20. Tuesday
TUESDAY
LORENZO
By six in the morning there are nineteen men on my house and I have counted them twice, and when Tazio tells me the number the second time, I make him walk me around the property and show me each one, which takes forty minutes and is the only forty minutes of the last two days in which I have been able to breathe.
“You are going to want twenty-two, Lorenzo,” Tazio says at the end of it.
“Why twenty-two?”
“Because you are going to keep counting, and nineteen is going to stop being enough at about noon, and I would rather do it now than at noon.”
“Get twenty-two.”
He goes to do it. He does not tell me I am being unreasonable, which is what I pay him for, and he does not tell me I am right either, which is the other thing I pay him for.
The last man on the walk is Ciro Tebaldi, at the south door, where I put him because it is the coldest post and he has been insufferable since my wife saved his life with a pen, and he needs to be somewhere he can be miserable about it in private.
He comes to attention when he sees me. He does it badly, because he is holding something.
“Ciro.”
“Boss.”
“What is in your coat?”
“Nothing is in my coat.”
There is a small sound from inside Ciro Tebaldi’s coat.
“He was sitting in the window,” Ciro says, staring at a point about four inches over my left shoulder, “and he was crying about it, and I could hear him from out here, and it is forty-one degrees.”
“So you took the Don’s cat on watch with you?”
“I took him on watch with me, yes.”
Soldo puts his head out through the gap in the buttons, considers the estate, the men on it, and the current state of the family, and goes back in.
“Twenty-two men,” I say.
“Twenty-three,” Ciro says, and does not smile, and I walk away before I do.
I have run this family for eleven years.
In eleven years I have been shot at four times, and I have never once put nineteen men on this house.
A man wrote whatever happens, you will be taken care of in my wife’s direction and put it in an envelope with her name practiced on it, and I have become a completely different animal, and the new animal is not interested in proportion.
She is in the study when I come in, and she has not been to bed.
The sheet is out of the bag, under glass now, weighted flat at the corners. She has a lamp on it at an angle. Her hair is up with a pencil in it, and she is standing over that page the way a surgeon stands over a table.
There is a second page beside it, and it takes me a moment to understand what I am looking at, and when I do, I have to stop just inside the door.
It is a legal pad. She has filled two thirds of it.
Valeria Rinaldi. V. R. D’Amato. Valeria R. D’Amato. V. Rinaldi D’Amato.
Over and over, in variations, some of them with the letters leaning the other way like a schoolgirl’s, and the further down the page she has gone, the stranger they have become, until near the bottom there are four or five that do not look like any human being’s signature at all.
“I have been trying to make a new one,” she says.
“Valeria.”
“Something he does not have. Something he has never seen.” She has not looked up. “I have been at it since two.”
“And?”
“And I can take every single one of them.” Her voice does not do anything.
“I make it, and then I look at it, and I can see exactly where I would start if I wanted it. There is no such thing as a signature a patient person cannot have. I have known that professionally for twenty years. I have never once had to know it about myself.”
Her own book is at the far end of that table, where the lamp does not reach. I have had a hundred chances at it since July and I have never read a word of it.
I go around the table. I take the pen out of her hand and I put it down, and then I take the pencil out of her hair, and she lets me do both.
“Then from today you do not sign anything,” I say.
“That is not…”
“Not a check. Not a receipt. Not a card for somebody’s mother.
If a thing needs your name on it, it needs your face in the room.
” I put the legal pad in the drawer and shut it.
I do not go near her book. I took that off her once, in July, and she gave it to me, and I have been thinking about the second and a half it took her ever since.
“He can have your handwriting. He cannot have you standing there.”
She breathes out through her nose.
“That is going to be extremely inconvenient,” she says.
“Yes.”
“All right.”
“They are not from one sitting,” she says without looking up.
“Say that again.”
“Eleven rows. At least five sittings, maybe seven.” She moves the lamp two inches.
