Birds sang as I approached the house that looked more Italian than its neighbors. It was old, but well tended at a time when paint was a luxury, and tin and cardboard roofed with burlap could be called a home, when people considered themselves lucky for the tenement room that sheltered their whole family, when hot water and a latrine meant a step up in the world.
The people who lived there were not among the quarter population without income or resources. But I already knew that. As I approached you, idling away your time on the swing, I remembered who I was supposed to be and spoke accordingly. “I’m looking for Vittorio Shepard. This the place?” I’d put a bit of swagger in my tone, and perhaps that explained the bite of your reply.
“Vittorio Shepard is my papa. What do you want from him?”
Those were your first words to me, and soon I would ask myself that very thing. I met your nonno, Quillan Shepard, there on the porch, but not your papa. Vittorio, I had come to know from watching and from the information I had regarding him. I told you none of that, because secrecy was my life; my purpose, deception.
————
In the closet at the bank, Antonia gasped. Secrecy was my life; my purpose, deception. More pain, fresh undiscovered wounds. How could there be more? What part of her was left unmarred?
“Nonna?”
She opened her eyes to Lance. He had not seen the page, did not know the words that had waited in that box since Marco’s death. My purpose, deception.
Not Marco. Her head shook side to side.
“Are you okay?”
She couldn’t answer. Something inside screamed, “No!”
“We can take the pages with us and put the box back. Mr. Giordano is waiting to lock it up.”
Yes, yes, Mr. Giordano, important banker, keeper of secrets. She nodded to her grandson, doing his best for her as always. For a moment she wanted to lock the pages back up as well. But they held Marco’s words. Marco! And she couldn’t do it.
Lance closed the metal box and returned it to Mr. Giordano, then wheeled her out as she clutched the pages close that would surely break her heart.
————
Pop met them at the door. He must have come home for lunch and seen them from the window. Lance searched fast for a reason he might have taken Nonna out, but Pop didn’t ask. As Lance took the packet from her lap, Pop lifted her from the wheelchair and started up the stairs.
Some buildings of the time had elevators, but not theirs. Lance had carried her down and planned to get her back upstairs without anyone the wiser, since his sisters and their kids had gone to the zoo. He couldn’t help that the neighborhood, the Bronx, and the greater Manhattan area had probably all noted and remarked on their trip by now. But he’d planned to have her back in bed before the family was onto them.
He looked at the pages he held, but didn’t read them. The words on the front page were for Nonna alone, though one look at her face as she’d read had scared him enough to get her out of there quick. He just had to trust they were doing the right thing.
He folded the unwieldy chair and leaned it against the wall, then followed Pop up the stairs. Nonna looked like a doll in Pop’s arms, and she’d been almost weightless when Lance carried her down. He hadn’t realized how frail she’d become. Somehow she’d grown old.
Lance slipped the pages behind the lamp on her nightstand as Pop tucked her into bed instead of seating her in the chair by the window. Their trip to the bank had exhausted her. He should have waited another day or two, but the moment he explained the situation, she’d wanted it over with. Once her mind was set, Nonna was never one to procrastinate.
Pop straightened, rubbing his neck. “You want a beer?”
Lance hid his surprise. “Don’t you have to get back?”
“Momma’s feeling lousy, so I stayed home today.”
They’d been there the whole time. So much for getting one by the family.
“A headache?”
Pop nodded. Momma’s migraines were one of the only things that kept Pop from work, even though he was past the age of retirement.
Lance didn’t want to explain more than he had to. But maybe it wasn’t right keeping them all in the dark. If he went back to Sonoma, the rest of them needed to know what was up with Nonna. “Sure, Pop. I’ll have a beer.”
They went down and his father took two cans of Bud from the refrigerator. They sat in the kitchen across from each other at the table with the yellow daisy cloth Lucy had embroidered in home economics. A half carafe of coffee soured on the hot plate since someone had forgotten to turn it off, and the miniature TV played mutely in the corner.
Pop fizzed open his beer and palmed the can. “You gonna marry that girl?”
“Haven’t gotten that far.” He had two strikes already but didn’t need to go into that with Pop.
His father took a long draught, even though it was early in the day for beer and Pop was not a hard drinker. Maybe he needed bolstering to meet his youngest son across the table. He rested the can on the cloth. “You ought to think about it.”
“Okay.”
“Someone else can make you different, you know.”
“Different how?” Lance opened his beer, and mist from the aluminum mouth whispered smart, responsible, worthy.
“When you got someone who believes in you, you believe in yourself.”
Lance raised his eyes from the can. Pop’s brow had cragged in the last few years; the hair had silvered at his temples and in the cleft of his unshaved chin. He still had the athletic build he’d passed on to Tony, big hands, hard and generous.
The brown eyes were neither hard nor generous, but at least they weren’t blank. Pop looked straight at him. “It’s time to grow up.”
“I’m trying, Pop.”
“There’s no try. There’s only do.”
Lance took a swallow, and the biting malt flavor filled his mouth.
“You stop running now.” Pop crowded the table. “It’s time to stop.”
