Chapter 18 #3
I will never get the noise out of me. Gunfire in an insulated room is not a sound, it’s a thing that happens to your whole body, the cork and the tile that ate every whisper for days throwing the shots back flat and enormous and on top of each other until it was one continuous slamming wall of it, no space between, and the muzzle-flash strobing white off the dead iron rails overhead, and the smell of it coming up sharp and chemical, and I had my hands over my ears with the raw wrists screaming and my face to the cold concrete and the drain a foot from my eyes and the slope of the killing floor running someone’s blood toward it already.
I saw Gianni running. Not fighting. Running.
The moment his sister gave the word he was already moving, already past it, already gone, the rot slipping the net the way I understood now the rot always slips, because the cornered ones don’t stand, they run for the door, and he had a door, he had the freight doors standing open to the yard and the rail spur beyond, the yard he owned, the corridor he’d bought block by block, and he went for it low and fast through his own falling men, out into the grey, into the dark of the machine he’d built, gone.
And then, my heart broke.
I saw the old man go down.
Don Arturo, in the middle of the killing floor in his linen suit, the silver head, upright until he wasn’t—and I saw the dark bloom come up across the pale linen, sudden, an ugly red flower opening over his chest, and I saw his weathered hands come up to it the way you reach for a thing you can’t believe is happening, and I saw his knees go.
And I saw who fired.
Gianni. On his way out. He’d reached the freight doors, he was half through into the grey, free, gone—and he turned.
He turned in the open doorway with the river-light behind him and he raised his hand and he put a round into his own father, into the old man who’d just stood up in front of everyone and refused to give him the family, the last bridge, burned, the final small spiteful word from a small spiteful man who’d torch a city for a wedding card and shoot the throne dead rather than watch it go to someone better.
Then he was through the doors and into the yard and gone, and I lay on the cold concrete with my hand over my mouth and the wail of it trapped behind my teeth.
The men roared.
I heard it over the gunfire, two voices, and I knew them—Dante and Salvatore, the grave one and the wall, going down onto the floor over the old man, their suits in the wet and the blood, hands pressing, voices that had never once risen for me going up now in three languages over the silver head, and around them their men closing the room, sealing it, the gunfire thinning as the thing Serafina had built did its work and Gianni’s men found there was no door for them.
And then, across the floor, through the thinning smoke, Tonio came for me.
He should not have been able to. He came up, out of the wheelchair.
I saw it—I saw him get his good arm down and shove and come out of that chair and go to his knees on the wet concrete, and then he wasn’t standing, he couldn’t stand, so he crawled.
He hauled his wrecked taped burned body across that whole cold killing floor toward me on his good arm and his knees, dragging the dead arm, through the smoke and over the slope and the wet, his face gone grey and his teeth bared with the cost of it, and his eyes never once left me, and he came, the way Olimpo had gone into the fire, the one who got there, the one who tried, the soldier and the Daddy and the man all at once poured into the single animal fact of getting his body between me and the room no matter what it cost the body.
The soldier shielding me saw him coming and made space, and Tonio dragged himself the last of it through the column’s shadow and got there, got to me, got his good arm around me and pulled me into him, into the dark wool of the wedding suit gone grey with smoke and ash, and he was shaking with the effort of having crossed that floor.
“I’ve got you,” he said.
His mouth at my ear, his voice scraped down to nothing, the soft-steel gone ragged, the words I’d held onto in the cork-lined room when I didn’t know if he had a voice left to say them. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got the line. I’m here, I’ve got it, I’ve got you—”
And I let myself shake.
“You came,” I said into him, and it didn’t sound like the boss at all. “You came for me.”
“Always.” His broken hand fisted in my hair, holding my head against him, holding the line the way he’d vowed he would. “Always. To the end of the world. I told you. I hold the line.”
I held onto him.
And over his shoulder, through the thinning smoke, I could see it all — Don Arturo down in the spreading red, Dante’s hands pressed to the linen, Salvatore’s face cracked open at last; the open freight doors and the grey yard beyond them, empty now, the doorway Gianni had walked through; Serafina standing alone in the center of the killing floor under the dead iron rails, perfectly still, looking out at the door her brother had fled through with a face I couldn’t read at all.