“Look at the ink. Rows one and two are the same pen. Row three is a different pen, and it starts wet, so it was a fresh one. Rows four through six are back to something like the first pen but not the same, the tip is worn differently. And here.” Her finger hovers.
“Row nine has a hesitation at the start of every single one. He was cold. Or he had not done it for a while and he was warming up.”
“How long is a while?”
“That is the question, is it not?”
She straightens up and rolls her neck, and I hear it go, and I want to put my hands on her and I do not, because when she is like this, touching her is like putting your hand on a machine that is running.
“Lorenzo, this is not a page he made for me.” She says it quietly. “You do not sit down five times over an unknown period of years to produce a threat. This is a working document. He tore it out of the back of something and gave it away, and he gave it away because he does not need it anymore.”
“Because he has it.”
“Because he has it,” she says.
Then she goes very still.
I have learned it the way you learn weather.
“What?”
“Get me the marriage license.”
“Valeria.”
“The one from Queens. Giulio’s. In the folder, in the second box, on the left.” She is bent over the glass again with the lamp all the way down. “Now, please.”
I get it.
She puts it beside the sheet and she looks from one to the other for a long time. Then she puts both hands on the table and leans on them, and she does not say anything for so long that I come around to her side.
“Row one,” she says.
“I see it.”
“No, you do not. Look under the name. There is a mark under the N.”
There is. A small line, half a centimeter, more of a flick than an underline, so slight that you would take it for the pen catching.
“My mother did that,” she says. “So I did it. I stopped at twenty-two, because a man in an office told me it looked girlish.”
She puts one finger on the license, where there is no flick under the N, and one on the top of the sheet, where there is.
“Rows one through four have it. Rows five onward do not. I met Domenico at twenty-three.”
The room gets very cold.
“Say the rest of it.”
“The specimen he started from is older than my first husband.” She turns and looks at me and there is nothing in her face at all.
“There was no widow yet. He got hold of my handwriting when I was a girl who had never buried anybody, and then he sat down and got good at it, and then men started dying.”
“That does not mean…”
“It means I was not selected out of a pattern,” she says. “It means I was the reason there is a pattern.”
Keane comes to the house at half past nine and does not sit down.
That is how I know. In nine years that man has never once refused a chair.
“I have brought you something, and I am going to ask you to read it standing up,” he says, “because you will want to be able to walk out of the room afterward.”
It is four pages, typed, stapled, and there is no letterhead on it.
“What is this?”
“It is the other side’s opening statement.” He puts it in my hands. “Nobody asked me for it. I wrote it last night because I could not sleep, and I wrote it as well as I could, because a lawyer who writes his enemy’s case badly is a lawyer who is lying to his client.”
I stand in the hall of my mother’s house, and I read four pages about my wife.
They are very good. There is no hysteria in them and no adjective doing work it did not earn. It is only facts, in an order, and the order is the whole weapon.
She was the last person to enter her husband’s storage unit before his death, alone, at four in the morning.
She removed a box, and it is in her handwriting.
She was holding the device that killed him.
She has taken three payments from an account she cannot explain.
She married the dead man’s brother three days before the funeral, which gives her a motive with a dollar sign on it that twelve people will understand in eleven seconds.
And she is a woman who has buried three husbands, which the writer of these four pages does not even have to say out loud, because he can simply list them, in order, with dates.
Not one word of it is invented.
“He does not need to fabricate anything,” Keane says.
“Everything on those pages is true, and every single piece of it was arranged. He has not been building a case. He finished it, and he put it on a shelf, and it has been sitting up there for years getting better with age, and all he has to do to take it down is make one telephone call to somebody bored.”
“And then?”
“Then it does not matter what is true. It matters what is documented.” He takes his glasses off and rubs them on his tie, which is the only nervous thing I have ever seen him do.
“And the documents are beautiful, Lorenzo. I have been doing this for thirty-one years, and they are the most beautiful documents I have ever seen.”
I look at the four pages in my hand.
“You want me to burn this,” I say.
“I would prefer it.”
