30. Bond Street
BOND STREET
LORENZO
Ruggero is out of the car before I have the handbrake on.
“Fifty-one minutes. In at eight forty. He knocked, he waited about twenty seconds on the step, somebody let him in, he has not come out.”
“Loffredo.”
“Upstairs asleep. Nights at the plant on Allens Avenue, home at ten past six, front bedroom light off at half seven. The woman at the corner shop gave me his whole day for the price of two coffees.” Ruggero’s jaw is tight.
“He gets up at eleven. Every day of his life, she says, and he is on the road by twenty past.”
Twenty-five past ten.
“The girl?”
“Kitchen light on since he went in. Nobody has raised a voice, boss. Not one sound out of that house.”
“Who else is in there?”
“There is a kid. A boy. He goes out the front on a bike at ten to eight, every day of the holidays, and this morning he did not, and when she said it I did not think anything of it, because it is the holidays.” He swallows. “I should have thought something of it.”
“How old?”
“Nine, maybe.”
The front door is on the latch.
I stand in a hallway that smells of somebody’s toast and somebody else’s cigarettes and I can hear my brother through a wall, level, unhurried, the voice he uses to tell you the boiler wants bleeding.
“…and it does not stop if you do something I would not have chosen. That part is the important one. Say it back to me.”
A girl’s voice, flat: “It does not stop.”
“The whole thing.”
“It does not stop if I do something you would not have chosen.”
I come round the door.
Small kitchen, table pushed against the wall for room, three people at it.
Nella Moro is nineteen and she is sitting in the corner where she can see both doors, with a mug in both hands she is not drinking from, and she does not look up when I come in because she clocked me two seconds ago in the glass of the back door.
There is a boy on the far side with a cereal bowl in front of him that he has not touched, and both hands flat on the table on either side of it.
And my brother, on the side, with his back to the yard door.
A bakery box sits on the counter behind him with the string still on.
“Enzo,” Fabrizio says without turning. “Sit or stand, but do it now and do it quietly. Mr Loffredo has a bad chest, and the floor above this one talks.”
I sit down.
“I have been through it twice,” he says to the girl. “I am going to go through it a third time and then stop, because three is where my mother stopped, and I have been told this week that she should not have.”
“You have said it twice. I’m not slow.”
“I did not say you were slow. I said I am going to say it again.”
“Why?”
“Because the third time is the one people hear. The first time you are working out what it costs you. The second you are working out what I want.” He turns his cup a quarter turn. “The third is usually the first time anybody listens to the words.”
She looks at him properly for the first time.
And he says the whole thing again, the six of them, in order, in a kitchen off Bond Street at half past ten on a Friday morning in the summer of 2026, and it is word for word what a woman wrote on ruled paper in December of 1995, and I sit at somebody else’s table and listen to my mother’s voice come out of my brother’s mouth.
When he finishes, he does not move his hands at all.
“That is everything I have. There is no seventh thing, nobody is coming next week with a better offer, and I am not going to insult you by pretending what I have got is enough.”
Nella Moro sets the mug down.
“Who are you?” she says.
“I have told you my name.”
“You have told me a name. I didn’t ask what you are called.
” Her voice has not moved off flat since I came in.
“A man knocks on my door at twenty to nine on a Friday in a coat that cost more than this kitchen and offers me an apartment and a wage for the rest of my life and does not want anything. Do you know what that is, where I live? That is a man who wants something. That is always a man who wants something, and the ones who tell you they don’t are the expensive ones. ”
“Yes,” Fabrizio says.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, that is what it is, everywhere, nearly always, and you are right to say it out loud, and I would think less of you if you had not.”
“So what do you want?”
“Nothing you would recognize as a price.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he says. “It is not.”
Nella Moro looks at him a long time.
“Who else?” she says.
“Who else what?”
“You’ve done this before. You said the six things in order twice without stopping, and you knew you were going to say them a third time before you got here.” She has not blinked. “Who else have you done it for?”
“Eight women.”
“And where are they now?”
“Alive. Housed. Paid on the first of the month.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“And their husbands?” Nella Moro says.
The kitchen goes very quiet.
I watch my brother’s face, and there is nothing in it. He looks at a nineteen-year-old across a table and I know what he is doing, because I have watched him do it at my own table for eleven years. He is choosing which true thing she gets.
