Vow to Bury

CHAPTER TWO

GABE

Mina Vassallo does not step back.

That is the first problem.

The second is that I notice.

She stands beside my brother’s body with one glove half peeled from her hand and a pair of surgical scissors within reach. Most people look at me and calculate how quickly agreement can sound like dignity. Mina calculates the distance to my carotid artery.

“Forty-eight hours,” she repeats.

“Friday night.”

“It’s Friday now.”

I check the wall clock. Twelve-oh-three.

“Saturday night.”

“Good. I’d hate to begin our marriage with unclear scheduling.”

Her voice is dry, but her fingers are white around the discarded glove. She is afraid. She is also angry that I can tell.

I should leave before grief makes me careless.

Instead, I look at Paolo.

The overhead light exposes the gray beneath his skin and the damage to his shirt. He hated white shirts. Our mother bought them, and he wore them to keep her from asking why he preferred black.

Mina moves between us without making it look deliberate.

“You need to leave now,” she says.

“We’re not finished.”

“He has been dead for less than four hours. If his mother wants an open casket, I have work to do before your revenge develops another administrative requirement.”

The words should earn a response. They don’t, because she is right.

“The papers are valid,” I say.

“I’ll verify them.”

“Felix will stay.”

“Felix can sit in the arrangement room and contemplate why your family keeps bringing me emergencies after business hours.”

“You’ve had other Corso emergencies?”

She looks at me then. Not long. Long enough.

Bianca.

The old chapel. Smoke so dense it turned the emergency lights into bruises. Paolo fighting me at the side door because he thought Bianca was still inside. Salvatore gone before the fire crews arrived.

Mina does not know what I saw that night. She knows only that I was there.

That ignorance has been useful.

Until now.

“Saturday,” I say.

“Get out.”

I do.

Felix waits in the corridor beside a framed photograph of Mina’s grandfather cutting the ribbon in 1978. In the picture, the old man smiles as if opening a funeral home is a cheerful civic achievement.

Felix falls into step beside me. “That went well.”

“You’re still employed because Paolo liked you.”

“I’m family. Employment law gets murky.”

We pass the dark visitation rooms. Vassallo & Daughters is larger than it looks from Morrow Avenue, a brick house expanded in pieces until the corridors learned to turn without warning. The building smells faintly of coffee, waxed wood, and flowers that have outlived their purpose.

“Lock the exterior,” I say. “Two men at the service entrance. One at the apartment stairs. Nobody enters her prep room without her approval.”

“She won’t approve our men.”

“Then they stand outside it.”

Felix stops near the office. “You were serious.”

“About security?”

“Marriage.”

I open the front door. Cold air moves in from the street.

“Sal has ignored money, threats, and every contact we put pressure on. He sent a message after Paolo’s death because he wants us looking at him. We give him something he can’t ignore.”

“His daughter.”

“His name. The Vassallos survived because the city treated this place as neutral ground. Mina becoming my wife ends that. Publicly.”

“And privately?”

I look at him.

Felix raises both hands. “Operational question.”

“There is no privately.”

The lie is efficient enough to carry us to the car.

My phone rings before I reach it. Victor.

I answer. “What.”

“You received him?”

His voice has the careful roughness of a man speaking beside an open grave. Victor Sarto taught me to shoot, negotiate, and identify a lie by what arrives too early. His grief arrived before I called him.

“Yes.”

“Elena?”

“With Rosa at home.”

“Good. Keep her there until the boy is ready.”

Paolo was forty-one. Victor still calls us boys when he wants us to remember who taught us to be men.

“We meet at eight,” he says. “The captains want an answer.”

“They can wait.”

“Your brother’s Saint Christopher is missing. That is an answer.”

My hand tightens around the phone.

I did not tell Victor about the medal.

Felix is watching me from the passenger side.

“Who told you?” I ask.

Silence. Brief, but present.

“The men at the scene,” Victor says.

“Which men?”

“Gabriele, this is not the hour to interrogate your own house.”

It is exactly the hour.

“Eight,” I say, and end the call.

Felix waits.

“Find everyone who saw the body before transport,” I tell him. “No calls from our usual numbers. I want the list before dawn.”

“Victor?”

“A question.”

“That isn’t a no.”

“It isn’t supposed to be.”

We get into the sedan. Tommy pulls away from the curb, and Vassallo & Daughters disappears behind the bare branches lining Morrow.

Port Mercy after midnight is cranes against a low sky, wet pavement, and expensive apartment towers pretending they cannot see the warehouses that made them possible. Paolo liked the new waterfront. He said every criminal enterprise deserved a rooftop bar once it reached middle age.

I open the preliminary file on my phone.

Nine seventeen, parking structure, two wounds. Phone missing. Wallet intact. Medal missing. Message sent at nine forty-eight from Paolo’s device, then the signal died near the river.

The debt is closed.

Salvatore used that phrase once before, five years ago, in a warehouse office while the old chapel burned three miles away.

The words were followed by his disappearance and three million dollars leaving a joint contingency account.

Now another thirty-two million is inaccessible, Paolo is dead, and the Vassallo deed sits beneath a security agreement signed by Sal in 2018.

I do not need Mina to consent to losing the building. I need her to understand that she can keep it by helping me.

That excuse would sound better if it were larger.

