Chapter 6
SALVATORE
There's a hand on her.
That's the whole of what I see for the first second.
Not the man. Not the room. A hand, grey at the knuckles, closed round her left wrist over that black elastic, and a thumb that's gone under the elastic and is pressing, and her face above it, which is doing nothing.
Nothing at all. Her face has gone somewhere and left the rest of her standing at the bar.
Then the room comes in. Two waiters at the service end, frozen. The kitchen door swinging. Benny nowhere. A rocks glass on a napkin, half gone, and the man in front of it turning on his stool to look at me, slow, like a man who's been looked at by Vitales before and has never yet had it cost him.
Fifties. Long grey hair. Brown coat. A brass lighter in his free hand that he doesn't put away.
He lets go of her. Not fast. He opens his fingers one at a time, and he sits back, and he picks up his drink.
"Mr Vitale," he says.
I don't answer him. I look at her. "Marina."
"I'm fine."
"Go in the office."
"I'm working."
"Go in the office. Benny's in there. Tell him to come out."
She doesn't move for a second. Then she does, and as she comes round the end of the bar I see her right hand, which she's holding closed, and there's blood coming out of the side of the fist and running down between two fingers and dripping off the knuckle, one drop, on the floor by the ice well, and she walks past it and past me and into the back without looking at either.
The man on the stool watches her go.
I take my watch off.
I do it slowly. Unbuckle the strap, slide it off, put it in the inside pocket of my jacket, and the two by the coffee machine see me do it and one of them, the young one, goes back through the kitchen door without being told, and the other one follows. Now it's a room with two men in it and a bar.
"I don't know you," I say.
"Ray Donato." He puts a hand out. I don't look at it. He takes it back. "I was a friend of the family. Her family. Back when."
"Back when."
"When her mother was alive. Gia." He drinks. "I'm just here catching up. She's doing well for herself. I said so."
"You had your hand on her."
"Old friends."
"You had your hand on her, in my mother's restaurant, and she was bleeding, and you were smiling. Which part of that is old friends."
He puts the glass down. He does it carefully, on the wet ring it came from, and I clock that, because it's the kind of thing a man does when he wants you to know his hands aren't shaking.
"I'll be straight with you, Mr Vitale," Ray Donato says.
"Since we're talking. I know that girl. I know things about her.
Her mother, the end of it, what went on in that apartment.
Things a man in your position might want to hear before it gets round that she's living up the hill.
And I'm not a greedy man. I'm just a man who knows things, and I thought, who'd want to know them. And I thought, him."
Benny comes out of the back. He stops when he sees my face, and then he sees the watch is gone off my wrist, and he goes very still and stays where he is by the kitchen door, which is right.
"Say it again," I tell Donato.
"Say what."
"What you know. Say it to me now. Whatever it is."
He smiles. He's got a smile that's been working for him for a long time and I can see him deciding to trust it. "Not here. Not like this. A man doesn't give it away, does he. You know that better than anyone."
"You're right," I say. "I do."
I step aside from the door.
He looks at the door. He looks at me. He looks at Benny by the kitchen, and at the empty room, and he does the sum, and he gets the answer wrong, because he thinks the sum is can I walk out of here, and it isn't. He picks his lighter up off the bar and puts it in his coat and stands.
"Think about it," he says. "I'm around."
"You're around."
"I'm always around."
He goes past me. He's close enough that I could put him on the floor with one hand and he knows it and he goes past anyway, and that's the thing I take from him, that's what I'll keep: a man who walks past me like that isn't brave.
He's used to it. He's used to walking past men who could kill him and not being killed, and he's been doing it for a long time, and somewhere in that there's a reason, and I want the reason more than I want him on the floor.
The door closes.
"Benny," I say.
"Boss."
"Where were you."
"The office. She said she was fine, she said go do the invoices, I"
"Did she ask you to go in the office, or did you want to go in the office."
He doesn't answer. Good. A lie now would have been worse.
"Get the mop," I say. "There's blood by the ice."
The office is a box with a desk in it and a safe and a chair, and she's sitting in the chair with her right hand held up in the air like she's been told to and a wad of paper towel round it going red.
She looks at the door when I come in and then at the wall.
"He's gone."
"I know. I heard."
"Give me your hand."
"It's fine."
"It's bleeding on Carla's chair. Give me your hand, Marina."
She gives it to me. I don't know why. She holds it out with her eyes on the wall and I take it, and it's the first time I've touched her, and I know that as I'm doing it, and I put it where it goes.
I take the paper towel off. It's a cut across the base of the palm, an inch and a half, not deep, but it's ragged, and there's a bit of something in it.
Glass. I get the first-aid tin out of Carla's desk, where it's been since I was ten, and I take the tweezers and I take her hand in mine and I turn it to the light.
"Hold still."
"I'm holding still."
