Chapter 18 #2
Not in words but in sounds. I lay on the grey canvas cot and I put my whole self into listening, and the cold-store told me, piece by piece, that the waiting was over and the preparing had begun.
Boots, first. More of them, and heavier, moving on the floor below me—not the unhurried single tread of the man in the grey suit but many feet, fast, with purpose, the sound of men being put into position.
Then a long grinding shriek that went up through the structure into my teeth, metal on metal, a vast tired weight moving: freight doors, the big ones, hauled open on their rails to the yard and the river beyond.
And once, when the steel door at the top of my stairs was drawn open for a moment and a man put his head in to look at me and say nothing and draw it shut again, three words came up the stairwell on the cold air before the cork could eat them.
Scordato. And then, fainter: abdication. And then a number, a time, said flat by a voice I didn’t know. Arturo’s name.
I lay very still and I put the fragments together the way you put a recipe together off a smell.
Don Arturo was coming here.
To what end, I wondered.
Then the bolt drew back, and they came for me.
Two of them, big, gloved—and I flinched at the gloves, the skin of my wrists remembering—and they didn’t say anything, just got me up off the cot by the arms, not gentle, not cruel, the handling of men moving a thing from one place to another.
I made my legs work. I would not be carried.
I went out the steel door under my own power and down the iron stairs with a man on each side, the metal ringing under us, down into the cold.
And the cold-store floor opened up below me, and it was vast.
A great insulated room, bigger than my whole street, the ceiling lost up in shadow where the old freight rails still ran bolted along it, the hanging rails they’d moved sides of meat on once, iron tracks for the carcasses, fading off into the dark.
The walls were the same tiled-and-corked deadness as my room writ enormous.
There were drains set into the concrete floor at intervals, round iron grates, and the floor sloped to them, the way a killing floor slopes, made to be sluiced clean.
And the cold of the place came up through the soles of my shoes and into my feet and my shins and the bones of me, the deep settled cold of a room built to hold cold, that had held it so long it had soaked into the structure and would never let it go.
They walked me to the edge of the open floor and stood me there.
One on each side. Flanking me. And I understood, standing there displayed under the dead iron rails with a man’s gloved hand on each of my arms, exactly what I was for. Proof of life, made flesh. A thing to be looked at.
And then, across the great cold floor, past the gloved men and the drains and the slope of the concrete, I found Tonio. My darling, my love, my Daddy.
He was hurt.
They had him in a wheelchair, off to the side near a column, and around him stood men I half-knew, the soldier shorthand of the family I’d been welcomed into a hundred years ago in a garden. He should not have been there. He looked like he was in pain, wincing the whole time.
And then he looked up at me.
Those beautiful eyes, strong and soft at the same time.
I wanted him. Wanted his arms around me. Wanted him to tell me everything was ok, that we would be together soon.
He gave me a nod, the smallest one you could imagine.
I held it back. I gave it back. Across that ruined room full of armed men and drains in the concrete and the dead iron rails overhead, I put my whole self into looking at him the way he was looking at me, and for one held breath the cold-store and the danger and the size of the thing about to happen all fell away, and there was only that—the line between us.
The old man came onto the killing floor like he was walking into church.
The freight doors stood open to the grey of the yard and the river-light came in flat and cold, and Don Arturo walked into it in his linen suit—the same suit, no tie, silver hair swept back, an old man dressed for a wedding walking into a slaughterhouse. He looked tired. Tired but dignified.
Men came in behind him and around him, and the cold floor filled with the most dangerous people in the city.
I knew their faces now. Dante—his expression giving nothing, his eyes everywhere.
Beside him, Salvatore—Tonio’s brother—who’d bent over my hand in the old-country way and made me laugh, standing now like a wall someone had set down in the room, immovable, a graze on his jaw and grief bolted down behind his eyes.
The coiled one—Santo—who looked like a wolf in a suit even with no suit on, everything in him wound tight and ready to spring.
The warm wicked one, Marco, gone very still, the charm packed away somewhere, his easy face turned to flint.
And at the edge of it, a little apart, the dark sharp woman in clean lines.
