Chapter 8
“Four years ago, they arrested him for the murder of a man he had never met.”
She said it without heat. That was the thing that would stay with Dominic later — not the words, but the temperature of them. She had carried this so long that it had cooled.
“There were no witnesses. There was no motive. There was a paid informant, and there was a district attorney who needed a conviction that month.”
Above them, the house creaked and settled.
“Daniel was the son of a fisherman from Bari who changed the family name at Ellis Island. He did not know how to defend himself against men in suits.” She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. “He died in his cell before the trial, from injuries no one was ever charged with.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
“I did not yet know I was carrying his child.” She looked at the window. “There was no family left in this country. Two lawyers turned me away because I could not pay them. By the time the landlord put my things onto the street I was seven months along. I sat for two nights on a bench in Battery Park with one suitcase and a round belly before I stopped hoping that anyone would come.”
She lifted her coffee, drank, and set it down.
“On the third morning, an old man in a black coat sat beside me.”
She looked at him then.
“He said he had known Daniel’s father in the old country. He said he had looked quietly into the case and that the whole thing stank to heaven.” A pause. “He said he could not give me my husband back, but he could give my child a roof.”
Dominic’s voice came out very low.
“My father.”
“Don Antonio Moretti.” She said the name carefully, the way you handle something breakable. “He gave me back my dignity when I had none left. He never once asked for anything in return. He never once mentioned it again.” She raised her eyes. “I do not betray Don Antonio. Not for Victor. Not for money. Not to save my own skin.”
Dominic reached across the small table and laid his hand over hers.
Heavy. Warm.
He did not squeeze. He simply held.
Behind him, the kitchen door opened without a knock.
A man in a gray wool coat stepped into the kitchen, a canvas bag hanging from one shoulder. His left hand was sheathed in soft black leather that did not match the weather.
Marco Bellini.
Dominic had trusted this man with his life for eight years. Marco had stood at Don Antonio’s funeral at Dominic’s shoulder. Marco had taken a bullet in the ribs for him at a failed negotiation in New Haven three winters past. Marco had held Dominic’s newborn nephew at the baptism and wept.
Dominic drew his hand back from Elena’s.
Slowly. The way a man closes a door he does not want to slam.
“Marco.”
“Boss. Thank God.”
Marco’s voice broke in the right place.
“I have not slept in a week. When Salvatore called this morning and said you were alive, I nearly dropped the receiver. He told me to come quietly and bring what I could carry.”
He set the canvas bag on the counter.
He crossed the small kitchen with the sprawling, exhausted strides of a man running on fumes and the memory of adrenaline, and stopped two respectful steps from the table.
“May I ask, boss. Where have they put you to rest?”
“Second floor. Third room.”
Dominic kept the tired smile on his face.
In his head, he was counting.
The first thing was the telephone. Salvatore had agreed only hours before that no one on the trusted list was to know this address. Salvatore did not break a rule on the same morning he made it. Not in thirty years.
The second thing was the shape of the greeting.
Marco had asked very smoothly which floor Dominic was resting on. Not how he was breathing. Not whether the leg had held. Not whether the doctor had come.
He had asked which room.
A man eaten alive by a week of worry asks after his boss’s breath. He does not ask after his boss’s floor.
The third thing was lying on the table between them.
Marco’s left hand rested on the wood, half curled around the coffee cup Elena had set down. It was sheathed in soft black leather.
The right hand was bare.
It was mild in Brooklyn that morning. No wind. The pavement outside was dry. No man carrying a bag of ammunition wore a single glove.
Dominic did not look at the glove a second time.
“You have done well, Marco.”
“Boss—”
“Rest a few hours on the couch downstairs before you drive back.” A beat. “And thank you. Truly.”
Marco nodded, respectful and brief.
He lifted the cup Elena had set before him. He did not drink from it.
He turned and left the kitchen. His boots crossed the front hall. The stair creaked as he went down into the ground-floor sitting room.
Dominic waited until the door at the foot of the stairs clicked shut.
“Salvatore.”
The older man was already in the doorway. He had been standing in the hall, listening.
“Did you call Marco this morning?”
“No.”
“Did you tell anyone this address?”
“Bruno. Vincenzo. Falcone. No one else breathes it.” Salvatore’s mouth was a thin line. “He found it himself, or someone found it for him. He may have followed Falcone’s car. He may have called ahead before he knocked.”
“Then we cannot stay.”
“We cannot leave.” Salvatore did not raise his voice. “Falcone will not let you be moved before midnight. If I put you in a car now, that leg opens and you bleed out somewhere on the Belt Parkway. I will have two cars at the ends of the street by dark, Vincenzo on the roof, and a third car in the alley ready to go at one o’clock. Not before. That is the earliest the doctor will allow.”
“And Marco?”
“He will want to leave by dusk. Let him. A man will follow him from the door.” Salvatore’s eyes were very steady. “If he goes to Victor, I want to know the road he takes.”
Dominic nodded slowly.
“Send Bruno to Bensonhurst. Himself. Marco’s wife and his son. Anna and Nico. The apartment, the school, the mother-in-law. All of it. Today.”
“You suspect Marco.”
“I suspect that Victor is holding something of Marco’s.”
A long silence.
“Understood,” Salvatore said. “Bruno leaves within the hour.”
Elena watched them from across the small kitchen with the stillness of a woman who had understood every word without needing to hear it twice.
The day settled into the strange, airless quiet of a house waiting for a call.
It cannot hurry. Vincenzo sat at the table in the front room cleaning a pistol he did not realize he was cleaning. Salvatore sat at the window and read the same page of a newspaper for two hours without turning it.
Elena moved through the small kitchen with the calm of a woman who had learned long ago that fear is best beaten back by work. She rinsed rice. She warmed broth on the stove. She chopped onions into a shallow pan of melting butter until the warm, forgiving smell crept through all the back rooms of the little house.
Lily sat on the floor beside the counter with a tin of crayons Bruno had bought her at the corner shop and a stack of white paper, her small tongue caught between her teeth.
When she finished, she carried the drawing to the table with great seriousness and set it beside Dominic’s plate.
Three figures in a row. A tall man in the middle. A woman with long dark hair on one side, a small girl on the other. A white rabbit at their feet. A large house behind them.
“Mr. Dominic is in the middle,” she said. “Mama and me beside him.”
Dominic looked at it for a long time.
He did not speak of it. He folded it carefully in half, then into quarters, and slipped it into the inner pocket of his borrowed shirt, over his heart.
At dusk Marco came up from the sitting room, put on his coat, and said he would drive back and see if there was news. Dominic thanked him from the top of the stairs. A man in a dark cap left the alley a minute behind him.
The house settled into its night rhythm.
Salvatore took the front room. Vincenzo took the roof. Dominic climbed the stairs, slowly, one hand on the rail, and slept with the borrowed shirt still against his body.
At half past midnight, thirty minutes before the cars were due, the brakes of a car cried out on the wet cobblestone outside.
Two beams of white light swept across the drawn curtains of the front room in a hard arc.
May you like
Vincenzo, who had come down from the roof at the first sweep of headlights, three flights in the time it took the street door to splinter, was already at the foot of the stairs with a pistol in each hand.
The front door of the safe house flew inward with a hollow, splintering crash.
