I held up my hands. “Alright, alright.” I walked. Backward, mostly, because I didn’t want to stop looking at her, which is its own kind of stupid. “Tomorrow,” I said, at the door, like it was a date.
“We’re closed tomorrow,” she said.
“No you’re not.”
She didn’t answer that. When I got the dog out into the cold and the door swung after us, it didn’t quite catch—hung an inch open on the warm gold light—and through the gap, just before it finally clicked, I saw her standing there in the wreck of her shop, arms crossed, watching me go, not smiling.
Not not smiling, either.
Ididn’tsleep.Ilayin my bed and I stared at the ceiling and bounced my whole arsenal off her wall in my head over and over and grinned like an idiot at the dark.
By the time I got to the back room of the restaurant the next morning, the wedding had eaten the table again. Place cards in stacks. A swatch of tablecloth Pietro was holding up to the light with the expression of a man defusing a bomb. Sal at the head with the list and the pen and the audit-of-God face, and Olimpo, who’d ridden over with me, crossing the room to lie on Sal’s foot without so much as a backward look.
“Toe,” Sal said, glancing up then wincing. “Sit. You look like hell.”
I blew him a kiss. “Don’t lie,fratello, I look incredible.” I dropped into the chair across from him and reached for the coffee and noticed, in passing, that I didn’t want an arancino, which never happens. What was wrong with me?
“The block,” Sal said.
So I gave it to them. Flat, clean, no jokes. A collector came down on the holdout last night. The polite men in the good cars are done, this is the not-polite phase. The consolidation’s tightening; it’s as good as confirmed the whole street’s flipped but for the one. And the money still runs where we knew it ran—the yard, the freight line, the nothing-name company, the thread that goes up the line toward a name we don’t say in daylight.
“Good,” Sal said. He wrote something. “And.”
“And what.”
“There is an ‘and.’ You’re holding it like a man who broke something.”
I drank my coffee. “I removed him.”
The pen stopped.
That’s the thing about Sal—Pietro fidgets, I talk, and Sal just stops, goes completely still, like a man listening to the ground for the sound of something coming. He set the pen down flat and lined it up parallel to the edge of his list, and he looked at me with the geological face, the one that’s worse than any shouting our father ever did, the one that’s so flat you fill the silence yourself with everything you already know you did wrong.
“You removed him?” he asked.
“He broke something of—” I stopped. Started over, cleaner, no her in it. “I thought it might become physical. Didn’t want anyone hurt. So I made a call.”
“You made a call.” Quiet. “Three months we have been ghosts on that block. The whole reason it works is that no one knows anyone is watching, because the second anyone knows, the thread runs back to us, and the old man buries us, you said this, Tonio.Yousaid it. At this table. Bring it to him airtight or not at all.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never does. “And last night you put a collector’s face on the holdout’s window and told him—what, exactly, did you tell him?”
“That a friend of the family came around. No names. The holdout’s spoken for now.”
Pietro put down the tablecloth swatch.
“Spoken for,” Sal repeated.
“It’s a thread,” I said. “It’s a thin one. He’s three rungs from nobody, he doesn’t know the outfit, by the time it goes up the line it’s noise, somebody on a holdout, that’s all, it could be anybody—”
“It could be us,” Sal said, and that was that, that was the whole verdict. He was right, of course. I’d known he’d be get angry while I was doing it and I’d done it anyway. Months of patience with a hole burned in it because I couldn’t watch a coward touch a woman’s hair.
And then—and this is the thing about my brothers, the thing that’s saved my life more than once—Sal looked at me a beat longer, and Pietro looked at Sal, and something passed between them that wasn’t about the op at all. Because they’d both clocked it. The not eating. The look like hell. The way I’d said her without saying her and caught it and edited it out, too late, too clumsy, when I’m never clumsy. The whole loud machine that is Tonio Scordato running about forty percent quieter than usual and pointed somewhere none of them could see.
“He pushedher,” Pietro said, slowly, tasting it. “Her.”
“The collector,” I said. “He went hands-on with the owner. Of the bakery. It’s a relevant detail.”
“The bakery,” Sal said.
“The bakery girl,” Pietro said, and there it was, the corner of his mouth going up, the dread of the op folding right back over into the thing they’ve been doing to me since lunch yesterday, since eleven times, since so much bread.
