Chapter 26
SALVATORE
Luca's gym smells of forty years of other people's sweat and the bleach that never gets it out, and at seven in the morning there's nobody in it but a kid on the heavy bag and the two of us in the office with the door shut.
"Four sheets," I say.
"Four."
"Same five boxes. Same ship. Same week. Except the copper's in a different stack on every sheet."
Luca looks at them. He's laid them on his desk in a row, and they're identical, my handwriting, the week's schedule the way I've written it every Sunday for two years, and on each one the fourth line says a different number. Stack C-14. Stack C-22. Stack D-9. Stack D-31.
"Dom gets fourteen," I say. "Aldo twenty-two. Matteo nine. You thirty-one."
"And the real one."
"Isn't on any of them. The real one's in my head. The copper's going in E-6 and nobody knows that but me and the crane."
He picks up the one with thirty-one on it. His. He looks at it for a while.
"You're testing me."
"I'm testing four men."
"You said you believed."
"I do. I'm doing it anyway." I take the sheet out of his hand and put it back in the row.
"If I leave you off and it's you, I never find out, and I've got a Camry outside her window for the rest of her life.
If I put you on and it's not you, you've had a sheet of paper in your hand for a week.
That's the cost. Tell me it's too high."
He doesn't. He folds his hands, and looks at the four sheets, and nods once.
"When."
"Sunday. Same as always. I hand them round at the table before the meal, and everybody puts theirs in a pocket, and by Thursday night somebody's called Danny with a stack number, and Danny tells me which number." I straighten the row. "And then I know."
"And then what."
"Then I've got a name and I do what I do."
"Sal." Quietly. Always quietly. "If it's Dominic, you can't just do what you do.
He's your father's brother. He's got the club and he's got New Dorp and he's got eleven men who've eaten at his table for twenty years.
You put him in the basement on a stack number and half of them go to Moretti by Christmas. "
"I know."
"And if it's Aldo"
"It's not Aldo."
He looks at me.
"Aldo's sixty-one," I say. "Aldo cried in a hospital chair on Friday because a boy got hurt.
Aldo taught me to shave, Luca. He stood in the bathroom on my fourteenth birthday with my father's razor because my father was at the club, and he showed me, and he cut himself doing it because his hands shook, and he laughed.
" I put the sheets in my coat. "It's not Aldo. "
"You said you didn't know."
"I said I'd test four men. I didn't say I'd believe four answers."
Through the office glass the kid on the bag is going at it like the bag's done something to him.
He's nineteen and he's got hands and no chin, and he's the one who was drinking at Cassidy's six months ago where he shouldn't, and I watch him for a minute, this boy who put me at the end of a bar for forty minutes without knowing it.
"He can't take a punch," Luca says.
"No."
"He'll learn."
"Or he won't. And then he'll be a man who hits well and goes down, and there's a lot of those."
The kid on the heavy bag stops. The chain squeals and goes quiet. Luca takes his hands apart and puts them flat on his desk and looks at me, and it's the look from the car, the one that says be clear about which one you're doing.
"Your father believed a lot of things about Aldo Bracci too," he says.
The Mosler's open for the second time in a week and I'm standing in front of it with the tank lamp turned in and my mother's box in my hand.
It's a small box. Leather, once red. Rosa put her rings in it the week after, because my father couldn't, and he put it in the safe, and it's been in the dark with the guns and the files ever since.
I open it. Three rings. The one from her mother, thin and worn nearly through.
A wide gold one that I don't know the story of and never will.
And the one my father gave her, which I do know, because she told me, on the stairs, when I was ten and asked why she never took it off.
He gave it to me in the music room. Enzo was playing. Your father couldn't say anything, he just held it out, so I took it, and Enzo stopped playing and stood up and clapped, and Carmine told him to sit down and play, and he did. That's the whole story, Salvatore. That's all a story needs to be.
I take it out. I close the box and put it back and shut the safe and turn the tank lamp back, and the ring's in my bad hand, and it's warm already, it takes the heat off you faster than you'd think, and I hold it under the tank lamp and think about a man in a car outside a house in Bensonhurst eleven years ago who thought he knew what he was doing.
He didn't. I don't either.
I go up anyway.
I don't go to the study. I go up the stairs and along the second floor and down the back corridor to the tall doors, and the cloth's off the piano and the lid's up and she's not playing.
