22. Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREE
LORENZO
Ciro Tebaldi comes to see me at eleven in the morning and stands in front of my desk for a full minute without saying anything, which is not like him, and I let him do it, because I have known that face since he was nineteen and it is the face of a man who has rehearsed something in a car.
“Boss.”
“Ciro.”
“I want to ask you about a thing.” He is holding his hands behind his back the way he does when they are sweating. “It is not a work thing.”
“Sit down.”
“I would rather stand.”
“Sit down, Ciro.”
He sits down like a man being lowered into water.
“There is a girl,” he says.
I put my pen down.
“Rosalia,” he says. “She works the register at the place on Belmont, the one with the bad awning. Six months. Her mother likes me, which I am told is the difficult part.”
“It is the only part.”
“That is what my sister says.” He rubs his palms on his knees.
“I want to ask her. And I do not know how you buy a ring, boss. I do not know how much. I do not know if there is a person you are supposed to go to or if you just walk into a store like a normal man and they can tell you have never done it before.”
I look at him for a second.
“How much do you have?”
“That is the other thing.” He is going red. “I do not want to say the number out loud in this room.”
“Ciro.”
“It is not a lot.”
“Nobody has ever asked me this,” I say, which is true, and which surprises me as I say it. “Not once. In eleven years.”
“That is because everybody is frightened of you.”
“And you are not?”
“I am extremely frightened of you,” Ciro says. “But I have thought about it, and being frightened of you is going to be a much smaller problem than doing this wrong.”
I laugh. It is the first time I have made that sound in three weeks, and it comes out rusty and wrong and it feels like a coat I have not worn since the spring.
“Go to Gilda Renzi’s brother in Pelham,” I tell him. “Say I sent you. Do not let him show you anything in a case at the front, make him bring out the box he keeps in the back. When he tells you a number, say nothing at all and look at the wall for six seconds. He will come down.”
“Six seconds.”
“Six. And Ciro. Whatever you spend, do not tell her what it cost, ever, not in forty years, because the day she finds out is the day it stops being the ring and starts being the money.”
He writes none of it down and he stands up and he is grinning at the floor.
“Thank you, boss.”
“Get out of my office.”
At the door he stops.
“South door again tonight?”
“South door again tonight.”
“Good,” he says. “He knows where to find me now.”
Valeria is not telling me something.
She has been not telling me something since three o’clock this morning, when she got out of bed and stood in the middle of the room for two minutes and then got back into it, and lay there on her back with her eyes open until the sky went gray.
I know because I was awake. I have not properly slept since Woonsocket.
At six she got up and went down to the ballroom and stood over the eleven for half an hour without touching them, and then she came back up and showered and put on a color, and at breakfast she talked to me about Concetta and about Dr. Kelleher and about whether we can get the woman a death certificate without a body, and she was warm, and she was funny, and she was somewhere else the entire time.
I do not ask her.
I want that in the record, because of what happens later. I had one whole day in which I could have asked my wife what she found at three in the morning, and I decided to give her the room, because I have learned that she puts things down when she is ready and not one hour before.
That is the reason I gave myself.
The real reason is that I was afraid of what she had found, and I did not want to hear it on a Wednesday.
They come at twenty past two in the morning.
There are six of them and they come over the east wall in two groups, and they are good, and they are not from here.
That is the first thing Tazio says on the radio, and it is the last complete sentence anybody says for four minutes.
Not from here. No local man comes over the east wall of this house, because every local man knows what my father put in the ground along that wall in 1991.
Two of them find it.
That noise wakes the whole property, and after that it is not a robbery or a warning or a message, it is simply men with rifles moving toward a building with people asleep in it.
I get Valeria into the interior stair with Tazio and I go the other way, and I take the ground floor with four men, and somewhere in the first thirty seconds of it I stop being a person who runs a family and become the other thing.
The first one I meet is in the corridor outside the ballroom.
He is younger than me and better armed than me, and he makes the single mistake that men who train in rooms make, which is that he tries to raise a long weapon inside a narrow hallway.
