not flinch. I pull a folded square out and lay it on the workbench between us. Telephoto. Bad light. Gemma at a kitchen table in a house I do not own, two men I do, one cup of coffee, no smile. Three days before the canal.
"That's so you know I'm not selling you a thing I haven't held."
She looks at the photograph. Her jaw works once. The smaller motion, the one that lives in the hinge when the throat stays closed and the mouth won't open.
"Here's the trade," I say.
I roll my chip across my knuckles once. Set it flat on the bench beside the book. Tails up. Doesn't matter; it's a habit, not a verdict.
"You help me put my father in the ground before Sunday.
You walk out of this boathouse tonight under your own name.
You take the page. You take the photograph.
You take the closed notation next to Rocco's name three lines down, which I have not shown you yet, and which is the proof your uncle ate from Cosimo's hand before he sent you out wearing a dead girl's necklace. "
I watch her find it on the page. Amato, Rocco. Same column. Same red.
"Refuse," I say, "and Sunday goes as drawn. I will not be in the chapel. You will."
I do not raise my voice. I do not need to. The bulb hums. The water moves.
She breathes out through her nose. Slow.
"Why me," she says.
"Because you've got a reason."
"Why now."
"Because Sunday."
She doesn't move. The fingertip stays on the corner.
"Why not kill him without an audience."
Good question. The one I'd ask.
"Because the men he made want to see who did it before they decide whether to let me live," I say.
"And because I'm not putting my hand on him in a room where I can claim I didn't. I need a witness who already has a reason and who will not spend the story later.
You spend the story, you die in print. You keep it, you keep the page. "
She looks at the red beside her father's name. She looks at the red beside her uncle's. She looks at me.
She does not move toward the door.
I'm off the stool before I have decided to be. Two steps. My hand finds the small of her back through the dress, where it has found her once before, and the other goes under her arm at the waist and I lift her onto the workbench.
The book slides sideways under her hip. She doesn't look at it. Her hands close on my lapels and pull, not push.
I kiss her. She kisses back. Not soft. Not careful. The way she does everything, like she has already drawn it on paper and is just executing now.
I work the buttons of the dress from the collar down.
Slow. I do not name the dress. I do not name the woman who wore it before.
The first button, the second, the third; she lets me, hands flat on my chest now, breathing through her teeth.
The dress falls off her shoulders and the bulb throws a warm bar across her collarbone and the pearls go cold against my mouth when I put my mouth there.
I lift the pearls away. Set them on the workbench beside the page. They click once on the wood.
Her bra is plain. Black. Front clasp. I open it with one hand because I do not want to take the other off her.
She makes a sound at the back of her throat when my mouth finds her. Low. The kind of sound a woman makes when she has not let herself be touched in long enough that she has forgotten the noise. I file it. I am going to want it again.
"Up," I say. Against her sternum.
She braces and lifts and I pull the dress the rest of the way down her hips and let it pool around her thighs on the bench. The burn book is under one of them. She still does not look at it.
Her hand goes to my belt and I catch her wrist. Not stop. Slow. Her eyes come up, irritated and amused at the same time, and she makes a sound low in her throat that lands somewhere under my sternum.
"Slow," I say. Against her throat. "I'm not in a hurry."
"You always this generous on a Thursday."
"Only Thursdays."
She laughs. Once. Short. Like a door clicking shut from the inside.
I put my hand at the back of her neck and ease her down until her shoulders touch the wood. She goes. Not because I made her. Because she has decided where this is going and the bench is faster.
"I'm not done at your throat," I say.
"Then don't be."
I take her mouth again first. Then her jaw. Then under it, where the pulse is, where it moved the first night across my father's table, when she said the dead girl's name to a room full of us and wore it like she had been wearing it since she was nine. I file that too. The pulse stays fast.
I move down. The collarbone. The bar of light. Her left breast, then her right, slow, because I want her to know I am taking my time on purpose. She arches once. Her hand goes back into my hair and stays there. Not pulling. Holding.
"I want your mouth on me first."
It is not a request. It is the order of operations.
"I had planned on it."
I go to my knees. The concrete is cold through the wool. I do not care. Her thighs are open before I touch them and her hand stays in my hair and I push the slip up the rest of the way with my forearm and put my mouth on her without warning.
She is wet. Soaked. I name it in my head and do not say it. Yet.
I work two fingers into her slow because I want her to feel them go in.
She is tight around them, hot, and the sound she makes is not quiet anymore.
It leaves her in one piece and her hips lift off the wood and the burn book slides another inch and neither of us moves it.
My tongue finds her clit and stays there.
Pressure first. Then the small precise rhythm.
Then her name said low into her thigh because there is no one in this boathouse but us and the lamp and the water and I will say it if I want to.
" Caterina. "
"Don't stop."
"No."
"Don't."
I do not. I keep my mouth where she wants it because she has told me where she wants it twice now, the second time without breath behind it, the way she does everything, and I read the small fast pulse at the inside of her thigh and the way her heel digs into my back and the slow tightening around my fingers that means I have about ten seconds before this stops being foreplay.