Chapter 8
SALVATORE
"Robert Green," Luca says.
"That's not a name."
"When."
"Wednesday. Ten in the morning."
I'm at the window. It's dark, and the drive's lit, and Benny's in the booth. Wednesday at ten in the morning she was standing outside that booth with her hands in her pockets waiting for me to decide.
"Same day."
"Same day," Luca says. "And Thursday it was in the lot at Teresa's. Benny's sure. He clocked it and he didn't think anything of it because it's a grey Camry, and there are nine thousand grey Camrys on the Island, and he's twenty-four." A pause. "He's beating himself up about it."
"Good."
"Sal."
"He should be beating himself up about it. He was in the office with the invoices when Donato had his hand on her. He's not in the office again. Ever. Tell him."
"I told him."
I turn round. Luca's by the door. He's got a sheet of paper in his hand that he hasn't given me, which means there's something on it he wants to say out loud first.
"Say it."
"It's not the boy," he says. "Nico Silvestri's been in that apartment for thirteen days with the chain on, eating peas.
Nobody needs to sit outside three nights to know that.
Whoever it is rented that car the morning she walked up the hill, and put it outside the place she used to live, and outside the place she works, and hasn't touched her. Hasn't gone near her. Just sits."
"Watching."
"Waiting."
"For what."
"For her to be somewhere she isn't with us."
I take the sheet of paper off him. It's the rental agreement. Somebody at Enterprise likes Luca, or likes what Luca gave them. Robert Green, an address in Elizabeth, a phone number that rings out, and a signature that's nothing, a line and a loop.
"Tommy," I say. "Donato."
"Went home. Drank at the Anchor till one. Went upstairs. Came down at eleven this morning and bought cigarettes and went back up. Tommy says he's a man with nowhere to be."
"He's had somewhere to be for thirty years."
"Then he's not being paid by the day."
I put the paper on the desk. I put it face down. The tank behind me hums, the lamp over it that nobody's turned off in two years, and I look at the door, and I think about what I'm about to do, and I do it.
"She doesn't leave the house."
Luca doesn't say anything.
"No restaurant. No Sunday. Nothing. Her phone comes to Rosa at ten and goes back to her at seven. Benny's on the door of that room, not the booth. If the brother needs to see her, he comes here, and he comes in a car we send. And nobody in this family hears the word Camry."
"She'll hate it."
"Yes."
"She'll fight it."
"Yes."
"Sal." He says it the way he said it about the room. "She walked up that drive on her own. That's the whole reason she's here. You put her in a box, that's what you're taking off her."
"I know what I'm taking off her."
"Then tell her why."
"No."
He waits, because he thinks I'll say more. I don't. He folds his hands.
"Then I'll tell Rosa about the phone," he says, and goes.
Rosa brings the phone down herself at ten past ten.
She puts it on the desk in front of me. Not on the corner where she puts the coffee.
In the middle, on the gate logs, face up, so I can see the screen, which is a photograph of the brother with a birthday cake and no other thing on it.
No lock. She doesn't lock her phone. She's got nothing in it worth locking, and she knows that, and that's a kind of poverty too.
"There," Rosa says.
"Thank you."
"She gave it to me."
"I heard."
"She didn't argue. She asked me one thing and she gave it to me." Rosa folds her arms. She hasn't folded her arms at me since I was fourteen and she caught me with Carmine's car keys. "She asked me if you were frightened."
I look up.
"I said I'd known you thirty-one years and I'd never once seen you frightened of anything. And she said, that's not what I asked."
The lamp over the tank hums.
"Go to bed, Rosa."
"I'm going." She doesn't. "Your mother would have had that girl in the kitchen the first night. Making her peel things. That's how she did it. Nobody got to sit in this house feeling sorry for themselves while Teresa had potatoes."
"I know how my mother did it."
"Then you know she'd have told her why."
She goes. I sit with Marina's phone in the middle of my desk, unlocked, the brother's face on it, and I don't touch it, and I don't touch it for so long that the screen goes dark on its own.
She comes down at eleven.
I knew she would. Rosa will have gone up for the phone and got the look, and given it back, and said he said, and that's all it'll have taken.
I'm at the desk with the gate logs Matteo pulled, thirty days of trucks in and trucks out in a handwriting I can't read, and I hear her on the stairs, and she doesn't knock.
"No."
"Sit down."
