My Don's Friends Spoke Italian to Shut Me Out novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Say It Again

I was waiting in the study when Cesare came home.

I had turned off every light but the desk lamp, and I had put the red primer on the blotter where he couldn't miss it.

He stopped in the doorway with his coat half off.

He looked at the book for a long time.

"Who gave you that?" he asked.

"Your grandmother."

"She shouldn't have."

"She said it was for you."

He shut the door.

He hung up his coat with the same careful hands as always, and I watched him choose, one second at a time, not to lie.

"Then you know why," he said.

"Your father's rule. Gaspare told me. Agnese told us both."

His jaw tightened.

"You took Gaspare to my grandmother."

"He's your friend. He wanted to know."

"And now he knows."

"He's not going to tell anyone, Cesare. He cried in a hospital bed this morning because he'd been laughing along with you for three years."

Cesare sat down on the edge of the desk.

He looked, all at once, thirty-four years old and very tired.

"The night my father died," he said, "I walked into the back room at Gallo's. Twelve men were waiting. Tommaso stood and said a few words, and everybody stood with him. I sat down. I didn't understand one of them. I understood my own name."

"You could have said so."

"To twelve men who'd followed my father for thirty years? What was I going to say? Sorry, fellas, I only speak the language of the people who kill you?"

He laughed, a short awful sound.

"So I said bene," he said. "And Tommaso smiled at me, and that was that."

"For three years."

"I signed whatever he put in front of me." His voice thinned. "I've recorded a hundred hours of them. At night I play it back and try to match the sounds to what he wrote. It's like trying to read the sky."

"The recording from Sunday."

"I played it forty times." He didn't look at me. "I don't know what's on it, Margo. I could not tell you whether he says Friday or fish. When I said I'd go to the port, I was guessing. You were so scared, and I didn't know if you were right."

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