5. Something Borrowed
SOMETHING BORROWED
VALERIA
The nib skips on the first stroke of the V, because the pen has been dry since Thursday morning and the man who filled it last is in a drawer on Fountain Street.
I press harder, and it catches and lays down a wet black line. I finish my name on page one of eleven while nine people watch me do it.
“That is Ferro D’Amato’s pen,” Ottavia observes from the good chair. “My father-in-law bought it in Bologna in 1948 and never once lent it to anybody, including his wife.”
“It came back in the county’s paper sack with a receipt taped to the front.” I hand it across the table to Lorenzo, cap first, the way you hand somebody a knife. “I had it filled yesterday. It should sign something.”
He signs eleven pages without looking at any of them. Nadia Ferrante counts the initials in the margins with the highlighter, and Rosanna Pelle witnesses for the Rinaldi side in a hand so small it looks like a seam.
At 1:52 p.m., I am married on paper to a man I have kissed once, in an elevator, forty-three hours ago, which neither of us has mentioned since.
The dress is my mother’s, 1987, taken in at the waist by a woman in Bayside who did not ask why the fitting had to be on a Saturday. Flat shoes, because the crypt floor is old stone and my grandmother broke a hip on that floor in 1994. My right hand does not shake at all this morning.
On Saturday afternoon, when the table came apart into chairs and paper, I sent Tazio down to a pharmacy on Post Road for a spiral notebook, ninety-nine cents.
On Saturday night, I copied the pad into it, line for line, and then I burned the pad, because it was theirs.
I had been keeping the only account of the worst week of my life on paper this family could take back off me by asking.
It is the first thing in this house that is mine.
We leave the estate at 2:50 p.m. in four cars.
Peppe Mazza takes the lead with three men.
Fabrizio runs the chase car. My father follows in his own with four of his own, because the two families have agreed on a great many things this week and have not agreed on that.
I am in the middle car with Lorenzo beside me, Tazio in the front passenger seat with his suit hanging off him and a radio in his lap, and Ciro Tebaldi driving, who has driven for this family for nine years and keeps butterscotch candies in the door pocket for his nieces, and who offers me one at the gate as if today were a school run.
Thirty-one men. That is the whole D’Amato roster. Lorenzo has told me twice this week that he needs sixty, and today fourteen of them are on this road and the rest are standing on a lawn and a crypt door.
At 3:18 p.m., we come off the parkway onto Cross Street, which drops under the rail embankment through a short concrete underpass, two lanes, abutments on both sides, thirty meters of shade.
At 3:20 p.m., a landscaping box truck reverses across the far mouth of it.
Peppe’s car is already inside. The engine of it comes apart in a sound like a bag of coins going down stairs, and the windshield goes white. Ciro brakes us hard at the near mouth with the nose of the car half in the shade.
Behind us, a utility van noses out of the auto-body lot and stops across both lanes.
I count muzzle flashes because counting is the only thing I own, and because there is a notebook in the footwell under my mother’s dress with every hour since Thursday in it, and whatever else happens on this road, I am not going to be the one who stopped writing it down.
Two above the far mouth on the embankment, up on the ballast where the track crews walk.
Two on the flat roof of the body shop behind us.
One in the cab of the truck. Five, and probably six, and all of them are firing into a box thirty meters long with fourteen men in it.
“Down.” Lorenzo has my collar and my shoulder and puts me across the seat with his forearm over the back of my neck.
The glass at the top corner of the windshield turns to frost and holds. The door pillar takes three and rings like a church bell. Ciro grunts, a small annoyed sound, the sound of a man who has stubbed his toe, and then the car fills with the smell of copper.
“Ciro’s hit,” Tazio calls out.
“Where?”
“I do not…”
Tazio has the door open before anybody tells him not to.
He is nineteen years old, and he goes up out of that seat into the open to get his hands on Ciro’s shoulder.
A round goes through the meat of his upper arm and takes a strip out of it.
I get two fists in his belt and drag him back down below the glass line while he swears in his mother’s dialect.
The middle car is not going anywhere with the engine block eaten.
I get up over the back of the front seat with my mother’s dress in the footwell and my hands on Ciro Tebaldi.
