Chapter 19
SALVATORE
She doesn't ask in the car. She doesn't ask in the hall, or on the stairs, or at the door of the third-floor room where I leave her at eleven with the bag still on the floor and the money gone back into the shoe, and she doesn't ask at breakfast, where she sits across from me and eats Rosa's eggs and looks at me over them with the question sitting in her face like a stone in a shoe.
She's waiting for me to say it.
Aldo told her to make me. She's not going to make me. She's going to sit there with it until I can't stand the weight of her not asking, and she knows that, and it's the cruellest thing anybody's done to me in years and she's doing it with a fork.
"Get your coat," I say.
"Where."
"Get your coat, Marina."
Moravian at nine on a Saturday is empty except for the crows and a man on a mower who lifts a hand to me because I've been coming here on Sundays for two years and he knows the car.
I don't take her to my father.
I park on the lower road and we walk up between the older stones, the ones with the photographs set into them behind glass, and she doesn't ask where we're going, and I don't say, and the ground's wet and she's in the good shoes, both of them, Carla found the other one, and she walks in them like she's learning.
My mother's stone is white and it's plain because my father couldn't stand to look at anything else. Teresa Anna Vitale. The dates. Nothing under it, because he couldn't decide, and then he was dead too, and I've never changed it.
I stop. She stops beside me.
"Rosa told you," I say.
"Yes."
"Tell me what she told you."
"The club. The car. Nine shots. He'd gone in for two minutes." She looks at the stone. "You were twelve. Your hands."
"That's what she told you."
"Yes."
"Here's what she didn't."
I've never said it. Not to Rosa, not to Luca, not to my brother, who was six and asleep at home and has only ever had the story.
I put my hands in my coat because the bad one's started to hurt in the cold and I look at my mother's name and I say it, in the order it happened, because that's the only way I know how to say anything.
"The radio was on. That's the first thing.
She sang along to it, badly, she couldn't sing, and she had her hand back between the seats to hold my ankle.
She did that. When she drove me anywhere she'd reach back and hold my ankle at the lights, and I was twelve and I hated it and I let her.
And the car came down Ninth the wrong way with its lights off and I saw it before she did because I was looking out the back, I was always looking out the back, and I said Ma, and she turned round to look at me.
That's why. She turned round to look at me and that's why the first one went in the side of her head and not the front. "
Marina doesn't move.
"Nine. Rosa's right. I counted. I was under her.
She'd come back over the seat when it started, I don't know how, she got her whole body over the seat and on top of me on the floor in the back, and I lay there under my mother and counted nine, and then the car went, and she didn't move, and I said Ma.
I said it a lot. And then I tried to get out from under her and I couldn't, and the window was in, all over us, and I put my hands through it.
" I take the bad one out of my pocket and look at it, at Rosa's wrapping, and under it the old line across the knuckles.
"That's this. Not the glass on Sunday. That's from trying to get out from under her. "
"Salvatore."
"He came out of the club. My father. He'd heard it.
He came out and he opened the back door and she came out onto the sidewalk, she just came out, and I was underneath and I sat up, and he looked at me.
He looked at me for a long time, with her on the sidewalk between us.
And he didn't touch me. He didn't pick me up.
He put his hand on the roof of the car and he looked at me sitting in her blood with glass in my hands, and I've never known what he was thinking, and I've never once stopped wanting to.
" I put the hand away. "Then Luca's father came, and picked me up, and that was that. "
The crows go over. The mower's stopped somewhere.
She puts her hand in my pocket.
Not on my arm. In my pocket, where my hand is, the bad one, and she takes it, and she holds it, and she doesn't squeeze, she just holds it there in my coat where nobody could see, and looks at my mother's stone, and doesn't say anything.
She doesn't say I'm sorry. She doesn't say anything at all, and it's the right thing, and I don't know how she knows it.
We stand there.
I could tell her. Now. It's the same story, that's what she doesn't know, it's the same story five years later with a different woman's child on the floor of a different room, and my father in the door looking at me the same way, and I've got her hand, and she's not asking.
She's not asking. She's standing in a graveyard holding a hand I've never let anyone hold and not asking, and if I say the rest of it she'll take her hand out of my pocket and go down that hill and the next car won't miss.
That's what I tell myself.
That's the lie. Not the one I tell her. The one I tell me.
"That's what I remember," I say.
She looks up at me.
