Chapter 21
SALVATORE
Matteo had him from the kitchen window and got as far as the door, and by the time it was open there was nothing on the lawn but grass.
"He was looking up."
"I know."
"At her window. Sal. He was standing on Ma's lawn looking up at the window with you in the"
"I know what he was looking at."
He shuts his mouth. He's got a dish towel in his hand that he took off Rosa's rail without noticing and he's twisting it, and I take it off him and put it back on the rail, and I go out the kitchen door and across the grass to where the man was standing.
Nothing. Grass. The prints of a heavy man's shoes in the wet where he stood for as long as he stood, and I put my own foot in one of them, and it's bigger than mine, and I look up.
Third floor. End of the hall. The window with the light in it, and behind the light, an hour ago, a woman in a T-shirt with her arms wrapped round herself looking down the hill, and me asleep on the bed behind her with my hand open on her pillow, and Paulie Gatto on the grass with his hands in his pockets, looking up at both of us.
It's four o'clock. She's in the kitchen with Rosa. She hasn't said anything. She will.
The brother's in the pool house door. He's seen me on the grass and he's come out in his socks with his arm in the sling, and he stands there with the lit water behind him and says, "Was that Paulie?"
"Go inside, Nico."
"It was. I know him. He's the one who held me. In the alley, the first time, before any of this. He didn't hit me. He just held me while the other one did." He's not shaking. That's new. "He was looking at her window."
"I know what he was looking at."
"Is he going to"
"Nobody comes on this lawn. Not him. Not anybody.
That's the whole of it." I look at him. Twenty years old in his socks with a V under his sleeve, and he's not gone back inside, and he's not going to until I say the thing he came out to hear.
"Your sister's on the third floor of my house.
Anybody who wants to stand on this grass and look at that window has to come up my drive and past my gate and past my brother, and then they get to me. Go inside."
He goes inside.
I get my keys.
Lucia's is on Victory Boulevard and it's got my aunt's name over the door in gold script that Dominic paid too much for, and at half past four on a Monday the dining room's empty and the bar's got two old men in it and my uncle's at the back table with a glass of water and a newspaper, because it's not Sunday, and he's drinking water anyway.
I clock that. I put it where it goes.
Lucia comes out of the kitchen before I've got to the table. My aunt. Sixty, small, with her hair done every Thursday and a face that's been kind to me since before I could walk, and she takes my face in both hands the way she's done for thirty-three years and looks at it.
"You're not eating."
"I'm not staying."
"You're not eating anywhere. Look at you." She lets go. She looks at the table where her husband is, and back at me, and something passes over her that she puts away. "Is it true? Gia's girl?"
"Yes."
"I did Gia's hair. For the wedding. Nineteen ninety-eight, at Enzo's mother's, in a kitchen with a curling iron that kept cutting out.
" She smooths the front of her apron. "She was the most nervous bride I ever saw.
And the happiest. Both at once. She kept saying, Lucia, is it straight, is it straight, and it was straight, and she couldn't see it. " A pause. "Is the girl like her?"
"No."
"No?"
"She's like him."
Lucia nods slowly. "Then God help you," she says, and kisses my cheek, and goes back into her kitchen.
He looks up. He doesn't stand.
"Salvatore."
"Dom."
"Sit. Eat something. Lucia's got"
"I'm not eating."
He folds the paper. He does it carefully, the way he does everything at his own table, and he puts it down beside the water and looks at me, and I don't sit.
"Paulie was on my lawn."
"Was he."
"Two o'clock. Standing on my mother's grass, looking up at the third floor. My brother had him from the kitchen window. Gone before the door was open, so he wasn't there to be seen. He was there to look." I put my hands on the back of the chair I'm not sitting in. "And you're going to tell me why."
"I sent him."
He says it like that. Flat. No pause, no look at the bar, nothing, and it's the last thing I expected, and he sees it land.
"I sent him," Dominic says again. "I said go up the hill and stand where the men stand when they come to the house, and look at what they look at, and come and tell me what you see.
And he went. And he came back and told me.
" He picks up the water. "He said the girl's window.