“I do not burn paper anymore.” I fold it once and put it inside my coat. “Make me two copies and put one with your will.”
I go and see my brother at two o’clock.
That is what I have been calling it in my head all morning, going to see Fabrizio, and the fact that I have been arranging a reason to do it is the thing I would like taken out of my head with a spoon.
He is at the New Rochelle office with his coat off doing something to a filing cabinet with a screwdriver, because he cannot sit in a room where a drawer sticks, and he says my name before he turns around.
“You should have called. I would have come.”
“I wanted the drive.”
He looks at me for slightly too long, and puts the screwdriver down.
We do forty minutes of actual work, because there is actual work, and he is good at it.
At some point I stop being able to hear my own heart.
He has a way of making a room become only the room.
When I was fifteen and my father was in one of his months, I used to walk to wherever Fabrizio was and sit down and not say anything, and after a while the house would go back to being a house.
Then I say it, in the middle of something else, in the tone I would use for any small thing.
“Where were you Tuesday?”
He does not react at all for about a second and a half.
Then he says, “White Plains. Ettore had the appointment with the cardiologist, and he would not let Valeria take him and he would not take a car service, so I drove him. He went in at ten past eleven and he came out at twenty past two and I sat in the parking lot for three hours and read the entire newspaper, including the part about boats.”
“Ettore.”
“He asked me in June. He did not want her to know.” He picks the screwdriver back up and puts it in the drawer where it lives. “He was frightened, Lorenzo. He is a proud man having a frightening year. I did not think it was mine to spread around.”
“No.”
“Do you want me to have him confirm it?”
And there it is, out in the open, on the table between us, and I have to stand there in it.
“Fabrizio.”
“You do not have to build a reason to ask me where I was.” He says it without any edge at all.
He says it gently, which is worse. “Twenty-two years. Ask me. Any day, any hour, and I will tell you, and if you want it checked, I will hand you the names of people who will check it. That is not a hard thing you are doing to me. The hard thing is watching you spend two hours getting to it.”
I look at the floor of my brother’s office.
“Something came to the house,” I say. “For her.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
He is quiet.
Then he says, “Is she all right?”
And I say no, because it is true, and because I have not said it out loud to anybody, and because he is the only person left on this earth who has known me since before I was this.
He takes that in the way he takes everything, which is completely, and he does not offer me a single word of comfort, because he knows I do not take them, and instead he does what he has done since we were boys, which is go and find the piece of the problem that can actually be carried.
“You have how many on the house?”
“Twenty-two by now.”
“Twenty-two of yours.” He is already reaching for his coat.
“That is twenty-two men who all came up in the same three streets and all know each other’s mothers, and if there is one that has been bought, the other twenty-one will not see it, because you do not see the man you were an altar boy with. ”
I have been awake for two days and I had not thought of it, and he thought of it in four seconds, standing up, with a coat half on.
“So I will put my own on the perimeter,” he says. “Outside yours. Men who owe me and do not know your people, and I will rotate them on no schedule, and I will not tell you who they are, because if you do not know, then nobody can get it out of you at a dinner.”
“Fabrizio.”
“And I will do the vetting myself. Not Tazio. Not you. Me.” He shrugs his coat on. “I will see to it myself.”
And I stand in my brother’s office with two days of no sleep in me and a woman at home who has been drawn and copied since she was a girl, and something in my chest lets go for the first time since Tuesday, and I hear myself say thank you.
He puts his hand on the back of my neck on the way past, the way our mother used to, and he says, “Go home to your wife.”
I get in the car.
Halfway across the bridge it occurs to me that I never told him it happened on Tuesday.
I sit with that for about a mile and a half, and then I do what a tired man does with a thing like that, which is turn it over and find the door in it. The door is right there, and it opens easily: I asked him where he was on Tuesday. I said the day myself.
Of course he knew.
I put the window down and let the cold come in, and I drive the rest of the way home to the twenty-two men on my house, and the ones outside them that I will not be told about, arranged by the only person I have ever been able to hand a thing to and stop thinking about it.