Pietro said it. Pietro, who’d been very quiet, who had the most to lose and the most reason to want it true and the most reason to be afraid of it. “Gianni.”
“Gianni,” Sal said.
And there it was on the table, the name none of us liked to put down in daylight. Gianni Scordato. Our cousin. Don Arturo’s son. The nominal consigliere, the man who took Serafina’s strategies and wore them like his own clothes, and underneath that, we’d come to understand, slowly, against our will, the man who’d shaken hands with Enzo Valenti’s ghost and inherited his pipes—the smuggling, the laundering, the whole filthy patient machine—and turned it loose on a corridor of buildings in Chicago, store by tired store.
“He’s been pushing his own block of relatives toward the Carusos,” Pietro said, low, “and the whole time he’s been running Valenti’s old play on a street six miles from here.” He rubbed his face, and this time when his hand came down he wasn’t smiling. “And Angela testified against the structures underneath it. The shells. The hedge fund. The thing she gave up her life to expose. It’s the same machine.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. The wedding three weeks out, the woman he was marrying entangled in the exact thread that ran up to the man whose name we’d just said.
“We can’t move,” I said finally. Somebody had to. “Not yet. You all know it, I’ll say it. He’s the old man’s son.” I spread my hands. “Arturo wants to believe in Gianni more than he wants to believe in air. Even though the facts go against it. He’ll bury us. He’ll buryyou,” I said to Sal, “and you’re the only one of us he actually trusts, which is the joke of the whole family. We don’t get to be wrong about this. Not once. We bring it to him airtight or we don’t bring it at all.”
“Yes,” Sal said. Simple. Final. He’d known it before I said it; he’d just needed it said in the room so it was ours together. “Weneed proof the old man cannot deny. The block is the proof—or at least the start of it. The yard, the leases, the company, the money running through it—pull that, and it runs straight up to him. The block is the keystone.” He looked at me. “And the block has a problem.”
“A holdout,” I said. My mouth was dry. “One storefront. North side, mid-block. Won’t sell, won’t pay. Breaks his clean run.” I knew where this was going. I’d known where it was going since five that morning, standing across the street from a warm gold window, telling myself it was the cannoli.
“The bakery,” Pietro said. And here—God help all of us—here the corner of his mouth came back up, just a flicker, the teasing folding right back over the dread like nothing. “The bakery girl.”
“You work the block,” Sal said. “You watch the yard from it. You learn who comes, who leans on her, who she pays or doesn’t pay. You already go there. You already over-tip and stay too long and buy too much bread.” The dry stone of his voice, the thing that’s almost a kindness when you know him. “She doesn’t know who you are?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s a struggle to get her to say a fucking word to me.”
“Not for want of trying,” Pietro said, with a grin.
“You watch that mouth.” I grinned back. “Anyway, no one will ever wonder why Tonio Scordato keeps turning up at a bakery making a fool of himself over a woman. It is the most natural cover in the world. It requires no acting at all.”
They were smiling now, the both of them, because that’s how we survive these conversations—we put a joke over the abyss so we can stand on it.Bring her to the wedding.It had gone from a tease to an assignment and back to a tease in the space of an hour, and the laughing was real and the dread was real and they were the same thing now, the warm and the cold, the girl and the case, all one job.
“Fine,” I said. I gave them the grin. I always give them the grin. “I’ll suffer for the family. I’ll go drink coffee and watch a beautiful woman bake bread. The sacrifices I make.”
But under the table, where neither of them could see it, my hands had gone very still. I’d be living on her block now. Watching her doorway. Building a case that ran up through a corridor of leaned-on storefronts toward a man I’d called cousin my whole life. And the one bright stubborn light in the middle of all of it, the holdout, the keystone, the thing that, pulled, would crack the whole block open—
—was her.
IdroppedPietrofirst.Hewas going home to her, to the apartment with the seating chart taped to the fridge and the woman who’d put the lights back on in him, and he clasped my shoulder at the curb and saidgrazie, Toe, for all of it,and meant it, and went inside to his life. Then I drove Sal and the dog back, and Olimpo gave me one last judgmental grumble and lumbered out of the car to go be Sal’s, because he was always Sal’s, he’d only ever been on loan. Sal stood in his doorway with the great wet beast leaning on his leg and looked at me a second too long, the way he does, like he was about to say a true thing.
He didn’t. He just said, “Good work today.” And went in.
And then it was just me. The car, the dark, the heater ticking, and the particular quiet that comes down after you’ve spent a whole day being the noise.
I should have gone home. When we first moved here, we lived together in a carriage house. Soon after Pietro met Angela though, that changed. I had an apartment with my name on the lease now and a bed in it. But I didn’t go home.
I drove. I told myself I was just driving, just letting the engine cool me out, just shaking the day loose—and somewhere in the lying I noticed where my hands had taken the wheel, which was back toward the river, back toward the freight line, back toward the dead block with the same sign-shop signage and the air going out of it store by store.
The block. My block now. My assignment, my cover, my case. I parked across from it the way I’d stood across from it that morning a lifetime ago, and I shut the engine off, and I sat in the cold and the dark and the quiet, and I looked.
Dozed off. But I woke the following morning, early.
Three in the morning. Maybe four. The hour with no name. Every storefront dark—the cowed ones, the bought ones, the for-sale ones, the whole leaned-on length of the street black as the inside of a fist. The grocer dark. The church candles guttered out. Nothing moving, nothing warm, nothing awake, a whole block holding its breath in the dark while somebody patient and ugly six miles or six thousand miles away ate it one mouthful at a time.
And then.
A light.
It came up soft and gold mid-block, north side, the way it had come up every morning I’d ever come to watch for it—the ovens going on, the heat throwing up against the steamed front glass, the thin gilt haze of flour catching it. FILOXENIA in its worn green paint.
She was in there.
I sat there and I looked at the light and I didn’t have a joke for it. Out here, alone, there was nobody to be funny for, and the charm came all the way down like a shutter going up the other way, and underneath it was just this—this stupid, enormous, unmanageable thing in my chest that the light put there, thething I wouldn’t look at in daylight because you don’t show that hand.
