Chapter 10
SALVATORE
The Anchor has a back stair that comes up from the alley, and Tommy's been on it since six, and he lifts two fingers when I come round the bins, which means one man, upstairs, alone, drinking.
"Anyone else in the building."
"Landlord's out. Bar's got four in it and a game on. Nobody's coming up."
"Stay here."
"Boss."
"Nobody comes up, Tommy. Nobody comes down."
I go up. The stair's wood and it gives under every step and I let it, because I want him to hear me coming and I want him to have time to decide what to do about it, and I want to see what he decides.
Second floor. Front. A door with the number gone off it and a strip of light under it, and the smell coming through the wood already, cigarettes and old carpet and the sweet rot of a room a man's been drinking in for eleven years.
I don't knock.
He's at a table by the window with a bottle and a glass and the lighter, and he doesn't get up, and he doesn't reach for anything. He's decided. He's decided he's Ray Donato, and he's been Ray Donato in this room for a long time, and nobody's ever come through that door and changed it.
"Mr Vitale," he says. "You said Friday. It's the Friday after."
"I didn't say which one."
"No. You didn't." He pours. He's careful with it. "You want a drink."
"No."
"Sit, then. You make the place look small."
I don't sit. I shut the door behind me and I stand with my back to it, and I look at the room, because you look at the room.
One bed, unmade. One chair. A hot plate.
A radio. Photographs on the wall, and I look at them, and one of them's a woman, dark, thin, laughing at whoever's holding the camera with a drink in her hand, and I know the face because I've seen it on Marina when she doesn't know she's doing it.
"Gia," he says. He's watching me look. "She was something. Before."
"Before you."
"Before everything. Before Enzo. Before your old man put a hole in him. You think I did that to her? That was done. I just moved in on what was left." He drinks. "Somebody was going to."
I take my watch off.
He sees me do it. He's seen it before, in the restaurant, and he knows what it means, and he doesn't move.
He puts his glass down and he picks up the lighter, and he opens it, click, and he takes a cigarette out of the pack on the table and puts it in his mouth and lights it and closes the lighter, click, and blows the smoke at the ceiling, and all the time he's looking at me, and there's a thing in his face I've been trying to name since the parking lot, and I name it now.
He's not brave. He's not stupid. He's safe. He's a man who's been safe for thirty years and doesn't know how not to be, the way a dog that's never been hit doesn't flinch.
Somebody's been keeping him. I don't know who. I'm going to.
"I had a man ask around," I say.
"I bet you did."
"Rosebank. The old building on Tompkins where you had the apartment with Gia and the two kids. There's a woman on the second floor who's been there since 'ninety. She remembers you."
"Everybody remembers me."
"She remembers a girl on the fire escape.
Fourteen, fifteen. Winter. Two, three in the morning, sitting on the iron in a coat with her knees up.
She said she used to see her from the bathroom window and she used to think, that girl would rather freeze than be inside.
And she never once asked why." I let that sit.
"She remembers an ambulance. A burn. Stove, the mother said. "
Donato smokes.
"So I know," I say. "I said I would."
"You don't know shit." He says it easily.
"You know what an old woman saw out a window.
That's not knowing. Knowing is what I've got.
And I'll tell you something else for free, since you came all this way.
She never told her mother either. Not the stove.
Not any of it. I'd have thought she'd have gone crying to Gia the first time, and she didn't, and she never did, and I used to look at that kid and think, she's going to be somebody's problem one day.
She's going to be some man's whole problem. " He taps ash. "And here you are."
I cross the room.
He doesn't get up. He thinks the lighter's going in his pocket. It's in his right hand, the hand he does everything with, the hand that turns it over and over, click and click, and he's closing his fingers on it to put it away when I take that hand in mine.
Not hard. Not yet. I close my hand over his fist with the brass in it, and I hold it, and I look at him.
"You'll be out of the state by next Friday," I say.
"That's the Friday after this one, so there's no confusion.
You'll be somewhere that isn't New York and isn't New Jersey and you'll stay there, and you won't say her name, and you won't say her mother's, and if you're ever in a room with her again for any reason at all, I won't be sending a man to ask around. Do you understand me."
"Or what."
I close my hand.
It's a small thing, the lighter. Brass. It doesn't give.
His fingers give, round it, all four of them and the thumb, and the sound it makes is not loud, it's the sound of a handful of dry sticks, and he doesn't scream.
He does the thing they do first, which is nothing, which is look at his own hand like it belongs to somebody else. Then he screams. I let go.
The lighter falls out of what's left of his hand and hits the table and doesn't close.
"Next Friday," I say.
I pick up my watch off the table where I put it. I put it back on. I go to the door and I open it and I look back at him, holding his right hand in his left against his chest and rocking, and I take the photograph of Gia off the wall on my way out. I don't know why. I put it in my coat.
Tommy's on the stair.
"Nobody came up," he says.
