I Left the Underboss for the Man Who Remembered Me novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Two Hundred Witnesses

Aurelio did not touch the page.

He looked at it, face down on the table, and then at the lawyer in gray, who had stopped smiling.

"Turn it over," my father said. "It's your name. You know your own name."

"A forgery," Aurelio said.

"Then turn it over and say so."

The old men along the wall leaned forward in their chairs.

Aurelio lifted the page by one corner, and turned it.

He read it.

I watched his eyes go down it to the bottom, to his own signature, to the heavy loop he put on the A that he had used for thirty years.

His mouth twitched.

"That is not mine," he said.

"Aurelio Falcone, signed under my line." My father's voice was a dry rattle. "Under my line. In front of four captains. You were so happy that night you sang."

"I sang nothing."

"You sang 'Mamma' at the piano. I have a witness."

The old captain by the window stood up.

He was crying, and he did not hide it.

"My copy was robbed," he said. "My memory wasn't. I watched you sign that page, Aurelio, with a pen from my own pocket. I held the lamp."

A rumble went around the Orsini side.

On the Falcone side nobody moved.

"An old man's word," the lawyer in gray said quickly. "A page of unknown provenance. A grievance."

"Then hear another," I said.

I turned toward the double doors.

The young dockhand stood there with the bellhop beside him, in a borrowed suit that fit him badly.

The bellhop came up the aisle between the folding chairs with his hat in his hand.

His knees shook.

He stopped in front of the table.

"I was on the twelfth floor at the Falcone building three weeks ago," he said. "On a Tuesday. With a coffee cart."

"Who is this?" Aurelio asked.

"I'm nobody, sir. That's why they let me stand in the hall."

He told it from the beginning.

The open door.

The old man's quiet voice.

Her birthday is the anniversary. No gift. Seat her as a guest.

Take the cake to the Greco girl in front of everyone and let her watch.

A girl like that will walk, and when she walks the docks are ours.

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