Chapter 34
SALVATORE
St Joseph's has a side door on the alley that hasn't been painted since the Carter administration, and a box beside it, wooden, with a brass slot and a padlock the size of a thumbnail, and I've been looking at it through the windscreen of a florist's van since six.
Luca got the van. I didn't ask where.
"Seven," he says.
"I can tell the time."
"You've been looking at it for an hour. The box hasn't moved."
"Neither have I."
Thursday. Six days since a basement. I put C-14 on the table in front of my uncle on Friday afternoon with his nose taped and his face the colour of a plum, and I watched him look at it, and he looked at it the way a man looks at a bill for something he didn't order.
He said, What's this. I said, Your copy.
He said, I know it's my copy, I put it in my coat, what's it doing on the table, and I told him, and he laughed.
Through the tape. He said, You think I called a gate house.
You think I've got a gate house's number.
And I said no, I don't think that, and he said, Then what do you think, and I said, I think somebody knew which pocket you keep your coat in, and he stopped laughing.
Six days. He's been sober six days. That's what sits with me. Not the laugh. The sober.
"There," Luca says.
A man's come round the corner into the alley.
Not from the street. From the church side, from the door in the wall that goes to the rectory garden, and he's got his hands in his coat and a bald head and a walk I've seen by an Escalade with a door held open, and he doesn't look at the van.
Why would he. It's a florist's van. He walks up to the box beside the door and takes out a key and opens the padlock and lifts the lid and puts his hand in.
Paulie Gatto.
He takes out an envelope. Brown. A rubber band round it. He puts it in his coat and closes the lid and locks the padlock and walks back the way he came, into the rectory garden, and the door shuts behind him, and the alley's empty, and it's taken forty seconds.
Neither of us says anything.
"Well," Luca says, eventually.
"Yes."
"Dominic's man."
"Dominic's man. Dominic's copy. Dominic's key to a church that Dominic's wife has done the flowers for since nineteen ninety-two.
" I put my hands on the wheel of the van and look at them.
"Dominic in the hall on Tuesday telling me she's a knife in every man's eye.
Dominic at my mother's table telling her about the basement so she'd walk.
And she walked, Luca, and four days later Donato had her in a chair. "
"Yes."
"So it's finished."
"It looks finished."
I turn my head.
"I'm saying what it looks like," Luca says.
"You told me a week ago you didn't believe fourteen.
You said it's not what it feels like when it's true.
You said that in the car with your eyes shut, and I believed you, because you're not wrong about that.
You've never been wrong about that." He looks at the box.
"And now it's Paulie with a key, and it looks finished, and I'm asking you if it feels finished.
Because if it does, we go and get your uncle.
And if it doesn't, we sit in this van a while longer. "
I look at the box.
I try. I sit in a florist's van in an alley in Rosebank and I put everything on the table in my head the way I'd put it on the desk, the sheet and the card and the tin and the key and the church and Paulie's bald head going back through a door, and I wait for the thing, the click, the door shutting, the thing that happens when it's true.
I don't get it.
I get Dominic sober for six days. I get something in his face on the gravel that wasn't anger.
I get him laughing through the tape and stopping when I said pocket.
I get a man who's wanted my chair for two years, and who's said so, out loud, at my table, in front of the men, every Sunday, which is the one thing a man who's actually taking it would never do.
"Get him," I say. "Bring him to the club."
"Sal."
"I know. I know it doesn't. Get him anyway. Because if I don't, the men will hear it was Paulie at the box by lunch, and they'll do the sum, and I'd rather they saw me do it first."
The Ninth Street club has a room in the back that my grandfather built for a purpose, and it's got a table in it and a drain in the floor, and Dominic's sitting at the table with his hands flat on it and the tape gone off his nose, and he looks at me when I come in like he's been expecting me since Friday.
"Paulie," he says.
"Paulie."
"At the church."
"With a key."
"His mother's key. She does the altar Wednesdays. He's had a copy since he was an altar boy, he goes in and lights a candle for his father, I've seen him do it." He doesn't take his hands off the table. "That's what you've got. A man lighting a candle."
"He opened the poor box and took out an envelope with a rubber band round it and put it in his coat."
"Then ask him what was in it."
"I'm going to."
"Then why am I here."
"Because he's your man, Dom. Because C-14 was your copy.
Because you wanted her out of the house from the day she walked into it, and you said so, and then she walked, and four days later a man you cut loose for skimming in nineteen ninety-six had her in a basement in Rosebank.
" I sit down across from him. The watch stays on my wrist. He clocks that.
"And I told you the day before you did it at the table that when the story got round, I'd know where it started.
And it started with you. All of it. Every piece of this has your name near it, and I've been sitting in a van all morning trying to find the piece that doesn't."
"Did you find one."
I don't answer.
He leans back. The chair creaks. He's fifty-eight and he's sober and there's a look on him I've seen exactly once before, on the gravel, with my hand on his throat, and I still can't name it.
"I hated your mother," he says.
The room goes very still.
