Chapter 16: Thirty-Four

The bullet cracked into a barrel of Barolo, and red wine poured across the flagstones.

Ruggiero fired twice.

The man in the gray cap dropped between the rack and the wall and did not move again.

The doctor lay flat on the floor with both arms over his head, and he was still alive.

I looked at the number over him.

It was climbing, past 57, past 60, slowing at 64.

"Take him," Ruggiero said, and his captain hauled the doctor up by the collar with the tin clutched to his chest.

Then I looked at Ruggiero.

The number over his head had read 36 all week.

It read 34 now.

It was his exact age, and it was shaking.

"Behind you," I said. "The lane door."

I did not think. I threw both hands against his chest and shoved him sideways as hard as I could.

The door at the end of the cellar banged open.

Something hot raked the outside of my left arm, and the sound of the shot slapped the whole length of the racks.

Ruggiero's captain shot a man in the doorway before he could fire again.

I stood with my back against the barrels and looked at my sleeve.

It was torn open, and the blood was coming through.

Ruggiero's face went a color I had not seen on him before.

"Nerina."

"It's only a graze."

"Don't talk."

I looked up at his head.

The shaking had stopped. The number was climbing.

34. 40. 49. It settled on 52.

I started to laugh, and then I could not stop, and then he had me by the shoulders, and his hands were shaking.

The old doorman came down the stairs and looked at the dead men and the wine on the floor.

He took the tin from the doctor's hands without a word.

"The Commission's physician reads this at dawn," he said. "In this house, in front of every capo. Nobody touches the doctor. Nobody touches the tin."

He looked at me.

"Take your wife home, Falsetti. She has done enough for one night."

At the Falsetti house, my sister was asleep two doors down, with Ruggiero's doctor in a chair beside her bed.

Our bathroom was white tile and steam.

Ruggiero had cleaned the graze himself, with a hand that would not stay steady, and wrapped it in gauze.

Then he stood in the doorway with the red cloth in his fist and stared at me.

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