Chapter 17
SALVATORE
I take the bag.
She doesn't let go of it. I don't pull. I put my hand on the strap next to hers and I hold it there, and we stand in her doorway with a duffel between us and four thousand dollars in her other fist, and I wait, because I can wait longer than her.
That's never been in doubt. She's got twelve years of picking up a boy in her arms and I've got twenty-one of standing in doorways.
"Let go," she says.
"No."
"I'm not asking."
"I know you're not."
Her hand comes off the strap. Not because I won. Because she's tired, she's so tired I can see it in her spine, and I put the bag on the floor by the door and she watches me do it and then she looks at the money in her hand like she's forgotten it's there.
"Sit down."
"Don't tell me to"
"Marina. Sit down before you fall down, and then I'll tell you something, and then you can pick the bag up again if you still want to."
She sits. On the edge of the bed, where she sat on Sunday, in the same jeans and a T-shirt that's on inside out, and she puts the money on the blanket next to her and looks at it, and I shut the door and stay by it.
"Four thousand one hundred and sixty," I say.
Her head comes up.
"Left shoe. Under the insole. You've counted it every night you've been in this house and I've never once seen you do it and I've known since the first morning.
You stood in my study with your weight on the wrong foot because there was a strip of bills under it and you're not used to the shoes.
That's how. I saw it before you sat down. "
She doesn't say anything.
"Six months ago I was in Cassidy's. I told you I'd seen you run a bar.
I didn't tell you when. Luca had a fighter in there and I went with him, and I sat at the end of the bar for forty minutes and watched you put a drunk's coat on him one arm at a time, and I went home and didn't sleep.
" I don't move from the door. "And in the morning I told Luca to keep an eye.
Not on you. Around you. If anybody leaned on you, if you got sick, if you left the city.
Six months. You never knew. You weren't meant to. "
"You had me followed."
"I had you watched."
"That's the"
"It's not the same and you know it's not, because you've had a man on your brother's building for nine days and you slept better for it."
Her mouth shuts.
"So when you walked up my drive with your brother's number in your mouth, I already knew your name and I already knew your shoe and I already knew what you'd do for him, and I gave you ninety days because ninety days was the longest I could think of that you'd say yes to.
That's what the offer was. It wasn't the debt.
I told you it wasn't the debt on the first day, I said it's not the reason, and you heard me and you took it anyway, because you needed to.
" I stop. "That's what I've got to tell you. Now pick up the bag."
She doesn't pick up the bag.
She sits on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and she looks at me for a long time, and I can't read it. I can read anyone. I've read Dominic across a table for two years and Donato across a bar in four seconds and I can't read her, and she says, finally, very quietly:
"You watched me for six months and you never came in."
"No."
"Why."
"Because I'd have done this." I look at the room. The bed. Her. "And I didn't want to do this to you. And then your brother did it for me."
She doesn't leave.
She doesn't stay, either. Not the way I'd call it.
She sleeps three hours in the third-floor room with the bag still by the door and the money on the blanket, and at nine she comes down to the kitchen where I've been since six and puts her hands flat on Rosa's table across from me and says, "I'm going to work. "
"No."
"I'm going to work, Salvatore. Not Sunset Park.
Teresa's. In daylight, with Benny, in your car, to a building with your name on it, and I'm going to stand behind a bar and pour drinks for people who hate me, because if I sit in that room today I'm going to go out the window, and if I sit with Nico I'm going to say something to him I can't take back. Those are the options. Pick one."
Rosa, at the stove, doesn't turn round. Her shoulders do something.
"Daylight," I say.
"Daylight."
"Benny's inside. Not the door. Inside, at the end of the bar, where he was."
"Fine."
"And you're back here by four."
"Four."
"And if you see a grey car, any grey car, you go in the office and you lock it and you call me. Not Benny. Me."
"The car's gone."
"Then it costs you nothing to say yes."
She says yes. She goes. I watch the car go down the drive from the kitchen window and Rosa says behind me, "That's the first right thing you've done since she got here," and I say, "Which part," and she says, "The part where you let her," and puts a plate down.
The pool house smells of chlorine and Rosa's soup, and the brother's awake, sitting up in the bed with his arm in a sling across his chest and the television on with the sound off, and he goes white when I come in.
I take the chair. I put it by the bed and sit and look at the arm. Rosa's dressed it, but the top of the V shows above the gauze at the elbow, two clean lines, and I look at that for a while.
"Show me the phone," I say.
"What phone."
"The one your sister asked you about. In the hospital. The one you lost in the van."
He doesn't say anything. He's got his mother's mouth and none of his sister's spine, and he looks at the television, and I let him.