"I'll say that once and you can do what you like with it.
I hated Teresa. Not for anything she did.
For what she did to him. Carmine was the hardest man I ever knew until he married her, and then he was a man who went into a club for two minutes and left his wife in a car, because she'd asked him to hurry.
And she died in it. And I sat with him after, in that house, for a year, and watched what it did, and I said to myself, never again.
Never again does a woman walk into that house and do that to a Vitale.
" He looks at me. "And then one did. And you bled at the table.
And I thought, here it is. Here's the thing that killed my brother, and it's got his son by the throat, and nobody's going to do anything about it but me. "
"So you told her about the basement."
"So I told her about the basement. Yes. To get her out.
Because I thought she'd go and you'd hurt for a month and then you'd be Carmine again, the way he was before Teresa.
" He puts his hands flat on the table again.
"I didn't rent a car, Salvatore. I didn't call a gate house.
I didn't put Ray Donato on a bus with an envelope.
I told a girl the truth at a dinner table because I thought it'd save you, and I'd do it again, and if you want to put me on the floor for that, the drain's right there. "
I look at him.
"Say the last part again."
"Which."
"You didn't put Donato on a bus."
"I cut Ray Donato loose in 'ninety-six for taking forty dollars a week off my book.
Forty dollars. I haven't said his name in twenty-five years.
If I'd wanted her in a chair I'd have used a man whose name I remember.
" He almost smiles. It doesn't get there.
"You know that. You've known it since Friday.
That's why you didn't take your watch off. "
The door opens behind me.
Aldo. He's got his coat over his arm and his glasses on his head and his face is grey, and he looks at Dominic, and at me, and at the drain, and he comes in and stands by the wall where he stood in a different basement sixteen years ago, and he says, very quietly:
"Salvatore. Don't."
"I'm talking."
"You're sitting across from your father's brother in the room your grandfather built, and there's a story going round the club already that Paulie was at the church, and I've had three men ask me on the way in whether Dominic's coming out of this room.
" The ring on his finger goes round once.
"Your father sat where you're sitting. With Enzo.
With something in his hand that I brought him and that looked finished.
And he did what looked finished. And it was, Salvatore, it was finished, but I've never once in sixteen years been sure it was right, and I was the one who brought it.
" His voice doesn't rise. "Be better than him.
That's all. Whatever this is, be better than your father was in a room like this. "
Nobody says anything.
I look at my uncle. I look at the drain. I look at Aldo against the wall with his grey face and his ring, the man who taught me to shave, saying the one thing that's been in my own mouth all morning in a florist's van.
"Take him home," I say. "Not the house. His own. And he stays in it."
"Salvatore"
"He stays in it, Dom. Till I've talked to Paulie. That's not a favour. That's the only thing I can do that isn't the floor."
Dominic stands. He does it slowly, with his hands on the table, and he looks at me across it for a long time, and then he goes past Aldo to the door, and stops there, and doesn't turn round.
"She walked back up the hill," he says. "Friday morning. Vito told me. Barefoot, in your car, with your blood on her." A pause. "Teresa would've walked back too."
He goes.
Luca's waiting in the hall outside the holding room. The other one, the small one, at the end, where we put Paulie at nine this morning with a chair and a bottle of water and a man on the door.
He doesn't say anything when I come out. That's the first thing. Luca always says something, one word, well or so, and he doesn't, he just stands there with his hands not folded and his face doing a thing I've seen on it twice in twenty-five years.
"What."
"Paulie."
"What about Paulie."
He doesn't answer. He turns and goes down the hall and I go after him, and the man on the door's not on the door, he's standing three feet from it with his back to the wall, and the door's open, and the light's on inside.
Paulie Gatto's hanging from the pipe.
The water pipe, the one that runs across the ceiling of the holding room, with his own belt round his neck and the chair on its side under him and his bald head down on his chest, and his hands are at his sides, open, and he's been there a while. Long enough. His face is the colour they go.
I stand in the door.
"Who was on this."
"Vinnie. Since nine. He heard the chair go over and thought he'd knocked it and went in and."
"Where's the envelope."
Luca holds it up. Brown. Rubber band. He's already opened it.
"Twenty-two hundred in fifties," he says.
"And a note. Typed. It says Thursday. Same.
That's all." He puts it back in the envelope.
"Nobody's asked Paulie Gatto one question, Sal.
Not one. He sat in that room for two hours with a bottle of water and a man on the door and nobody said a word to him, and now he's on a pipe. "
I look at Paulie's hands. Open. At his sides.
A man who hangs himself grabs the belt. Everybody does. It's not a thing you decide.
"He didn't do that," I say.
"No."
"Somebody came in here."
"Vinnie says nobody."
"Then Vinnie's wrong, or Vinnie's lying, or somebody in this building has a key to a room my grandfather built, the same as somebody's got a key to a church and the numbers to a Mosler and a card out of a tin.
" I turn round. "And every one of them's a thing you'd only have if you'd been sitting at that table for thirty years. "