Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: The Table

Santo didn't answer him.

He looked at me instead.

"Friday," I said. "I'm coming."

"They won't let you in the room."

"Then I'll sit outside it."

The bookish capo opened his mouth, and shut it, and wrote something in his ledger.

On Friday night the back room on Bay Street smelled like espresso and old carpet.

It was a social club with the windows painted over, three doors down from a bakery that had closed in 1990.

Old men played cards at the front tables.

They stopped when Santo walked in.

They stared at me when I walked in behind him.

The big driver brought me a folding chair.

He set it in the hall outside the back room, beside a coat rack and a picture of the Pope.

Then he stood next to it with his arms folded.

Through the door I could see a long table with a green cloth.

Twelve men sat around it. Some I'd known since I was ten.

The one with the cane who used to give me butterscotch at Christmas.

The two brothers from the Stapleton docks.

The one who'd laughed loudest at Dino's toast.

Santo went in and didn't sit.

The door didn't close all the way. The latch had been broken for years.

I could see a slice of the table and the back of his black jacket.

"Sit down, Santo," somebody said.

"I'll stand."

"Then we'll be quick." It was the one from the toast. "The photo's on every phone from here to Jersey. Tullio's men laugh at ours in the street."

"Gate's lost a man to the Torrisis," said one of the brothers. "First time in thirty years."

"Your father would have ended this in a week."

"With Tullio in the river," somebody said. "Not on a stage holding hands."

There was a mutter around the table. It sounded like agreement.

"Give her up," said the one from the toast. "Send her back to Staten Island, or Brooklyn, or wherever. Nobody touches her. You marry somebody sensible next spring, and in a year this is a joke at a christening."

"Or?"

"Or you step down, and we pick."

I gripped the edge of the folding chair.

The big driver looked at the ceiling, very hard.

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