Chapter 32
SALVATORE
The man in the knit hat runs.
He's fifty yards up Tompkins and he looks at the car and he looks at me and he does the sum, and he's better at it than Donato, because he turns round and goes. Back up the street. Past the stoop. Round the corner onto Chestnut, heavy, a big man running badly, and I watch him go and I don't follow.
Luca will. Luca's four minutes behind me and Luca will see a big man in a knit hat come round a corner at four in the morning and Luca will know what that is. That's what Luca's for.
She's still in the road.
"Marina. The car."
"No."
"I'm not asking."
"I can hear that." She's shaking. All of her, in the T-shirt, with the blood on her hands drying and her feet bare on the asphalt, and she's not moving.
"He's down there. Ray. In the basement. I put a bottle in his leg and he's down there and there's nobody with him now, and you're going to go down, and I'm not going to sit in a car while you do. "
"Yes you are."
"You said you wouldn't lock me in."
"This isn't a"
"It's a car with a door. It's the same thing." She looks at my wrist. At the bare place where the watch goes. "I know what that means. I've known since the restaurant. And I'm not sitting in your car with the heater on pretending I don't."
I look at her.
I don't have time for this. Ray Donato's in a basement with a hole in his leg and a phone in his pocket, and every minute he's down there is a minute he's on that phone to whoever pays him, and I've got four minutes before Luca and maybe forty before whoever opened that driver up on the Expressway comes to see what the noise was.
And she's in the road, T-shirt, jaw set, telling me no.
"Behind me," I say. "On the stairs. You don't come down."
"Fine."
"You don't come down, Marina."
"I heard you."
The basement door's open under the stoop, the way she left it, and there's light at the bottom of the steps and a sound, and the sound's him.
Not screaming. That's done. It's a low sound, on and off, a man breathing through his teeth, and I go down the eleven steps with her behind me, and at the bottom I put my hand out flat behind me without looking, and she stops. On the stairs. Three from the bottom.
Donato's on the floor.
He's got himself against the boiler with his back to it and his legs out and the neck of a bottle standing up out of his right thigh like something planted, and the floor round him's dark and wet and going towards the drain, and he's got his good hand pressed round the glass, not pulling it, because he knows enough not to pull it.
The cast's on the floor beside him. The lighter's gone somewhere.
And he's laughing.
That's the thing. He looks up and he sees me and he starts to laugh, through the teeth, the breath going in and out of him with the sound in it, and he says, "Well. Look who it is."
"Ray."
"She got me. Did you see? Did she tell you? Little girl. Fourteen years old and she never made a sound, and tonight she." He laughs. Coughs. "Tonight she put a bottle in me. Your old man would've liked her. Carmine liked a girl with."
"Who pays you."
"Told her. Told her in the car. A voice."
I take the phone out of his coat.
He doesn't stop me. He can't. I get it out of the pocket and it's a cheap one, a flip, the kind they sell at the gas station, and I open it and there's one number in it, and it's not a number, it's a string of digits that rings out to nothing, I know that without dialling it, because it's the same kind of nothing as Robert Green.
"When did you call him."
"Didn't."
"Ray."
"Didn't get to. She'd. The bottle." He breathes.
"I was going to. When she was in the chair.
I was going to call and say I've got her, and I was reaching for it, and she started talking, and I.
" He looks at the phone in my hand. "She talks.
You know that? She just talks, in that voice, like she's telling you what you ordered, and you listen. And then there's a bottle in you."
I crouch. I put the phone in my own pocket.
"You don't know his name."
"No."
"You've never seen him."
"No."
"Eleven years."
"Eleven years." He's grey. He's going grey round the mouth and the wet on the floor's still moving. "It's not a thing you ask, Vitale. A man pays your rent, you don't ask his name. You take the envelope."
"Where's the envelope."
He looks at me.
"You told her a box. In the car. A voice on a phone and a box with an envelope in it." I don't move. "What box."
"Doesn't"
"Ray. You're bleeding into a drain in a building you've had a key to for fifteen years and the man who pays you isn't coming, and if he does come you'll wish he hadn't, and I'm the only thing in this basement that might put a tourniquet on that leg. So. What box."
He laughs again. It's not much of one.
"St Joseph's," he says. "The church. Rosebank.
There's a box by the side door, for the poor, for the candles, whatever, an old wooden thing with a slot.
