He is not going to insult the man across from him by suggesting the difference matters.
The cop's face. The Ranger's face. Frank Donovan's son's face.
I watch a man who has been carrying a question for fifteen years receive the answer, and I watch the receiving not break him, and I know, watching it, that nothing is going to break him. Not the answer. Not the room. Not the man in the wheelchair who wrote his life.
He gives thirty-one names. Sean holds them.
The phone on the side table rings.
Four times. Neither of them answers. It stops.
Kostas looks at the phone.
"That was supposed to be a call I would take."
"It is not."
The phone is for information later.
"There is one more thing. About your mother."
Luca's head turns.
Kostas waits. He has learned, this morning, how this family waits.
When Luca's face is arranged, Kostas begins.
"My wife's name was Eleftheria. She was twenty-four when we married. She had her father's eyes and her mother's stubbornness, and she laughed at things other people did not find funny. I called her Theria. She called me an old man from the day we met. I was thirty-two. She was twenty-four. She called me an old man anyway."
He breathes.
"She died in a hospital bed in Astoria. November 4, 1987. She was thirty-one years old. She had not left the hospital since Demetrios was born. She gave birth, and her body did not have enough left in it to come back from the giving. The mold had been in her lungs for eighteen months."
I watch him understand that the architecture of the war starts here.
"Demetrios lived ten weeks after her. He did not suffer. I want you to know that. He did not suffer. He slept a great deal. He made the sounds newborns make. I held him every night. I had a four-year-old and a dying infant and a house with black mold in the walls, and I learned to make the formula correctly. I learned to change a diaper. These are the things a man learns when there is no one else to learn them."
He looks at the window.
"He died on a Tuesday morning. He was in my arms. He went the way babies go when the going is quiet. Not all at once, butslowly, the breathing changing, the color changing, and then the breathing stopping. I held him for an hour after."
Cazzo, fuck.I still cannot breathe.
"Three weeks later, Maria Moretti came to the memorial I held for him. She knew me. We had been friendly for years. She had poured wine at my table, and I had been at hers. Theria and I were regulars. The women in the kitchen. The children between the rooms."
He looks at me.
"I had been a little in love with her for years. I watched her pour wine for men she did not like and make them feel welcomed anyway. I watched her quiet Vittorio when no one else could. I carried the love the way a man carries what he cannot have."
"She knew what Vittorio had done to my family. She knew, and she came anyway. Without telling him. She was heavily pregnant, and she came alone, and she sat in the last pew, and she lit a candle at the front for a baby she had never held."
He breathes.
"She did not have to come. Vittorio had won. My family was destroyed. She owed me nothing. A woman who lights candles does not stop lighting them because her husband has decided the people she loves are enemies."
He looks at Sean.
"Be the kind of man who lights candles. Not the kind who takes the sons of women who light them."
