Chapter 30
SALVATORE
Danny gets the call at nine forty-one and he doesn't stammer this time.
He says the ship. He says the container number.
He says, "Hang on, Tommy, let me look," and he looks at the sheet I gave him, which is blank, and he says a number into the phone that the voice on the other end has just given him, and he hangs up, and he turns round to where I'm standing behind the door of the gate house, and he says it.
Dominic's.
It doesn't come.
"Boss?"
"Good, Danny."
"Was that. Is that the one you"
"That's the one."
I go out into the yard. Luca's in the car by the reefers and I get in and shut the door and he looks at me and doesn't start the engine.
"Fourteen," I say.
He doesn't move.
"C-14. Dom's copy. The one I put in his hand on Sunday before the meal and watched him fold and put in his coat.
" I look at the windscreen. "Moretti's truck's going to come through that gate in two hours and go to C-14 and find a box of nothing, because the copper's in E-6, and I'll have watched them do it, and I'll have my name. "
"You've got your name."
"I've got a number."
"Sal."
"It's a number on a sheet of paper, Luca. It's a number Danny read off a sheet I gave him because a voice gave it to Danny. It's not Dom's mouth. It's not Dom's phone." I put my head back against the seat. "And I don't believe it."
He waits.
"I don't know why. I've been sitting behind that door for an hour waiting for the number and the number came and it's the one I'd have bet on, it's the one everybody at that table would've bet on, it's the one Dom's spent two years earning, and I heard it and I felt nothing.
I felt Danny getting it right. That's all.
" I open my eyes. "That's not what it feels like when it's true. I know what that feels like."
"Or you don't want it to be your uncle."
"Or that."
"Or somebody wanted you to hear fourteen."
I look at him.
"Four sheets," Luca says. "Four men. And one of them's been in that office downstairs on a Thursday and knows there's a tin, and knows what's in it, and rented a car with it. A man like that." He starts the engine. "A man like that might've looked in your uncle's coat."
The truck comes at eleven fifty, the same as before. Jersey plates. Three men. The one with the bolt cutter walks down the row to C-14 like it's his garage, and cuts the seal, and opens the doors, and stands there looking at an empty box for a long time.
Then he gets on his phone.
I watch him talk. I watch him listen. I watch him kick the door of the box, once, hard, and get back on the truck, and the truck goes out through the gate without the copper, and Danny lifts the barrier with steady hands, and Luca says, "Well," and I say, "Now they know," and that's the end of the trap.
It's one in the morning. Matteo's in the gate house because I told him he could be, and he comes out into the light with his hands in his jacket pockets, and he doesn't ask, and I tell him.
"Fourteen."
He takes it. He's got his mother's mouth and it goes flat.
"Dom."
"Dom's copy."
"That's not the same thing."
"No."
"So what do we"
"We go home. We sleep. Tomorrow I sit across from my uncle and I put a sheet of paper on the table with C-14 on it and I watch his face, because his face I can read, and a number I can't." I look at the empty box.
"And nobody says a word to him before that.
Not you. Not Paulie. Not the men. You see Dom tonight, you say goodnight. "
"And her?"
I don't answer.
"Sal. She's in Sunset Park on her own with Tommy across the street, and you just told Moretti's people you're onto them, and the man who cut that driver's throat is going to find out inside an hour, same as before.
And if it's not Dom, if somebody put fourteen in Dom's coat, then that somebody's sitting in the house tonight, and he knows exactly where she is.
" He takes his hands out of his jacket. "You let her walk down that hill. You said she's safer gone. Is she?"
"Tommy's on the building."
"Tommy's one man in a car."
"Tommy's what I've got."
My brother looks at me, long enough that Danny finds somewhere else to look, and then he does the thing he's never done, which is put his hand on my shoulder, and squeeze once, hard, the way Aldo does, and let go.
"Go and get her," he says. "Before somebody else does."
My phone goes at three twelve.
I'm in the car. I've been in the car since one thirty, in the drive, with the engine off, not going in the house, not going anywhere, sitting in the dark with the watch on and her father's key in my pocket, because Matteo said go and get her and I've been sitting in a car for two hours deciding whether he's right, and the phone goes, and it's Tommy, and he's not talking.
He's breathing. Wet.
