Chapter 28
SALVATORE
I get him on the gravel.
Not in the room. In the room I sit, because forty people are looking at me and a Don who goes over a table is a Don who's finished, and I know that, I've known it since I was seventeen and sat where Matteo sits and finished a plate.
So I sit. I let her go. I let the hall take her footsteps and I let Rosa step aside and I let Dominic say now she knows and sit down and pick up his fork, and I say, "Eat," to the table, and they eat, because I've said it.
Then I say, "Dom. Outside."
He comes. He's not stupid. He comes out the front and down the steps onto the drive with Paulie already moving from the car, and I take my watch off on the way, and Luca sees me do it from the door and doesn't stop me.
Dominic turns round at the bottom of the steps.
I hit him once.
That's all it is. One, with the bad hand, because the bad hand's the right one and I've never once in my life hit a man with the left, and the plasters go and the cuts go and he goes, down, on the gravel, on his back, fifty-eight years old in a black suit with blood coming out of his nose, and I'm on him.
Knee on his chest. Hand on his throat. Not squeezing.
Holding. And he's looking up at me and he's not frightened, he's my father's brother and he's never been frightened of a Vitale in his life, and I say, very quietly, so only he can hear it:
"You did that at my mother's table."
"I did it," he says, through the blood, "because you wouldn't."
"That was mine."
"It was hers. She's marrying it. She had a right."
"You didn't do it for her."
"No." He doesn't even pretend. "No, I didn't. I did it for the family. Same as everything. Same as Carmine would've." His eyes go past me. "Aldo. Get him off. He's going to do it. Look at his hand."
I look at my hand. It's on his throat and it's bleeding onto his collar and it's started to close, on its own, without me, and I watch it and I don't stop it, and Paulie's three feet away not moving because Luca's behind him, and then there's a hand on my shoulder.
Aldo.
"Salvatore." Gently. The way he said it in the bathroom with the razor. "Not him. Not tonight. Not on the gravel in front of Paulie Gatto with forty people at the window."
"He"
"I know what he did. I was there. I was standing next to your father and I heard it, and I'll never forgive him, and you can't kill your uncle in the drive on the night you put a ring on her.
You can't. That's the story they'll tell instead of the ring.
" His hand tightens. "Get up. She's going up the stairs with a bag. Go and be where that is."
I get up.
Dominic stays down. He puts his hand to his nose and looks at the blood and looks at me, and there's something in his face I'll think about later, something that isn't anger, and I don't have time for it.
I go in. I put the watch on in the hall. It's got blood on the strap.
The bag's on the bed.
She's not in the dress. She's in the jeans and a sweater with the dress on the bed beside the bag, folded, Teresa's green, laid out like it's going back in its bag in Rosa's room, and she's putting things in the duffel, and she doesn't stop when I come in.
The ring's on her hand. I look at that first.
"Say it," she says. Not looking up. "You've got about four minutes.
That's how long it takes me to pack. It's always been four minutes.
So say it now, in here, to me, or don't, and I'll go anyway, but I'd like to have heard it from you once before I've heard it from your uncle for the rest of my life. "
I shut the door. I stand with my back against it.
And I say it. In the order it happened. There's no other way I've got.
A Sunday. Seventeen. Upstairs in my room with the door shut.
My father came to the door of my room at ten at night and said come down, and I came, because he'd never once come to the door of my room, and he took me along the hall and down the back stairs, past the kitchen, where the light was on and Rosa wasn't, and down, and I'd been in the basement maybe twice in my life and never at night.
Dominic was already there. And Aldo. And a chair, a kitchen chair, in the middle of the floor by the drain, and Enzo Silvestri sitting in it with his hat on his knee.
Not tied. I want that known. He wasn't tied and he wasn't bleeding and he wasn't afraid. He was sitting on a kitchen chair with his hat on his knee like a man waiting for a bus, and when I came down the stairs he looked up, and he looked at me, and he didn't look at my father at all.
My father said, Salvatore. This is Enzo. You know Enzo.
Yes, I told him.
He said, Enzo has been talking to the government for four years.
