Chapter 25
MARINA
"What did he call himself."
Nico looks at the television.
"Not his name. I know you won't give me his name. What did he say he was. When he called you. The first time."
It is Thursday morning and the pool house smells of chlorine and the toast Rosa brought him, and I am sitting on the end of his bed in the clothes I slept in with a ring I have not seen coming for me on Sunday and a horn still ringing somewhere in my head from a garage, and I have decided, somewhere between the garage and the toast, that I have been asking my brother the wrong question for a month.
"Nico."
"Mari, I told you, I"
"You told me you can't. I heard you. I'm not asking who.
I'm asking what he said." I put my hand on his good ankle through the blanket.
"The first time he called. A number you didn't know.
You picked up. And a man's voice said something, and it was the something that made you listen, because you don't listen to anybody, you never have, so it wasn't nothing. What was it."
He is quiet for a long time. The television is on mute. Somebody on it is selling a mattress.
"He said he was Dad's best friend," Nico says.
I do not move.
"He said. He said, Nico, you don't know me, but I stood up in the church when your sister was baptised, and I've watched out for the two of you for sixteen years from further away than I'd have liked.
That's what he said. Those words. From further away than I'd have liked.
" His hand comes out from under his arm and rubs his face.
"And I believed him. Because who says that? Who makes that up?"
"And then."
"And then he said there was a way to make us safe.
Both of us. He said there was a man who'd look after you if you were under his roof, and the only way to get you under his roof was to give you a reason, and the reason was me.
He said, go to Sonny. He said, Sonny'll take your bets, and you'll lose, because you're going to lose, and when it's big enough, don't run.
Send your sister." Nico looks at me. His eye is nearly the right colour again.
"He said Salvatore won't hurt her. He said it three times.
He said I know him, I've known him since he was born, he'll take her in and he won't hurt her, and she'll be safer than she's been since your father died. "
"And the phone."
"He gave me the phone so he could tell me how you were doing. That's all it was. He'd text. She's fine. She ate. She played the piano." His voice cracks on the last one. "He knew when you played the piano, Mari."
The mattress advert ends. Another one starts.
"The van," I say.
"I don't know. I don't know about the van. He said that wasn't him, he said that was somebody else, somebody who'd found out, and he was sorry, he said he was so sorry, and then he said get rid of the phone, so I." He stops. "So I did. It's in the pool. I put it in the pool the first night."
I look at the water through the glass. Blue. Lit from underneath. Somewhere at the bottom of it, a phone.
"Okay," I say.
"Mari."
"It's okay."
"Are you going to tell him? Salvatore? Because he'll. If he finds out somebody in the house was running me, he'll"
"I don't know what I'm going to do," I say, and it is the truth, and I stand up and I kiss the top of my brother's head the way I did in Sunset Park, and I go.
Aldo does the restaurant books on Thursdays. In the office downstairs, off the back hall, in the room with the phone.
I have known that for three days. Rosa said it, in passing, the way Rosa says everything, and I put it where I put things, and this morning I take it out.
Eleven o'clock. The door is half open. He is at the old desk with the reading glasses on his nose for once and a ledger open in front of him and a pencil, an actual pencil, moving down a column of figures, and he does not hear me until I am in the room.
"Bella." He looks up over the glasses. He smiles. "You've caught me. I'm the last man in New York who does it by hand. Enzo taught me and I never learned anything else."
"Enzo taught you to keep a ledger."
"Badly."
"You said." I shut the door.
He watches me shut it. The smile stays, and something behind it does not.
"I stood up in the church when you were baptised," I say. "You told me that in the hospital. You said it like a thing you were giving me."
"It was."
"You said it to Nico too. On the phone. The first time. I stood up in the church when your sister was baptised. And then you said go to Sonny."
He takes the glasses off.
He does it slowly. He folds them and puts them on the ledger, on the column of figures, and he looks at them there, and then he looks at me, and he does not deny it.
I had thought he would. I had a whole speech ready for the denying, and there is nothing to use it on.
