28. A Chair
A CHAIR
LORENZO
The car goes down the drive at four minutes past seven, and I sit at the table and let it.
He said I am asking you and I sat down, and my legs did it before I had decided anything, and I have spent eleven years telling men in this house that a decision you make with your body is still a decision.
Soldo comes off the mat when the tires change on the gravel. He goes to the south door and stands with his nose an inch off it and does not scratch and does not make a sound, and after a while he lies down across the gap at the bottom with his chin on the sill.
He has picked a second one to wait for.
“Boss.”
Tazio is in the doorway with his shoes on.
“Two cars went out. Him, and Ruggero four minutes behind, because I put Ruggero on him at six when you were upstairs and I did not ask you first.” He does not apologize for it. “You can have that conversation with me now or later. Later is cheaper.”
“Later.”
“Where is Ruggero?”
“Bond Street. Corner at the far end, bakery box on the passenger seat, and the box is not a prop, he stopped for it, and I have told him what I think about that.” Tazio comes in. “Boss. What is he doing there?”
“He is going to go into that house and offer a nineteen-year-old girl a bus and a name and money in her own hand,” I say. “And she is going to say no. And I do not know what he does after that, and neither does he.”
Tazio stands very still.
“And the man in the house?”
“Bruno Loffredo. Fifty-one. He is the stepfather. The girl’s name is Nella Moro, and her grandmother is card twenty-eight and has been dead since ninety-six.” I turn Giulio’s ring. “Do not stop Fabrizio going in. Stop him coming out with anything that is not a piece of paper.”
“That is not an order.”
“No.”
“That is you not being able to say it.” Tazio’s jaw sets.
“Give him a sentence or give him nothing, because Ruggero is thirty-one and he has a kid and he is going to do exactly what comes out of your mouth, and if you give him a shape instead of a sentence then whatever he does at half past nine is going to be his to carry and not yours, and I have watched you do that to men before and I have never said anything about it until now.”
Nobody in eleven years has spoken to me like that who was not my brother, and both of my brothers are gone, and I understand that this is what the rest of my life is going to be like: people saying true things to me because there is nobody left who is allowed to.
“If Fabrizio Serra puts a hand on Bruno Loffredo,” I say, “Ruggero puts him on the floor and does not shoot him. If Fabrizio walks out with the girl, nobody touches either of them, Ruggero follows and reports. If Fabrizio walks out alone, Ruggero lets him go, calls me from the car, no radio.”
“That is an order.”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Tazio says, and goes.
Keane comes at eight with two cases and a cardboard box, and he is wearing a tie, which nobody has asked him to do in nine years.
“Sit down,” I say.
“I am all right standing, Mr D’Amato.”
“Sit down.”
He does not move.
“There is an irregularity in the Providence property account,” he says, “and I want to say at the outset that I identified it and that I have been reconstructing the history, and I would ask that you let me finish.”
“When did you find it?”
“I have been working through it for some weeks…”
“Martin.”
He stops.
I have not used his first name in nine years. His face comes apart in a way I am not ready for, and he says:
“June of 2011.”
I put my hand on the back of a chair.
“Fifteen years.”
“Yes.”
“You just tried to tell me you found it in the spring.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I have had fifteen years to write that sentence and it is the only one I ever managed,” Keane says, and his voice goes, and he does not get it back for a moment. “I am sorry. I have practiced the other one in the car since half past five, and it did not survive you saying my name.”
It comes out badly after that, which is how I know it is the truth.
There is a line in the general ledger called maintenance, legacy sites.
It was my mother’s. It ran about eleven thousand a year for fifteen years after she died, because taking a line out of a set of books draws more attention than leaving it in, and my father left it, and nobody ever asked what the nothing was.
In 2011 it went to two hundred and nine thousand.
“It took me a weekend,” Keane says. He is looking at the tablecloth. “Nine standing orders. First of the month. Every one into an account in a woman’s own name with no man on the mandate. It is not sophisticated. It was never built to survive an audit. It was built to survive a husband.”
