Chapter 4
Delaney began talking about a malfunction at the mixing plant, about how he would have the entire production line inspected before the week was over.
Enzo didn’t answer. He waited until the man stopped, then said there were two choices, and he would explain them only once.
The first choice was that Delaney would sign a formal acknowledgement of debt for the exact amount of the difference, plus the cost of demolishing and repairing every one of the support columns, and that he would work on Baranti family projects for the next seven years at cost, without a single dollar of profit.
The second choice was that the file on the table would be sitting on the desks of the state tax authorities and the city building inspector at nine o’clock Monday morning. And Enzo said he didn’t need to describe what would happen after that, because Delaney had lived in the city long enough to imagine it for himself.
Delaney sat still for a while. Then he asked whether there was a third choice.
Enzo looked at him and answered that there was. But he wouldn’t want to hear Enzo describe it — and that wasn’t a threat, only an observation about the man’s particular tastes.
Then he stood, fastened the button of his jacket, picked up his briefcase, and walked toward the door. He didn’t look back. He didn’t ask Delaney which choice he would make. Sal opened the door for him, then followed him outside, and the container door closed behind them while Frank Delaney remained seated exactly where he was, with the unopened file lying in the middle of the table.
Outside on the construction site, the wind came up from the river, carrying the smell of machine oil and brackish water. Sal walked beside him in silence for a stretch, then said there was something else.
He took an already opened envelope from inside his coat and handed it over.
Enzo stopped in the middle of the crushed stone path, pulled out the paper inside, and read it. It was a federal grand jury subpoena, demanding all financial records belonging to Baranti Holdings from the previous seven years, including subcontractor agreements and real estate holdings.
He read it from beginning to end, no faster and no slower than he read anything else.
Sal said the lawyers wanted to meet with him that afternoon, that there were several ways to delay it, that they could drag things out for at least a few more months if necessary.
Enzo folded the paper in half, then folded it into quarters, and slipped it back into the envelope. He handed it to Sal.
He said to let them dig. He said he didn’t care whose name was waiting at the bottom of it.
Then he added three more words, casually, as though they meant nothing — as though they were only the trailing end of a sentence he hadn’t yet decided to finish.
“Even my name.”
Sal looked at him for a moment, about to say something, then chose not to. The two men continued toward the car. Behind them, the container door remained closed.
Mave always ate lunch in the basement, in the mail room, sitting on one of two plastic chairs beside the sorting table, and it had been that way since her first week on the job.
Ros Ferraro had been running that room longer than Mave had been alive. She was the only person in the building who called Mave by her name, and she had done it from the very first day — when Mave still didn’t know whether her name was something anyone wanted to hear.
That afternoon, Roz had already set out two meals on the table, as she always did. One for herself, and one she had made for Mave, because she said cooking for one person or two took about the same amount of work.
Mave sat down, ate a few bites, then set her spoon aside and took out her notebook. She wrote slowly, pushed it over for Roz to read, then continued writing. She told her about Tuesday morning. She told her how she had pushed the cart into the room, how someone had glanced at her and suddenly gone still, how the man at the head of the table had spoken those three words, how six hands had gone up while she was setting down the final cup.
Roz read each page. The farther she went, the more slowly she read.
When she reached the last page, she stopped reading altogether. She only sat there staring down at the tabletop, and her hands — the hands that had sorted mail in that building through four different chairmen — began to tremble.
Then she sprang to her feet so quickly that the plastic chair tipped backward behind her.
She said she was going up to the thirty-fourth floor right now. She said she knew every one of those six men by sight, that she had delivered mail to their desks for decades, that she had signed for Christmas gifts meant for their wives and children, and that she wanted to look each of them straight in the face and ask whether they truly intended to do such a thing. She said she would call the newspapers. She would call the police. She would stand in the lobby and tell everyone who passed what had happened.
Mave let her finish. Then she pulled Roz gently back down, told her to sit, and wrote a single line before sliding the notebook across the table.
If you do that, you’ll lose your job, and I’ll still go to prison.
Roz read the line. She read it a second time.
Then she sat down, set the fallen chair upright, and remained silent for a long while. At last she asked Mave what she intended to do.
Mave shrugged. She wrote that she didn’t know yet, that she was writing everything down. And she turned the notebook around to show Roz the new pages — the rectangular table she had drawn, the six seats she had marked, the margins crowded with times and notes.
Roz studied those pages for a moment, then asked what good writing it all down would do.
Mave wrote that she didn’t know, that it was what they had taught her to do in school, and that her hand simply kept doing it on its own.
Roz nodded. She didn’t ask anything else.
She poured Mave a glass of warm water, pushed it across the table, then changed the subject and asked the question she asked once every month. She asked how much Mave had managed to save.
Mave wrote down a number.
Roz looked at it, then looked at Mave’s hands resting on the table. Hands without gloves, because there was no one down in the basement she needed to make comfortable.
Roz said that at this rate, Mave would have to wait until her hair turned gray.
Mave picked up her pen, wrote four words, and turned the notebook around.
Then I’ll wait until it does.
Roz laughed — a brief laugh with no happiness in it — then reached across and smoothed Mave’s hair the way someone might smooth the hair of her own daughter. She told her to finish eating before the food went cold.
When they were done, before Mave went back upstairs, she did what she always did on that particular day. She reached into the deepest compartment of her wallet, took out a photograph with frayed edges, and placed it on the table.
In the picture, a thirteen-year-old girl sat on the front steps of a house, two tightly braided pigtails hanging over her chest, laughing so hard that her eyes were squeezed shut, one hand raised and pointing at her own hair as though someone had just done something wonderful for her.
Roz lifted the photograph with both hands. She asked whether today was the girl’s birthday.
Mave nodded.
Roz said the girl laughed like she did.
May you like
Mave wrote that her sister had chosen those braids herself, that she had made Mave braid them three times that morning before she was satisfied.
Roz placed the photograph back on the table very gently. Then she said nothing more, and the two of them sat together in silence until the lunch break was over.
