7. The Last Copy
THE LAST COPY
VALERIA
I make the decision the only way I was ever taught to make one, on paper, in two columns.
The notebook is the cheap kind, spiral, ninety-nine cents, because expensive notebooks make people think the contents are worth stealing.
On the left side of the page, I write what spending Queens buys: a second pair of eyes that have laid ambushes, a reader who knows which of his family’s numbers should exist, a husband who cannot protect a wife from a thing he has never seen.
On the right side, I write what it costs, and the right side is shorter and heavier: the last copy.
There has never been a hedge for trust, and I have looked.
Under both columns, I write the entry that decides it: he held the line at a table on Saturday to protect a county pathologist who is useful to him, and he held me all of last night like something he had already decided not to survive losing.
I tear the page out and burn it over the sink at 7 a.m., before the house is up.
At 9:04 a.m., Nadia Ferrante puts her phone face down on my mother-in-law’s breakfast table and tells nine men that the port block has settled.
Nobody cheers, because there is a coffin coming to this house on Wednesday, so what they do instead is exhale, all of them, at slightly different speeds.
Every official road out of Thursday morning has been closed inside four days.
There is one road left, and it is mine. I have been sitting on it since April.
“I need to go out,” I announce. “Today. Off the property.”
Corva’s cup stops moving.
“The gate has had fourteen photographers on it since the broadcast,” he objects. “There is a van from Channel 4 parked on the Kellermans’ grass.”
“Then we go out the service road.”
“Signora, after Cross Street…”
“After Cross Street, I would like to point out that the safest place in this county on Sunday afternoon was anywhere except a D’Amato convoy.” I set the cup down. “Three of us. No detail. Tazio drives, and he stays with the car.”
Lorenzo has not looked away from me since I opened my mouth.
“Where?”
“I will tell you in the car.”
Ottavia, who has been reading the arts section through Aldo’s glasses and appearing to hear nothing, turns a page. “Take the Buick from the barn. Nobody has photographed that car since 1998 because nobody wants to.”
We leave at 11:40 a.m. in the groundskeeper’s Buick with a bag of birdseed still in the trunk, down the service road, past the pump house and out through the gap in the hedge that lets onto the Kellermans’ back lane, and no one on Ocean follows us, because no one on Ocean is watching a twenty-eight-year-old station wagon with a rosary on the mirror.
“Nobody hears where we went,” I tell Tazio. “Not Corva, not Nadia, not the house.”
“Not Fabrizio?”
“Fabrizio is at the state lab with Nadia until 4, and he does not need one more thing in his hands today. You take your orders from me. This is one.”
“Yes, signora.”
We cross the Whitestone at 12:50 p.m. Lorenzo has said nothing for thirty miles.
At the light on Northern, I take his right hand off his knee, turn it over, and hold it in both of mine, and Giulio’s ring sits between my palms.
“Three weeks before the wedding, your brother put a folder in front of me in his study and let me read it for a quarter of an hour without interrupting me once.” My voice is level, and I intend to keep it that way as long as I can.
“My first two husbands died four months apart. There was a broker sitting on the far side of both of their last trades. Different instruments, different counterparties, same fee arrangement, same account taking the settlement.”
He does not move his hand.
“He told me he did not think I had killed anybody. He told me somebody had been using me as the story.” The light changes, and Tazio does not go.
“The marriage was an audit with a wedding stapled to the front of it. Nine months. He opened his family’s books to me, and I opened mine to him, and it was the kindest arrangement anybody has offered me since I was twenty-four. ”
“That is what you would not tell me in the blue room on Thursday night.”
“Some of it.”
“Say the rest.”
I look at the dry cleaner on the corner and the woman propping its door open with a milk crate, because I cannot do this looking at him.
“He was going down, and I got under him. He had my wrist. He put his mouth against my ear and he used the last air he had. He did not use it on his own name or on yours.” My throat closes on the first attempt, and I make it work on the second. “He said, finish it.”
Tazio has his eyes on the windshield and his hand off the wheel.
Lorenzo takes a long time. When it comes, it comes flat, and quiet, and he keeps hold of my hand the whole way through it.
