Chapter 19Caterina
Caterina
The bank on Ditmars Boulevard opens at nine, and the manager does not ask why two people who look like they have not slept since Friday want a safe-deposit box on a Monday. He has the kind of face that has learned not to ask.
Massimo is at my left shoulder at the distance he keeps in public, which is the distance of a man not advertising.
His distance, not mine to name. He does not put a hand on my back.
He has not, since the subway turnstile, where he let me go through first and followed without looking back at the platform.
The vault is in the basement. The manager walks us down.
Fluorescent buzz, the smell of carpet glue and a printer that has not been cleaned since the Bush administration.
Row fourteen, third from the floor. He turns his key.
I turn mine. The drawer slides out on a runner oiled by twenty years of other people's secrets.
I set the folded page inside myself. Smooth the crease once with two fingers. Close the lid.
Massimo signs the secondary access card without being asked. I watch his hand do it. The handwriting is smaller than I expected. No flourish on the F. No tail on the e. Block letters that lean the way a man leans against a wall when he is not in a hurry.
The manager slides the box into row fourteen. The lock turns. The sound it makes is a small mechanical click. I breathe out through my nose. Long goddamn sentence.
"Thank you," I say.
He nods without looking up.
Upstairs the air is colder than the vault was.
November doing November. Chiara is sitting on the hood of the car eating a bodega sandwich, the foil pulled back around the bread, mustard at the corner of her mouth that she has not noticed yet.
Her hair is off her face the way it has been off her face since Wednesday. The bitten nails are still bitten.
"How's the box," she says, around the sandwich.
"Closed."
"Good box."
"Good box."
She chews. Swallows. Looks at me the way she looks at me, which is the look of a woman who reads the room before she says the thing she came to say.
"Gemma deserved better than a peace marriage."
I do not move.
"So did you," she says.
She picks a piece of lettuce out of the foil and eats it.
"Those are related observations," she adds, in case I missed it, which she knows I did not.
I take the foil out of her free hand because she is going to drop it, and I fold it down around the sandwich the way her mother probably folded it down around hers in 1992, and I give it back. Her thumb brushes mine. She does not look at me when she takes it.
The passenger window is down. Ottavia is in the seat with her silver braid laid over her shoulder and her black housecoat replaced by a navy wool coat that has the cut of 1978 and the dignity of every year since. The gold band sits loose on her third finger. She does not feel the cold.
"I packed my good coat."
"I can see that."
"The estate kitchen." She tilts her head a quarter inch. "Anchovies still."
"I'll get anchovies."
"Salted. Not in oil."
"Salted."
She closes the window with the handle that is a handle, not a button, and folds her brown hands in her lap, and that is the whole of what she has to say to me about Monday morning in Astoria.
Chiara finishes the sandwich. Wipes the mustard off with the back of her wrist. Hops down off the hood.
"I'll drive her up," she says. "Pino's at the house already. He wanted me to tell you he changed the locks on Friday and he wants you to know he did not enjoy it."
"He never enjoys anything."
"He enjoyed it a little."
She gets in. The car pulls out into traffic the way Chiara drives, which is fast and clean and without indicating because indicating is a courtesy she does not extend to Queens. The taillights go around the corner at 31st. Gone.
Massimo is at my left shoulder still.
We walk.
On the corner of Ditmars and 33rd I stop. A woman with a stroller goes around us. A man with a coffee goes around us the other way. The light changes and does not change us with it.
"I'm not the Amato crew's woman."
He looks at me.
"I'm not the Valenti bride. I'm not a widow-in-waiting. I'm not anyone's instrument."
He does not interrupt. I clock that. He has the face he uses in rooms where the answer is being decided by somebody else, which is a face I have only seen him put on twice, and one of those times was at a desk that shifted on floorboards.
"I'm the woman who walked into your father's house in a dead girl's pearls and walked out as myself. If you want me in New York, it's beside you. Not behind you. With a full accounting of every name still breathing on that list."
A bus goes past. The exhaust comes up off the asphalt in a wave that smells like every winter morning of my entire adult life.
He looks at me for a long second.
"Agreed. All of it. Every name still breathing."
I wait.
