Chapter 17Caterina
Caterina
"Show me the study."
I let the curtain fall an inch and turn back to the desk.
He is at the sideboard, sleeves pushed to the forearms, the chip flat between two fingers. He sets it down on the edge of the blotter without rolling it. The chip stays where he puts it.
I clear the desk with the back of my hand.
The blotter, a brass pen cup, a stack of mail Cosimo has not opened in three days.
I push them to the far edge and I lay my palms flat on the leather and I draw the study in my head before I draw it on the paper, because I have been in that room twice and twice is enough if you walk it the way I walk rooms.
I take the pencil he hands me without looking up.
"Door here. East wall." I mark it.
"Door to the east corridor, here. Window, south. Window, west. Desk between the windows. Sideboard against the north wall, three drawers. Liquor cabinet here. Two chairs, one ottoman, the rug runs the length. Two paintings, one over the sideboard, one over the desk."
"Caravaggio over the desk."
"Reproduction."
"Yes."
"Backup piece."
"Behind it."
I mark it. "Front drawer of the desk?"
"Empty. The decoy."
"Middle?"
"Letter opener. Nothing else."
"Bottom?"
"False back. Glock with three full magazines. He keeps the magazines stacked, not loose. Easier to grab."
I mark the false back. I am writing on the back of a catering invoice because the pad on the desk has Cosimo's letterhead and the letterhead is the kind of paper a woman should not be holding if a man with a Brooklyn rasp turns out to be on the lawn at the wrong hour.
"East corridor door."
"Latches from inside only."
I stop with the pencil halfway down a line.
"Inside only."
"Built it that way in eighty-nine. Wanted a room he could close from the desk side and nobody could open from the hall."
"So if he's at the desk and the east door is shut."
"Nobody comes through it. Including you."
"Including me." I correct the line on the paper. The east corridor was meant to be my way in. The east corridor is now a wall with a door painted on it. "All right. Then I'm coming in through the sacristy passage."
"You're coming in through the sacristy passage."
"Where does he sit."
"Behind the desk."
"Window at his back."
"No."
I look up.
He is leaning on the sideboard with his arms folded, the white shirt loose at the collar where he has not put the tie on yet, the chip behind him on the blotter where he left it.
"He doesn't sit with his back to a window."
"Not in any other room."
"In this one?"
"In this one he sits with his back to the south window. He's done it for thirty years. Believes nobody fires across twenty acres of his own lawn. It's the one piece of vanity he kept after my mother died."
I write it on the back of the invoice. Backs window. South.
"That's the shot."
"That's the shot if we needed the shot. We don't."
"I know. I'm marking it because if Sunday goes sideways the shot is what we have."
He does not argue. He nods once at the paper. He uncrosses his arms and reaches past me for the pencil and I let him take it and he draws the line of the false back in the bottom drawer two millimeters further from the wall than I had it, because I had it wrong, and he does not say I had it wrong.
I do not say thank you. He does not wait for thank you. We work.
It is 8:38 a.m. when Pino comes through the door at a walk that is almost a run.
He does not bother with the knock. He does not bother with the door behind him.
He is two steps into the room with the cold of the lane still on the shoulders of his coat and his hand already going to the inside pocket where he keeps the notebook he does not actually need because Pino's notebook is in his head.
"Service gate."
Massimo is at the desk already. He did not move. He just is.
"Catering van came through at 6:04 a.m. Cleared. Cleared because the van was on the list."
"And?"
"Third car came up behind it at 8:31 a.m. White panel.
Florist plate, fresh. Rocco's third car, on the florist plate, three feet behind the van's bumper, came through under the van the way you come through a gate under a van, which is you do not stop at the gate, you ride the van's clearance through, and the kid at the gate logs one vehicle because one vehicle is what he sees on the camera. "
"How many."
"Two. East wing. Black trousers, white shirts, aprons. They've got cards on lanyards. Floral staff. The cards are real because Rocco printed the same lanyards we did at the same shop in Mineola last June and the shop does not keep a list."
"Weapons."
