Chapter 7: Mariano's Chair

They let me out of the front door at ten to six, and I didn't run.

I want credit for that too.

A Cortese car took me down Larkhill in the grey dawn, and Emanuele sat beside me with his jaw set.

"I can't go in," he said. "A Cortese at a Montalto council is a declaration of war."

"I know the rules. I grew up on them."

"Two of my men will wait at the door. If you raise your voice, they come."

"If I raise my voice, it'll be at someone who deserves it."

He almost smiled.

Then the car stopped under the cold stone arch of the Via Sant'Anna Hall, and he caught my wrist.

"Don't look at him as if you know," he said. "Not yet."

I pulled my arm free, gently.

"I've been looking at Mariano all my life," I said. "I don't know how to do it differently."

The council room was at the back, a long chamber paneled in dark oak.

Eleven capos of the Montalto family sat around the table, gray old men and hard young ones.

Their overcoats smelled of cold and cigarettes.

At the head of the table was my father's chair.

It was a heavy carved thing with a high back, black with age, and a lion's head on each arm.

Mariano sat in it.

My cousin looked smaller in it than my father had.

But he had put on a black tie and his sorrowing face, and he had the room.

"Raffi." He stood to kiss my cheek, and the capos rose in a scrape of wood. "Thank God. Sit, sit."

"I'll stand."

"Then stand beside me. You've lost weight, cara. Are they feeding you?"

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