Chapter 38
MARINA
He told me everything last night except a name, and I have decided that is enough.
Not the way I decided things before. Not the way you decide to eat fast in a house where the plates might stop.
The other way. Lying in a hard bed at one in the morning with a man's voice going in the dark beside me, low, in the order it happened, a card in a tin and a folder with nothing in it and a church box and a man on a pipe with his hands open, and a wedding in a church in December that is not a wedding, it is a door he is going to stand behind, and me in front of it in a dress with a key round my neck.
"Who," I said.
"I don't say a name till I'm sure."
"Salvatore."
"My father said a name. He said it in a basement with a boy in the door, and he was sure, and he was wrong, and I've spent a week finding out how wrong.
" His hand on my hip in the dark. "I'm not going to say a name to you in a bed.
When I say it, it'll be to his face, and you'll be standing where you can hear it, and you'll be the first to know.
That's the deal. That's the whole of it. "
"Is it Dominic."
"No."
"Then it's"
"Then it's one of three men and I've known all of them since I was born, and one of them's my brother, and I'm going to sleep now, Marina, because tomorrow I've got to look at all three of them across a table and eat."
He slept. Four hours. I lay there and did the arithmetic, the way I do, and it came out the way arithmetic does, which is to say it came out to three names and I put one of them away at once because he is twenty-seven and cannot keep a lie past lunch, and I put one of them away because he stands by walls and has never once said a word he did not mean, and that left one.
And I put that one away too. Because he sat in a hospital chair. Because he smelled of wool.
Because he asked me not to tell, and I have not, and it is Monday, and he still has not told Salvatore himself, and I have stopped counting Thursdays.
I am going to make him. Today. That is the thing I decided at four in the morning with a man asleep on my chest. Not for Salvatore.
For Aldo. Because if he tells it himself, in the study, in his own words, with his ring going round, then it is a thing a frightened old man did to keep a girl safe.
And if Salvatore finds it in a tin, it is something else.
The morning is the first one.
I mean that. There have been mornings, seven weeks of them, and this is the first one that is mine.
Rosa's kitchen at eight with the window steamed and the cat on the radiator and Nico at the table eating standing up because he has been in this house three weeks and Matteo is contagious.
Salvatore in the door with his coffee. Luca in the drive, in a car, not coming in, because Luca does not come in for breakfast, he sits in the drive and waits for a man to be finished with his eggs.
Benny is at the table. He has been at the table since Friday, on his chair, with his brace and his two phones, and one of the phones goes every few minutes and he looks at it and does not smile, because he is a man on a chair and men on chairs do not, and then he does.
"Danielle," Rosa says, to the stove.
"She's just asking about the"
"She's asking about you. Answer her."
He answers her. He types with one thumb like a man defusing something.
I watch him do it and I think about a parking lot and a scream and a phone store on Forest Avenue, and about a woman ninety-one years old who would say he'll do, and I put two eggs on his plate instead of one, and Rosa sees me do it and says nothing, which from Rosa is a whole sentence.
"I'm going to the bodega," Nico says.
"There's a bodega on Todt Hill?"
"There's one at the bottom. Tommy's taking me. I need," he looks at Rosa, "things."
"There's things here."
"Not those things."
Rosa looks at him with her mouth in a line, and then she looks at me, and there is a thing in her face I have seen once, on the night I went down the stairs with a bag, and I do not know what it is doing here at eight in the morning over eggs.
"Go on, then," she says. "Tommy waits in the car."
"Tommy waits in the car."
He goes. He touches my shoulder on the way past, the bad hand, the V under the sleeve, and he says, "When I'm back. The thing. Okay?" and I say okay, and he goes out the kitchen door into the drive and I hear Tommy's car start, and Salvatore looks at me over his coffee.
"What thing."
"He wants to tell me something."
"I know. He told me. Yesterday, at the pool house." He drinks. "He said he had to tell you first."
"Did he say what."
"No."
We look at each other across Rosa's kitchen. Then he puts the cup down and comes across and puts his hand on the back of my neck, under my hair, the way I put mine on his, and holds it there, and says nothing, and Rosa turns the tap on.