Serafina. Quiet the way deep water is quiet.
Watchful the way Salvatore was a wall. I’d thought, in the garden, that she was the one in charge, and I’d been embarrassed by the thought, because the men were so obviously in charge.
I looked at her now, standing at the edge with her hands loose and her eyes moving slow across the whole room, and I wasn’t embarrassed anymore.
Gianni stood near his father. Close. Too close, the way a man stands close to a thing he’s about to take, and I could see the hunger come up in his soft face, the borrowed eyes lit with it, a man watching the one thing he’d never been good enough to earn move an inch from his own fingers.
The old man spoke.
It was Sicilian, rolled out slow over the cold concrete, and I caught only the shape, the way I’d caught the shape of the vows in the garden two days and a lifetime ago.
He sounded old. He sounded tired. He spread his weathered hands—the hands that had closed over my ruined hand and read it like a maker’s mark.
It sounded like surrender. Every word of it. It sounded like exactly the thing the man in the grey suit had bought me to buy.
I watched Gianni’s face open all the way up.
I’ll remember it as long as I live, that face, because it was the face of a man getting the thing he’d wanted his whole life and never believed he’d have, the throne an inch from his fingers, his father’s crown coming down off the old silver head and into his soft uncalloused hands—and it was the exact same look I’d seen on Pietro at the altar, joy and disbelief and hunger, except on Pietro it had been holy and on Gianni it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen.
And then Don Arturo named his heir.
He didn’t look at his son when he did it.
That was the first wrong thing, the first crack in the surrender, and I caught it because reading faces is the only thing I’ve ever been truly good at.
The old man’s deep-set eyes did not go to the soft hungry face beside him.
They went past it. They crossed the whole cold floor and they landed, level and certain and unsurprised, on the dark sharp woman standing quiet at the edge.
He said a name, and it was not Gianni’s.
Serafina.
The cold store went silent as a held breath.
Total. And in the middle of that silence Gianni’s face came apart—the hunger curdling, the joy draining out of it so fast it left the soft features slack and grey, a man watching the thing he’d torched a city for go to the one person on earth he most needed it not to go to, his sister, his shadow, the mind he’d stolen, handed the crown in front of everyone while he stood there holding nothing.
And then his entire body tensed, ready, desperate—
Serafina stepped into the center of the floor.
She came in under the rails with no hurry at all, into the middle of the killing floor where the light from the open freight doors fell, and she stood, and she looked at her brother for one long second with something in her face that wasn’t triumph and wasn’t even anger, just a kind of terrible quiet, and then she looked away from him like he was already nothing, and she gave her first order as head of the family.
She didn’t raise her voice. That was the thing.
I’d learned in two days with these people that the dangerous ones go quiet, that Salvatore’s silence said paragraphs and the soft-steel in Tonio’s voice was worse than any shout.
Serafina spoke barely above the cold air of the room, even, economical, three words I understood in any language because they were in English, said for everyone, said so it could not be misheard.
“Take it apart.”
A breath.
“The yard. The corridor. The men. All of it.” Her dark eyes moved once across the room, claiming it. “Now.”
And the held breath broke.
The word was barely out of her mouth before the room came apart.
I’ve tried since to put the order of it together and I can’t. It doesn’t go in a line. It goes in pieces, the way the explosion went in pieces, the way I’ve taken in every danger of my whole life—in fragments, in flashes, the cold animal grabbing what it can and letting the rest blur.
Gunfire. Screams.
I dropped to the ground as soldiers poured in. I heard the slap of fists on faces. The thunk of bullets in flesh. My heart pounded, my mind reeled.
Then: hands closed on me. Not gloved. Not hard and wrong.
A young man I half-knew from the bakery, one of the soldiers who’d piped cannoli with cream on his forearms and called me boss, had me around the waist and was taking me down and back, away from the open floor, dragging me low behind a concrete column where the floor sloped to one of the round iron drains, and he put his own body between me and the room and said, into my ear, fast, “Stay down, ma’am, stay down, I’ve got you, you’re ours—“ and I went down onto the cold wet concrete behind the pillar and stayed.