“And you did not come in.”
“I stood outside that door for forty minutes with the printout.” He puts both hands flat on the table on either side of nothing, and it is the second time I have seen that in twelve hours and I do not think he knows he is doing it.
“And then I sat in my car outside a Stop and Shop on the Sunday and tried to make the arithmetic come out in favor of stopping it, and I could not, and I have tried every June since and I have never once managed it.” He swallows.
“I did not decide to be part of it. I noticed about two years in that I already was.”
“And you stopped sitting down.”
“I did not decide that either.”
I go and stand at the window because there is a thing arriving in me and I do not want it done in front of him.
Two hundred and nine thousand dollars a year. For fifteen years. Out of an account that I have signed off, personally, in ink, every March, in the study at the end of this hall, sitting in my father’s chair with a coffee going cold at my elbow, since the year I took this family.
Eleven times.
“I signed it,” I say.
“Mr D’Amato.”
“Eleven times I have signed that account off.” My voice is not doing what I want.
“Do you know what I do in March? I do the summaries and the exceptions and then I initial the rest of it, because the rest of it is fifteen hundred lines and I have men waiting outside the door, and I have told myself for eleven years that the reason I can do that is that I have you.”
“Yes.”
“So I paid for it.” I turn round. “Say it back to me so I can hear it in somebody else’s mouth.”
Keane’s face is gray.
“The house paid for it,” he says.
“I paid for it. Fourteen men. My brother.” I have to stop. “He was killed with my money out of my mother’s line and I initialled it eleven times without reading it and I have spent this entire month calling myself the man who is going to find out who did this.”
And then it gets worse, because Keane opens the second case.
“There is one more thing and I have to say it now or I will not.”
He puts a printout in front of me. Four years of the Providence account. Somebody has gone down the legacy sites column in blue ballpoint and put a small careful mark against every March.
“That is Giulio’s hand,” he says.
I look at it a long time.
“He asked me for it on the eleventh of June,” Keane says.
“He asked the way a man asks for a thing he already has the shape of. He came back on the twenty-sixth and asked me two questions. Did the line predate your tenure. And could it be characterized as your mother’s.
” He does not look away. “I do not believe he knew about the men. I want that said, because there is going to be nobody else in this house who says a fair thing about him. I think Giulio found a slush line and thought he had found a lever.”
“Against Fabrizio.”
“Against you.”
I sit down opposite him because my legs have done it again.
“He read it,” I say.
“Sir?”
“He read the books.” I am looking at the small blue marks and they are the marks of a man going slowly down a column with a ruler under the line.
“Fifteen years. My father did not read it. I did not read it. Fabrizio did not need to read it because he wrote it. My mother is dead, and Ciro was nineteen then.” My throat closes.
“Giulio read it. Giulio, who could not run a restaurant, who I have called a disappointment in front of other men, who I have thought of for eleven years as a man I was carrying. He is the only D’Amato in fifteen years who actually did the job. ”
Keane says nothing at all.
“And it killed him,” I say. “He did the one thing I have wanted from him since we were boys, and it killed him in five weeks.”
“When did Fabrizio come to you?”
“The second of July. Ten to seven in the morning, in the car park behind my office. He got into the passenger seat and closed the door and said, he has asked you about the eleventh of June, and I would like to know what you told him.” Keane’s hands are shaking now, and he does not hide it.
“And he was not frightening. That is the thing I have never been able to put down. He was polite and he was tired and when I told him he said thank you, and then he asked after my mother by name. She has been in Fatima House four years and I have mentioned it in front of him twice in nine years.”
“And Giulio died on the nineteenth.”
“Yes. Seventeen days.”
“What did he have with him?” I say.
Keane blinks.
“Sir?”
“In the car. In your passenger seat. What was he holding?”
“A bakery box,” Keane says. “On his knee. The one on Ives Street with the string.”
And the floor of my dining room goes about four inches to the left.
