Chapter 37
SALVATORE
My father's stone is black because he chose it, and it's got a lot written on it because he chose that too, and I stand in front of it on a Monday morning with my hands in my coat and ask it a question it can't answer.
Who told you.
Not out loud. I'm not a man who talks to stones.
But it's in my mouth, the way it's been in my mouth since a basement, since a kitchen chair and a hat on a knee and four words from a man who was looking at me and not at the gun, and I've had it in my mouth for sixteen years and never once opened it, and I open it now, at Moravian, on a Monday, with the crows going over.
Who told you, Pop. Who brought it. Who put the thing in your hand that looked finished.
He'd have said Aldo. He did say Aldo. Aldo found it.
Aldo brought it to me. And I've had that answer for sixteen years and it's never once been a question, because Aldo cried the next day and Aldo taught me to shave and Aldo stood by a wall on Thursday and said be better than him, and a man who says that is not a man who.
I stop.
I stand in front of the black stone and I make myself finish the sentence, because I've been not finishing it for a week, and it's time.
A man who says that is not a man who framed my father's consigliere and stood next to him while it happened.
That's the sentence. That's what I've been telling myself in a florist's van and a club room and a bed with her hand on the back of my neck.
Aldo cried. Aldo's kind. Aldo's sixty-one and turns his ring.
And Aldo does the books on Thursdays in a room with a tin in it.
And Aldo was in the kitchen an hour before my father, with his face a colour Rosa had never seen.
And Aldo took Enzo down the stairs with his hand on his arm.
And Aldo has had the numbers to a Mosler since before I was born, because my grandfather gave them to two men, and one was my father, and I never once asked who the other one was.
I never asked.
Sixteen years, and two years in the chair, and a safe I didn't open, and a folder with air in it, and a man at my table every Sunday saying grace, and I never asked, because he cried.
The crows go over.
"Sal."
Luca. At the bottom of the row, where he's been standing for twenty minutes without coming up, because he knows what this stone is and he knows I don't like company at it.
I turn round. He's got his hands folded and his coat done up and his face is the ordinary one, and I go down to him, and we walk.
Along the row. Past the newer stones, the flat ones, to the north fence where the unmarked ones are, and I stop at the third row and count four from the end, and stand there.
Luca doesn't ask. He looks at the flat grey stone with no name on it and he knows.
"I'm going to tell you everything," I say.
"You've told me everything."
"No. I've told you what I was going to do.
I've never once told you why, and you've never once asked, and that's why you're the only man alive I'd say it to.
" I look at the stone. "So I'm saying it.
All of it. And then you're going to tell me something, and I'm going to believe it, because I don't have anything else. "
He waits.
I tell him.
The card in the tin. The Mosler and the empty folder and the two men who had the numbers.
Sonny's voice on the phone saying I've known that girl since she was baptised, which Sonny gave me on Saturday in the back of his laundromat with a look on him like a man handing over his own teeth, and which she'd been carrying since New Dorp Lane because I wouldn't let her say it in the hall.
Rosa's kitchen and the hat on the knee and Aldo's face and the back stairs.
The church box and a key to a church. A club room and a key to that.
Paulie hanging with his hands open. A typed note that says Thursday. Same.
And a kitchen chair, and four words, and a man who cried the day after.
Luca listens. He doesn't move. When I'm done he's quiet for a long time, longer than he's ever been, and then he says the thing I brought him here to say.
"Then it's not Dominic."
"I know."
"Then it's one of the other two." He doesn't look at me. "Or it's me."
"I know."
"You said you believed."
"I do. I said it in the gym and I'll say it here.
I believe it's not you. I believe it's not Matteo, because Matteo can't keep a lie past lunch, and this one's sixteen years old.
" I look at Enzo's stone. "And I've believed it's not Aldo for sixteen years because he cried, and I've just stood at my father's grave and understood that a man can cry and do the other thing in the same week. My father did. I watched him."
Luca folds his hands.
"You can't put him in a room on that," he says.
