Chapter 18: Through the Glass

The street went from silence to roaring in one breath.

Sarno men came over the tables.

Somebody knocked over the zeppole stand.

A marshal put his hand on his gun.

"Stop!"

I didn't know it was my voice until it came back off the buildings.

I came down the bandstand steps and walked into the middle of them.

"Nobody touches a marshal," I said. "Not one of you. You want to help him, you go home and you keep your hands clean."

The underboss looked at Ettore.

Ettore, with his hands cuffed behind him, nodded once.

"You heard the captain," the underboss said.

The men stepped back.

The agent looked almost disappointed.

They walked Ettore to the gray car through six hundred silent people.

At the door he turned his head and found me.

"Captain," he said. "Feed the birds. Half a can at dawn, half at dusk. The checkered hen won't eat if you watch her."

"Anything else?"

"Don't let the deckhand near my espresso machine."

The car door shut on him.

I stood in the street under the colored lights until the sirens were gone.

The underboss came up beside me.

"What now?" he said.

I realized he was asking me.

For seven days, I ran two families.

I didn't know I could until I was doing it.

At dawn I fed forty-two pigeons and didn't watch the checkered hen.

At seven I sat at Ettore's kitchen table with the underboss and a pot of coffee.

He told me which Sarno trucks were due where, and which men owed what, and I told him what I wanted done.

The first morning he checked my face after every answer.

By the third morning he'd stopped checking.

At noon I went to my pier and worked my small launch with Sarno men and Cardone men on the same deck.

At night I ran the harbor.

The deckhand slept in the wheelhouse so I wouldn't be alone in it.

He made espresso on Ettore's machine anyway.

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