Lance held the gaze with difficulty.
Pop’s hand tightened on the can. “You can’t bring Tony back.”
Lance jerked away and closed his eyes. Pop’s chair creaked as he sat back and waited. Finally Lance said, “What do you want, Pop?”
His father sighed, because what he wanted, he could never have again. “This is about you. Where you should be; what you should do.”
Lance rubbed his chin in a slow arc, up and down with the ball of his thumb. Where he should be and what he should do was what this week in Belmont was all about. He’d brought Rese there as a catalyst between his past and his future. Already they’d spent more time than he’d expected. Even though the next week was free of reservations, he had thought they’d be back, getting their heads into business, not still entangled in the Michelli dramas that sucked him in as though he’d never stepped away.
He made his decision. “It won’t be here.”
“Where, then?”
“Sonoma. Nonna’s place.”
Pop’s brow creased. “What place?”
So Lance told him. Conchessa, the villa, the cellar where he found Nonno Quillan, the letter. “Could Nonno Marco have been a federal agent? Undercover?”
“I don’t know.” Pop unclenched the can with a tinny bang. “He was …” He chewed his lower lip, then drained the rest of the beer and tossed the can to the wastebasket in the corner. It banged off the wall and dropped in. “Maybe he was undercover.”
“But he was a cop, and everyone knew it. You’re not undercover in an NYPD uniform.”
“That was later. Before that— But you wouldn’t know much before that.”
“Much of what, Pop? Talk to me.”
“Before you were born. When I was young he did something else, something that took him away for weeks at a time. Months. He’d maybe drop home for a night or two.” Pop frowned. “And sometimes … sometimes it didn’t seem even he knew who he was.”
“I don’t remember that.”
&nb
sp; “Momma said he had to travel for his job, but there was one time when she said he was in Chicago that I saw him outside the school watching. He was dressed like a bum, and he watched me all the way to the trolley.”
Lance searched his pop’s face. “Why would he watch? Why not talk to you, ride with you?”
“It was like he stood guard, but didn’t want me to know he was there.” Pop brought his thumb to his teeth, nipped off a hangnail, and spat it out. “I asked him about it later, and he made a joke. ‘You think your pop’s a bum?’ Then he wrestled me down, and when we were done playing I wasn’t sure I’d seen him at all.”
Nonno might have wanted to be sure his son got safely to the trolley, but why the disguise? Unless he was involved in something that might have endangered his son, and he couldn’t blow his cover by openly approaching him.
“Later I wondered if he went off on binges, you know, drinking or something. But … that never seemed right either.”
“Could he have been so deep under that even Nonna didn’t know?”
Pop shrugged. “Those days, you crossed the wrong person and not only you but your whole family could end up in the river.”
Pop was talking the stuff of movies, the Corleones and Scarface. But Lance thought of the dossiers collected in Vittorio’s cellar. “You think Nonno infiltrated the mob?”
“Not the mob, you idiot.”
And then it hit him. “Camorra? But that was his bunch.”
Pop scowled. “That was never his bunch. Naples isn’t Sicily. The Camorra served no one but themselves.”
“So Nonno …”
Pop’s fist opened flat on the table. “I don’t know, okay? He could have gotten in with his connections.”
Lance had known there were ties. Momma had joked about marrying into the “family.” He couldn’t imagine Nonno involved in Camorra business, but could he have lived a double life?
“Wouldn’t that be worse if they found out?”
Pop shrugged. “Dead is dead. I guess they never found out.”
So what did that have to do with Arthur Jackson? Hands down he wasn’t Camorra, though the bank could have been a front. Or it could have been completely unrelated.
“The question is …” Pop looked toward the ceiling as though he could see his mother upstairs. “Why did she take this to you?”
“Only one with nothing important to do.” Why did he hang the bait out there like that?
But Pop didn’t take it. He studied him a long moment, then said, “She trusts you.”
Surprised, Lance sighed. “Don’t know how she’ll take my telling all this.”
“She’s a good one for secrets.”
“I don’t think she knew—about Nonno, I mean. She didn’t take the news so good.”
Pop’s brow furrowed. “That’s what set her off?”
Lance sagged. “I didn’t think. I just told her what I’d found.”
Muttering under his breath, Pop stood up and walked to the sink. He leaned heavily on his palms, head hanging, then said, “Stuff happens. You couldn’t know.”
Lance’s throat tightened. Absolution? From Pop? “What do we do now?”
His father shook his head. “You think I’m God, or what?” There was enough of an edge to his words to show they were through. But it was more than they’d had in a long time.
————
Rese looked up from the trim piece along the floor when Lance came in. “Well?”
“We got in.”
“And?”
“All that was in there was a letter or journal to Nonna. I don’t know why Nonno didn’t just give it to her.”
Because that would be obvious and logical. It presumed people did what others expected them to. “What did it say?”
“I don’t know. The front page had the phrase they used for each other and no one else. La mia vita ed il mio amore.”
The words sounded lovely coming out of his mouth, especially the way his voice softened, lilting as he pronounced them. But she didn’t know what they meant.
