The Famous Mafioso Hired Me to Hear Him, and the Man in the Cell Is Not Who They Convicted novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Retainer
In the visiting room of the lake prison, Jo is handed a check and a contract by a lawyer who will not look at her, meets the most famous convicted mobster in America, and signs while his hand tells her under the table not to translate what he says.
The lawyer slid the check across the steel table without looking at me.
It was made out to Joanna Dunphy for thirty-one thousand dollars.
My mother's implant surgery cost exactly thirty-one thousand dollars.
I had never told this woman that number.
"The retainer is a flat fee," the lawyer said to the wall behind my head.
"Two sessions a day for three days, plus travel, plus a confidentiality clause on page two."
She was fifty-two, with a silver bob and glasses on a chain, and she touched the pin on her lapel whenever she finished a sentence.
I had been in the glass visiting room of the lake prison for ten minutes, and nobody had told me who I was interpreting for.
I had been told he was going deaf, that he refused every aide, and that nobody in the building could read him.
I read the contract.
Then I looked closer, because the first time I had stopped at the name in the heading.
"Salvatore Brancato," I said.
"Yes."
"The Salvatore Brancato."
"The petitioner has a medical condition, Miss Dunphy," the lawyer said.
"That is all you need to know."
Everyone in America knew the rest.
Nineteen years ago a ferry full of commuters in Palermo harbor had gone up in flames, and forty-one people had died.
The man the papers called the most feared mobster in the country was arrested the same night in Buffalo.
He had never spoken a word since.
I had been nine years old that week.
I remembered it because I had stood in a school gym and signed a fire drill to my Deaf father in the bleachers.
The door at the far end of the room opened.
Two guards came through first.
Between them walked a man in a beige uniform, with a chain around his waist that ran down to his wrists and his ankles.
He was tall and lean and gray at the temples, with a crooked nose and a pale scar running back from his left eyebrow.
He walked with his eyes on the floor.
The guards sat him across the steel table from me and bolted his chain to a ring.
The camera on its tripod clicked once, and a red light came on.
I was afraid, and I wasn't going to pretend I wasn't.
My hands were cold, and my pulse was loud in my ears.
Every instinct I had said to stand up and walk out of that glass box with a check I hadn't cashed.
Then the man lifted his head.
He did not look at the lawyer.
He did not look at the camera.
He looked at my hands where they lay on the table, and then he raised his own as far as the chain allowed, and signed.
He signed slowly, with perfect grammar, in a regional style I knew in my body.
It was the sign of the Deaf club in Buffalo, where my father had taken me every second Saturday of my childhood.
YOU ARE AFRAID, he signed.
Nobody else in the room moved.
GOOD.
His eyes stayed on mine.
THAT MEANS YOU ARE NOT STUPID.
SIT.
I was already sitting.
He meant something else, I understood.
He meant stay where you are, and my knees went loose under the table.
I answered him in sign, in front of the lawyer and the guards and the red light, because it was my job and I had never refused it.
WHOSE IDEA WAS IT TO HIRE ME, I asked.
His hands came down and rested on the steel.
"What did he say?" the lawyer asked sharply.
"He asked for a glass of water," I said.
It was the first lie I had ever told in a courtroom voice.
I hadn't decided to tell it.
It was out before I thought.
His hands rose again.
NOT MINE.
Then they dropped below the table, out of the camera's sight, and something touched my knee through my slacks.
It was the back of his hand, with the cold chain lying across the cloth.
His knuckles were hard and warm and scarred.
He was signing against my leg, one letter at a time, slowly enough that I could read it through the skin.
D-O N-O-T
T-R-A-N-S-L-A-T-E
T-H-I-S
I did not move.
I did not look down.
Every guard in that room stood within ten feet of me, and the camera watched my face.
A man I was supposed to fear was telling me a secret in the one language the world had never learned to listen to.
My knee burned under his hand.
I ought to have stood up and told the lawyer the retainer was a trap.
She had not looked at me once since I sat down.
She was looking at her pin.
The man across from me raised his eyes, and under the stiff gray face he looked exhausted.
He looked like someone who had held a door shut for a very long time.
I thought about my mother at the kitchen table in Rochester, watching my face to read what the surgeon said.
I thought about thirty-one thousand dollars.
I thought about the first thing he had signed to me, and how long it had been since anyone had looked at me that plainly.
"Mr. Brancato asks for a glass of water," I said again, aloud, to the lawyer.
She nodded to a guard, and the guard went out.
I picked up the pen and signed the contract with my own name.
I wanted to know what was in this room.
I wanted to know it more than I wanted to be safe.
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