Chapter 2
SALVATORE
Dominic has been talking for eleven minutes and he has not said one thing I need.
"Two boxes light," he says. "Two. Off the same ship. You want to tell me that's the union?"
"No."
"Then who?"
"I'll tell you when I know."
"Your father would've known by now."
My father would have had somebody's fingers on this desk by now and it would have been the wrong somebody.
I don't say that. I sit with my back to the wall and the door on my left and the window on my right, and I let my uncle walk up and down my carpet, and I count the number of times he looks at the chair I'm sitting in.
Four. He's getting worse at it.
Luca is by the door. He hasn't moved since he came in. He has his hands folded in front of him like an usher and his eyes on the middle of Dominic's back, and if Dominic knew what that meant he'd stop pacing.
"Matteo's crew," Dominic says. "You've got a twenty-seven-year-old running the terminal."
"Matteo didn't take the boxes."
"I didn't say he took them. I said he's twenty-seven."
"He's my brother."
"He was Carmine's son. Now he's your brother. There's a difference, and the men know it."
The tank behind my head is empty. It's been empty two years.
It's six feet of glass with a lamp over it and a branch in it and nothing on the branch, and I've been asked eleven times to have it taken out, and it's still here, because the men who ask are the men who were made to put their hands in it, and I like watching them not look at it.
Dominic doesn't look at it.
"Anything else," I say.
"The Silvestri thing."
"What Silvestri thing."
"The boy. Fusco's book. Two twenty."
I keep my face where it is. "Sonny's book is Sonny's business. He'll collect or he won't."
"He came to me."
"Sonny came to you."
"He's my guy. New Dorp's mine. He said the kid's got nothing and the sister's got a bar job in Brooklyn and it's a lot of money to write off, and I said I'd raise it with you." Dominic stops walking. "So I'm raising it."
"Raised. Anything else?"
He looks at the chair again. Five.
"Your father"
"My father is in Moravian Cemetery, Dom. I go Sundays. Anything else."
There isn't. He goes. He doesn't slam the door because he's fifty-eight years old and he has manners when he's sober, and it's nine in the morning, so he's sober. Luca lets him past and closes the door behind him and we listen to him go down the stairs.
"He's counting the chairs," Luca says.
"I know."
"He'll stop counting one day."
"I know that too."
Luca doesn't sit. He never sits in here. He stands where he stood and waits until he has my whole attention, which is a thing he's been doing since we were eight years old and I've never once told him to stop.
"There's a woman at the gate," he says.
"Since when."
"Twenty minutes. She walked up from the bus. Benny's got her in the booth."
"Selling something?"
"Asking for you by name."
I wait.
"Silvestri," Luca says.
The room does a thing. Not the room. Me. My hand goes down on the desk and I look at the back of it, at the white line across the knuckles, and I let it pass.
"The sister."
"The sister."
"What does she want."
Luca gives me the look that means I've asked a stupid question, and I have, so I take it.
"Bring her up."
"Sal."
"Bring her up, Luca."
He doesn't go. He stands there with his hands folded and looks at me, and I know what's coming, because I've known him twenty-five years and there are only two things he ever pushes on.
"If she stays," he says.
"Who said she's staying."
"If she stays. Where."
"The third floor. End of the hall."
He takes a second with that. "That's the room over the music room."
"I know which room it is."
"Rosa's kept it shut since"
"I know how long Rosa's kept it shut."
"Sal." He says it quietly. Luca says everything quietly.
"There hasn't been a woman sleeping in this house in twenty-one years.
Not a girlfriend. Not a cousin at Christmas.
Your father put Matteo's girl in the pool house and she cried about it.
The men know that. The men count on it. You put Enzo Silvestri's daughter in a bed on the third floor and every one of them is going to want to know what's changed. "
"Then they can ask."
"They won't ask you. They'll ask Dominic."
"Bring her up."
He goes. He doesn't slam the door either. Nobody in this house slams a door, and it's the quietest house on the Island, and some nights I'd pay money for somebody to break something.
I get up. I go to the window. From here you can see the drive all the way down to the gates, and the booth, and Benny in it with his gum going, and a woman in a dark coat standing very straight outside it with her hands in her pockets.
Five foot five. Slight. Dark hair up. Good shoes, and she isn't used to them, she's standing wrong.
I've seen her before. She doesn't know that.
Six months ago. A bar on Third Avenue that we've got no piece of.
Luca had a fighter drinking where he shouldn't, and Luca went to collect him, and for some reason I went too.
Forty minutes at the end of the bar. A room of thirty men and she ran it without raising her voice once.
Cut a guy off, walked him to the door, put his jacket on him one arm at a time like you'd dress a kid.
Luca told me her name on the way to the car.
No sleep that night.
Four hours is what I get, most nights. That night, none, and the reason was clear enough, and the thing to do with a reason like that is nothing. So Luca keeps a light eye. That's all. A light eye. If somebody's leaning on her, it comes to me. If she leaves the city, it comes to me. Nothing else.