I get the glass out. She doesn't make a sound.
Her hand's cold and it's steady, which it shouldn't be, and I clean the cut with the bottle from the tin and she takes that in silence too, and I put the butterflies on it, three of them, and then the gauze, and then the tape, and I do it slowly, because I'm not going to get to do it twice.
Her wrist is turned up. The left one's on her knee. The elastic on it has come round so the knot's on top, the way it wouldn't if she'd put it on that morning, and under the edge of it, on the pale inside of the wrist where the skin's thinnest, there's a mark.
Round. The size of a dime. Shiny, the way old burns go.
I don't look at it any longer than I look at the tape. I finish the tape.
"There."
"Thank you."
"Who is he."
She takes her hand back. She holds it against her chest and looks at the gauze on it and not at me. "Nobody."
"He knew your mother."
"A lot of people knew my mother."
"He put his hand on you."
"And you came in. And now he's gone. So."
"So what did he do to you."
Nothing. Her face does the thing it did at the bar, goes away and leaves the rest of her, and I hate it, I hate watching her do it, and I stand there over her with the tin open in my hand and I want to put my fist through Carla's wall.
I don't. I close the tin.
My phone goes. Luca. I take it.
"You had a visitor," Luca says. He never says hello.
"Who is he."
"Raymond Donato. Fifty-two. Lives above the Anchor in Rosebank. Small time. Ran numbers for Dominic's crew in the nineties and got cut loose for skimming, and he's been around ever since, doing nothing, for nobody, which is a hard thing to do for thirty years unless somebody lets you."
"And her."
A pause. Luca doesn't pause.
"Gia Silvestri's boyfriend," he says. "From about a year after Enzo. Lived in the apartment. Four years. Till she died."
I look at the top of Marina's head. She's turned the chair away. She's looking at the safe.
"Okay," I say, and hang up.
He's still in the lot.
I'd have bet on it and I'd have won. A tan Buick with a dent in the rear quarter, parked nose out in the far corner by the bins where the smokers go, and him in it with the window down and a cigarette going, watching the front door of the restaurant like a man waiting for a table.
I walk over. I don't hurry. Benny starts to come after me and I lift a hand without turning round and he stops.
Donato watches me come. He doesn't start the car. He's decided something, sitting there, and what he's decided is that I'm the kind of man who does business, and he's about to find out that's not the kind I am.
I put my hand on the roof of the Buick and lean down to the window.
"Nice car."
"It gets me about."
"Where's about."
"Here and there."
"Rosebank," I say. "Above the Anchor. Second floor, front. You've had it eleven years and you're two months behind, and the landlord lets it go because you once did something for his brother, and nobody remembers what."
He takes a pull on the cigarette. His hand's steady. I'll give him that. "You've been busy."
"I've been on the phone for four minutes."
"And now what."
"Now nothing."
He waits. I don't give him anything else.
I stand with my hand on his roof and I look at him, at the grey hair and the fallen mouth and the coat, and I let him look back, and after a while he understands that this is all he's getting, and he doesn't like it.
He'd have liked a threat. A threat is a conversation. This isn't.
"She didn't tell you," he says.
"No."
"She won't. She never did. Not even when." He stops, and smiles, and drops the cigarette out the window onto my lot. "Well. You'll have to ask her."
"I'm not going to ask her."
"Then you'll never know."
"I'll know," I say. "I'll know by Friday. And then you and me will have a different conversation, and you won't be in the car for it."
I straighten up. I take my hand off the roof.
I read his plate once, and I look at the dent in the quarter, and I walk back across the lot to the door where Benny's standing, and behind me the Buick starts on the second try and pulls out onto Hylan and goes, not fast, the way a man drives when he wants you to see he isn't running.
"Tommy," I say to Benny. "Tell Tommy I want that car followed, and I want to know where it stops, and I want to know who it stops for. Not touched. Followed."
"Boss."
"And pick up the cigarette."
I drive her home myself.
Benny follows in his own car and she doesn't ask why, and I don't tell her. She sits with her bandaged hand in her lap and the other one over it and watches Hylan Boulevard go by, and neither of us says anything as far as the lights at Richmond Road, and then she does.
"You're going to do something."
"Yes."
"Don't."
"Why."
"Because I didn't ask you to."
"You didn't have to."
"That's the point." She turns in the seat.
It's the first time she's looked at me since the office.
"That's exactly the point. I didn't ask, and you're going to do it anyway, and then I'm going to owe you for that too.
On top of the ninety days. On top of my brother.
I've been owing people my whole life, Mr Vitale, and the only thing I've ever learned about it is that it never stops, and I'd rather have his hand on my wrist than yours on my"
She stops. She turns back to the window.
I let the light change. I let a block go by.
"Tell me what he did," I say.
"No."
"Then I'll find out. And it'll be worse for him than if you'd told me."