My Father's Test Turns Lovers Into Killers novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Dark Room

Teo walks out with murder in his eyes, aimed at her uncle, and her father announces that he passed; Teo tells her low not to thank her father yet.

On Friday night the club was closed to everyone but family.

At nine o'clock my father took Teo through the steel door behind the bar and down the cellar stairs.

Teo didn't look back.

I sat on a bar stool with my hands pinned between my knees and watched the door close.

My uncle Corrado sat down next to me and poured two small glasses of anisette.

"Drink, piccola."

"I can't."

"Then hold it. It gives your hands something to do."

I held it.

Ten minutes later my father came back up the stairs alone.

He looked gray under the bar lights, and he held the banister the whole way.

"The boy's talking," he said to nobody. "A father doesn't stay for the rest."

He lowered himself into a chair at the nearest card table and shut his eyes.

Corrado squeezed my shoulder.

"I'll go hold the lamp," he said. "Nothing to worry about, I promise you."

He walked behind the bar and went down the steps, and the steel door shut after him.

I stared at it.

It was thick, and no sound came through.

The clock over the register said 9:26.

At 9:41 I stood up and walked to the cellar door and put my palm flat on the steel.

It was cold.

Behind me a card table creaked.

"Sit down, Allegra," my father said, without opening his eyes.

"How long does it take?"

"As long as it takes a man to decide."

"Decide what?"

He didn't answer.

At 9:53 the door opened.

Corrado came up first, and his smile was set too wide.

"Ignazio," he said. "You'd better come down."

My father pushed himself out of the chair, grunting, and went to the stairs.

I tried to follow him and Corrado stepped in front of me.

"Not yet."

"Move."

"Piccola. Let your father."

I stood there with my fists closed.

The longest four minutes of my life went by on that clock.

Then the steel door swung open for the third time, and Teo walked out into the light.

He had his jacket over his arm.

His shirt was dark with sweat down the front, and there was a thin red line across the palm of his right hand, where something heavy had been gripped.

I looked at his eyes.

I had promised him I would.

They were black.

I had seen that look six times, on six faces, in a doorway or a driveway or a bakery, right before the man turned and walked away from me.

It was a cold, flat, murderous look.

It wasn't aimed at me.

It went right past me, over my shoulder, and landed on my uncle.

Corrado took half a step back.

He hid it fast, with a laugh and a hand on the bar.

Behind Teo, my father came up the steps one at a time, and he was clapping.

Slowly.

"He passed," my father said.

The sound of it went around the empty club.

"Nine years," he said. "Nine years and six men, and he's the first one who did not pull the trigger."

I didn't understand.

I didn't understand any of it.

"What trigger?" I said. "Papa, what trigger?"

"A test is a test, cara." He patted my cheek like I was ten. "The boy has my blessing. Take him home."

He turned to Corrado.

"Open the good wine. We'll drink to my daughter's husband."

Corrado went to the bar and got a bottle.

His hands were not quite steady.

Teo walked across the room to me, and each step cost him something.

I thought he might say he was sorry.

I thought he might say my name in that dead voice and tell me it was over.

Instead he took my hand.

His fingers closed around mine so tightly the bones ground together.

His whole arm was trembling, from the shoulder to the wrist.

"Teo."

"Walk with me."

"Are you hurt?"

"Just walk."

We went out the front door of the club into the cold air, and the street was empty and orange under the lamps.

He stopped at the curb and bent forward with his hands on his knees, and breathed.

I rubbed his back in slow circles.

His shirt was soaked.

I could feel every muscle in him shaking.

"I'm still me," he said, after a while, to the pavement.

"I know."

"You looked."

"I looked."

He straightened up and caught my hand again, and pressed it flat against his chest.

His heart was pounding under my palm.

"Say it back," he said hoarsely. "Say you saw me."

"I saw you. It wasn't for me. It was for him."

His eyes closed.

When he opened them they weren't black anymore, only tired and wet and very gray.

He pulled me into him, hard, and I felt him breathe into my hair.

Then he turned his mouth to my ear, so quietly that nobody on the sidewalk could have heard.

"Don't thank your father," he said. "Not yet."

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