Chapter 18Massimo
Massimo
I clock the room from the back. Six rows of seven, twenty-three in the seats because eight chairs sit empty by design. Side door behind the sacristy. Door at the rear under my left hand. The window above the altar too small for a body. Three.
Same count she ran in this room at three this morning, and I have run it twice since, and I run it again now because the count is the only prayer I have ever finished.
Cosimo is at the altar head.
Dark suit. White shirt. The collar pin. The Madonna at the lapel. He moves the way he has moved in every room of his life: the way a man moves who has decided in advance that the room will adjust to him. He takes his place to the left of the priest and turns his face out to the pews and he looks.
He looks the way a man looks who has survived thirty years on his own read.
Left side first. Piero in the third row. The two from the city next to him. Pino's cousin in the fourth on the aisle. He clocks every face the way a butcher clocks a side of beef: weight, hang, what the hands have done. He gets to the front pew on the right where Caterina is.
He stops.
One. Two. Three.
He does not stop on her hands or her throat where the pearls are not.
He stops on her face. He looks for the half-moon in the meat of her left palm and he does not need to look because the face tells him what the palm would tell.
She does not flinch. She has not flinched in this house in nine days and she does not flinch now.
Her chin sits the way her chin sits, which is exactly level.
His eyes come off her and find me at the back wall.
I am at the back wall. I am not in a pew because I am not a guest. My hands are at my sides because my hands at my sides is what he needs to see, and because the chip is in the right-hand pocket of the jacket and the other thing is in the left, and because I have decided which one is finished today and the chip is the one that is finished.
He reads my face the way he read hers. Half the time. He already knows the answer.
He turns. Not fast. The turn of a man who has thirty seconds in his head and is going to use eight of them.
Toward the wall. Toward the small reproduction of the Caravaggio that hangs to the left of the sacristy door in this chapel because Nonna asked for it there in 'seventy-eight and Nonna's requests do not get moved. His right hand goes up.
I am already moving.
Three strides up the side aisle. The priest has not finished the first line of the missal.
Cosimo's hand finds the right edge of the frame and lifts and the painting swings on its pin the way the one in the study swings, because my grandfather hinged both in 'sixty-one and Cosimo put a piece behind both because Cosimo keeps the answer in the same place he keeps the question. His hand goes in.
My hand goes around his wrist.
I do not say anything. I take the wrist and press it flat against the plaster, put my body between him and the wall.
The piece comes out of the niche with my hand already on the grip and his hand already on mine, and I work it free the way you work a knife from a child: by being the larger hand. The piece is a small black thing, the same one he has carried since I was eight.
I clear the chamber against my hip. I put it in my own jacket. I put my left palm flat on the center of his chest. Not a push. Just the palm.
He looks at me.
The pews have gone quiet the way pews go quiet when the priest's voice stops. Piero is standing. The two from the city are not, because Pino's hand is on the back of Piero's neck from the row behind and Piero is sitting back down without help.
My eyes go to the front pew. She is already reading the room the way I read it, the count run, her weight even, nothing in her hands.
For one beat she looks at me and does not set her face for anyone watching, and I do not set mine, and it is the only thing in this chapel today that neither of us is performing.
"Outside," I say. Quiet. The voice I use in this house.
He nods once.
I walk him through the side door with my hand at his elbow the way a son walks a father into a room, because that is what the room needs to see.
Caterina is already up. She moves up the aisle behind us at the distance she keeps, which is the distance of a woman who is not standing where a hand can put a body between her and the door.
The chapel door closes behind us at 11:03 a.m.
The east corridor at 11:04 a.m.
The study door opens before my hand finds the handle, because Pino is already through it from the other side.
Two men are on the floor in the corridor, wrists zip-tied at the small of the back, mouths taped, no blood.
Florist aprons. The neck I had clocked yesterday on the short one's cousin and the hand that goes with it.
Pino is breathing the way Pino breathes after a thing, which is the same way he breathes before.
"Rocco," I say.
"Service road. Beppe pulled the gate motor at 10:50 a.m. He's sitting in the Lincoln. The Lincoln isn't going anywhere because the Lincoln has no road under it that opens before noon."
"Keep him there."
"He's there."
I walk Cosimo into the study.
The brazier is lit. Brass, on the hearth, the small one Nonna brought down from the attic before she left, that Beppe lit at dawn because Nonna said the chapel braziers are for incense and this one is for the other thing.
The coal in it is low and red. The smoke goes up the flue in a column that does not hurry.
The book is on the desk where I put it at six. Black cloth cover. Cosimo's hand on the inside of the front board, the closed notation in the second column, the names in the first.
I press it flat.
Page one. Tear at the gutter. Into the brazier. The page takes the coal the way paper takes coal, which is slow at the corner and fast at the middle, and the writing on it goes through gray and then through white and then through nothing. Page two. Page three.