"Also." A small thing at the corner of his mouth that is not a smile and is not not a smile. "I already told Pino."
"When."
"Saturday."
"You told Pino on Saturday."
"On the drive in from the hedge break."
I look at him. I do not say anything for the length of a light cycle. He lets me not say it.
"Walk," I say.
We walk.
The subway platform at Ditmars is doing what it does at ten on a Monday, which is half-empty and smelling faintly of metal. A man with a violin case sits on the bench. A kid with headphones leans on a pillar. The R comes in on the express track and goes out again without stopping.
Massimo takes my hand.
Not for anyone watching. Not for the man with the violin case. Just his palm against mine, fingers between fingers, the weight of it neither claiming nor asking.
I let him keep it.
The N comes. We get on.
He keeps it through the doors closing, the lurch out of the station, the run above ground through Queens with the light coming in through the windows in panels, the long descent into the tunnel under the river.
I look at his hand around mine. I think about the page in row fourteen, present and accounted for. I think about Monday morning New York reorganizing itself the way cities do when a power shifts and most people do not notice until the price of something small changes.
Somewhere between Queensboro Plaza and Lexington he tells me, without looking at me, that Rocco is in a federal holding cell in lower Manhattan as of nine this morning.
Halloran's sealed indictment has Rocco on the cooperating line.
The cooperation does not cover what Pino's people put on Halloran's desk on Sunday, which is twenty-two minutes of audio of Rocco pricing Gemma's removal with my father's name as collateral.
He says it the way a man reads a receipt. Rocco will not see a sidewalk in Brooklyn again.
"Seventeen years he waited for the Antonio file," he says. "Now he's got the don and the broker, both convictable. The case he wanted. The only one he gets."
"And you."
"Nothing of mine is in it."
"Rocco names you from the cell."
"Until his voice gives out. It buys the government weather. A cooperator who hid his own killing is a defendant now, not a witness, and a defendant without the book is just a man talking."
"The book."
"Two drives nobody handed over. That's why the house stays quiet. It's not why anybody sees a courtroom."
The question I have not asked is the one about me. He answers it before I find the shape of it.
"You were never the courier. The Long Island City drop was the grave Rocco dug for you dressed as a handoff. A photograph nobody took is not paper Halloran can hold."
I look at the lights going past in the tunnel and I do not answer. The answer is not a sentence. It is the small mechanical click of a box closing in a basement on Ditmars two stops ago.
My building is on a block in lower Manhattan that Rocco does not have the address of.
Fourth floor walk-up. The stair smells like the stair has smelled since 2019, which is paint and somebody's curry and the bleach the super uses on Mondays.
My key in my lock. The deadbolt I installed myself with a YouTube tutorial and a glass of wine. I step inside ahead of him.
The lock turns behind us.
I peel the button-cam pin off the bodice. Set it on the nightstand. Face down. I set it face down and straighten up and the nine days settle somewhere behind my sternum, not gone, just filed.
I turn around.
He has not moved. He waits the way he waits, which is the way a man waits who has decided to let me choose. Both hands come up to my waist when I face him. Not pulling. Just resting. The heat of them comes through the wool and settles under my ribs.
I lift my hands to the shirt buttons. One at a time.
Slower than I have done anything in nine days.
He watches me do it. Does not say a word.
The collar opens, the placket opens, the third button comes through the buttonhole and the fourth, and when the shirt is open I press my palm flat against the center of his chest the way I did at the study desk.
This time there is no clock. No corridor. No Pino about to knock. No Cosimo about to walk through a door.
His pulse goes under my hand. I let myself just feel it.
He undresses me the way he does anything that matters to him, which is without hurry.
The coat off the shoulders. The blouse open.
He pulls the camisole over my head and his knuckles brush the underside of my breast and I do not perform a sound about it.
The skirt down over the hips. He goes to one knee to take it off the ankles.
He stays there long enough that I look down at the top of his head and put my hand in the hair at the back of his neck because I want to, not because the room requires it.
He lifts me. I wrap my legs around him. He carries me the four steps to the bed I have slept in alone for three years. Lays me down. Looks at me in the gray Monday light, hair loose on my own pillow, the cam pin face down on the nightstand.
"Caterina."
The only name now.