Chapter 7
The recording was six minutes and twelve seconds long.
In the first minute, Santino Russo’s voice filled a cathedral of nine hundred silent people, and he was laughing, and he was talking about a fuel transfer valve. In the second minute, Camila Moretti said the words two accidents, and someone in the third row stood up and walked out, and nobody watched him go. By the fourth minute, the two police captains at the back had already disappeared. By the fifth, Santino had stopped trying to reconstruct his strategy and had simply gone still — the stillness of a man who has finally understood that there is no version of the next ten minutes in which he wins.
When the recording ended, Enzo let the silence run.
Then he said, quietly, “I’m going to give everyone in this room one minute to decide whether they were at my funeral as a mourner or as a guest of the man who killed me. The doors are open. Nobody will stop you.”
Nobody moved.
“That’s what I thought.”
He turned to Santino.
“Salvatore. Twenty-three years.”
Santino’s jaw worked. When he spoke, his voice was low and raw and for the first time in all the years Enzo had known him, completely honest.
“I was there when you had nothing. I was there when they put you away. I held it together for eighteen months while you were gone, and nobody — nobody — thanked me, because you came back and took it all back like it was never not yours.”
“It was mine.”
“Everything is yours.” Santino’s hands had started to shake. “That’s the whole thing, Enzo. Everything is always yours. I spent twenty-three years being the second man in every room and I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“So you went to my wife.”
“She came to me.”
Enzo looked at Camila. She had not moved from the front row. Her face had gone the color of ash, and she was looking at the floor, and there was something in the set of her shoulders — not grief, not fear exactly, something more like exhaustion, like a woman who had been holding up a lie for a year and had just been told she could finally put it down.
“Camila.”
She looked up.
“Say it.”
“I’m not going to—”
“Say it.”
A long silence. The whole cathedral watching. And then, quietly, the only true thing she had said in two years:
“I was so tired of being something you owned.”
Enzo looked at her for a long moment. He thought about the wedding, the house, the fifteen years of a marriage that had become a contract with a bed in it. He thought about how he had not, in all that time, once asked her what she wanted, because he had never had to ask anyone that.
“I know,” he said. “That’s the part that’s mine.”
He turned away from her. He looked at Santino.
“You’re going to leave Chicago. Tonight. You’re going to go somewhere far enough that I never have to think about you again, and you’re going to stay there, and you’re going to be very careful for the rest of your life.”
Santino stared at him. “You’re letting me—”
“I’m not letting you anything.” Enzo’s voice was flat and final. “I’m choosing not to become you. That’s the difference between us, Salvatore, and it’s the reason I’m standing here and you’re not. You wanted my chair. I’m keeping it. And I’m not going to kill a man I grew up with to do it, because I don’t want to be the kind of man who would.”
He looked at the room.
“Get out.”
Santino went. He went alone, down the side aisle, through the sacristy door, and nobody stopped him, and nobody ever saw him in Chicago again.
May you like
Camila rose to follow him. Enzo watched her walk, and at the door she paused and turned, and for a moment it seemed she might say something. She didn’t. She just looked at him — really looked, for the first time in years — and then she left.
And the cathedral emptied, and the morning went on, and Lorenzo Moretti stood at the altar of his own funeral and understood that he had just buried the man he used to be.
