Chapter 3
MARINA
The man driving me has been chewing the same piece of gum since the Verrazzano, and he has not said a word, and I have decided that I like him for it.
"Benny," I say.
"Yeah."
"Is it Benny or Benjamin."
"It's Benny."
"Okay."
That is the whole of the conversation until Sunset Park.
He double-parks outside my building with the hazards on and gets out and stands on the sidewalk with his back to the door and his hands in his jacket, and I go up three flights and let myself in and Nico is on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on his eye, and he looks at me, and he looks at the duffel in my hand, and he stands up.
"No."
"Sit down."
"Mari, no. No. Whatever you did, undo it."
"It's done."
"What's done? What did you"
"I got you ninety days." I go past him into the bedroom and open the drawer and start putting things in the bag without looking at what they are.
Underwear. The black jeans. The good white shirt, which I am wearing, so the other one.
"Ninety days, and if I do what I'm told for ninety days, it goes away.
All of it. Your name comes off the book. That's the deal."
"Do what you're told where."
I put the bag on the bed and zip it.
"Where, Mari."
"There."
He does not say anything for a long time.
Long enough that I have to look at him. He is standing in the door of the bedroom with the peas in his hand, dripping, and his face, the half of it that still works, is doing the thing it did when he was six and I told him our mother was not going to wake up.
"You can't."
"I can. I have."
"That's the house. That's the house where"
"I know what house it is."
"Then how can you"
"Because you owe them two hundred and twenty thousand dollars, Nico, and I don't have it, and you don't have it, and nobody we know has it, and the man who owns your debt sat behind a desk this morning and offered me a way to make it go away that doesn't involve anybody putting you in the water.
So I said yes. And I'd say it again. And I'm not going to stand in this apartment and argue about it with you while a man with a gun waits on the sidewalk, so you can either hug me or get out of the doorway, but pick one. "
He hugs me. He is taller than me now and it still surprises me every time. He smells of peas and of the blood in his hair that I never got to cut out, and he holds on longer than he has since he was small, and I let him, and then I pick up the bag.
"Chain on," I say. "Nobody but me."
"Mari."
"Nobody but me."
The house is bigger from the inside.
That is a stupid thing to think and I think it anyway, standing in the hall with my duffel while Benny shuts the door behind us.
Stone floor. A staircase that goes up and turns and goes up again.
A smell of lemon and something underneath the lemon, older, wax or wood or years, and a silence that is not the silence of an empty building.
It is the silence of a building where a lot of people are being quiet on purpose.
A woman comes out of a door at the back with a dish towel over her shoulder.
She is sixty-something, short, built like a bollard, with her grey hair scraped back so hard it must hurt, and she looks me up and down the way you look at a delivery to check it against the docket. Then she looks at the duffel. Then she looks at Benny.
"This is her," Benny says.
"I can see it's her."
"Mr Vitale said the"
"I know what Mr Vitale said. I've known what Mr Vitale said since before you were born, and I'll thank you to take that gum out of your mouth in my hall."
He takes the gum out of his mouth. He has nowhere to put it. He puts it in his pocket.
The woman turns to me.
"Rosa," she says. "You'll be wanting something to eat."
"I'm fine, thank you."
She looks at me for a second longer than is comfortable.
Then she turns around and goes back through the door she came out of, and I stand there, and Benny stands there, and after a moment there is the sound of a plate being put down on a table, hard, and she says from the other room, "It's on the table," and that, it turns out, is what Rosa says instead of I don't believe you.
It is bread and a bowl of something with beans in it, and it is the best thing I have eaten in a month, and I eat all of it standing up at the kitchen counter while she watches me with her arms folded and does not say a word.
The room is on the third floor at the end of the hall, and Rosa unlocks it with a key off a ring she keeps in her apron, and the lock is stiff, and the door sticks, and when it opens the air that comes out is cold and clean and has not been breathed in a long time.
A bed. A window looking down the hill at the trees and, past the trees, a grey strip that is the water. A chair. A wardrobe with nothing in it and a chest of drawers with nothing in it and a bathroom through a door that has a bar of soap in it still in the paper.
"Sheets are clean," Rosa says. "I did them this afternoon."
"Thank you."
"Dinner's at eight. Dining room. He'll be there."
"He eats here?"
"He eats where he eats." She looks around the room, at the bare walls, at the window, and something in her face moves and then does not. "This was a good room once."
"Whose was it."
She looks at me. It is the first thing I have asked her and I can see her decide whether I get an answer.
"Teresa's," she says. "For sewing. She sat up here in the afternoons for the light. She said it was the only room in the house where nobody could find her, and she was right, because nobody's been in it since." She puts her hand on the door frame. "So don't make a mess."
She goes.