“Fabrizio,” I say.
“Be quiet, Enzo.”
Then he says:
“Fourteen of them are dead. I did all fourteen.”
Nella does not move at all.
“Say it in a way I can’t get out of,” she says.
“I killed fourteen men over fifteen years, and one of them was the husband of the woman who taught me how to do it properly, and none of them knew it was coming, and I have never been caught and I am not going to be.” His voice does not change.
“You asked. That is the answer. It does not come with an argument attached, because there is not one that would survive you.”
The boy has not moved. He is watching the door to the hall.
“Bruno,” Nella says.
“I have not decided.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Yes,” Fabrizio says. “It is.”
She sits there.
And then Nella Moro says the thing that I am going to hear for the rest of my life.
“If I get in the car, that is me saying yes to it.”
“No.”
“Don’t.” Her hand comes up an inch off the table and stops.
“Don’t do the thing where you take it off me.
I have had that done to me my whole life, and I can feel it coming across the table.
” Her eyes are dry and enormous. “If I get in that car with your money and my brother, and in a week Bruno Loffredo is dead, then I knew. I knew this morning, sitting here, and I got in the car anyway, and there is no version of me after that who didn’t know. ”
“You are nineteen.”
“So were you.”
Fabrizio Serra shuts his eyes.
“I’m telling you not to,” she says. “Right now, in front of your brother and mine, on the record, so that whatever happens I said it. Don’t do it.
I don’t want it. Take him to the police, take him nowhere, let him go to work and live to be ninety in that room upstairs, I don’t care, I’m not asking you for that and I never will. ”
“All right.”
“Say you heard me.”
“I heard you.”
“That is not the same as…”
“No,” Fabrizio says. “It is not.”
And she looks at him, and something in her face closes, and she has just been handed the exact arrangement Renata Alba has been living inside for fifteen years, with her eyes open.
“Then I’m going to get in the car,” Nella Moro says, “and I’m going to be a person who got in the car. And you’re going to know that I knew. That’s the only thing I have got, and I’m keeping it.”
The boiler goes and all four of us come off our chairs an inch, including me, and that is when I understand what kind of house this is.
Fabrizio turns his head and looks at the boy.
Then he gets up, and goes round the end of the table, and gets down on the floor.
Not crouched. Down, on one knee, on somebody else’s linoleum in a good coat, so his eyes are below the child’s.
“Tobia. My name is Fabrizio. I am going to ask you a question and it is a real one, which means whatever you say is what happens, and nobody in this room is allowed to be angry with you for the answer. Not your sister. Not me. Do you know what a real question is?”
The boy looks at Nella.
“Do not look at her. That is the whole point. This one is yours.”
“What is it?”
“Do you want to go?”
The boy sits over a bowl he has not touched, and thinks about it, and takes a long time, and nobody says one word while he does.
Then he says:
“Is it because I did something?”
And I watch my brother’s face come apart.
“No,” Fabrizio says, and his voice is not right. “No. Tobia. Listen to me. It is not because of anything you did, and it was never going to be. You have not done anything. There is nothing in this house that is because of you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was nine in a house like this one,” he says, “and I thought it was me, and I have thought it was me every day for thirty-one years, and I found out at seven o’clock this morning that it never was, and I would rather you did not have to wait as long as I did.”
The boy considers this.
“Would I have to come back?”
“No,” Fabrizio says. “Nobody goes back from this. Once you are out, you are out for good.”
And I have to put my hand on the table, because I said those words in my own hall when I was fourteen because I thought they sounded good, and he has been carrying them for thirty-one years, and he has just handed them back to me corrected.
“Yes,” Tobia says. “I want to go.”
Nella puts her face down into her hands and makes no sound at all, which is the loudest thing that has happened in that house all morning.
After that it is fast and quiet, and my brother is very good at it.
Documents and photographs and nothing else.
When she argues about a coat he says there will be coats.
When she argues about Tobia’s schoolbooks he stops and says take the books, and I watch him make that call in a quarter of a second.
Ruggero goes on the front with the bakery box held in plain view, because a man looking out of a landing window at half past ten will believe a delivery before he believes anything else.