"Under the aprons. Likely. The tall one walks with his right arm an inch off his ribs."
"The tall one's here."
"The tall one's here."
Massimo's hand goes to the chip on the blotter without looking. Across the knuckles and back. Once. Pocket.
He looks at me.
I look back.
"East wing's mine," I say. Flat. The way I confirm.
"East wing's yours."
"You take the study and Cosimo."
"Study and Cosimo."
"The guard with the earbuds is on the east stair at the half hour and the full hour. Three minutes either side, he's at the cigarette window. That's your three minutes."
"My three minutes."
"The book goes into the chapel brazier page by page. Except Astoria."
"Astoria goes to Chiara. Chiara carries it."
"Chiara carries it," I say. Once. Without ceremony. The way you confirm a thing you have already confirmed in a chapel at three in the morning and do not need to confirm again to make true.
Pino does not move from the door. He waits because Pino waits.
"Go," Massimo says.
Pino goes.
The room is quiet then in the way it can only be when the hallway on the other side of the door is not.
I can hear the caterers two floors down arranging stemware on the long table.
I can hear a chair being dragged across stone in the chapel garden.
I can feel my pulse knocking against the camera pin, the same pin that has been pressing into my sternum since Wednesday.
He crosses to the sideboard. Pours two cups from the small pot that has been on the warmer since five.
He does not ask if I want sugar. He does not put sugar in either.
He turns with the two cups, hands one across, takes the saucer at the angle a man takes a saucer when he has not slept since Thursday: flat, deliberate, the grip of a hand that has made its own arrangements with exhaustion.
I take it. I do not drink. He does not drink either.
We stand at the window.
Below us the florist is finishing the chairs.
White ribbon at the last one. She steps back, tilts her head, leans in again to retie a knot she does not like.
A boy with a coil of cable walks along the path behind her and disappears under the chapel eaves.
The Sound lies flat and gray, the way it does in November, like something with iron in it.
A gull crosses overhead without calling.
I count to thirty without meaning to and then I stop counting.
He does not say anything.
I do not say anything.
The minute hand of the clock above the sideboard moves once, twice, three times. The fourth time it moves I reach over and I take the cup out of his hand. I set both cups on the windowsill. The saucers make the small dry sound saucers make on stone.
I turn him toward me by the lapel of the coat. Not hard. The lapel is wool and the wool is cold under my fingers from the window. He turns without resistance, the wool shifting under my fingers.
I look at him.
He looks back.
I kiss him.
Not the way I kissed him on Wednesday at the boathouse table, which was a question.
Not the way I kissed him yesterday against the safe, which was an answer.
This is the third thing, the one neither of us has been calling by its name.
Slow. Deliberate. The kind of kiss two people give each other when they have done the arithmetic and the arithmetic is what it is.
His hand comes up to the side of my face. The thumb at my jaw. He kisses me back the same way. Slow. Like something he is committing to the same place he commits the layout of a room.
I do not close my eyes.
He does not either.
Below the window the florist ties her knot and walks away from the chair and the chair stays tied. A man in a black apron carries a tray of glasses across the gravel without rattling them. The white chairs stand in their rows for a wedding that is not going to happen and we do not look down.
I pull back an inch. I do not let go of the lapel.
He does not let go of my face. His thumb is still at the line of my jaw, exact, the same two-finger pressure he uses at the small of my back when he passes me in a corridor.
"Massimo."
"Caterina."
The whole conversation. The real one. The names we have, said back the way they were given.
Pino's knock is two short taps on the door and then his voice through it, careful, the way Pino's voice gets when he is interrupting something he has guessed at.
"The priest. He's early."
Neither of us moves.
The door opens before Pino can finish the sentence.
Cosimo stands in the frame already dressed for the ceremony.
Black coat. White shirt. Silver at the cuffs.
He looks at the cups on the windowsill. He looks at Massimo's hand on my face.
He looks at me last, and longest, his face settling into the expression of a man who has just confirmed something he already suspected and was hoping, in the small private place a Don keeps such things, to be wrong about.