Ten o'clock.
I am in the music room, the piano open, my father's key on Rosa's steel chain inside my collar, and I am not playing.
I am sitting. I played for a minute when I came in, the left hand only, the slow part, and I stopped, because the study door went and I wanted to hear who it was, and it was Luca, and now I am listening to a house that is not making any sound.
Salvatore is in the study with the door shut and Luca inside it for once, and I have heard the door, and I have not heard anything since, and a bodega at the bottom of the hill is nine minutes there and nine minutes back and he has been gone an hour.
I go to the kitchen.
"Rosa. Tommy's number."
She gives it to me without asking. It rings out. It rings and rings and goes to a voice that is Tommy's saying his own name like an apology, and I hang up and I ring it again, and it does the same, and I put the phone down on Rosa's table and look at it.
"Ring the boy," Rosa says.
I ring the boy. I ring my brother. It rings once.
"Mari."
Car sounds. Not Tommy's car, Tommy's car has a thing in the exhaust, this is smooth, this is a car that costs, and Nico's voice is wrong, it is high, it is the voice from the bar with the frozen peas, and I am on my feet, and the chair is somewhere behind me.
"Where are you."
"Mari, listen. Listen to me. The thing. The thing I didn't tell you."
"Nico, where"
"He asked me about tapes." Fast. All at once, the way he talks when he has been holding it.
"The friend. Dad's friend. The first time, on the phone, before Sonny, before any of it, he asked me if Dad ever gave you anything.
Anything to keep. He said tapes, Mari, he said your father made tapes, did he ever give your sister anything to keep, and I said I didn't know, and he said good, and then he never said it again, and I didn't tell you because I didn't know what it"
A sound. Not him.
"Nico."
"Mari, there's a car. There's a car behind, it's the same, it's the one from the van, it's been behind us since the bottom of the hill and Tommy's, Tommy's not, he's"
"Nico, give the phone to Tommy."
"He's not moving, Mari, he's not, there was a man at the bodega and he, and I got back in and Tommy was"
"NICO."
"Mari, he's here. He's standing right"
The line goes dead.
Not cut off. Dead. The nothing that a phone makes when it has stopped being a phone, and I stand in Rosa's kitchen with it against my ear and I say his name into the nothing three times, and Rosa is already moving, she is in the hall, she is shouting a name I have never heard her shout, and there are feet on the stairs, two sets, fast, and I do not turn round.
The phone rings.
In my hand. Nico's number. Nico's name on the screen where I put it when he was fourteen, Nico, with a picture of him at the beach, and I answer it, and it is not Nico.
It is a man. Older. A voice with Jersey in it and money over the Jersey, easy, the voice of a man ordering in a restaurant he owns, and he says, pleasantly, as if we have been introduced:
"Miss Silvestri. Vincent Moretti. We haven't met."
I do not say anything. Salvatore is in the kitchen door. I can feel him there without looking. I hold up one hand, flat, and he stops.
"I've got your brother," Moretti says. "He's fine.
He's a little upset, and there's a man of Vitale's in a car at the bottom of the hill who'll need a hospital, but the boy's fine, and he'll stay fine.
That's the first thing I want you to understand.
I don't hurt boys. I've got three of my own.
" A pause. Something being lit. "The second thing is this.
Your father made tapes. Everybody who was anybody in this city sixteen years ago knows it.
He was a careful man, Enzo Silvestri, he never once wrote anything down, and the only reason a man like that gets shot in a basement is that he'd put something somewhere, and I've spent a long time and a lot of money finding out what and where, and I've got nowhere, and I'm tired. So."
"So what."
"So I'm going to make it simple. The boy for the tapes. You find them, you bring them to me, you get your brother, everybody goes home. A week. That's fair. That's more than fair. Tell Vitale a week."
"I don't know about any tapes."
It comes out of me the way the truth does, plainly, and I hear him hear it. I hear a man in a car somewhere in Jersey with my brother in the back seat hear a woman in a kitchen tell him the truth, and I hear him decide it does not matter.
"Then you'd better find out, sweetheart," Vincent Moretti says. "Because if you don't, your brother's dead."
Click.
To be continued…