Everything we say at that table, he's said to a man in a car in New Jersey on a Monday.
Aldo found it. Aldo brought it to me. I've seen it, and I'm satisfied, and this is what we do, and you're going to watch, because one day you'll have to do it, and I want you to know what it costs before you sit in my chair.
Nothing came out of me.
Enzo did. That's the thing. My father was talking, and Dominic was standing with his arms folded, and Aldo was by the wall with his face turned away, and Enzo Silvestri looked at me, at seventeen, at the boy in the doorway, and he said one thing, and he said it to me.
He said, Ask who told you.
That's all. Four words. Not to my father. To me. Ask who told you. It meant nothing to me then, and no question came out of me, and my father put the gun to the side of his head, and my eyes were on Enzo, and Enzo's were still on me when he did it.
Then the stairs. And the table where my plate was, because my father said finish it, and the plate got finished, and I have never once in sixteen years been able to eat chicken on a Sunday, and Rosa knows, and cooks it anyway, because she's trying to make me.
She's stopped packing.
She's standing by the bed with a folded shirt in her hands, and she's looking at me, and her face isn't doing the thing. It hasn't gone anywhere. It's right here, all of it, and it's the worst thing I've ever seen, and I put it there.
"He said that to you."
"Yes."
"Ask who told you."
"Yes."
"And you never asked."
"I was seventeen."
"You've been thirty-three for eight months.
" She puts the shirt in the bag. Her hands are steady.
That's how bad it is. "You sat in his chair for two years.
You had the safe. You had the files. You had Aldo at your table every Sunday, and Dominic, and my father's last words in your head, and you never once asked who told him. "
"I asked Aldo."
"When."
"The day after. I was seventeen. I asked him what Enzo meant and he said he meant me, Salvatore, I'm the one who found it, and he hated me for it, and he had a right to, and he cried, and I never asked again."
She doesn't say anything to that. There isn't anything.
Then she reaches up behind her neck and undoes the chain.
I've never seen it off her. Not on the desk, not in the bed with the sun on her, not in the car.
She undoes it and the small key slides down the chain into her palm and she looks at it there, gold gone dull, the size of the end of her finger, and she comes across the room to me and takes my hand, the bad one, bleeding again, and puts the key in it, and closes my fingers on it.
"Then you might as well have this," she says. "It's all he left. It's all I've got of him, and you were there, and I wasn't, so." She lets go of my hand. "So you keep it."
"Marina."
"Don't."
"I'm not going to lock the"
"I know you're not. That's the only reason I'm not going out the window." She picks up the bag. "Move."
I don't move. I stand against the door with her father's key in my fist and I look at her, and I say the one thing I've got, the only one, the thing I've said to Luca and to myself and to nobody else, and I say it because it's true and because it's the last thing she's going to hear from me and I want it to be true.
"You're safer gone."
She stops.
"Whoever's doing this, they're doing it because you're here.
Because I put my hand on you. The Camry came the day you walked up the drive.
The van came the night I had you on my desk.
Every time I get closer, somebody gets hurt, and I can lock every door in this house and I can't lock that.
" My hand's closed so hard on the key that it's in my palm.
"So go. Go and be somewhere I'm not. That's the only thing I know that works. "
She looks at me with the bag on her shoulder.
"That's not a reason," she says. "That's a lock with the door open."
She goes past me. I move. I move because she's got the bag and she's going and I'm not going to be the thing that's in her way, not tonight, and she goes down the hall, and down two flights, and I follow her, and the dining room's still full and nobody comes out of it, and she crosses the stone hall and Rosa's at the kitchen door with her arms folded and doesn't say anything, and she opens the front door herself and goes out into the dark and down the steps past the place on the gravel where Dominic's blood is, and she doesn't look at it.
I go as far as the gate.
Vito opens it. She walks through it. On foot, at midnight, down Todt Hill with a duffel and four thousand dollars in her shoe and my mother's ring on her hand, and she doesn't look back, and I stand in the gateway with the serpent in the iron over my head and watch her until the trees take her.
Luca's beside me. I didn't hear him. I never do.
"You're letting her walk out with a target on her back," he says.
"I know."