She's sitting on the stool with her hands in her lap looking at the keys.
She's been like that a while. I know the difference now.
There's the way she sits when she's about to play and the way she sits when she's finished, and this is neither, this is a woman sitting at an instrument with something in her hands that isn't music, and she doesn't turn round when I come in, and she says, "Rosa told me you were at the gym. "
"I was."
"Luca's."
"Yes."
"Do you box."
"I used to."
"Were you good."
"I was heavy."
She nearly smiles. Her hands stay in her lap. I come across the parquet and I don't take a chair this time, I stand at the end of the keyboard with my hand on the curve of the case, the way you'd stand at the end of a bar, and I look at her, and she looks at the keys.
I've done this once. Eleven years ago, at a girl in Bensonhurst whose name I've stopped saying, in a car outside her mother's house with a ring from a place on Canal Street, and she said yes and cried and six weeks later she was in Arizona with a cousin because Dominic had gone to her father and told him what happens to Vitale wives, and she never called, and I never went, and I've never once since then put my hand in my pocket for a woman.
I put my hand in my pocket.
"Marina."
She looks up.
I take it out. It's not from Canal Street.
It's my mother's, the one from the box in the Mosler, the one my father gave her in 1988 in this room with Enzo Silvestri playing something behind them, and it's a plain band with one stone that isn't big, because my father didn't believe in big, and it's been in the dark under a viper tank for twenty-one years, and I hold it in my bad hand with the three plasters on and I don't get down on anything.
"I told you Sunday," I say. "I told you why.
I told you it was the men and the wall and the crack, and all of that's true, and none of it's this.
This is the other thing. I haven't got the words for the other thing.
I've never once said it and I'm not sure the word exists.
So I'm going to say the only thing I'm sure of, which is that I've been asking you a question since the morning you walked up my drive and I've been asking it wrong every time, and I'm going to ask it right once, and you can do what you like with it. "
Her hands have come out of her lap. They're on the edge of the stool, either side of her, holding on.
"Will you marry me."
Nothing moves. Not the room, not her, not the dust in the light off the windows. The house does what it does at eleven in the morning, which is nothing, and I stand at the end of my mother's piano with my mother's ring and I wait. I'm built for waiting. I've never in my life wanted to do it less.
"Yes," she says.
I don't breathe.
"Yes. That's the answer. That's what it is, and I've known what it was since the garage, since before the garage, since you sat down in a plastic chair.
" She stands up. She steps round the stool and stands in front of me, close, and she doesn't take the ring.
She puts her hand over mine, closed round it, and holds it shut. "But ask me again."
"I just"
"Ask me again when you've told me everything."
I look at her.
"I have."
"No." She says it gently. That's the worst of it.
She says it the way you'd tell a child something it's not going to like.
"No, you haven't. I stood at your mother's grave with my hand in your pocket and you told me the worst day of your life, and then something else went across your face and you put it away.
I watched you do it. I've watched ten thousand men put things away across a bar and I know what it looks like, Salvatore, and you did it, and you said that's what I've got, and I let you.
Because you'd just told me about your mother and I couldn't ask for more.
" Her hand tightens on mine. "I'm asking now.
Not for what it is. I'm asking you to know that I know there's a room.
And to open it before Sunday. And then ask me again, and I'll say yes again, and I'll mean it more. "
The ring's in my fist inside her hand. Hot. My mother's.
I could do it here. Now. It's the same room.
It's the room he played in, it's the room she touched the piano in at seven, it's forty feet above the room where it happened, and she's standing in front of me with my hand in both of hers saying open it, and I could.
I could say seventeen and the stairs and he looked at me, not at my father, and she'd hear it, and then she'd do whatever she'd do, and it'd be done, and Sunday would be whatever Sunday was.
I don't.
I tell myself: after Sunday. After the ring's on her in front of forty men and Dominic's raised his glass and there's nothing on this Island that can touch her without touching me, then.
Then I'll take her down the back stairs myself and show her the drain and say it.
After Sunday, when it can't cost her anything.
That's what I tell myself. It's a good reason. It's the best reason I've ever had for anything.
It's a lie.
"After Sunday," I say.
She doesn't answer that. Not with words. She opens my hand, and takes the ring out of it, and puts it on. Herself. Left hand, third finger, and it fits, because my mother's hands were small too, and she looks at it there, and then at me.
"After Sunday," she says. "Then ask me again."