He just sits in my grandfather's chair, no, in Salvatore's grandfather's chair, with his hands on the desk and his face open, and he says:
"Yes."
"Why."
"Sit down."
"I'm not going to"
"Marina. Please. You're standing over me the way he stands over people, and I'm sixty-one, and I'd like to say this to you sitting down."
I sit. There is one other chair and I sit in it, and it is close, and he leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, and he looks like a man in a confessional.
"Dominic wants you dead," he says.
I do not say anything.
"Not hurt. Not gone. Dead. He's wanted it since the day Carmine died, because that was the day Salvatore started opening his father's drawers, and Dominic knows what's in the drawers, and somewhere in the drawers is your father, and somewhere near your father is your name.
" He turns the ring. "I don't know all of it.
I know Dominic. I've sat next to him for thirty years and I know the way he looks at a thing he's decided to remove.
And a year ago he started looking at you that way.
Across the Island. From his restaurant. A girl behind a bar in Bay Ridge that he'd never met. "
"You're saying Dominic"
"I'm saying I watched him decide. And I thought, where is the one place on this earth that man can't reach her.
And there was one." He looks at the ceiling.
At the house. "Under Salvatore's roof. In Teresa's house.
Because Dominic won't touch a thing in this house that his nephew's put his hand on, he can't, the men would tear him apart.
So I needed you here. And I couldn't come to you, I couldn't knock on your door and say come and live with the people who shot your father.
You'd have laughed. You'd have been right to. "
"So you used Nico."
"I used Nico." He does not look away. "I'm not proud of it.
I built a debt out of a boy and I sent his sister up a hill on her own with cash in her shoe, and I sat in this house and watched her walk in, and I have never in my life been so ashamed and so relieved in the same minute.
" His eyes are wet. "And then the car. And the van.
And I understood that I'd been wrong about one thing.
I'd thought getting you here would be enough.
I hadn't understood that getting you here would be the thing that made him move. "
"Dominic."
"Who else."
I look at him. I look at him for a long time, this man with the wet eyes and the pencil ledger who has sent me money for sixteen years without a name on it, who held my chair and squeezed my knee under a table and told me my father would have sat in the hospital chair, and I try to find the lie.
I am good at that. It is the one thing I am good at.
I have found the lie in ten thousand faces across a bar, and I look for it in his, and I cannot find it.
Because there is not one. Not the way I know how to look. He believes every word he is saying, and that is the thing I do not have a tool for.
"Why didn't you tell Salvatore," I say.
"Because he'd have thrown me out of this house."
"For helping"
"For running it behind his back. For putting a girl on his third floor without his say.
That's what it is, bella, whatever I meant by it.
It's a thing done in his house that he didn't decide, and there's nothing on this earth he hates more, and he'd have been right.
He'd have put me out that gate, and then there's nobody at the table between you and Dominic.
Nobody. Luca's his, not yours. Matteo's a boy.
And I'd be in Florida with the accountant.
" He puts his hand out and puts it over mine on my knee.
"So I'm asking you. Don't tell him. Not yet.
Not till Sunday's done and there's a ring on you and Dominic's had to raise a glass to it in front of forty men.
After that he can't touch you. After that I'll tell Salvatore myself, everything, and he can put me out the gate if he wants, and I'll go. But not before Sunday."
I sit there with his hand on mine.
I should say no. I know that the way I know the sticking F at Sunny Vale, I can feel exactly where it is. I should stand up and walk out of this room and up the stairs to the study and say it was Aldo, and let Salvatore do what Salvatore does.
And then Aldo is out the gate, and it is me and Dominic and a man who locks doors.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay."
"Not before Sunday."
"Thank you." He squeezes my hand. He stands up, and I stand up, and he puts his arms round me, which nobody has done in this house, not even the man I have been to bed with three times, and he smells of pencil shavings and old wool, and he kisses my forehead, and he lets me go.
"And the key, bella," he says. Light. Picking his glasses up off the ledger. "Keep it close. Your father wore it every day of his life."