Cosimo sits down in the chair behind the desk.
He sits the way he has sat in that chair for thirty-one years, which is with his back to the window because nobody fires across twenty acres of his own lawn. He folds his hands in his lap. He watches me feed the pages.
"I always knew this day would carry your name on it."
I do not stop feeding. Page seven. Page eight. The smoke goes up.
"What I did not expect," he says, and he looks past me to the doorway, "was the woman."
She is in the frame. The coat. The button pin still sewn into the bodice where she put it at six this morning and where she left it through the chapel and where she will leave it until the package goes to the priest she picked, not the one I picked. Her chin is level. Her hands are at her sides.
He does not say Gemma. He does not say the name that is on page eleven. He does not look at the brazier when I put page eleven in.
He looks at her face. Then mine.
"You're not handing me to the Amatos."
"No."
"Or the desk in lower Manhattan."
"No."
"That's the mercy on offer."
"Yes."
He nods once. The way she nods, or the way she nods because he taught the family to nod, which is the thing I have not let myself think about until now.
"All right."
The pages keep going in. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. The flue draws clean. Nonna asked Beppe to clear it Friday and Beppe cleared it. Nonna does not order a brazier without ordering a flue.
At page nineteen the brazier is almost full of ash and the book is almost done except for the one folded sheet I have been working around because the one folded sheet is hers.
The name above the closed column on it is the one I will not say in this room with my father in this chair.
I lift the cover off and I let the cover go in. I let the empty spine go in. I leave the folded sheet on the desk where the book was.
She comes forward without looking at the page.
She picks it up and creases it twice more with her thumb and the pad of her index finger, working the folds smaller, the way you fold a thing you are going to keep against your skin.
She slides it inside the coat to the pocket against the ribs.
Not the drive pocket. The other one. Closer to the ribs, because the coat is cut that way and her hand has chosen the cut.
She does not look at me.
I look at the pocket. I let myself look. Maybe she uses it. Maybe she keeps it folded in a coat that becomes another coat after that. Maybe she burns it on a Sunday I am not in the room for.
I do not ask.
Cosimo watches her hand go to the pocket, and his eyes close once, all the way down and back up, the way a man receives a verdict he has already decided to carry.
Pino at the door.
"11:43 a.m. Rocco's still in the Lincoln. Beppe says he's done shouting."
"Take him."
"Where."
"Service gate. Your car. The route we walked Thursday. Hand him to the men at the second exit and come back."
"He's going to want to say a thing on the way out."
"Let him say it to your dashboard. And to Halloran's recorder under the passenger seat."
Pino's mouth does the quarter inch it does when something almost lands on it. He goes.
11:47 a.m. by the small clock on the mantel when the wheels of his car move on the service gravel below the study window.
I do not look down. She does not either.
The sound goes up the way the smoke went up, steady, unhurried, and then it is gone past the gate and into the road and the road takes it.
I close the brazier. The ash settles. The room smells of paper and old coal and the single lily Beppe set on the boxwood post at 8:40 a.m. and did not move.
Cosimo stands up from the chair.
He does not look at the chair behind him. He walks the three steps from the desk to where I stand and stops at the distance he has always stopped at: close enough for a hand on a shoulder, which he has not done in two years, and does not do now.
"The priest."
"He'll close the missal. Nonna told him to."
"Quieter Sunday."
"Yes."
"There is a page with your name on it on that desk in lower Manhattan. It goes in front of a judge in the morning."
Cosimo does not move. The math is already done behind his eyes.
"The men here answer to me. The book is ash.
By tonight nothing in this house is yours.
The page is the only mercy on the table, and the mercy is the hours before it lands.
Beppe has the car. Go back to the old country and stay in it.
You will have the cousin who would not fly, and he will not cross a room for you either. "
"And if I come back," he says.
"Then you go where Rocco went, and I hand them the rest myself."
He looks at her one more time. Whatever he does not say, he keeps.
He walks to the east corridor door and stops at the threshold and turns and looks at the chair behind the desk and looks at me, and he goes through the door, and the door is the wood and the steel my grandfather put in in 'sixty-one and the door closes the way that door closes, which is once.
The chapel bell rings noon. The priest, somewhere on the chapel step, closes the missal and says, audibly enough that it comes up through the open window, that he supposes the blessing can wait for a quieter Sunday.
I look at her.
She has her hand on the outside of the coat over the pocket against her ribs. Flat. Not pressing. The way you hold a thing you are not going to look at yet.
"Sunday," she says.
"Sunday."
"On my terms."
"On your terms."
She does not nod. She does not have to. The estate is twenty acres above the Sound and the wheel is in her hand for the next thing. I am the man on the bench at the distance she sets, and I will sit at that distance until she moves the bench.
The brazier ticks once as it cools.