Now her brother owes my uncle's book two hundred and twenty thousand dollars and she's walking up my drive.
I don't believe in that kind of luck. So it isn't luck.
Luca brings her in and stands her in the middle of the carpet where Dominic was walking and goes back to his place by the door.
She looks at the room first. Not at me. The room. Where the windows are. Where the second door is, the one to the bathroom that she'll have guessed isn't an exit. Where Luca is. Then at the tank behind my head, for a long second, and then at me.
Hazel eyes. Brown at the centre going green at the edge.
"Mr Vitale."
"Sit down."
"I'll stand."
"You walked up from the bus. Sit down."
She sits. On the edge of it, feet flat, weight forward. She could be up and at the door in a second and a half and she knows it and she's wrong, because Luca would have her before she got there, and she'll work that out in a minute.
There's a chain at her throat. Thin. Something small on it, under the collar of the coat, and she touches it once without knowing she has and puts her hand back in her lap.
"My brother," she says.
"Nico Silvestri. Two hundred and twenty thousand. Sonny Fusco's book."
"Yes."
"You have it?"
"No."
"Then why are you in my house."
"Because I can work it."
I don't say anything. She goes on. She's decided to go on and she's going to do it whether I help or not.
"I've run bars for ten years. I can run a book.
I can run a floor. I can do the money in a restaurant, I can do payroll, I can do stock, I can do the thing where the numbers say one thing and the safe says another and somebody has to find out which of the waiters it was.
I'm not asking for a favour. I'm asking for a job.
Whatever it pays, all of it goes against the debt, and I'll sign anything you put in front of me that says so. "
"It'd take you nine years."
"Then it takes nine years."
"And the boy?"
"The boy is twenty and stupid and he's mine. He stays out of it."
"That's not how a debt works."
"Then tell me how it works, Mr Vitale, because I'm sitting here."
Luca shifts by the door. Not much. Enough that I know he heard the same thing I did.
Her hands are still. I noticed that when she sat down and I'm still noticing it. She's holding them still. It's costing her something to do it, and I want to know what her hands do when she isn't paying for them to stop.
"Take your coat off," I say.
"I'm fine."
"It's warm in here. You've walked. Take your coat off."
She takes it off. Under it a white shirt, cheap and ironed, and the sleeves pushed up, and on her left wrist a black hair tie, worn flat, the kind of thing you'd never look at twice. Her forearms are stronger than the rest of her. Trays. Ten years of trays.
I look at the hair tie for exactly as long as I look at everything else, and I move on.
"Your father played that piano," I say.
She doesn't move. "I know."
"You've been in this house."
"Once. I was seven."
"You touched it."
"I was told not to."
"I remember."
I do. A little girl in a dress that had been ironed the same way that shirt's been ironed, standing at the B?sendorfer with her hand flat on the lid and my father laughing, and Enzo Silvestri standing behind her with his hand on her shoulder, and me in the doorway, fifteen, not staying, because it was a Sunday and I had somewhere to be.
I don't tell her that I remember her father's hand on her shoulder. I don't tell her what else I remember. I sit in my father's chair with my father's watch on my wrist and I look at Enzo Silvestri's daughter, and I understand, very clearly, that I am about to do something I have never done.
"Here's how it works," I say.
"Ninety days."
She waits.
"You come here. You live under this roof.
There's a room. You'll work, you'll work where I put you, and you'll work hard, and the pay goes against the paper the way you said.
But you're here. Every night. Nobody comes to see you that I don't know about, and you don't go anywhere without one of my men, and when I say the day's over the day's over. "
"That's not a job."
"No."
"That's a"
"It's ninety days. At the end of ninety days we'll see where the paper is, and if I'm satisfied, the rest of it is gone.
Sonny gets paid out of my pocket and your brother's name comes off the book and stays off.
If I'm not satisfied, you leave, and it's Sonny's problem again, and Sonny's problem is Dominic's problem, and you don't want to be Dominic's problem. "
"Why."
I don't answer that.
"Why would you do that," she says. "Ninety days of bar work isn't two hundred thousand dollars. You know that. I know that. So what is it."
"It's the offer."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
She looks at me. She's good at it. Most people look at me and see what they're afraid of and stop there.
She looks at me the way she looked at the room when she came in: for the exits, for the second door, for the thing that's wrong with the picture.
And there's something wrong with the picture.
She can see there is. She just can't see what.
I could tell her.
I could tell her that Sonny Fusco doesn't write credit to a busboy without a call from this house, and that I didn't make the call, and that somebody did.
I could tell her that the last time a Silvestri came up this drive he didn't come back down it, and I was in the building.
I could tell her I've had a man watching her for half a year and I don't know what I'd have done if she hadn't walked up to the gate this morning, and that's the truth, I don't know.
I could tell her the debt is the reason.
It's not the reason.
"Ninety days," I say. "That's the offer. Yes or no."
She says yes before I finish the sentence. That's the first thing she does wrong.