"Aldo said ask you. So I'm not asking. You brought me here and you told me." She holds the hand. "Is that all of it."
"That's what I've got."
It's not a lie. I want that on the record. Later, when it costs what it's going to cost, I want it known that I stood at my mother's grave and I didn't lie to her. I said that's what I've got, and it was, it was what I had, and I didn't say it was everything. She heard it as everything. I let her.
That's the one. That's the one time.
We walk back down between the stones. She keeps her hand in my pocket the whole way, and at the bottom, by the car, where the older graves give out and the newer ones start, flat and cheap and close together, she stops and looks along the rows.
"He's here," she says. "Somewhere. They never told us where."
I don't say anything.
"Nobody told my mother where they'd put him.
She asked. She went to the priest at St Joseph's and she asked, and he said he'd been told it was Moravian and that was all he'd been told, and she walked every row of this place for a week with me holding Nico's hand, and she never found him.
So she stopped." Marina looks at the flat stones.
"She's in Green-Wood. In Brooklyn. I couldn't afford here. "
I know where he is. Third row from the fence on the north side, the unmarked ones, fourth from the end. My father took me there once, a year after, and stood over it and said nothing, and I've never been back and I've never forgotten which one.
I don't tell her. I put it with the rest.
"Get in the car," I say. "It's cold."
The safe's behind the tank.
Not behind it. Under it. The tank sits on a cabinet that's built into the wall and the cabinet has a false back, and behind the false back there's a Mosler from 1961 that my grandfather put in and my father never changed the combination on, because he liked that I'd have to learn it from him, and I did.
The day I turned eighteen. He stood behind me and said the numbers once and never said them again.
I haven't opened it since the funeral.
There wasn't a reason to. Everything I need to run this family is in my head or in Luca's, and what's in the Mosler is my father's, and my father's dead, and I didn't want to put my hand in his things.
That's the truth. I've had his chair and his watch and his desk for two years and I've left the safe shut because a safe is a different thing.
A safe is where a man keeps what he was.
I'm opening it now because of a girl in a hospital chair asking who did it.
The combination's easy. My hands know it. The door comes open heavy and the smell comes out, paper and steel and the cigars he kept in the bottom, and I turn the tank lamp so it shines in.
Cash. Not much. He didn't believe in it. Two guns wrapped in cloth that I know the weight of. My mother's rings in a box. And the files.
He kept a file on every man who died under him.
I know that because Dominic told me once, drunk, and I never asked to see them, and here they are, a row of them standing up in the back of the Mosler in brown folders with the names on the tabs in his handwriting, twenty, twenty-five, more.
I don't count. I go through the tabs with one finger.
Amato. Bruno. Castellano. DeLuca. Fusco, not Sonny, Sonny's father.
Gatto, and that's Paulie's uncle. Lombardi. Marino. Pastore. Rizzo.
Silvestri.
The tab's there. In his hand. Silvestri, E. And the folder's there, standing up between Rizzo and Tedesco where it should be, and I pull it out, and it's light.
It's empty.
Not thin. Empty. A brown folder with a name on the tab and nothing in it, not a sheet, not a photograph, not the thing he'd have put in it first, which was whatever Aldo brought him that made him decide.
The others are thick. Rizzo is an inch. Silvestri is a folder with air in it, and I stand in my father's study with it open in my bad hand and the tank lamp on it and I turn it over, like something's going to fall out.
Nothing falls out.
I pull Rizzo. I want to know what a full one looks like, and it looks like this: a typed page, single spaced, no letterhead, with dates down the left side.
Two photographs of a man I half remember getting out of a car.
A Polaroid, and I don't look at the Polaroid for long.
And on top, clipped, a sheet in Aldo's hand, small and neat, that says what Rizzo did and who saw him do it and what it cost, because that was Aldo's job, that was what a consigliere was for, to bring my father the thing that looked finished.
Every folder in this row has a sheet like that on top. That's how it worked. Aldo brought it. My father read it. My father decided.
Silvestri has no sheet. Silvestri has nothing. Whatever Aldo brought him about Enzo, it was the first thing in the folder, and it's the first thing that's gone.
I put Rizzo back.
Somebody's been in here. Somebody with the numbers. And there are two people alive who had the numbers, and one of them is standing here, and the other one taught them to me on my eighteenth birthday and has been dead for two years.
Or there's a third.