Chapter 17 #2
No one called out.
The house was quiet.
I went down the long corridor to my father’s study.
My boots on the tile were the loudest sound in the house.
I passed the sun room—empty—and the small sitting room—empty—and the door to my grandmother’s old bedroom, which had been kept as her bedroom since her death and which was now, I saw through the crack, dark with the shutters drawn.
The door to the study was closed.
I stood in front of it.
I raised my hand and I knocked once.
“Avanti, figlia.”
My father’s voice. From inside.
I opened the door.
The study smelled of bergamot and old paper.
The shutters were half-closed the way he kept them for morning work, and the pale gold light came in across the desk in two flat bands and caught the dust in the air.
He rose when I came in.
Not slowly. Not the measured rise of a Don in his own study receiving a subordinate.
The rise of a father when his daughter has come through a door.
He was around the desk in three steps and he took my face between his palms before I had fully closed the door behind me, and his hands were warm and dry and smelled faintly of the rosemary soap from the bathroom off the corridor, and he kissed my forehead.
“Figlia.”
Just that.
His eyes were wet at the corners. I had seen my father cry twice in my life—at my mother’s funeral, and at his own father’s—and he was not crying now, but the wet at the corners was closer to tears than I had seen on his face in ten years.
“Papa.”
“Come. Sit.”
He drew me by the shoulders to the chair across from his desk. The cracked-leather one. The one I had sat in as a child with my legs dangling above the floor while he made phone calls in Sicilian I did not yet understand. He pressed me gently down into it.
He had made coffee. Two cups sat waiting. He set one in front of me on the leather blotter and he took the other with him back around the desk, and he sat in his chair, and he lifted his cup and nodded at mine.
“Bevi, figlia.”
I lifted the cup.
The smell went up into my face. Bitter and dark and familiar the way my bedroom was familiar, the way the tile under my feet in the corridor was familiar, and I breathed it in and I closed my eyes for a second and I thought, for one single held breath:
I am home.
I lifted the cup to my mouth.
The door opened behind me.
I did not turn. I did not need to. The door had a specific sound when it opened from the corridor—a small catch in the bottom hinge that my father had been meaning to have fixed for fifteen years—and I heard it, and I heard the footstep on the threshold, and I knew the step because I had been listening for the step my whole life, and the cup stopped halfway to my mouth.
Gianni.
He did not greet me.
He walked past me without looking. He came around the end of the desk—not to my father’s side, not quite; to the corner of the desk where the papers lived—and he set something down on the leather.
A manila folder. New. The edges still crisp.
He placed it in front of my father, square to the edge of the blotter, and then he walked back around and sat on the arm of the second chair beside mine.
He looked at me.
His face was not angry. His face was the face of a man watching the second half of a play he had seen the first half of and was waiting for the ending to confirm.
I set the cup down.
I looked at my father.
My father’s face had changed.
It had not changed to anger. I would have known what to do with anger.
I had seen my father angry two thousand times and I had the map for it.
This was not that. This was grief, the specific grief of a man who had rehearsed what he was about to do and had decided he would do it anyway and was mourning, in real time, the thing he was about to destroy.
He reached out. He laid his hand flat on the folder.
“Figlia.”
“Papa?”
“I am going to show you some things now.”
He opened the folder.
He did not look at the first photograph. He had seen it already. He slid it across the desk to me with two fingers, the way a man slides a check across a restaurant table, and it came to rest on the blotter between my cup of espresso and his.
Margie’s Candies. The booth. The red pleather. Marco across from me in the grey sweater. My head was tipped back. I was laughing. The angle was from outside the window, from across the street, and the photograph had the slight distortion of a long lens.
Eleven days ago.
He slid the second one.
The river. The water taxi. The white boat and the afternoon light and Marco’s arm around my shoulders and my head tipped into his throat. Shot from another boat, maybe, or from the bridge. A week ago.
The third.
The awning of Marco’s building on Lake Shore Drive. Eleven at night. Him holding the door for me. My hand on his back. The doorman looking away. The photograph dated, in small white digits at the bottom corner, the night of the flood.
The fourth.
Dante’s place. Through the high industrial windows.
A long lens from the rooftop across the street, probably.
The dinner table. All of us. Rosa at the stove.
Cora with Midge. Me with the biscotti dish on my lap.
The angle cut off just above Dante’s chair at the head.
It was not a surveillance shot of a stranger.
It was a shot that said we know everyone in this room and we want you to know we know.
The fifth.
Marco’s balcony. Dawn. Me in the Henley. My hair down. My hand on the railing. The gold chain at my ankle catching the first light of morning. Long lens. Very long lens. Taken from what could only have been the building across the park.
He placed each one between us without looking at me.
When the last one was down he folded his hands on top of the empty folder and he lifted his eyes to my face.
“I have read these, figlia.”
His voice was quiet.
“All of them. For three days. I know every detail.”
He did not raise his voice.
He never did. I had known this about my father my whole life and I had admired it in him until this morning, and now I understood that the quiet voice had been a weapon the entire time and I had simply never been on the other end of it.
“The analysis in your report is correct, figlia.”
He said it plainly. No softening.
“The framework is sound. The counter-positioning is the best I have read in a decade. Your recommendation is the right one.”
I waited.
“I cannot use it.”
There it was. Clean.
“Papa—“
“Let me finish. You have had me listen, on the phone, for a long time. You will listen now.”
I listened.
“If I ally with the Carusos now,” he said, “after Gianni has brought me these photographs, every family from Naples to Trapani will say one thing. They will say Arturo Scordato followed his daughter’s heart and not his judgment.
