Chapter 23
SALVATORE
The card number's on the second page and Luca's put his thumb next to it so I can't miss it.
"Richmond Terrace Holdings."
"Yes."
"That's the linen contract."
"It's the linen contract, and the dry goods for the three restaurants, and the lease on the club's parking lot, and about nine other things nobody looks at.
It's a company card. There's four of them.
One's in Carla's drawer at Teresa's. One's with the accountant.
One's in the office downstairs in the tin with the petty cash.
" He takes his thumb off. "And one was Carmine's, and it's in the Mosler, and you told me yesterday you opened the Mosler. "
"It's there."
"You checked."
"I checked this morning."
Cash for the rental, fine, but Enterprise keeps a card on file for the hold, and Robert Green who doesn't exist gave them Richmond Terrace Holdings, which does, and the kid at the counter ran it and it went through and nobody at Enterprise thought anything of it, because why would they.
It's a company card. Companies rent cars.
"So it's the office," I say.
"Or Carla's drawer. Or the accountant."
"Carla's had that drawer thirty years and she doesn't know what's in it. The accountant's in Florida till November. It's the office."
"The office downstairs."
"The office downstairs."
Luca doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to.
The office downstairs is a room off the back hall with a desk and a phone and a tin, and the phone's the line Sonny Fusco's had in his book for forty years, and the tin's got a card in it, and the door's never locked, because it's inside the House, and the House is the lock.
"Who's been in that room," I say.
"Everybody."
"Since Wednesday four weeks ago."
"Everybody, Sal. Me. Aldo does the restaurant books in there Thursdays. Dominic uses the phone because he won't carry a cell. Matteo eats lunch in there when Rosa's in a mood. Rosa. Tommy, for the petty cash. Benny, before." He folds his hands. "It's not a room. It's a hallway with a desk in it."
I look at the rental agreement. A line and a loop where a name should be.
The man in the car was dead inside the hour.
Whoever paid for that car paid for it with a card from a tin in my own house, and whoever cut that throat knew where the car would be before Tommy did, and whoever it is has been in a room I walk past six times a day.
Somebody with a key to the Mosler, or the numbers.
Somebody with a voice Sonny Fusco knows.
"She went to Sonny," I say.
"Tommy said."
"Sonny'll have called Dominic before she was back across the road."
"He did. Dominic's on his way up."
"Good."
Luca looks at me.
"Good," I say again. "Let him come."
She comes in through the kitchen with Tommy behind her looking like a man walking to his own hanging, and I'm in the hall, and she stops.
She's got a thing in her face. She's got a thing she wants to tell me, I can see it, it's right there behind her teeth, and I don't let her.
"Not now."
"Salvatore, he said"
"I know what Sonny said. Sonny says what he's paid to say and then he calls my uncle. Whatever it was, Dominic's had it for an hour." I turn to Tommy. "Go and sit in the booth."
"Boss, she"
"Booth, Tommy."
He goes. She doesn't. She stands in my hall in her coat with the thing still behind her teeth and she looks at me, and I do what I do.
I close it. All of it. I put the face on that I put on for Dominic and I give it to her, and I watch her see it, and I watch her understand what it is, because she's the only person who ever has.
"No more Teresa's," I say.
"What."
"No Sunny Vale. No Sunset Park. No Sonny Fusco. No New Dorp Lane. You don't leave the property. Tommy's not on the door, he's on the gate, because you don't need a door, because you're not going anywhere there's a door to. Your phone stays with you. Call who you like. But you don't get in a car."
"You said"
"I said daylight, with Benny, to a building with my name on it. And a car came up over the kerb of that building and Benny's got a plate in his hip." I don't raise my voice. I never do. "So that's done. I gave you the daylight and it cost me a man. I'm not giving you New Dorp Lane."
"He didn't tell me anything you don't"
"Then you've got nothing to tell me. Go upstairs."
Her hands come up. Both. The fingers of the left one going, that rhythm, tapping on nothing, and she doesn't know, she never knows, and I've watched it in this hall and in the study and on my desk with her legs round me, and I make myself not look at it.
"You said you wouldn't," she says. "In the study.
I said say you won't and you didn't say it, and I stayed anyway, and I thought, he didn't say it because he doesn't say things, not because he'd." She stops.
"You're doing it. This is it. This is what the door sounds like from the inside, Salvatore, I told you I knew, and you're doing it in your own hall with your face like that. "
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because I don't have another one."