Because on the morning of the nineteenth of July, at twenty past seven, I came down into my mother’s kitchen and there was a white box on the counter with the string still on it, and my brother Giulio was standing at the sink eating a sfogliatella out of his hand over the basin so as not to drop the flakes, and he said these are still warm, get one before Ciro comes down, and I took one, and I ate it standing up next to him, and that is the last conversation I ever had with him.
There were nine in the box. I remember, because Giulio counted them out loud and complained about it.
Fabrizio brings a box.
He brought one to Keane’s car. Ruggero is sitting on the corner of Bond Street this morning with a bakery box on his passenger seat because he stopped, because everybody in this family stops at that shop, because he taught us to.
I get up and I go out into the hall and I stand there.
She is in the study with the two piles and a pot of tea gone cold, and she has been awake twenty-seven hours, and she has done her hair, which frightens me more than if she had not.
I tell her standing up, from the front, and I do not arrange any of it. The line. The eleven thousand that became two hundred and nine. Keane’s fifteen Junes. Giulio’s blue marks and the two questions in that order. Seventeen days.
And the box.
She listens with her hands in her lap and does not write anything down, which she has not once failed to do in five weeks.
There are two of them at her elbow now, the one from July with the mark on the cover and the one she is in.
When I finish, she is quiet.
“How long have you known?” she says.
“Fifty minutes. Forty of them were Keane talking.”
“You came straight here.”
“Yes.”
She looks at the two piles on the desk for a while.
“I have been sitting in this room since ten past seven,” she says, “working out how to tell you that his confession this morning was steered, and that he chose which of two true things you and I were allowed to have, and that whatever else was underneath the Catania file was the real reason.” Her voice is level.
“I had it at nine minutes past. And I have been in here for an hour deciding when to give it to you.”
I do not say anything.
“I had settled on after you had slept,” she says.
“Valeria.”
“I want to be exact, because I have spent five weeks being exact about everybody else in this house.” She squares the two piles with the edge of her hand.
“I was not protecting you. I was managing the timing of a hard thing so it would land when I judged you could carry it. Which is what he does. I had the whole of it at a quarter past seven and I sat in a chair and did to you exactly what has been done to me, and it took me under a minute to decide and it did not feel like anything at all.”
“You would have told me.”
“Yes. Later. Kindly.” She looks up. “It is the kindly that I cannot get out from under. That is the whole disease of this family and I have had it since about ten past seven this morning and it did not even itch.”
And I stand in the doorway of my father’s study and understand that we have both been sitting fifty feet apart for an hour.
“I came in,” I say.
“You came in an hour before I was going to.” Something in her face gives very slightly. “That is not nothing. But do not let anybody tell you it was a large margin.”
She stands up and takes the two lists, hers and mine, and lays them side by side, and it is the first time since the cathedral that I have watched Valeria Rinaldi come up to her actual speed, and it is like standing beside a machine reaching temperature.
“Then here is where we are,” she says. “There is a nineteen-year-old girl on Bond Street with your man on the corner, and there is nothing either of us can do in the next two hours that Tazio has not already done better.
“And there is a woman of eighty-one on Doyle Avenue who has known all of it since June of 2011, who has written fifteen letters and had none of them answered, and who has spent eleven years telling me to turn every page over.”
“Renata.”
“Your mother went up that path in 1995 and got a piano for an answer and had the grace not to argue about the piano.” She is already reaching for her coat.
“Nobody has been back since. Thirty-one years, Lorenzo. That woman has been sitting in a room full of paper waiting for one person in this family to come up the path and ask her something she is allowed to answer honestly, and she has watched four of us walk past the end of it.”
“And you are going to.”
“I am going to ask her a fourth time,” Valeria says, and stops with her arm in one sleeve. “And I want you to understand what I am going to do when she says no, because she is going to say no. She has said no to your mother and she has said no to fifteen years of her own letters.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to ask her a fifth time,” she says. “That is the entire difference between me and everybody else in this house. I am not cleverer and I am not kinder. I just do not stop at three.”