At two minutes to eleven he walks them down the path and puts them in the back of my car.
On the step he stops the boy with one hand, reaches back for the box, and cuts the string with his thumbnail.
He does not give him one.
He turns the box round so it is open toward him and says: “Do you want one?”
And Tobia Moro looks into a bakery box on a doorstep on Bond Street and takes his time about it, because somebody has asked him, and then takes one and eats it on the step in front of everybody and gets flakes all down himself.
I have to walk to the car.
Valeria is at the gate. I do not know how long.
“He is nine,” she says. She has not taken her eyes off him.
“I know.”
Fabrizio comes down the path and stops in front of her.
“Mrs Alba said yes.”
“She telephoned me an hour ago. She had my number off the letter.” He puts his hands in his pockets. “She said you argued with her about the piano.”
“Somebody should have argued with her in 1995.”
“Yes,” he says. “Somebody should.”
“I have her letter in my coat. It is a solicitation to murder, signed, on a machine that can be identified in a day and a half, and it puts a woman of eighty-one in prison until she dies.” Valeria’s voice is level. “You are going to ask me for it.”
“Yes.”
“Go on, then.”
“Give me the letter,” Fabrizio says, “and it stops being your problem, and she is safe, and you never have to decide.”
“No.”
“Valeria.”
“That is you taking it off me. That is the whole of what you are.” She does not raise her voice. “It is mine. I will carry it badly and I will probably get it wrong, and it will be me that got it wrong.”
He nods once, slowly, like a man having a thing confirmed.
“All right,” he says.
“Get in the car,” I tell him.
“No.” He is already looking back at the house. “There has to be somebody sitting at that table when he comes down, or he is on the telephone inside four minutes and they are picked up before Attleboro. I will be very calm and very boring, and I will take up forty minutes of his morning.”
And I believe him for about four seconds.
Then I look at my brother’s face.
I have looked at that face across a table since I was fourteen years old and I have never been able to read it, and I can read it now, and I would give the rest of my life to go back to not being able to.
“You are not going to take up forty minutes of his morning,” I say.
Fabrizio does not answer.
“She just told you not to. She said it out loud, in front of witnesses, and she is nineteen and she made you say you heard her.”
“I did hear her.”
“Then say you are not going to do it.”
“Enzo.”
“Say it.”
And my brother looks at me on a pavement on Bond Street in the sun with his coat marked at the knee, and does not lie to me, which is the last thing he ever gives me.
“I asked her properly,” he says. “I have never done that in my life and I did it this morning and I did it right, and I am glad, and I will have it for whatever is left.” His voice is almost gentle.
“And it turns out the asking was never the part that stopped me. I thought it would be. I have thought for thirty-one years that if somebody had only asked, none of this…” He stops.
“It is not a lever. It is just a thing you do first.”
“You are going to kill him.”
“There is a nine-year-old in your car,” Fabrizio says, “and that man has three years of him.”
“That is not…”
“It is not a justification. I am not offering you one.” He steps back off the curb. “You asked me what I wanted, a minute ago, and I told you, and I would like that to have been the last conversation, because it was a good one and I have not had many.”
Behind him the landing light goes on.
Eleven o’clock.
And I stand there with my hand on the door of my own car.
Two children in the back seat. One of them has pastry flakes all down his front and the other one is looking straight ahead through the windscreen at nothing with her jaw set, and she is nineteen, and forty minutes ago she said do not do it to the only person in her life who has ever offered her anything.
If I go back up that path, there is a fight on a public street with my brother, in front of both of them, and Loffredo wakes, and police, and paperwork, and two children in a system that has Bruno Loffredo’s name on it and not Nella’s.
If I drive, a man dies.
I know exactly what I am choosing. Nobody is making me and nobody is deciding for me and I will not be able to tell myself anything else later, because I have had it explained to me twice today by women who would not let me have the comfortable half.
I drive.
Valeria does not say anything. She puts her hand over mine on the gearstick and leaves it there and does not look at me, which is not forgiveness.
And in the back seat, four minutes down Broadway, a nine-year-old boy who has not spoken since the doorstep says, to nobody in particular, with his mouth full:
“He asked me.”
Nella Moro puts her arm round her brother and looks out of the window.
“I know,” she says. “Do not get used to it.”