"Good."
"He's loud."
"He'll stop."
Luca's in the car at the end of the alley with the engine running and the lights off, and I get in, and he pulls out before the door's shut.
"How many."
"One hand."
"Which."
"The one he needed."
He drives. Rosebank at nine on a Friday, the bars lit and the sidewalks wet and kids outside the pizza place on Bay Street, and he takes it slow, the way he takes everything, and after a while he says, "What's in your coat."
I take the photograph out. I hold it under the dash light. Gia Silvestri, thin and laughing, with a drink, in a kitchen I don't know.
"The mother," Luca says.
"Yes."
"Why."
"I don't know."
He lets that go. He's the only man alive I'd say I don't know to and he's never once made me pay for it.
"Tommy went back to the old woman," he says. "Tompkins Avenue. After you called. He asked her one more thing, because I told him to, and she had an answer, and I don't like it."
"Go on."
"Donato's rent. Eleven years over the Anchor and two months behind, you said.
It's not two months behind. It's never been behind.
It's paid on the first, every month, by money order, and the money orders come from a post office in Manhattan, and the landlord doesn't know who sends them and has never asked, because a man who gets paid on the first doesn't ask. "
"Since when."
"Since he moved in. Since Gia died."
I look at the photograph.
"So somebody's kept him," Luca says. "Eleven years.
Paid his rent and let him drink and left him where he was, in Rosebank, where the Silvestri girl grew up and where she'd have to walk past his window to get to the ferry.
Somebody wanted him there. And a man who's kept like that, Sal, is a man who's kept for something. "
"For her."
"Or for whoever came looking for her." He turns onto Richmond Road. "And you just broke his hand."
"Yes."
"So now whoever's keeping him knows we've been up those stairs."
"Yes."
"Was that the idea."
I put the photograph back in my coat.
"It is now," I say.
He drives a block.
"What are you going to tell her."
"The truth."
"All of it?"
"What she asked for. She said don't. I did. She'll want to know what, and I'll tell her what, and then she can do what she likes with it." I look out at Richmond Road going by. "I'm not going to stand in that kitchen and say I went for a drive."
"She'll hit you."
"Probably."
"Good," Luca says. "Somebody should."
Rosa's kitchen at ten at night is the warmest room on the Island and I stand in the door of it with the cold still on me and the two of them look up.
Marina's drying. She's got a dish towel and a plate and she's standing at the counter in the T-shirt with her hair down and the tape gone off her hand, just a plaster now, and she's laughing at something Rosa said, and the laugh goes out of her face when she sees mine.
Not all the way. It stays in the corners for a second, like it doesn't know yet.
Rosa looks at my hands.
"I went to see Ray Donato," I say.
Nobody moves.
"He's in his rooms over the Anchor. I broke his hand.
The right one. He's leaving the state by next Friday, and he won't be back, and he won't say your name again, to anybody, ever.
" I say it plainly. I say it the way you'd read a list. "I'm telling you because I said I'd find out, and I did, and I said it'd be worse for him, and it was. "
She puts the plate down.
She does it carefully, on the counter, with both hands, and she puts the towel down next to it and folds it once, and she comes across the kitchen at me, and Rosa steps back against the stove without being told, and Marina's hand comes up and she hits me across the face.
Open hand. Hard. It lands, and my head goes with it, and I bring it back, and she's right there, and her face is white and her eyes are wet and furious and her mouth is shaking.
"I didn't ask you."
"No."
"I told you not to. In the car. I said don't, and you"
"Yes."
"You don't get to. You don't get to walk into that room and put your hands on him for me. That's mine. That was mine. I've carried that for eleven years and I didn't give it to you, you just took it, you just went and"
"Yes."
"Stop saying yes."
"Then stop telling me things I already know."
She hits me again. Or she starts to. Her hand comes up and it doesn't land, it stops, it's on my face, it's flat against the side of my face where the first one hit, and it's not a hit, and her thumb's on my cheekbone and she's looking at her own hand like she doesn't know whose it is.
Then she's kissing me.
She does it. I want that clear, later, when I go over it.
She goes up on her toes with her hand on my face and her other hand in the front of my coat, in the wet of it, and she puts her mouth on mine, and it's not soft.
It's furious. It's a woman who's just hit a man and hasn't finished, and she kisses me like that, hard, with her teeth in it, and I don't touch her for one second, two, because if I touch her I won't stop, and then I do.
Both hands. Her face. I take her face in my hands and I kiss her back, and I'm not gentle either, I don't know how, and she makes a sound into my mouth that I'll hear for the rest of my life, and behind us Rosa turns the tap on, and off, and goes out.
It's Marina who stops it.
She takes her mouth off mine. She doesn't step back. She stands there with her forehead nearly on my chin and her breath going and her hand still in my coat, and she says, into the front of me, not looking up:
"Don't do that again."
"I'll do it every time."