He said the light was on at two in the afternoon and the curtain was open and she was standing in it in a shirt that wasn't hers.
He said he could see your car in the drive and Luca's car in the drive and nobody had been in the study since noon.
" He drinks. "That's what the men see, Salvatore.
That's what I sent Paulie to look at. So I'd know what they know. "
"And what do they know."
"That the Don's on the third floor on a Monday afternoon with the Silvestri girl and the door shut, and the boxes are still going out of the terminal, and nobody's been put on the floor for it.
" He puts the glass down. "That's what they know.
I didn't tell them. Paulie didn't tell them. They've got eyes."
"And the boxes."
"Four boxes. Three and a half million. And nobody on the floor.
" He turns the glass. "You want to know what Sonny says at the club?
Sonny says the old man would've had a name inside a week.
Sonny says it in front of the Brooklyn captains.
I don't say anything, Salvatore, I sit and I drink my water, but I hear it, and I'm telling you I hear it, because nobody else at that table will. "
"I'll have a name."
"When."
"When it's the right one."
"Your father"
"My father had a name inside a week once, Dom. Sixteen years ago. You were standing next to me." I let that sit. "How sure was he."
He doesn't answer that. He looks at the water.
I stand there with my hands on the chair.
"Paulie doesn't come up the hill again."
"He's my man."
"He's your man in Brooklyn. On my lawn he's a man standing on my lawn, and the next time he does it, Matteo won't stop at the door, and I won't stop Matteo.
" I take my hands off the chair. "I've dealt with it.
That's what I'm going to say to her, when she asks, and she'll ask.
I've dealt with it. And I'm telling you first so that when it gets round the club that Paulie Gatto got sent home off Todt Hill, you'll know where that started too. "
He looks at the water. He looks at it a long time.
"You opened the safe," he says.
I don't move.
"Rosa said. Not to me. To Lucia, at the church, Wednesday.
She said you'd been in your father's safe and you'd come out of the study with a face on you and hadn't spoken to anybody for two days.
" He turns the glass on its coaster. "I've never seen inside that safe.
Carmine never showed me. Thirty years, his brother, and he showed me the tank and he showed me the drain and he never once showed me the Mosler.
" He looks up. "So I'm asking, since we're both telling each other things first. Did you find what you were looking for? "
"I wasn't looking for anything."
"Then what did you find."
"Nothing, Dom."
He nods. He nods slowly, like a man who's been told a price, and he picks the paper up again and unfolds it, and that's the end of the conversation, and I turn round.
"Salvatore."
I stop.
"The girl stood in that window." He doesn't look up from the paper. "Paulie said. He said she saw him, and she didn't move, and she didn't shut the curtain. She stood there and looked at him till he left." He turns a page. "Teresa would've shut the curtain."
I take the long way back. Bay Street, past St Joseph's, because the long way goes past the water and I've got a thing to say to her and I haven't got the words for it yet.
There's a car in the alley by the church.
A Lincoln, dark, parked nose in by the side door where the poor box is, and I know the car, everyone knows the car, it's been in the drive of the House every Sunday for thirty years.
Aldo. Monday. He does the parish accounts, he's done them since before I was born, Father Amato won't have anyone else near the books.
I slow, and I don't stop, and I don't know why I'd stop.
The drive's dark when I come up it, and the kitchen light's on, and through the window I can see her at the table with a fork in her hand, waiting, and Rosa at the stove with her back to the room, and I sit in the car for a minute with the engine off.
Your uncle's man was in the garden. That's what she'll say. And I'll say I know. And she'll want the rest, and the rest is a restaurant on Victory Boulevard and a glass of water and a man asking what I found in a safe, and none of it's hers to carry, and all of it is.
My phone goes before I've got the door open.
Luca. He doesn't say hello. He never does.
"The rental," he says. "Robert Green. Enterprise keeps a card behind the cash, for the hold, and I've spent four days on a kid at a counter in Newark, and I've got it."
"Whose."
"That's the thing." A pause. Luca doesn't pause. "Sal. The car was paid for with our money."