I saw Gianni running. Not fighting. Running. The moment his sister gave the word he was already moving, already past it, already gone, the rot slipping the net the way I understood now the rot always slips, because the cornered ones don’t stand, they run for the door, and he had a door, he had the freight doors standing open to the yard and the rail spur beyond, the yard heowned, the corridor he’d bought block by block, and he went for it low and fast through his own falling men, out into the grey, into the dark of the machine he’d built, gone.
And then, my heart broke.
I saw the old man go down.
Don Arturo, in the middle of the killing floor in his linen suit, the silver head, upright until he wasn’t—and I saw the dark bloom come up across the pale linen, sudden, an ugly red flower opening over his chest, and I saw his weathered hands come up to it the way you reach for a thing you can’t believe is happening, and I saw his knees go.
And I saw who fired.
Gianni. On his way out. He’d reached the freight doors, he was half through into the grey, free, gone—and he turned. He turned in the open doorway with the river-light behind him and he raised his hand and he put a round into his own father, into the old man who’d just stood up in front of everyone and refused to give him the family, the last bridge, burned, the final small spiteful word from a small spiteful man who’d torch a city for a wedding card and shoot the throne dead rather than watch it go to someone better. Then he was through the doors and into the yard and gone, and I lay on the cold concrete with my hand over my mouth and the wail of it trapped behind my teeth.
The men roared.
I heard it over the gunfire, two voices, and I knew them—Dante and Salvatore, the grave one and the wall, going down onto the floor over the old man, their suits in the wet and the blood, hands pressing, voices that had never once risen for me going up now in three languages over the silver head, and around them their men closing the room, sealing it, the gunfire thinning as the thing Serafina had built did its work and Gianni’s men found there was no door for them.
And then, across the floor, through the thinning smoke, Tonio came for me.
He should not have been able to. He came up, out of the wheelchair. I saw it—I saw him get his good arm down and shove and come out of that chair and go to his knees on the wet concrete, and then he wasn’t standing, he couldn’t stand, so he crawled. He hauled his wrecked taped burned body across that whole cold killing floor toward me on his good arm and his knees, dragging the dead arm, through the smoke and over the slope and the wet, his face gone grey and his teeth bared with the cost of it, and his eyes never once left me, and he came, the way Olimpo had gone into the fire, the one who got there, the one who tried, the soldier and the Daddy and the man all at once poured into the single animal fact of getting his body between me and the room no matter what it cost the body.
The soldier shielding me saw him coming and made space, and Tonio dragged himself the last of it through the column’s shadow and got there, got to me, got his good arm around me and pulled me into him, into the dark wool of the wedding suit gone grey with smoke and ash, and he was shaking with the effort of having crossed that floor.
“I’ve got you,” he said.
His mouth at my ear, his voice scraped down to nothing, the soft-steel gone ragged, the words I’d held onto in the cork-lined room when I didn’t know if he had a voice left to say them. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got the line. I’m here, I’ve got it, I’ve got you—”
And I let myself shake.
“You came,” I said into him, and it didn’t sound like the boss at all. “You came for me.”
“Always.” His broken hand fisted in my hair, holding my head against him, holding the line the way he’d vowed he would. “Always. To the end of the world. I told you. I hold the line.”
I held onto him.
And over his shoulder, through the thinning smoke, I could see it all — Don Arturo down in the spreading red, Dante’s hands pressed to the linen, Salvatore’s face cracked open at last; the open freight doors and the grey yard beyond them, empty now, the doorway Gianni had walked through; Serafina standing alone in the center of the killing floor under the dead iron rails, perfectly still, looking out at the door her brother had fled through with a face I couldn’t read at all.
Chapter 19
Katerina
Springcame,andthesedays I was not the only store open on the block.
I still couldn’t quite believe it some mornings, coming down before the sun with my keys in my hand. The block had filled back up. Where Gianni’s people had bullied storefront after tired storefront into the dark, there were lights again now—a cobbler, a phone shop, a place that sold rugs nobody bought. People came back when the threat went away.
There she was. Filoxenia. Baba’s place. My place.
The Scordatos had rebuilt it from the burnt shell out, and they’d asked me a hundred questions and I’d answered every one—where the deck oven went, how high the marble, which way the proofing room should face—and they’d built it bigger and they’d built it right, same bones, more room, the new green glass across the front with FILOXENIA lettered deep into it in fresh paint. Tonio had wanted to do the letters again himself. I’d leta professional do them this time. The curve of the F was perfect now and I missed the wrong one.
I opened the door and the warmth hit me. The ovens were already on.
Even though it had been six months, I still was not used to it. The heat was already up and the ranks of trays were already moving, because I was not the first one through the door anymore.
“Morning, boss,” Theo said, not looking up.
He was at the near bench with the tsoureki, braiding, his tongue between his teeth, a boy of nineteen with flour to the elbows and the same concentration I remembered on the faces of three Caruso soldiers at five in the morning a lifetime ago. Theo was a darling. There was no other word for him. He took everything I said like scripture, wrote things on his forearm in pen when he ran out of paper, and looked at a good loaf the way some men look at women. He braided slow and careful and his braids came out beautiful and I had to tell him to speed up nineteen times a shift and he apologized every time.
“Light. Let it breathe.”
“Sorry, boss.”
