CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
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LUCA
Nestor had the sign-in book open under his lamp in the lobby of the Aurelio Building, the pen chained to it and a plate of orange peel at his elbow, and he read the line off it before he would let me touch the courier’s envelope.
“Luca Varela, fourteen. Write it yourself, Mr. Varela, I’m not forging you again.”
“You’ve forged me twice.”
“Four times.” He pushed the envelope across the marble. “You sign like a man who’s late—”
“I’m late for everything.”
“So be late and legible.”
The licenses had come by courier at nine at night, which is why I was down there at all. I wrote my own name in the ruled column. It smelled of cold toner and orange peel and nothing else.
“She’s coming at nine-fifteen,” I said. “Warren. Send her up.”
“The bakery lady.” Nestor capped the chained pen. “She’s called down already to ask about parking.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That there’s never been parking.”
The working elevator counted the floors the whole way up, to nobody. Eleven. Twelve. Fourteen. There was no thirteen in that building and I had stopped explaining it to clients years ago.
The cold front had come through at dusk and the glass was ticking in its frame, one small knock every few seconds, like somebody outside with a coin.
I had left one lamp on and the north wall lit from below, so the Rothko was the brightest thing on the floor. Two stories down a cleaner’s cart went along a corridor on one bad wheel, squeaking, stopping, squeaking.
The draft license folder had been squared on my blotter since six, my father’s pen uncapped beside it and drying out.
Under it was a legal pad with four lines in my own hand, taken down at four that afternoon while Gio Panetta talked into my ear from a parking garage.
“Three of the four,” Panetta had said, with his voice down to nothing. “The third seat committed by proxy.”
“Whose hand is behind it?”
“The book I keep has no column for hands.”
I read the four lines again. My mouth went metallic, and my hand went out and turned the pad face down on the blotter.
Three carries. On the ninetieth day Nicolas would be pakhan of a family with nowhere to sit, and there was no version of that argument I could win.
Underneath that, low, where I keep what I do not tell my brothers, something turned over and was glad. There was a paragraph in the wall behind that painting with her whole legal name in it, twice, and at four o’clock the danger it had been written for stopped being a forecast.
The elevator started counting again, down and then up.
Mary came out of the car with a wet folder held against her chest and drizzle still in her hair, and the floor stopped being an empty floor.
She did not sit. She walked it—reception, the bullpen, the copy room door, back again, touching nothing.
“Your building smells like money and nobody’s cooked in it in ten years.”
“That’s the kindest thing anyone’s said about this firm.”
“Give it a week.” She stopped in front of the north wall with her hands behind her back. “And that painting looks like a bruise somebody framed.”
“It’s insured for more than the building.”
“Then the building’s a bargain.”
I laughed. At nine-twenty at night, in an empty office, and I could not take it back. Mary did not turn around. Her shoulders came down half an inch.
“Somebody’s keeping a plant alive out there,” she said.
“Camila waters it. She thinks it’s a test.”
“Is that a real test?”
“Everything here’s a test. Sit down.”
She sat. I moved the desk lamp a hand’s width to the left before she put her arms on the blotter, and neither of us said anything about that.
“Occupational,” I said, laying them out. “Food service. And the one you actually came for.”
“I came for the sign.”
“The sign. Historic district, which means a man at the county looked at a photograph of your grandmother’s board and wrote contributing on a form.”
She read it upside down. “Contributing to what, though?”
“It’s the warmest word that office owns.”
I lifted my father’s pen, which had been drying uncapped beside the drafts, and tested it on the blotter.
“Is the pen an heirloom or a costume?”
“My father’s. These days it seems to sign nothing but family paper.”
She put her chin down on her hand. “Luca. It’s a food service license.”
“I know what it is.”
She tipped her head at the folder instead of arguing. “Does the bratva have a filing system, or is it just you?”
“It’s me. I’m the system.”
“That’s not a system. That’s a hostage.”
Then she read them. Every line, one finger under the line, her lips moving at the small print. It took eleven minutes, and I watched the clock on the credenza so I had somewhere to put my eyes.
At the food service page she stopped, pulled a pencil out of her hair, and struck through half a line.
“This says the operator’s the corporate entity.”
“That’s what it says, yes.”
“I’m the operator.” She turned the page around and pushed it back at me. “I’m not signing something that says the oven belongs to a company and the burns belong to me.”
I initialed her change and countersigned under it. Her hands were the problem. Nails cut down to nothing, a ridge of callus across the right palm, the pencil held like a paring knife. Something went wrong in my chest and I put the pen down.
I wanted that pencil out of her hand and her mouth open under mine in my father’s chair. I signed the second page instead.
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Mary went to the north wall and stood in front of the painting with her back to me. After dark that window gave the room back instead of the city, so there was a second office hanging over the street, and both of us kept finding the other one in it.
“What’s in the safe behind the bruise?”