I put the duffel on the bed and I do not unpack it.
I go to the window and I look at the lock on it, which is a good lock, and at the drop, which is three floors onto flagstones.
I go to the door and look at the lock on that, which is a good lock too, and which locks from the outside as well as the inside, which I notice, and which I put away somewhere to think about later.
Then I sit on the edge of the bed and I take off my left shoe and I take the strip out from under the insole and I count it, because I have counted it every night for eight years and I am not going to stop because the room has changed.
Four thousand one hundred and sixty.
I put it back. I lace the shoe. I put my hands flat on the mattress on either side of me and I feel the bed under them, and it is a good bed, and it is a warm room, and below me, somewhere in the walls, the house ticks and settles, and none of that is anything to do with me.
Ninety days.
I have done harder things for longer.
He is already at the table when I come down. He stands up.
I did not expect that. I stop in the doorway with my hand on the frame and he stands there at the far end of a table that seats twelve, with a white cloth on it and two places set at his end, and he waits, and I understand that he is going to go on standing until I sit, and that this is not manners.
This is a man showing me that he is patient.
I sit. He sits.
Rosa brings the food and goes. There is nobody else. No Benny, no Luca by the door, nobody. A room with a chandelier in it that could hold forty people, and it is him and me and the sound of the cutlery.
He does not talk. I had thought he would.
I had thought there would be rules, a list, a speech about what happens if I break them, and I had my face ready for it.
There is no speech. He eats. He eats slowly and without looking at the plate, and he looks at me, and he does not stop looking at me, and after about a minute I realise that this is the speech.
I eat. I am not going to give him the satisfaction of not eating.
The food is good. It would be. Rosa does not strike me as a woman who has ever let a bad plate leave her kitchen.
There is chicken and there is something with lemon in it and there is bread, and I go through it the way I go through everything, quickly, with my head down, because you do not know when the next one is coming, and I am halfway through before I notice that I am doing it in front of him.
I slow down.
He notices that too. He notices everything, and he does not hide that he is noticing it, and it is the strangest thing, sitting at the end of a table being looked at by a man who has not once glanced at the door.
Everybody glances at the door. It is what people do.
My father used to say you could tell a man's whole life by how often he checked the door, and this one does not check it at all, and it is a while before I work out why.
He does not check the door because he already knows what is behind it. He knows what is behind every door in the building. It is his.
"The room's all right," he says.
"It's fine."
"Rosa'll get you what you need. Ask her."
"I don't need anything."
"Ask her anyway. She likes being asked."
That is not what I expected either. I look at him and he looks back, and his eyes are a colour I have never seen on a person, pale, almost grey in this light and then not grey at all, the colour of sea glass, and I look at my plate.
"You start Thursday," he says. "The restaurant on Hylan. Teresa's. You'll run the bar."
"I can run a bar."
"I know you can."
I look up.
"I've seen you do it," he says, and goes back to his chicken, and does not explain, and I sit there with my fork in my hand and turn that over, and I cannot make it mean nothing, and I try.
He leaves first. He puts his napkin on the table and stands and says goodnight, and that is all, goodnight, and goes, and I hear his shoes on the stone and then a door somewhere towards the front of the house.
I do not go up. I should. Instead I sit in the empty dining room under a chandelier and I let the house be quiet around me until I can stand it, and then I get up and I go the other way, away from the stairs, down a corridor I have not been down, because I want to know where the doors are.
I am telling myself that. I want to know where the doors are.
The corridor goes past a room with books in it and a room with nothing in it and turns, and at the end of it there is a pair of doors, tall ones, with glass in the top half, and the glass is dark.
I know before I open them.
It is the room. The one I stood in when I was seven, in an ironed dress, being told not to touch.
It is smaller than it was. Everything is smaller than it was.
There are windows all down one side with the curtains drawn and the moon coming through the gap, and there are chairs against the walls with sheets over them, and in the middle of the floor there is a shape under a cloth the size of a car.
I know what it is. I go over anyway.
The cloth is heavy and it is dusty and I take one corner of it and I lift, and under it the wood is black and it shines, and the lid is down.
I lift the cloth further. I fold it back over itself until the whole of the keyboard end is bare, and I stand there in the moonlight with my hand an inch above the lid, the way I stood when I was seven, and there is nobody here to tell me not to.
So I touch it.
Cold. Just wood. I run my hand along the edge of the lid to the hinge, feeling for the catch, and my fingers find something that is not the catch.
Scratches. In the wood, low down on the inside edge where you would only find them by feel, where somebody had cut them with a key or a knife a long time ago and the polish had gone over them since and not filled them.
I get down on my knees on the parquet. I tilt my head so the moon comes in at the right angle.
Two letters.
E.S.