The Mob Boss Said My Father Owed Him a Life, So He Took Mine to Keep novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The House on Federal Hill

In the Ferrante house Grace gets a room, a rule and one question; Vincent offers to search her flat and Rocco says yes.

The house was red brick on a back street two blocks off Atwells Avenue, and it had a man standing at the garden gate.

I got out of the car before anyone could open my door.

Rocco watched me do it and said nothing.

The man at the gate stepped aside.

Inside the iron gate there was a courtyard with a dead fig tree wrapped in burlap, and a kitchen door with another man leaning on the frame.

I counted two on the gate, one on the kitchen door, and the driver, who had parked and stayed in the car.

"Four," I said.

"Five at the front," Rocco said.

"You can count them every day if it helps."

He led me through a kitchen big enough to feed a church supper and up a back staircase to the second floor.

The corner room had a high iron bed, a dresser, a rag rug, and a window that looked down on the courtyard.

There was a lock on the window, a brass one, newly screwed in.

"That's mine," he said.

"The key is on my ring."

"And the door?" I asked.

"The door doesn't lock from outside," he said.

I turned and looked at him in the lamplight.

Up close he was older than I'd thought.

There were lines at the corners of his eyes that didn't come from laughing, and a gray hair or two in the black of his beard.

"You can walk anywhere in this house," he said.

"You can use the garden.

"You don't leave the property without me.

"That's the rule, and there's only one."

"And if I break it?" I asked.

"Then I'll know you aren't as scared as you ought to be," Rocco said.

"I'm scared," I said.

"I'm just not going to do it where you can see."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he sat down in the chair by the window, which put his eyes lower than mine, and I understood that was on purpose.

"One question," he said.

"Where is your father?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Where would he go?"

I shook my head.

"He doesn't go anywhere.

"He goes to work and he goes to the diner on Broadway on Thursdays and he goes home.

"In twenty-two years he took the same vacation once, to Niagara Falls, and he was sick on the bus."

"A man like that doesn't steal from me," Rocco said.

"No," I said.

"He doesn't."

The corner of his mouth went flat.

"That's what I told myself for a week, too," he said.

"Then he was gone, and so were the books, and my brother was dead."

He rubbed his thumb over the scar in his eyebrow.

I watched the thumb.

"He sent me a postcard in March," I said.

"No return address.

"It said, 'I'm sorry, Gracie. Don't look for me.' That's all.

"I looked anyway for a month, and then I stopped."

"Where was it postmarked?" Rocco asked.

"Worcester," I said.

"Worcester is on the bus line to Maine and Canada both," he said.

"I know that," I said.

He leaned his elbows on his knees.

"Do you still have it?"

"It's in my flat, in the kitchen drawer, with the take-out menus," I said.

He nodded.

He didn't say whether he believed me.

I thought I saw him believe about half.

Someone knocked on the doorframe.

The man in the doorway was in his forties, trim, in a charcoal suit that fit him better than any suit I'd ever seen on a man.

He had silver at his temples, a pleasant, tired face, and a gold signet ring on his right hand.

He gave me a small friendly smile.

"Miss Delmonico," he said.

"I'm Vincent.

"I'm sorry about the way this had to start."

"Vincent's my cousin," Rocco said.

"He runs the money side."

"I'm the one who told Rocco you'd be easier to find than your father," Vincent said.

His voice was soft and warm, the kind of voice that tells a nurse thank you.

"I hope you can forgive that.

"It seemed kinder than the alternative."

"What was the alternative?"

His smile didn't move.

"Rocco's men visiting the people you work with," he said.

I thought about the captain's face behind the wheelhouse glass.

I thought about the deckhand who ate his lunch on the rail.

I understood that I had just been told something, gently, and that I was supposed to say thank you.

I didn't.

"Rocco," Vincent said, "she has a flat on Allens Avenue.

"Over a bait shop."

"I know where she lives."

"Of course.

"I only mean, if the books were ever there, if her father ever dropped by with a bag, then tonight's the night to look.

"Before anyone cleans it out.

"I could send a couple of the boys now.

"You don't have to get your hands dirty."

My stomach turned over.

"There's nothing in my flat," I said.

"There's a cat calendar and eleven pairs of socks."

"Then it won't take them long," Vincent said, kindly.

I turned to Rocco.

He was looking at his cousin, and I couldn't read what was in his face at all.

For one second I wanted him to say no.

I had known the man for two hours, I hated him, and I wanted him to say no.

"Yes," Rocco said.

"Send them tonight."

Vincent inclined his head.

At the door he looked back at me with that gentle, apologetic smile, as if he had given me something.

His footsteps went down the back stairs.

I stood in the middle of the rag rug with my hands closed at my sides.

"You said I could count on one rule," I said.

"I did."

"You didn't say you'd let a stranger go through my mother's things."

"No," Rocco said.

He stood.

At the door he stopped, and I thought for a moment he would say something else.

Then he looked at the window, and the brass lock, and me.

"I didn't," he said.

He left the door open when he went.

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