"Here's what I know, Nico. Somebody vouched for you to Sonny Fusco before you'd ever placed a bet.
Somebody gave you a phone that isn't yours.
Somebody told you the car outside your window was nothing, and you told her that, and she believed you, because she wanted to, because she's tired.
" I lean forward. "And somebody put you in a van last night and wrote on you.
I don't think it's the same somebody. But I think the one gave you to the other, and I think you know that now, and I think that's why you can't look at me. "
His good eye's wet. He still doesn't look.
"I'm not going to ask you who," I say. "You'd lie, and then I'd know you lied, and it'd be worse for you.
So I'll wait. When you're ready to tell your sister, you'll tell her.
And when you tell her, I'll already know, because I'll have found out on my own, and the only thing that'll be different is whether you said it first."
"I didn't know," he says. To the television. "I didn't know they'd. He said it was to help her. He said she'd be safe up here."
"Who said."
He shuts his mouth.
I stand up. I put the chair back where it was.
"Eat the soup," I say. "Rosa'll know if you don't."
Benny calls at ten past three, and he's not talking. He's making a sound.
"Where."
"Lot. Teresa's. The lot. Boss, the car, it came up on the"
"Is she hit."
"No. No. I got her. I got her down. I'm. It's my. Something's wrong with my."
"Where is she now."
"Office. She's in the office. She locked it. I heard it lock. Boss, I can't get up."
I'm already in the car. Luca's driving, because Luca was in the drive when the phone went and he had the keys before I did, and we come down Todt Hill at a speed that isn't a speed, it's a decision, and I've got Benny on the line the whole way and he's saying the same four things and I let him say them.
Grey Camry. Came up over the kerb. On the sidewalk, at her, doing forty. He got her down. His hip.
"Did you see him."
"Tinted. I didn't. He didn't stop. He went back down the kerb and out onto Hylan and he was gone, boss, he didn't even brake, he just."
"Okay."
"I got her down."
"I know you did."
"I got her down this time."
"Benny. Shut up and lie still."
The lot at Teresa's has a crowd in it. Not a crowd.
Six people, staff, Carla in the middle with her hands over her mouth, and the kid Dino kneeling on the asphalt by the kerb next to Benny, who's on his back with his leg wrong, and there's a scrape on the kerb where a tyre took the paint off it and there's a shoe.
Her shoe. One of the good ones she isn't used to, lying on its side by the door.
I go past all of it. Luca stops for Benny. I go in through the front and through the empty restaurant and down the hall to the office and I put my hand on the door and it's locked.
"Marina."
Nothing.
"It's me."
The lock turns. The door opens. She's standing in the middle of Carla's office in one shoe with her hair half down and a graze all down her left forearm from the asphalt and her phone in her hand, and she looks at me, and her face is white and it's not doing the thing.
It's not gone anywhere. It's right here.
"I called you," she says.
"I know."
"You said call you. I called you. Not Benny."
"I know. I'm here."
"He got me down. He just. He put himself on top of me and the car went past so close I felt it, I felt the heat off it, and he made a noise, and I got up and I ran in here like you said and I locked it like you said and I called you like you said.
" Her voice isn't shaking. Her hands are.
Both of them, and she's holding the phone with both, and she looks at them. "I did everything you said."
"Yes."
"And it still."
"Yes."
I take the phone out of her hands. I put it on Carla's desk. I put my hands on her face, both, the bad one and the good one, and I hold her there, and she doesn't close her eyes, she keeps them on me, and she's breathing too fast and I breathe slow so she can find it, and after a while she does.
"Is Benny"
"Luca's got him."
"He got me down."
"I heard."
"It was the same car."
"I know."
She puts her forehead on my chest. Just that.
She doesn't cry, she doesn't do that, but she puts her forehead on my shirt and leaves it there, and I put my hand on the back of her head and hold it, and I look over her at Carla's wall, and I think about doors and cars and phones and men and every single thing in this world I can put my hand on, and I think about a kerb.
I can't control a kerb.
Luca finds me in the lot an hour later with the ambulance gone and Benny in it and a man from the precinct who owes Dominic standing by his car pretending to write something.
"They found the Camry," Luca says.
"Where."
"Expressway. Off the shoulder past the Richmond exit, nose in the barrier, forty minutes ago. State trooper called it in." He doesn't fold his hands. He's got his phone in one of them. "Driver's in it."
"Alive."
"His throat's cut."
I look at him.
"Ear to ear," Luca says. "In the driver's seat, belt on, engine running.
Trooper thought it was a crash till he opened the door.
Forty minutes, Sal. That's forty minutes after he came up over that kerb.
" He puts the phone in his pocket. "Tommy's crew were ten minutes behind him. Somebody was closer."