At twelve thirty-seven, Felix sends the scene list. Seven names. Victor is not among them.

Before I call the attorney, I go to my mother’s house.

The Corso home sits six blocks from Saint Mercy, a brick colonial my father expanded every time he needed to prove business was improving. All the lights are on. Rosa opens the door before I knock.

“She is in Paolo’s room,” she says.

He has not lived here in fifteen years. My mother still calls it his room.

Elena sits on the edge of the bed holding his high-school jacket. Paolo’s adult suits fill closets in two apartments and an office. She chose the object from before he learned to carry a gun.

“Is he alone?” she asks.

The question Mina will later tell me how to hear.

Tonight I answer the wrong one first. “Felix is at the funeral home. Security is outside.”

My mother closes her eyes. “Was he alone when he died?”

“We don’t know.”

“Did someone stay with him after?”

“Felix transported him. Mina Vassallo received him.”

Her hand tightens in the jacket. “Mina.”

“She does.”

“Does she know?”

“Who he is? Yes.”

“What you think Sal did.”

“Yes.”

“And she still took care of him.”

“She is being paid.”

My mother looks at me with an exhaustion unrelated to the hour. “You make kindness sound like an accounting error.”

“It is her work.”

“Work can be kind.”

I stand by the old desk. Paolo carved P + ETERNAL FREEDOM beneath it at sixteen, then lived within three miles of my mother for the rest of his life.

“The funeral will be Sunday,” I say.

“Open.”

“Mina thinks she can.”

“Then I want navy. Not black. He wore black when he wanted people to believe him.”

I make a note.

“Stop,” Elena says.

“What?”

“Do not put me in your phone while I am telling you how to bury my son.”

I lower it.

She describes the shirt, the open collar, the way his hair fell when he had not seen a barber for three weeks. I listen without converting each detail into a checkbox.

When she finishes, I tell her about the missing medal.

Her face changes. “I put it on him after his first communion.”

“We will find it.”

“Do not promise me what you cannot return.”

The rebuke belongs to more than silver.

“I will find who took it,” I say.

“That is still a promise.”

She stands and puts the jacket on its hanger.

“Victor called,” she says. “Before you.”

“What time?”

“Ten thirty.”

I learned Paolo was dead at ten twenty-four. Victor claimed the scene men told him about the medal after midnight.

“What did he say?”

“That Paolo had been hurt and you were handling it. He asked whether the medal was insured.”

The detail arrives earlier than his explanation again.

“Did you tell him anything?”

“I told him to leave me alone.”

My mother touches my face with the hand that held Paolo’s jacket.

“Do not let the need to act make you useful to whoever planned this,” she says.

Hours later, I will order a marriage in forty-eight hours.

At the time, I believe I am following her advice.

At one fifteen, my attorney joins a secure call and objects to the marriage for eleven consecutive minutes.

At one twenty-six, I tell him to draft it.

At two ten, Mina sends back twelve pages of tracked revisions.

I read them in the rear office of Corso Maritime while container cranes move beyond the glass.

She has struck the provision allowing my security unrestricted access to her residence.

She has added protection for every employee, vendor, and active client family of the funeral home.

She has limited the marriage to ninety days unless both parties renew in writing.

She has demanded equal access to evidence concerning Paolo’s death and Bianca’s fire.

Then there is section eight.

Felix leans over the conference table. “Read it aloud.”

“No.”

“I can see your face.”

“There is nothing on my face.”

“That’s how I know it’s good.”

He takes the tablet before I stop him.

“‘Mutual Non-Homicide and Bodily Integrity,’” he reads.

“‘Neither spouse shall kill, poison, stab, shoot, strangle, immolate, dismember, confine in a room lacking code-compliant egress, or arrange the disposal of the other spouse, whether directly, by agent, or through a strongly worded suggestion to an enthusiastic cousin.’”

Felix looks up. “I feel seen.”

“Continue.”

“‘Surveillance is prohibited within bathrooms, changing areas, and any room in which the surveilled party is receiving medical care, unless an immediate and articulable threat exists.’ She underlined articulable.”

“I noticed.”

“‘Marriage shall not constitute consent to physical intimacy of any kind.’” His expression changes. “Keep that.”

“I intended to.”

Felix slides the tablet back. “She also wants the chapel key.”

“It’s her chapel.”

“Sal pledged the entire property.”

“She doesn’t know that?”

“She knows there’s debt. I don’t think she knows how complete it is.”

Outside, a refrigerated container moves through the east gate. White with a blue stripe. I watch until it vanishes between stacks.

“Accept everything except unilateral termination,” I say. “Either party can terminate after Paolo’s killer is identified or on day ninety.”

“You’re giving her access to evidence.”

“Controlled access.”

“She struck controlled.”

“Then access.”

Felix studies me. “When did this stop being only about Sal?”

I take back the tablet.

“It didn’t.”

He has enough sense not to answer.

At three twelve, I send the revised agreement.

At three fourteen, Mina replies.

You omitted a cremation clause. Optimistic.

I read it twice.

Then I type: Saturday. Seven p.m. Bring identification.

Her response arrives before I put down the phone.

Bring the deed.

For the first time since I saw Paolo on the concrete, something cuts through the grief that is not rage.

It is not amusement.

It is an operational complication with excellent punctuation.