Chapter 13: Four Buildings, One Yard

I looked at the photograph for as long as I could stand to.

The concrete under Massimo's shoes was wet.

The bulb above him was bare, and behind his head I could see the corner of a coal chute.

"Where is he?" I said.

"Somewhere cold," said Cinzia. "Papa will tell you. Six o'clock, the building on Dock Street with the green door."

I knew the green door.

It was the fourth building, the one Carmine had given his daughter the night I lay on my bathroom floor.

"Come alone, Fio," Cinzia said. "He was very clear. If anyone follows you, Massimo stays where he is."

"And if I come alone?"

"Then we talk." She tucked the phone into her bag. "Everybody wants to talk, in the end."

I walked out past twelve women who did not look at me.

In the car I called my grandfather and told him where.

He was silent for a moment.

"I will send forty men," he said.

"Send three. Put them in my second building, on the loading dock, and tell them to wait for my phone."

"Why that building?"

"Because the four buildings share one loading yard. Remo took me through it once to show me what he was giving me."

My grandfather breathed out slowly.

"Your mother used to do this," he said. "Find the one door nobody was watching."

I did not trust my voice, so I hung up.

At six I pushed open the green door with my phone in my pocket and the line to my grandfather's man still open.

The office upstairs smelled of cigars.

Carmine Cammarata sat behind a steel desk with his gold watch laid on the blotter, and two of his men stood at the wall.

Cinzia was not there.

"Miss Bell," he said. "Or do I say Miss Ruggieri?"

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