Chapter 19: Visiting Hours

The bullet went in under his left collarbone and stayed.

I knew that because the surgeon told me in the corridor at Saint Barnabas, with a clipboard in his hand and a pen behind his ear.

"It missed the lung by a finger," he said. "He's lucky. He'll be in bed a week."

"Can I see him?"

"After he wakes."

I sat in the waiting room in the dress I had worn to the berth, and my hands were still black from the concrete.

Ettore's father had never fired a third shot.

Forty longshoremen had gone over him, and the steward had taken the pistol out of his hand with a bolt cutter.

Then Ettore's cars had come around the corner of the berth, six of them, and taken his father out from under the union men's boots.

Nobody had stopped them.

Nobody had known whether they should.

At seven in the morning the first captain came through the double doors with his hat in his hand.

It was the man with the gold watch.

He sat down across from me and looked at the floor.

"I paid your loan," he said. "I mean the note. I paid Ettore two hundred thousand and I got the paper."

"I know."

"He said it was a favor. That I'd owe him." His voice was thick. "And then last night a bullet was meant for you, and the man took it."

"Ilario took it."

"I know who took it." He held out the watch, an ugly gold piece with a cracked face. "It was my father's. I'd like you to hold it, until the Mass."

"I don't want your watch."

"Then I'll put it on the table, and you'll see me in the front row." He stood. "I'm with you, Marta. I should have been at the grave."

He left the watch on the seat beside me.

The others came one at a time, through the morning, with flowers they didn't know what to do with and apologies they could barely say.