“My life and my love,” he answered before she asked. Then he looked down at what she was doing.
“It has a warp that’s causing the detachment from the wall.”
“You don’t have to fix it.”
Maybe not, but while he was off solving Nonna’s problems, and Rico was out searching for Star, she had to do something. “I found some tools in your closet downstairs. Screws will hold better than the tacking nails, and with all these layers of paint, they’ll embed. A little touch-up and they should all but disappear.”
His mouth pulled. “Bored?”
She sat back on her heels. “Rico had a guess where Star might be.”
Lance glanced out the open window forming the warm block of sunlight on the floor where she sat and allowing something like a breeze. “Did he say where?”
“No.” Maybe she should have asked, but Rico hadn’t looked open to questions. “He was strung pretty tight.”
Lance frowned. “Did Chaz go with him?”
She shook her head. “He got called in to work.”
Lance’s brow tightened. “Does she usually stay close? Like in the neighborhood?”
“She could be anywhere. She’s good at hiding.” She’d mastered the art of deflection. “A regular escape artist.” Then why hadn’t she gotten out before people came after her? Why did she slip away after the fact to cry on Rese’s shoulder? She shook her head. “Even if he has guessed where she went, I doubt he’ll find her. Star’s a free bird, Lance. There really is nothing holding her here.”
Lance hung his thumbs in his jeans and pressed his shoulder blades together. “How long’s Rico been gone?”
Rese checked her watch. “Almost an hour.”
He let his breath out slowly. “What are the chances she’s alone?”
Except for when she shut herself into her room to sleep or weep for days, Star hated being alone. “I’d guess she’s with someone. But that’s no crime.”
“Yet. Rico’s a street kid. He handles things his way.”
She set down the screwdriver and rested her palms on her thighs. “He’s not a criminal.”
“Anyone can get there with the right provocation.” Lance leaned a hip to the window frame. “I’m not sure what kind of hold Star has on him, but it isn’t normal.”
A shiver went through her. When Lance said things like that they were totally believable. And there was something about Star that entrapped and inflamed the guys she got involved with. Maury had been wrong to get violent, but Rese guessed the time with Star was scarring to him as well. And as Lance said, people could be pushed past their limits.
His head jerked back toward the open window at the sound of Rico’s bike, unmistakable over the other traffic, not too close, but fast and angry. The roar of the poorly muffled engine was followed by a raw screech of brakes and scraping metal. Lance braced himself across the glass to see the intersection, then launched off the frame and ran for the door.
Rese scrambled up and tried to see what he had, but people were gathering at the intersection. She hurried after Lance, down the stairs and out to the street. At the corner Lance crouched beside Rico, who was spitting blood and curses. Relief rushed in before the smell of burnt rubber and blood hit. Then the sight of Rico’s arm paralyzed her with blurred images of another blood-soaked arm, Dad’s screams and hers.
On his knees, holding Rico by the shoulders, Lance pulled his phone from his pocket and thrust it at her. “Call for help, Rese.”
Rico swore. She didn’t move.
“Rese.”
Pulse pounding in her ears, she took the phone and forced herself to think. 9-1-1. Red and blue lights; Dad carrying her out. Red and blue lights; Dad bleeding in her arms. Bleeding to death.
“What is the nature of your emergency?”
“There’s been an accident.” The voice sounded firm and controlled. It took a moment to realize it was hers. She described the scene and Rico’s co
ndition as well as she could tell. Was he alert—yes. Moving—yes.
She searched the intersection and gave the street names. As she finished, the faces around her came into focus. Old and young, dark and light and in between. “They’re coming,” she told Lance, then squatted down, cradling the phone in her lap. “What happened?”
“Guy ran the stop. The bike’s brakes were soft.”
She closed her eyes, recalling too well Lance’s speed on that same bike—with her. “Did he hit his head?” She’d have asked Rico but he was gritting his teeth in pain.
“He knew enough to ride it down.”
“Ride it down?”
“An experienced biker never separates in a crash. That’s where the head injuries happen, when the driver lets go and tumbles. Rico stayed with the bike to the ground.”
And it looked like his arm made first contact. The air filled with a wailing siren. Her stomach rolled. Closer and louder. She forced her mind back to Rico. Friction from the pavement seemed to have cauterized the blood, or maybe that was how arms bled when the artery had not been severed. She gagged back the memory of her own slippery attempts to staunch arterial flow.
Louder. Closer.
Rese forced herself to look at Rico, to realize that his life was not pouring out onto the pavement, even if bone protruded from his arm and the pain must be awful. The scream of the siren set her teeth on edge. The squeal and sigh of the fire engine’s brakes and the flashing lights registered, though she kept her face averted, tasting the exhaust that clung to the air.
Lance got out of the way as the emergency personnel took over. He drew her back against him while Rico argued about being laid flat on a backboard. More sirens. Rico turned to the police officers arriving on the scene and spoke in Spanish.
“What did he say?”
Lance said softly, “He wants them to find the jerk who ran him off the road, so he can slit his gullet.”
Rese looked over her shoulder. Lance was not making it up. “He’s okay, then.”
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