Upper arm, high, inside, and it is coming out of him in pushes rather than in a flow, which means it is arterial and which means I have about three minutes to be right the first time. His fingers are already wrong when I take his wrist.
“Your tie.”
Lorenzo has it off and in my hand before I finish the word.
I get the band around his arm as high as it will sit, up in the armpit where the pressure has to go, and I need something rigid, and there is nothing rigid in this car that is not bolted to it, and then there is.
Ferro D’Amato’s fountain pen is in the breast pocket of Lorenzo’s jacket where he put it at 1:53 p.m. this afternoon.
I twist it into the knot and turn it a full rotation, and Ciro screams. I turn it again. The pushing stops, and I tie off the windlass with the ribbon out of my own hair. The barrel of the pen bends by maybe two degrees under my thumb, and the ink comes out of the nib and goes into his sleeve.
“Hold that. Do not let it slip. Look at me, Ciro. Butterscotch.”
“Yeah.”
“Say the names.”
“Gia. Rosalia.” His head goes back against the pillar. “The little one bites.”
The firing has been going for six minutes, and I am underneath it. Something in the shape of it has been bothering me since the second burst, and I do not have the room to unpack it.
Nobody is shooting at the middle of the car.
Everything is going into engine blocks, tires, the corners of glass, the concrete a foot above men’s heads. There are five shooters with elevation on both ends of a static target, and Peppe Mazza’s men have been behind that abutment for six minutes, and every one of them is still moving.
I put my head up to the level of the window frame for two seconds and look backward, because the front of this box is a truck and the back of it is a van and the sides of it are thirty feet of retaining wall, except that they are not.
Forty meters behind us, on the right shoulder, before the van, there is a gravel ramp going up the embankment to the tracks with a swing gate across it and a chain on the gate. Track crews use it. The van closed the road and stopped short of it, because the van’s job was the road.
“Tazio. Radio. Word for word.”
He has the radio up against his good shoulder with his other hand full of his own arm.
“Tell Fabrizio: maintenance apron, right shoulder, forty meters behind my position, chained swing gate, gravel to the ballast. Chase car takes the gate. My car reverses on his smoke. Peppe’s men come out backward under it, two at a time, and somebody carries the driver.”
Tazio repeats it into the radio without changing a syllable, and I hear Fabrizio’s voice come back flat and immediate. Moments later, the chase car goes past us in reverse at forty miles an hour and puts its trunk through the gate with a noise like a dropped piano.
Then Fabrizio is out of it and standing in the open on the far side, laying fire up onto the body shop roof in short controlled pairs, moving between the gate post and the wall the whole time.
He gets Peppe’s four men past him one at a time by name.
He goes back into the shade of the underpass on foot for the last one and comes out with a man over his shoulder.
Lorenzo drives us up the apron himself with his door open and his head below the sill and one hand on the wheel. I hold the pen in Ciro’s armpit with both of mine, and my knees are on broken glass through the dress. I will find that out later.
At 3:32 p.m. the shooting stops.
It does not come apart into single shots the way a fight comes apart when one side starts leaving. Five weapons quit inside the same second, the way a shift ends, and when our men get up onto the ballast, there is nobody on the embankment and nobody on the roof and no brass anywhere on either.
The box truck has no plates. The van is a stolen work van with the ignition punched.
Fourteen of ours went into that underpass. One of ours is going to lose the use of an arm, and one of ours has a strip out of his. The rest walk up a gravel ramp in their good suits.
We come into the crypt at 4:25 p.m.
There is lime dust in my hair from the concrete and Ciro Tebaldi’s blood dried to the inside of my right wrist where the glove ends.
The notebook came up out of the footwell with a boot print across the cover, and Lorenzo has a cut over his eyebrow from his own door frame and no tie.
Neither of us has changed, because there is a transfer executing in sixteen hours and forty minutes.
Father Emilio meets us at the bottom of the stairs, still fighting the same head cold he was losing to on Thursday, and he takes one look at the two of us and does not comment.
The chapel under Santa Caterina is a low stone room with four generations of D’Amato in the walls and thirty feet of Carrara between its ceiling and the place where I did compressions on Thursday morning.
It holds eleven people. Ottavia in the front on the aisle with Aldo’s glasses pushed up in her hair.