“When the drug took, he had one breath in him. He looked past me and he found me and he got out one word.” He swallows. “Tell.”
“Tell.”
“That is all of it. Tell, and then the window.”
Two halves of the same sentence, spent in two directions inside the same minute by a man with one breath left, and neither of us has any idea what the middle of it was.
“He was talking to both of us,” I say. “He was not saying goodbye. He was assigning work.”
I put my face against his shoulder in the back of a station wagon on Northern Boulevard, and he turns his head and puts his mouth in my hair and does not tell me it is all right, because he is not a liar about the large things.
After a while he says, “Thank you for the order you told it in,” and I take that into a small room in my chest and close the door on it, because the order I told it in was the order that kept me from crying.
The place is on 46th under the elevated, between a tile wholesaler and a lot full of school buses.
The woman at the desk is called Doreen Pyle by her lanyard, which also carries eleven enamel pins, and she has a desk fan aimed at a bowl of hard candy, so the wrappers lift and settle while she talks.
“You’re on 6C? That’s Cimino.” She does not look up from her monitor. “Gate’s twenty-four hours, elevator’s out on three, so use the freight, and the roll doors stick if you don’t lift on the handle. Take a candy, they’re from Easter.”
The unit is rented to A. Cimino, who does not exist. The gate code is four digits Giulio made me repeat back to him twice in April, standing in his study with his back to me so that I would not see his face while I said them.
The key is the brass one with the green paint on the bow, off his ring, out of a paper sack the county returned on Friday night with a receipt taped to the front.
Unit 6C sits between a bass boat under a tarp and a stack of Christmas inflatables with a nine-foot snowman folded over the top of the pile, one enormous vinyl arm hanging out of the plastic wrap.
Lorenzo stops in front of it.
“My brother hid the thing he was killed over between a boat and a snowman.”
“He would have been delighted about that. He’d have made it a whole bit at the table.”
“He would have gone on about it until Nonna threw bread at him.”
We laugh in a storage corridor in Queens with a stranger’s snowman watching, and then the door is in front of us again, and the laugh goes wherever laughs go in buildings like this.
The door sticks. He lifts on the handle.
Nineteen banker’s boxes on steel shelving, labeled in his small square capitals. A folding table. A clip lamp plugged into the corridor outlet through a gap under the door.
There are two chairs. One is open, facing the table, with a coat over the back of it.
The second is still folded against the wall, and beside it on the floor there is an unopened box of the tea I drink, the loose kind, from the place on Court Street, and a mug turned upside down on a paper towel.
On the shelf by the door, arranged like a kitchen in a dollhouse: an electric kettle, an espresso pot for one, a jar of sugar cubes with a spoon standing in it.
And on a hook above all of it, a wool cardigan in my size, charcoal, the tags still on.
I asked him once, in March, why his family kept every room at sixty-four degrees. He said cold rooms keep meetings short. He bought the cardigan anyway, for a room he never got to bring me to, and he stocked his own sugar, three to a cup.
Taped to the inside of the roll door there is a receipt. Thirty-six months of rent, paid in cash, dated the Wednesday before our wedding.
“He paid it out to 2029,” Lorenzo says.
“He paid for time he did not think he would get to use.”
I stand in a storage corridor in Queens holding the tags of a cardigan and come apart quietly for a while about a man I never once kissed like I meant it.
Lorenzo stands near and does not touch me, and when I put the cardigan on over my dress and reach for a box, he takes it out of my hands and carries it to the table.
Then he takes off his jacket and folds it and puts it on the concrete in front of the shelving, and unfolds the second chair and dusts the seat with his sleeve before he lets me near it.
“Your knees have glass in them.”
“They do.”
“Kneel on that or sit in this, and I will hand you boxes.”
We work. He hands, I read. Copies of the D’Amato general ledger going back nine years, the consortium’s audited statements beside the ones that were actually filed, wire confirmations, counterparty schedules, six years of the broker’s settlement instructions clipped in date order.
The folder from the study has four siblings in box 6.