I get inside it. I put him into the wall with my shoulder and I take his head in both hands and I put it into the frame of my mother’s ballroom door, twice, and the second time is not necessary and I do it anyway.
Then it is very loud for a while.
I get hit twice. Once in the vest, which puts me on the floor and takes my breath for four or five seconds that last a year, and once across the outside of the left arm.
Nunzio Farro is shot through the hand.
Peppe Mazza takes one in the thigh and keeps going and puts two men down in the orangery and lives to be insufferable about it forever.
And at the south door, Ciro Tebaldi holds a doorway alone for a minute and forty seconds against two men, because the south door is the closest exterior door to the interior stair, and the interior stair is where my wife is.
I get there at the end of it.
There is a man face down on the gravel outside with Ciro’s second magazine in him and there is another one in the boot room with the back of his head opened, and Ciro is sitting on the floor with his shoulders against the door he has just kept shut, in the dark, with both legs out in front of him like a boy on a beach.
Both of his hands are pressed over the middle of his chest, and the dark under them is spreading.
“Boss,” he says.
“Do not talk.”
“It is all right.”
“Ciro.” I am already on my knees. I get my hands on it, and it is bad. It is bad in the way where you know inside a second and a half, and you spend the rest of your life pretending that you did not. “Look at me. You are going to be extremely annoying about this for months.”
“He got past me and then he came back,” Ciro says, puzzled about it. “Why would he come back?”
“Do not talk.”
“It is in my coat.”
“What?”
“Boss. It is in my coat.” His hand goes up about four inches and gives up. “I went Tuesday. I did the six seconds.”
I put my hand inside his coat, into the inside pocket, the same pocket a kitten sat in for two hours on a cold morning with its head out through the buttons, and there is a small hard box in there, and my fingers close around it.
“You already bought it,” I say.
“I already bought it.” And he grins at me in the dark, this man, with his life going out onto the tiles of my boot room, absolutely delighted with himself. “I was never going to ask you first. I wanted to hear what you would say.”
“Ciro.”
“Six seconds,” he says. “You were right. He came down two hundred.”
He dies about forty seconds later, and it is not peaceful and it does not look like anything, and I am holding the back of his head off the floor when it happens, and I stay like that for a while after there is no reason to.
Fabrizio arrives during the last of it.
I find out afterward what he did, because he does not tell me: he came in over the west wall alone, and he took the two who were working their way along the terrace toward the interior stair, and he did it with a knife because a shot from that angle would have gone into the stairwell where my wife was standing.
He is the reason there are four of them dead and not eight of us.
He comes into the boot room at some point after. I have not moved. He looks at Ciro, and then he crouches down on the other side of him and puts two fingers against Ciro’s throat, which is not for information, and then he takes his own coat off and puts it over him from the chest up.
“Nonna is on her landing with the door open and the Beretta on her knee, and she has refused to come down,” he says. “She says the stairs are the only part of this house she has ever been able to hold and she is not being carried off them at eighty-six.” He does not look up from Ciro. “Twenty-two.”
I look up.
“He counted the cat,” Fabrizio says. “On Monday. On the walk. He told everybody in the kitchen that there were twenty-three men on this house and he was going to keep saying it until you agreed.”
And I put my face in my hands in front of my brother in a room with a dead man in it, and Fabrizio Serra puts one hand flat between my shoulder blades and keeps it there and does not say one single word, which is the only correct thing that anybody did that night.
Soldo will go to the south door in the morning.
Nobody will see him decide to do it. Somebody will prop the boot room open for the men working, and by nine o’clock there will be a very small cat sitting on the mat about four feet inside the doorway, facing out, upright, with his tail around his feet.
He will still be there at noon.
He will be there at four, and Valeria will go and sit on the floor beside him with her back against the wall and not pick him up, and she will stay there until it is dark.
He will go back the next morning.
He will do that for sixteen days, and then he will stop, and I will not know which of those two things is worse, and neither will she, and we will never discuss it.
She will unwrap the arm at about eleven tomorrow morning and swear at me in Italian for a full thirty seconds.