"No. I'm not sitting down. What is this."
She's in the T-shirt and the black jeans and her hair's up with a pencil through it, and her hand's still taped, and she's standing on the carpet in the exact place my uncle wears a track in it, and she's shaking. Not scared. The other thing.
"What did Rosa say."
"Rosa said you said. That's what Rosa says. She said my phone and she said Teresa's and she said Sunday, and she said it like she was reading a list, and she wouldn't look at me, and she's looked at me every day since I got here, so what is this."
"It's until I know whose car that is."
"And when's that."
"When I know."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
She laughs. It's a bad laugh, short, and she puts her taped hand up to her face and takes it down.
"You said that the first day. In this room.
In that chair. You said it's the only one you're getting, and I said yes, because I thought you were doing me a favour, and now I think you just like the sentence. "
"I don't like anything about this."
"Then tell me what's going on."
"No."
"Why."
"Because you'd do something with it."
"What would I"
"You'd go to the car."
She stops.
"You'd go to the car," I say. "You'd walk out of this house and down that hill and you'd find that grey Camry wherever it's parked tonight and you'd knock on the window.
Because that's what you did on Wednesday.
You didn't run. You didn't hide. You walked up to the worst thing you could think of and you knocked on it.
And I'm not going to tell you what I know because you'd take it and do that with it, and I'm not going to let you, and I'm not going to argue with you about it. It's done."
She looks at me. It's a long look and it's not a kind one and I hold it. Her hands have come up in front of her, both of them, and the fingers of the left are going, tapping against nothing, a rhythm with no sound, and she doesn't know she's doing it, and I could watch it for an hour.
"You don't get to," she says.
"I do."
"I'm not"
"You're under my roof. That was the offer. You said yes before I'd finished making it."
"That's not what you"
"I didn't say what it was. I said what it wasn't. You're right. I like the sentence."
She comes across the carpet.
I don't stand up. She comes round the desk, which nobody does, and stands over me in my father's chair, close, closer than Dominic ever gets, and there's a strand of hair come loose from the pencil and fallen down across her face, across her mouth, and she's talking, she's saying something about ninety days and a box and what she'd rather, and I'm not hearing it.
I reach up and I push the hair back off her face.
I do it slowly. The backs of two fingers, from her mouth to her temple to behind her ear, and I tuck it there, and I take my hand back.
She stops talking.
We stay like that. The tank hums. Her hands have stopped, both of them, down at her sides, and she looks at me with her mouth a little open and the hair where I put it, and I look at her, and neither of us does anything about it, and that goes on for a length of time I'll think about later.
Then she steps back. One step. She puts her own hand up and touches her hair where mine was, as if to check it's still there, and she takes her hand down, and her face closes, and the whole thing is over and it didn't happen.
"Seven to ten," she says.
"Seven to ten."
"And Nico comes here."
"In a car we send."
"And you'll tell me when you know."
"I'll tell you when it's done."
She nods. Once. It isn't agreement. It's a woman filing something.
The door's open behind her and I didn't hear it open, and that's the second thing this week I haven't known, and I don't like the count.
"Salvatore," Aldo says.
He's in the doorway with his coat over his arm and his reading glasses pushed up on his head, the way he's stood in that doorway for thirty years, and he's smiling, and he's looking at her.
"And this is Enzo's girl."
Marina turns. She doesn't know him. She knows the name, everybody knows the name, but she's never had a face for it, and I watch her put the face on.
Sixty-one. Soft round the middle. Grey hair cut short, a good grey suit, and the wedding ring he still wears and still turns, and a face that has never once in my life been anything but kind.
"Marina," he says, and he comes in, and he crosses the carpet with his hand already out, and he doesn't shake hers. He takes it, the taped one, and looks at it, and looks at her, and puts his other hand on her shoulder, and she lets him, and I watch her let him.
"I knew your father," Aldo says. "I knew him before you were born. He was my closest friend in this world. I've wanted to say that to your face for sixteen years and I never had the nerve." He squeezes the shoulder. "You have his hands."
She doesn't say anything. I don't think she can.
Aldo turns to me with his hand still on her.
"I heard about the brother," he says. "Fusco's paper. Salvatore, let me handle it. Let me talk to Sonny, let me talk to the boy. This isn't business." He looks down at her, and back at me, and his eyes are wet, and he means it. "This is family."