Giulio labeled two of the boxes in the second row TAXES (REAL) and TAXES (FILED), and I laugh before I can stop it, one ugly grateful bark in the cold.
“He filed that joke where only an auditor would ever find it.”
“He wrote it for me.” I wipe my face with the cardigan cuff. “He put a joke where I would find it after he died. Who does that?”
“My brother,” Lorenzo says, and his voice does not hold. We let both of those stand.
Box 11 has a gap in the sequence, a single sheet lifted out of a sleeve, and the sleeve is empty. I hold it up to the lamp and then I hold it out to him, because we are done with rooms where things are not said out loud.
“Something lived here. One page. And on Thursday morning, during the vows, your brother put two fingers against his breast pocket twice, the way a man checks a thing he is frightened of losing. Whatever this was, he was carrying it. It was not in the county’s inventory, and it is not in this room.”
Lorenzo looks at the empty sleeve for a long moment. “Then somebody has it.”
“Somebody has it,” I agree, and we put box 11 back with its gap facing out, where we can find it again.
Box 14, under the settlement schedules, holds one page that does not belong to any sequence at all.
Thirty years old, brittle at the fold, typed on a machine with a bad lowercase e: the founding instrument of a family provision.
Four signatures at the foot. Three of them are names I can read, and I will be reading them again.
The fourth has been inked out by hand. Not redacted, not cut away.
Somebody sat with a pen and went over that name in tight overlapping strokes, over and over, long past the point of illegibility, the way you scratch out a thing you cannot stand to see, and then kept the document anyway for thirty years.
I put it in my bag. It is the only thing I take without a word, and I do not have the word yet. When I do, it will not be said in a storage unit.
Then box 17 gives me the funding leg.
I lay the chain out physically, sheet by sheet, down the length of the folding table, the way I used to do it for juries of one Don at a time.
Fee letter to settlement instruction. Settlement instruction to correspondent bank.
Correspondent to custodian. The broker’s fees on my first husband’s last trade and my second husband’s last trade, and then the retainer, the one that begins nine months before Thursday and pays monthly through the week of my wedding.
Patient money. Salaried murder. Every hop of the chain narrows, and the last hop lands, and I stand at the end of my own table refusing it.
Every payment clears from one custodial account at a three-branch bank in Providence.
The account holder is not a shell and not a person.
It is a family instrument, thirty years old, funded by both households and audited by neither, because auditing it would be an obscenity, and its statements file under the name it took at its second amendment, in a paragraph nobody at Saturday’s table could produce the original language for. The D’Amato Continuity Trust.
The widows’ provision. The fund that has buried every woman either family ever made into a widow.
Lorenzo is holding a box against his hip, and he has stopped moving.
“Say it once more.”
“The killing has a checking account,” I tell him, “and it is the one with the widows’ names on it.”
He comes around the table and looks down the chain, hop by hop, the whole length of it.
The lamp buzzes. Somewhere below us, a roll door comes down, and a car alarm chirps twice.
I take my notebook out of my bag and open it flat on the end of the folding table, in a room full of their paper.
Until this afternoon, the word for what I keep in it was notes. It is not notes. Theirs is a ledger of what was done to us, kept in beautiful order by the people doing it, and mine is the one that answers it.
I am a beneficiary of that trust. I have been one since I was twenty-four years old. It has sent me a check inside a condolence card twice in nine years, and I cashed both.
And then the arithmetic I have been holding off all afternoon arrives, and it arrives with teeth.
On Saturday, at a table with eleven people around it, I made one demand that was not strategy.
The widows’ provision. The original one, as written.
I said it out loud, twice, in a room where somebody has been paying for my funerals out of that exact instrument for nine years.
I watched Ferrante flip pages and fail to find the original language, and I thought I was sentimental.
I was not sentimental. I was loud.
Whoever rewrote that fund into a murder account heard a woman at a contract table ask for the one document that unmakes him, by name, as her wedding term.
I did not spend my last secret today. I spent it on Saturday, between the soup and the signatures, and I did not know I was spending it, and the only thing I do not know yet is which of the eleven people in that room he heard it with.