Chapter 15: The Seat

Rocco's POV

I read the ledger in my car, outside the house, with the engine off.

There were two letters in a column near the back, and they were P.B.

Beside them, every Wednesday since the third of September, Aldo had written the same word: reported.

No sum, no date of payment.

Just reported, week after week, in his neat square hand.

The third of September was the day Paola told me she had found out about the second wife.

She had told me she knew nothing before that day.

I sat with my hand on the book until the windshield fogged.

Then I put it in my jacket and went inside, and I did not say a word to Livia about what I had found.

That night I told her I was going to the council hall.

"Alone?" she said.

"Alone."

"Term three," she said, and put her hand flat on my chest. "I'm not coming. But I'm saying out loud that I would."

I kissed her forehead and went.

The council meets on Grand Avenue, on the floor above a bakery.

The room has eleven chairs and a table older than the city's drains.

Four of the chairs were mine to count on.

The other seven would not look at me when I came in.

The oldest capo sat at the head, a man of eighty who had carried my grandfather's coffin.

He had a cane across his knees and a cup of coffee he never drank.

"You are not called until Friday," he said.

"I know."

"Then you come to us out of turn. That is a bad sign in a Don."

"I come to offer my chair."

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