Thursdays. There's an envelope in it Thursdays, under the flap, with a rubber band.
Nobody looks in a church box. That's the whole trick.
Eleven years and nobody's looked in the box but me. "
"Who puts it there."
"Never seen."
"You've never once waited to see."
"Once." He shuts his eyes. "The first year.
I sat in the back of the church on a Wednesday night through the whole of the evening mass and then till they locked up, and nobody came near the box, and Thursday morning the envelope was in it.
" He opens his eyes. "So somebody with a key.
That's all I know. Somebody who can be in that church when it's shut. "
I stand up.
I look at him against the boiler with the glass in him and the cast on the floor, and I think about a girl on a fire escape in January, and a cigarette, and a woman who cried when her daughter didn't, and a man who put his thumb on a scar in my mother's restaurant like he was checking it was still his.
I think about eleven years of rent from a Manhattan post office. I think about what a man is kept for.
He sees me think it.
"You said Friday," he says. "You said out of the state by Friday."
"You didn't go."
"They paid me not to."
"I know."
"So it's not my"
"It's your leg, Ray. It's your hand. It's your name on her wrist." I'm very quiet. "And I told you in your room, with your lighter going, that if you were ever in a room with her again I wouldn't be sending a man to ask around. You remember that."
"Vitale"
"You're in a room with her."
He looks past me. At the stairs. At her, three from the bottom, where I told her to stay, and where she's stayed, in a T-shirt with her hands at her sides, watching.
Not looking away. I don't have to turn round to know she's not looking away.
I've known what she does with her eyes since a desk with a lamp on it.
"Little girl," he says to her. Softly. Like he's got a right.
I put my hand on the bottle.
Not to pull it. To push. My hand goes flat on the end of it where the neck stands up out of his leg and my weight goes onto it, all of it, down and in, and he screams, and the artery he's been holding shut with his fingers for ten minutes stops being held shut, and I keep my hand there.
I keep it there and I look at him and he looks at me, and the wet on the floor goes to the drain faster, and it takes less time than you'd think.
It always does. His hand comes off his leg and goes flat on the floor and his mouth opens and the laugh he was going to do doesn't get done, and his eyes stay open, on me, and then they're not on anything.
I take my hand away.
I straighten up. There's blood to the wrist, and I look at it under the bulb.
Feet on the steps above. Not hers. Heavy, and two sets, one of them dragging, and Luca comes down into the light with his hand in the collar of the man in the knit hat, who's got his own blood on his face now and isn't running anywhere.
Luca looks at the boiler. He looks at my hand. He doesn't say anything about either.
"Chestnut," he says. "He'd got as far as a parked car and couldn't get it open. He's nobody. Bar on Bay Street, two hundred dollars, Donato said carry a girl down some stairs." He shakes the collar once. "He's never heard a name. He's never seen a phone. He's a man who needed two hundred dollars."
"Then he's had a bad night for two hundred dollars."
"Yes."
"Take him somewhere. Not here. Find out if there's anything in him, and if there isn't, put him on a bus. He didn't know what he was carrying."
Luca nods. He takes the man back up the eleven steps, and the man goes, and neither of them looks at the boiler again.
Something on the floor by the chair catches the bulb.
Brass. I bend and pick it up, and it's the lighter, the Zippo, open, with the wick gone black, and I close it.
Click. The sound she's been hearing since she was fourteen, and I stand in a basement and make it once more, and put it in my pocket with his phone.
I don't know what I'll do with it. I know he won't.
Then I look at the stairs.
She's there. Three from the bottom. Her hands at her sides.
Her face doing nothing at all, not the gone thing, not the gate, just nothing, just a woman on a stair who has watched a man die and did not close her eyes, and she looks at Ray Donato against the boiler, and then she looks at me, at my hand, at the blood on it, and her face still doesn't do anything.
I wait for it to.
I wait for her to turn and go up the eleven steps and out under the stoop into the street and keep going, the way she went down the hill on Sunday, because that's what this is, this is the thing under the thing, this is the room under the room, and I've just opened it in front of her with my hand.
She doesn't go.
She comes down the three steps. Barefoot, through the wet, and she stops in front of me, and she looks up at me with the bulb over us and a dead man against the boiler, and she says it in the voice she uses to tell you what you ordered.
"Take me home."