"No."
"You can't put him in a room on a face in a kitchen and a key he might have.
You'd be Carmine. You'd be doing it on something that looks finished, and Aldo stood by a wall on Thursday and told you not to, and if he's what you think he is, that's the cleverest thing anyone's said to you in your life, and if he isn't, it's the truest, and you can't tell which. " He turns to me. "So what do you do."
"I do what he'd do."
"Which is."
"Wait. Watch. Let him think he's got it.
" I put my hands back in my coat. Her father's key isn't there any more.
Her father's daughter has it, in a fist, in my kitchen.
"He's been cleaning up for sixteen years and he's good at it, and the only reason I'm standing here is that she walked up my drive and made him move.
Every time he's moved, it's been because of her.
The car the day she came. The van the night I had her.
Donato the week she left." I look at the fence.
"So I give him a reason to move again. Something he can't clean up. "
"What."
"A wedding."
Luca looks at me.
"A month. December. Here, on the Island, at St Joseph's, in front of every man in the family and the captains from Brooklyn and Moretti's people if they want to come and watch.
The rat's daughter marrying the Don in the church where the box is.
And the consigliere stands up as the best man, because who else would, and he does the reading, and he raises the glass, and the whole time she's got a key round her neck that he's asked about three times.
" I say it flat. "He'll move. He'll have to.
Because after that day she's not a girl on the third floor.
She's the family. And whatever's in that key, he'll need it before she finds it, and he'll do something, and I'll be standing behind him when he does. "
"When," Luca says.
"The twentieth. The Saturday before Christmas. Father Amato's had that date for a Vitale since my father put a deposit on it in nineteen ninety, for a wedding that never happened, and he's never once given it away."
"He'll ask who the bride is."
"He'll know who the bride is. He buried her mother."
"You're using her."
"Yes."
"As the bait."
"As the wall. She said she'd be the wall. She said it in a car." I turn round. "And I'm telling her, Luca. Tonight. All of it. The key and the church and the man I think it is. She doesn't walk into a church not knowing what she's walking into. Not this time. Not ever again."
Luca doesn't say anything for a while.
"Say the other thing," he says.
"What other thing."
"The one you've been not saying since the gym. Since the plastic chair, probably. The one Matteo asked you in the kitchen and you didn't answer." He's not looking at me. He's looking at the fence. "I'm not going to say it for you. I've said everything else for you for twenty-five years. Not that."
I look at Enzo's stone. At the fence. At the crows.
"I'd burn it," I say. "The house. The chair. The whole thing my grandfather built. I'd put a match to it and stand in the drive and watch, if it was that or her." I stop. "That's the word. That's the only one I've got. I don't know if it's the right one."
"It's the right one," Luca says.
The pool pump's making a sound it wasn't making a week ago. Even. Low. The brother fixed it, Rosa said, with one arm, in an hour, and I stand on the gravel for a second and listen to a thing in my house that works because a Silvestri looked at it.
The brother's at the pool house door when I come up the drive, standing in it with his good arm across his chest holding the bad one, and he's been waiting, I can see it, he's been standing there since he heard the gate.
"Mr Vitale."
"Salvatore."
"I can't. Not yet." He swallows. "Can I talk to you. Not in there. Here."
I stop on the gravel. He doesn't come out of the door. He stands in it with the pool going blue behind him and the pump making the noise it makes, and he looks at me the way he looked at the television three weeks ago, and this time he doesn't look away.
"You said you'd wait," he says. "In there. On the bed. You said when I was ready to tell her, I'd tell her, and you'd already know."
"I did."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"All of it?"
"Enough."
He nods. He nods for a long time, like a man agreeing with something inside his own head, and he puts his hand on the door frame, the bad hand, the one with the V under the sleeve.
"Then I'm ready," he says. "But there's something I have to tell Marina first. Before you. She'll kill me if I don't." He looks at the pool. "It's in there. What I did with it. She knows that. But there's a thing I didn't tell her, and I'm going to, and then you can have me."