Chapter 16Massimo
Massimo
Three minutes I stand at the altar rail after the side door swings shut. I clock that. I clock the count because the count is the only thing in the room that is not the pearls and the gun and the space between them on the wood.
Short strand. Clasp open. Grip toward where she stood.
I do not pick either of them up.
The pearls are the shape of the lie that walked her through my father's front door, and the gun is the shape of the answer she chose to not give me, and the space between them on the rail is the diagram of every fucking thing I have built in this house since my brother went into the ground and every fucking thing I broke in nine days to do it.
I look at the diagram. I let myself look.
Then I pull the phone out of the inside pocket because the look is finished and the look is not going to do the next thing for me.
Chiara picks up on the second ring.
"How far."
"Astoria. Twenty minutes ago." A pause that is her counting whether I want the rest. She gives it. "The apartment's clean. Ottavia's at the table. She's making coffee on the stove because the machine offends her. She heard about the south gate."
"From who."
"Pino. The short version."
"Keep her there."
"She is there."
"Keep her there until Sunday noon. Whatever she hears. Whatever comes through that door that's not me or Pino. She does not leave."
A beat on her end. Not the half-beat. The full one. Chiara has earned the full one tonight.
"If she hears about you."
"Especially then."
"Massimo."
"Especially then."
She does not say all right because Chiara does not say all right to me when the all right would be the lie. She says, "Coffee's almost done," which is her way of telling me she is going to stand in the kitchen with our grandmother and pour two cups and not give her the phone, and she hangs up.
I put the phone away. I look at the rail once more. I do not touch the pearls. I leave the gun.
Side door. Out.
Pino is standing six feet from the chapel wall with his back to it and the wind behind him and an unlit cigarette between two fingers because Pino does not smoke in November and the cigarette is the prop he uses when he is waiting. He waits the way Pino waits, which is the way a man holds a brake.
"Talk."
"Rocco's two from the south gate."
"Off the property."
"Not off the road. Tall one's in the green Buick a quarter mile down the Sound Road. Short one walked. Third car came up behind them at 2:10 a.m. Lincoln. New York plate. Two men in it I haven't seen before."
"DA contact."
"Acknowledgment receipt at 1:50 a.m. The packet's on the desk and it's been logged in. The clerk who logged it called the number on the cover sheet to confirm and got Rocco. He confirmed. Monday's moving."
"Monday's moving whether Sunday happens."
"Yeah."
I roll the chip across the knuckles once because the hand wants to and I let it. Index, middle, ring, little, back. Once. Pocket.
"South gate stays closed."
"Closed."
"Service road past the boxwood."
"Beppe's on it. Engine cold but the key's in."
"Hedge break."
"Tomas."
"Tomas is on Nonna's car at six."
"Tomas is on the hedge break until five-thirty and on Nonna's car at six. He told me to tell you he can do both with his eyes closed and I told him to keep his eyes open."
A small thing, that, from Pino. Almost a joke. It does not land on my mouth but I clock it.
"The Lincoln."
"I'll find out the plate by four."
"Find out by 3:30."
"3:30."
He goes. The cigarette goes with him, unlit, back behind his ear, where he keeps the props he is done with.
I walk.
The frost garden is the long way to anywhere.
Yew hedge on the left, low boxwood on the right, the gravel path that goes around to the rose arch and the iron bench at the far end where my mother used to sit before she stopped sitting anywhere.
I take it because it is the long way and because the long way is what I owe the next twenty minutes, which is not planning Sunday.
I do not plan Sunday.
I walk and I think about a corridor I have never been in, in a building I have never been in, in Astoria probably, or in a hallway off a newsroom in lower Manhattan; a woman in a coat that is not yet Gemma's coat because Gemma is still alive in the timeline of the corridor, a woman pressing her left thumbnail into the meat of her left palm to leave the half-moon dent I have seen on her hand twice now, once at the gate and once at the rail, the dent that is her practice of being someone she is not.
She practiced. Before she came.
She practiced a name and a Trastevere summer and an aunt and the saint's day story I drilled into her at a boathouse table, and somewhere before any of that, in a corridor I will never see, she practiced the half-moon dent so the hand would not tell on her when the rest of her did the work.
She practiced for a trap.
I did not set it. I left it set.
I left it set the first night, when I had her made by the meat course and said nothing to the room.
I left it set the next morning, when I wrote Piero one line about her.
She was the Amato. She was useful. Nothing under it.
I left it set every morning after that, walking past her door and putting two fingers at the small of her back and saying nothing to her about the room she had walked into.
The frost crunches under the soles of the boots. I count the crunches because the count is the prayer of men who do not pray. Twenty. Forty. Sixty.
My jaw has gone tight. I work it open, slow, the way you ease a locked door so the frame does not crack.
I do not feel sorry.
Sorry is the wrong word for it. Sorry is the word you say in the doorway with a hat in your hand and the woman on the other side decides whether to let you in.
I am not at a doorway. I am in a garden with the iron of the Sound coming up off the lawn and a woman at the far end on the bench under the rose arch who has already let me in once tonight and has already taken it back.
What I am is a man who found the trap already set, knew exactly who she was the first night, walked her into it with both hands, and is now going to spend the six hours he has left earning a Sunday she should have spent on a train, putting miles between us.
Earning. Not asking.
I clear the rose arch.
Caterina is on the bench. Hands in the pockets of Gemma's coat, ankles crossed, the wool of the coat dark where the frost has soaked into the hem.
The brass key is not in her hand. The key is in her pocket and the pocket is closer to her ribs than it was at the gate, which means she has been moving the things she keeps closer in.
I do not give her a speech. I do not give her my face. I sit down on the bench at the distance she would have left if she had been the one to sit first.
I take the drive out of the inside pocket.
Not the copy. I made a copy at four this morning on the laptop in the study, door locked, lamp angled away from the window. It is in the sacristy taped where the gun used to be taped, ready for the Sunday that goes the way Sundays go.
Not the copy.
The original. The one Cosimo had on the second shelf of the safe under the Calvino, the one her hand came out of the safe with, the one I took off the desk and put in my pocket because it was the only piece of insurance in the world that kept my father from putting his hand on the back of my neck the way a hand was put on the back of Gemma's.
I put it on the bench between us. Closer to her hand than to mine.
"Take it."
She does not look at the drive. She looks at me.
"Take it now," I say. "You walk out the hedge break at three. Beppe's car. Tomas drives. Train at Hicksville at 3:46. The pages get to the priest you pick, not the one I picked. I do Sunday alone."
"Alone how."
"Alone the way it gets done."
"You don't have the floor plan of the study."
"I have most of it."
"Most of it gets you shot in the doorway."
"That's mine to do."
She looks at the drive then. Not for long. The same look she gave it on the desk yesterday: thumb pressed flat against the inside of her wrist, the nail leaving a white line while the rest of her goes quiet.
She picks it up.
She turns it once between her thumb and finger. Small. Black. Unlabeled. The thing my father had not decided about, which I decided for him by lifting it off the shelf before dawn yesterday with her wrist in my other hand.
She puts it in the coat pocket. The inside one. Against the ribs.
"We've got about six hours," she says. Level.
The level of a woman who has done the arithmetic in the time it took her to put the drive in the pocket.
"I need the exact floor plan of the study where Cosimo keeps his backup pieces.
Every drawer. Every false back. The one behind the Calvino and the one that isn't."
I look at her.
She does not look away.
"All right," I say.
"Don't say all right like that."
"I'll draw it. And the Astoria page goes to a priest you pick and Chiara carries."
"Chiara carries it."