"Tommy."
"Boss." A cough. "Boss, there's. He came round the back. I was on the front. He came round the back and I heard the door and I went up and he was. Somebody was behind me. On the stairs. I didn't."
"Where is she."
"I don't. I'm on the landing. Her door's. It's open, boss, the chain's. I can't see her. I can't get up. My head's."
I'm moving. The engine's on and the gate's opening and Vito's standing up in the booth with his mouth open, and I've got the phone on the seat on speaker and Tommy breathing on it and I'm on Todt Hill Road doing seventy with the lights off because the lights are a thing I can't be bothered with.
"Tommy. Stay on the phone."
"Boss."
"Is there a car."
"There was a. Tan. A tan. I saw it come past when I was. I didn't think. It's Rosebank, it's a"
Tan Buick. Dent in the rear quarter. Starts on the second try.
I don't say anything. I drive.
Vito's voice comes out of the dash. He's called me, not the other way round, and he's talking before I've answered.
"Boss, do you want Tommy's crew, do you want me to"
"No."
"Boss, you went out the gate at seventy with no"
"Nobody follows me, Vito. Nobody. Shut the gate and sit in the booth and if anybody asks, I'm in the study."
He goes. I hang up on him.
Luca picks up on the first ring. He's awake. He's always awake.
"Rosebank," I say.
"What's in Rosebank."
"Donato's got her. Tommy's down on her landing. Get a car to Tommy and get Rosa up and don't tell the brother anything yet."
"Where are you."
"Verrazzano."
"Sal. Where in Rosebank."
"Where else would he take her." The bridge lights go over the car, one, two, three. "He's got one place. He's had one place for eleven years. I'll be on Bay Street in nine minutes and I want you behind me in fifteen, and I want nobody else. Nobody. Not Matteo. Not the men."
"Why not the men."
"Because one of them told him where she was."
Silence on the line. Then, "Fifteen," and he's gone.
The building's dark except for the third floor, where her door's open and the light's on and it's coming down the stairwell in a wedge, and Tommy's in it, on the landing outside her door with his back against the wall and his legs out and blood all down one side of his face from something that's opened his scalp above the ear, and his eyes are open, and he tries to get up when he sees me and can't.
"Stay down."
"Boss, I"
"Stay down, Tommy."
Her door.
The chain's torn out of the frame. Not cut. Torn, the screws ripped through the wood, which takes a shoulder and a man who doesn't care about his shoulder. The door's open on the apartment and the light's on and I go in.
It's small. I knew that. I've stood in it once, on a Sunday, with Nico in the kitchen saying there's a car.
And it's the same room, the couch with its cushions still turned, the accordion door that doesn't close, the Formica table, and the duffel's by the couch, unzipped, with my mother's green dress half out of it on the floorboards like something spilled.
A chair's over. The one from the table.
Her phone's on the floor by the chair, face down, and I pick it up and turn it over and the screen's cracked across, and under the cracks it's the brother with a birthday cake.
No blood. I look. I look at every surface in the room the way I'd look at a yard, and there's no blood, not on the floor, not on the door frame, not on the chair, and I hold on to that. No blood. Somebody came through that door and put a chair over and she went out of it on her feet.
She went out of it on her feet.
I'm in the middle of her room with her phone in my hand and the dress on the floor, and I look at the table, the Formica, where she'd have been sitting, because it's three in the morning and I know what she does at three in the morning, I've stood in a corridor and listened to it, and there's an ashtray on it.
Her mother's, probably. Glass. The kind nobody's bought since 1990.
And in it, a cigarette. Winston. Burned down a third, a long grey ash still on it, unbroken, lying in the glass the way you'd put it down for a second if you meant to pick it up again.
It's still going.
There's smoke coming off it. A thread, straight up, in the still air of a room where nobody's breathing, and I stand there and watch it rise, and I understand what it means, which is minutes.
Not an hour. Not forty. Minutes. He put that down on her table and put his hand on her and walked her out the door, and it hasn't gone out yet.
I pick it up.
It's warm. Ray Donato's cigarette in my bad hand in her kitchen, and I look at it, and I put it out against the Formica, slowly, and I hold the end of it in my fist, and I go back out onto the landing where Tommy's bleeding, and on the stairs the watch comes off.