They will say the Scordatos are run by a girl and the American who turned her head.
The Commission will say it. The Valentis will say it loudest. Every cousin in every kitchen in every village from here to Messina will say it by the end of the week. ”
“Papa—“
“The analysis will not save us, figlia. The cleanness of the argument will not save us. Because no one will read the argument. They will read the photographs. They will read the photograph of you on his balcony in his shirt, and they will not open the report. They will think he played you. He does not love you. He used you. the famous playboy of the Caruso family.”
His voice stayed quiet.
“It makes me look weak. It makes you look compromised. It makes the family look like a family run by a woman’s feelings.
There is no version of the Caruso alliance that survives this.
There is only the version where I sign the agreement and watch our name become a joke across three seas for as long as I live, and then watch your brother inherit the joke. ”
“Papa, the analysis—“
“I have to go the other way.”
I went still.
“Not because Valenti is right. He is not right. Your report is correct about him and I do not need to be told that a second time. I will ally with Valenti because it is the only choice that repairs the damage of your being seen. It is the only move that restores the appearance that this family makes decisions from a seat at the head of the table and not from a bed in Chicago.”
The word bed landed the way he had placed it to land.
“Figlia.”
I stood.
The cracked leather of the chair creaked under the shift of weight and I felt my knees hold, which surprised me too, because I had not been sure they would.
“No. This is wrong. Worse, it is . . . unintelligent. It lacks nuance. It is a boneheaded decision.”
“Serafina.”
“No, Papa. This is exactly what Enzo bought Gianni for.”
Gianni did not move.
“Page twelve,” I said. “Of the report you just told me was the best you had read in a decade. Page twelve, third paragraph, the scenario I explicitly flagged. I wrote the two sentences in bold because I knew you skim the body in bold. The scenario was: Valenti surfaces compromising material on a Scordato principal at the exact moment Palermo is deciding between the Chicago alliance and the Valenti counter-offer, and the compromising material does not have to be true in any strategic sense. It has to only be embarrassing enough that you cannot use the Chicago alliance without losing face, and then Valenti is not the second-best option, Valenti is the only option. Page twelve. The one scenario I told you to watch for.”
My father did not answer.
“He has surveilled me for weeks,” I said.
“The photographs are expensive. He has paid for all of this, Papa. Valenit. He has paid Gianni to deliver it at this hour on this day, and he has paid him with something—a cut, a seat, a promise to make Gianni the face of the Palermo arm after I am out of the room—and Gianni has taken it. You are looking at the Valenti play from my own report and you are telling me you are going to follow it.”
Gianni did not move.
He did not deny it. He sat on the arm of the second chair with his hands folded loose between his knees and he watched me the way a man watches a horse he has bet against gamely try to finish the race.
My father took a breath.
“The play does not become less correct for you because Valenti designed it, figlia.”
“Papa—“
“If the play works, it works. Our job is to take the terms. Not to refuse them because the man who wrote them is a man we dislike.”
“You are allying with the man who put a camera on me.”
“I am allying with the family that will still be standing next year.”
I pressed my palms flat on the edge of the desk.
I leaned forward. I was not performing composure.
I did not have composure to perform. I had the remaining capacity of a woman with six hours of sleep in thirty-six and the full weight of a trap she had walked into with her eyes open on her shoulders, and I used what I had.
“Twelve hours.”
“Figlia.”
“Papa. Please. Twelve hours. Let me call Marco. Let me give him the shape of what’s happening.
He will not use it to counter-move against you—he will use it to protect his brother’s territory while you make your announcement.
That is all. Twelve hours is nothing. You lose nothing by giving them to me. ”
“You are not making any calls, Serafina.”
His voice was very quiet.
“I will not have my daughter on a telephone line with the Caruso envoy while Valenti is booking his flight to Palermo. I will not give you the chance to warn the man whose arm is around you in the photograph on my desk. I will not, figlia, and I am not going to explain it to you twice.”
I looked at him.
His eyes did not leave mine.
Gianni stood.
He did not walk fast. He did not need to walk fast. He crossed the rug in four measured steps, the way he had crossed rugs my whole life, the way the older brother crossed any room he had already decided he owned, and he stopped at my right elbow.
He put his hand out.
Palm up. Between us.
“Il telefono, piccola.”
Piccola.
He had not called me that since I was eleven.
He had called me piccola then in the voice a brother uses when he wants something, and he was using the voice now for the same reason, with the added weight of a man who had already won and wanted the small satisfaction of hearing the word again on the day of his winning.
I looked at my father.
He did not meet my eyes.
He looked at the blotter. He looked at the photograph of Marco’s balcony, the one on top of the stack. He did not look at me. His silence was the signature.
I reached into my coat pocket.
My phone was in the inner pocket, not the outer one. The outer one had the lamb. I closed my fingers around the phone and I drew it out and I placed it on my brother’s open palm.
He closed his hand around it.
“Grazie.”
He went back to the arm of the second chair and sat.
“Now. To your room.”
It was not a command. It was worse than a command.
It was the sentence a father gives a small child at the end of a long day when the child has been tiresome and the father is tired, and the softness of it was the thing that told me the decision had been made hours ago and the conversation in the study had been a formality he owed me because I was his daughter.
“Rest,” he said. “We will speak again in the morning.”
I walked to the door.
I passed Gianni on the arm of the second chair.
He did not look at me. The phone in his hand had already gone dark on the screen.
I walked past him and I did not look at him either, and the door of the study had been left open a crack by his entrance and I pushed it the rest of the way open and I stepped out into the corridor.
No one closed the door behind me.