She looks at me. Then she goes past me, up the stairs, and she doesn't run and she doesn't slam anything, nobody in this house slams anything, and I stand in the hall and listen to her go up two flights and along, and the third-floor door that sticks, and it shuts.
The thing she wanted to tell me goes up the stairs with her.
I let it.
The office downstairs is exactly what Luca said. A hallway with a desk in it.
From the door it looks like a room I've never seen, which is nearly true.
A desk that was my grandfather's. A chair.
A phone, the old kind, cream, with the cord twisted up on itself, and the number on a label under the handset in my mother's handwriting because she was the last person who thought anyone would need reminding.
A filing cabinet with the restaurant books.
And the tin. A biscuit tin, Danish, blue, on the corner of the desk where it's been for thirty years, and I open it.
Petty cash. Receipts. Rubber bands. And the card, Richmond Terrace Holdings LLC, sitting on top of the twenties like it's never been anywhere.
I don't touch it. I look at the phone.
Somebody stood here. In this room, at this desk, with my mother's handwriting under their hand, and picked that up and called Sonny Fusco and said a boy's name.
And then went back out into the hall and up the stairs, or down the drive, or into the kitchen for coffee, and sat at my table on Sunday and passed the bread.
"You're looking for something."
Rosa. Behind me, with a cloth.
"No."
"You're standing in a door looking at a phone. That's looking."
"Who's been in here this week."
She thinks about it the way she thinks about anything, which is briefly. "Aldo, for the books. Your uncle, for the phone, twice. Tommy for the tin. Matteo, for the chair, because he likes to put his feet on it and I won't have it in my kitchen." She looks at me. "And you. Now."
"Nobody else."
"It's a room in a house, Salvatore. It's not a vault." She goes past me and picks the tin up and puts it back down an inch to the left, where it belongs. "Whatever you're looking for, it's not in a biscuit tin. It never is."
Dominic doesn't come to the study. He comes to the hall, because he's been told what happened in the hall, and he wants to stand where it happened.
"Sonny called."
"I know Sonny called."
"She walked into his room. On her own. The Silvestri girl, into Sonny Fusco's back room, asking him who vouched for her brother." He's got his coat on and Paulie's in the drive and it's five in the afternoon, so he's had two, maybe three. "You know what that looks like."
"Tell me."
"It looks like a woman finding out who's on the inside of this family and what they're worth. It looks like a rat's kid doing what rats do." He comes closer. "And I'll tell you what else. It looks like a Don who can't keep his own whore in the"
I don't move.
I want that noted. I don't move an inch. I stand in my hall with my hands at my sides and my face where it is, and I say, in the voice I use for waiters, "Say whore again."
He doesn't.
He stands there with the word still in his mouth and his face going a colour, and Paulie's in the drive, and Luca's at the top of the stairs where he's been the whole time without either of us looking, and Dominic looks at me and does the sum, the same sum Donato did, and he gets a different answer, because he's known me since the day I was born.
"Salvatore."
"You've got a thing to say. Say the rest of it. Leave that word out."
He breathes. He puts his hands in his coat.
"The men are talking," he says. "Not me.
The men. Paulie hears it at the club, Sonny hears it in New Dorp, my guys at the restaurant.
They're saying you've got a woman in Teresa's room that you don't put a ring on and you don't put out, and either one they'd understand.
Either one's a man. This is neither. This is a girl on the third floor with a target on her and a Don who bleeds at dinner and locks her in when she walks to the store.
" He looks up the stairs, where the door stuck.
"Marry her or get rid of her. Those are the two.
Anything else is a knife in every man's eye, and it's a knife they'll use on you, and I won't be able to stop them, and I'm not sure I'd try. "
"Is that a threat."
"It's arithmetic. Your father taught me. He taught you too."
I look at him. At my father's brother in my father's hall with my father's rules in his mouth, and I think about a tin with a card in it and a phone that's been the same number for forty years, and I think about Sonny saying a voice I know, and I think about a folder with air in it, and I say, very evenly:
"Sunday."
"What."
"Sunday. Dinner. Everybody. You, Aldo, Matteo, Luca, the captains from the club, Carla, Sonny if he wants to eat.
And I'm going to stand up at my mother's table in front of all of them and put a ring on Enzo Silvestri's daughter, and you're going to raise a glass to it.
" I go to the door and open it. "And then we'll see whose eye it's a knife in. "
He doesn't say anything.
"Get in the car, Dom," I say. "Paulie's waiting."