I did not ask how she knew. She had seen the brass hinge at the frame’s left edge and the sweep mark beneath it. I had been careful with the combination and careless with everything a woman who cleaned her own shop would notice.
“Ask me something else.”
“No.” Mary turned around. “I want to read the contract I signed. Not my copy. The one you keep.”
“Mary, don’t do this—”
“Esperanza told me to read what I signed, and mine’s been in a drawer since the night I signed it because I was scared of it. I’m not now. You’re standing between me and it.”
I crossed the room. I did not decide to—my legs went and the rest of me came along behind them, and when I got there I swung the painting aside and put my hand on the dial.
It was colder than the wall it sat in. A knurled wheel under my palm, the numbers turning away under my thumb where I could not see them.
I held it there. Long enough for the glass to tick twice. Long enough that the second office out in the window showed me a man about to open something.
Then her hand closed around my wrist without pulling. Warm from her pocket, her thumb right where the pulse is. She has called me Luca since the night she signed. Nobody else makes it sound like an accusation I want to answer.
“There she is.”
“Is my name in it?”
“No.”
No qualification. No sentence trimmed until the lie was technically elsewhere.
I had just lied to her, and I heard it leave my mouth in my own voice with her hand on my wrist. She did not blink and she did not let go.
I understood she had just been answered, and that it was not the answer I gave her.
She released my wrist. I took my hand off the dial and set both palms against the wall beside her head.
She did not back off. She turned into it. Her knee came up against my ribs and her hands went inside my shirt, flat and cold-fingered, up my sides, and everything in me reorganized around that.
“Here’s what I want,” I said. “The blotter on the floor. You on that desk with your thighs open and my mouth on your cunt until you forget the painting exists, and that’s exactly why we’re not doing it.”
Her breath went out against my throat. “Then don’t do it.”
“There’s a version of tonight where I’ve got my mouth on your cunt in ten seconds and you never ask about that wall again. Your hand in my hair the whole time. I’d take an hour over it.”
She got a fistful of my shirt at the small of my back. “Luca—”
“You can feel what you’re doing to me against your hip, so let’s not pretend I’m being noble. I’m being precise. There’s a difference, and the precise version is that I want my mouth on your cunt and I want you to keep asking me about that wall, and tonight I only get one of those.”
My mouth was an inch off hers and I stopped it there and made myself say the rest.
“If I put my mouth on you right now you’d stop asking, and I’d have used your body to change the subject, and I’d never get that back.”
“You think I couldn’t tell the difference?”
“I think you’d forgive me for it. That’s the part I can’t live with.” I got off the wall. “I’d be the fourth man to buy something off you with your own body. I’m not doing it in my father’s office.”
My hands were shaking. I held them up where the lamp could get at them and let her watch them do it.
“Then talk,” Mary said. “You’re the one who talks.”
So I gave her my father instead.
“They shot my father on the causeway on a Tuesday morning and took him to the house on Star Island instead of a hospital, and he lasted the afternoon. Everybody came in and out. I got the last part of it.”
She caught my wrist again when I stepped back. This time I did not try to hide the shaking.
“He had my wrist like you’ve got it. He said we had one generation left in us, and to get my name onto something nobody could take off me.”
“And did you get one?”
“I’ve never said that to anybody. Not to Nicolas. Not to Rian.”
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The phone on the credenza went off while Mary stood at the north wall with her hand flat on her own sternum.
I picked it up. Panetta again, traffic behind the voice this time. I said yes, and then I said the vote day stands, and then I said Panetta’s name and put it down. Eleven seconds, and I did not explain a word of it to her.
“That was about me,” Mary said.
“That was about all of us.”
“Luca.”
“The count moved this afternoon.” I turned the legal pad face up and left it where she could see my handwriting and not understand a line of it. “Four families hold seats at the Accord. A motion carries with three. As of four o’clock they’ve got three.”
“Which three of them?”
“Sokolov and Ferreira are counted. The third commitment came through a proxy. It has to be Marchetti, but Panetta hasn’t seen what he actually promised. I don’t know whether he’ll say yes or find a way to make another word do it.”
She looked at the pad for a while. “So you lose the seat.”
“That is what the motion asks for on the ninetieth day.”
“How long’s that?”
“Forty-two days.”
She was quiet a moment. Then, carefully: “Does Nicolas know?”
“No.”
“And Rian doesn’t know?”
“No.” I capped the pen. “You’re the first person I’ve said it to out loud. I’d like you to notice I did that before I asked you for anything.”
She squared her copies on her knee and stood, and she took her time about it, and I let her.
“One more,” she said at the elevator. “Which one of you sat outside my shop?”
My hand was already on the call button before the rest of me caught up.
“That’s not mine to give you. Ask him.”
“Ask which one of you?”
“Rian.”
The car counted itself up. Eleven. Twelve. My mouth tasted metallic. The doors came open on fourteen and Rian was standing in the car with his keys in his fist, and Mary looked at him the way you look at a question you have just decided to ask.