Chapter 20: The Hundredth Cancel

Massimo's POV

She looked up at me from her chair, in front of the four families, and she did not stand.

"No," Renata said.

It was the same word she had said at the sit-down.

This time there was no anger in it at all.

"I haven't asked you for anything yet," I said.

"You were about to."

I had been.

I had been going to ask her to speak for me again, to say the old Don was wrong, to take the books and put me back.

I had been going to say please a third time in one week.

The old Don lifted his cane.

"Sit down, Ruggieri."

"Sit down" was what you said to a man who no longer had a chair.

I sat, on a bench against the wall, between the driver and the big man who had stood behind Paola.

Neither of them would look at me.

They divided my house in forty minutes.

I heard it all.

Renata read the routes from memory, without a page, and the four Dons wrote.

North pier to the north-side Don.

The ferry slips to the south-shore man.

The warehouses on Pier Nine and Fulton Street to Lombardi, because Lombardi had been burned for them.

The old Don took the Delorme account in his own name, and I watched the one account that had made me rich go to a man of eighty with a cane.

By nine o'clock I owned my suit and the shoes I stood in.

The south-shore Don came and read me the sentence.

I would live, because Carlo's page named two men and not the daughter, and the table did not want a second killing on its books.

I would leave the city by Sunday and never return.

If I came back, any man who saw me was free to finish it.

I signed where they showed me.

My hand shook so that the signature slanted off the line.

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