My father with his hands on the back of the pew in front of him.
Tazio at the door with his arm strapped and a fresh shirt somebody found, refusing to sit.
Fabrizio stands at Lorenzo’s shoulder as witness with a purple glitter elastic on his wrist and his cuffs still wet where he washed off another man’s blood in a sacristy sink.
There is no ring.
Lorenzo takes his brother’s out of his pocket, because it is the only one in the building. I take it from him, and I cannot make my hand put it down on the cushion.
“Give it here,” Ottavia orders.
She works her own wedding band off over a knuckle that has not let it move since 1965. It takes her a while, and nobody helps her.
“Sixty-one years, and Aldo bought it on credit.” She presses it into Lorenzo’s palm and closes his fingers on it the way he closed mine on Thursday. “It has never been on a dead hand, and it is not going to start today. Give her that one. You wear your brother’s.”
Lorenzo puts his brother’s ring on his own right hand and it fits.
Emilio starts the rite in the old form, the one from Thursday, and gets to the fourth promise, and I feel my stomach go, because the fourth promise is where the room stopped.
Lorenzo does not stop. He goes through it and past it and into the last line, the one nobody in my hearing has ever finished, and he holds both my hands while he does it.
“Finché il sangue non finisce (until the blood runs out).”
Emilio sneezes.
It detonates off the stone like a shot, and every armed man in the room moves half an inch. My father puts his hand flat on his chest, and Lorenzo leans in toward my ear with his mouth against my hair.
“You told me, the night Corva wanted the boathouse, that the last three men who married you all died indoors.”
“They did.”
“This is the furthest indoors I have ever been.”
I laugh into the shoulder of a man whose brother is in the wall behind him, and he laughs with his forehead against my temple. Ottavia makes a noise about the acoustics, and Fabrizio looks at the floor and smiles at it, and then it stops, and we are all standing in a crypt again.
We are married at 4:40 p.m. He waits a breath too long after he is told he may kiss me, and when he does, it is careful and short.
He keeps one hand at the back of my head the way he did on the marble on Thursday, and I put my palm flat against his chest and feel what his heart is actually doing.
Neither of us says one word about tonight.
The call comes to the estate at 7:40 p.m.
I am on the third stair with my shoes in one hand and the notebook in the other when Fabrizio takes it. I watch him go still, and Lorenzo is out of the dining room before the receiver is down.
“Fountain Street,” Fabrizio reports. “This afternoon. A courier came to the medical examiner’s loading entrance at 3:20 p.m. with a state lab manifest, correct forms, correct case number, a real transfer that was actually scheduled for Tuesday morning.
He signed the chain of custody. The technician on weekend duty released the retained specimens for the D’Amato case and nothing else, and she followed every step of the procedure the way she was taught. ”
“Kelleher?”
“At her sister’s in Pelham since noon. She is fine, and she is not fine.
” He turns the paper over. “The girl who signed it out is twenty-three. Marisol Vega. She took the Sunday shifts this month because they pay time and a half and her mother’s rent went up.
She has been crying down the phone to me since the call connected. ”
“The state lab has no record of the pickup,” I conclude.
“The state lab is closed on Sunday. There is no record of anything until 8 a.m. tomorrow, and the van on the camera has a plate that comes back to a landscaping company in New Rochelle.”
“He is finishing,” Lorenzo states, to the room and to nobody.
I sit down on the third stair and open the notebook across my knees, and I put the three entries in the column side by side, on paper, for the first time, the way I have been declining to do since 3:22 p.m. this afternoon.
Five shooters with elevation, twelve minutes, fourteen men in a box, and every round of it went into engines and tires and the corners of glass and the concrete over their heads, and the only two men bleeding tonight got that way reaching out of cover.
The road was closed, and the rail apron forty meters behind us was not, and the van stopped short of it.
Five weapons quit inside the same second, while they were still winning, and walked off a ridge they never had to leave, and took their brass with them.
Nobody spent that much ammunition trying to kill me.
They spent it to put every gun both families own onto one hundred meters of Cross Street at 3:20 p.m., twelve minutes from the county building, on the one day of the week with a single technician on the loading dock, and what my husband’s men have spent all evening calling an ambush was a diversion.