They Spoke Sicilian Over My Head, So I Called My Don Grandfather novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Lobby

Remo comes to the building and Massimo, posing as her cousin, stops him in front of the doorman while Fiora plays sick; Cinzia texts a picture of her fifth-floor window.

Massimo found the tracker in under a minute.

It was a flat black disc the size of a coin, stuck inside the lining of my work bag.

He held it up to the lamp.

"Cheap," he said. "Bought at a pharmacy. Whoever put it there wanted to know where you slept, not where you went."

"Remo never touches my bag."

"Then somebody who does."

I thought of the people who had ever reached into it.

Remo, for my pills. Cinzia, for a lipstick, a pen, a tissue, the hundred small borrowings of fourteen years of friendship.

"Don't take it out of the building," I said. "Leave it on the shelf. Let it say I'm here."

Massimo nodded slowly.

He looked at me a second longer than he needed to, and went back to the window.

By nine the next morning Remo was in the lobby.

I watched on the screen of the building's buzzer from the top of the stairs.

He wore his good gray coat and carried white tulips in paper.

The doorman came out from behind his desk with both hands lifted.

"Sir, you'll have to be announced."

"I'm her boyfriend," Remo said. "Fiora Bell. Fifth floor."

"I'm sorry, sir, I don't have a Fiora Bell."

Remo looked at him.

It was a look I had seen turn grown men white at the Cammarata club.

Then he took out his phone and held up the dot on the map.

"This is her. Right here. Tell me I'm wrong."

"I can't help you, sir."

Behind me, Massimo said quietly, "Go down."

"I'm not ready."

"You're ready." He put a hand flat between my shoulder blades. "You're sick, and he's worried. Be what he thinks you are."

I took one step down.

His hand stayed there until I took another.

In the lobby, Remo spotted me over the doorman's shoulder.

His face changed completely.

All the hard lines went soft, and he put on a smile I had spent five years believing.

"Baby. Thank God. I've been calling all night."

I pulled my cardigan tighter around my sweatpants.

"I turned my phone off. I felt awful, Remo."

"Why didn't you come home?"

"I didn't want you to catch it."

"This place," he said, glancing around the lobby, the brass, the marble, the mail slots. "Whose is this?"

"My friend's." I looked at my feet. "I'm borrowing it."

"Which friend?"

"Remo," said a voice behind me. "She told you she's sick."

Massimo stepped out of the stairwell, unhurried, in shirt sleeves.

He stopped at my shoulder.

Not touching me. Just there.

Remo looked him up and down.

"Who are you?"

"Her cousin," Massimo said. "From out of town. I'm looking after her."

"She doesn't have a cousin."

"She has several. She hasn't told you much about her family, has she?"

The doorman pretended to straighten a pen on his desk.

Two neighbors had stopped at the mailboxes, a woman in running clothes and an old man with a cane.

Remo laughed once, the short laugh I knew.

"Buddy, I don't think you know who you're talking to."

"Remo Scalise," Massimo said pleasantly. "Capo of the harbor district, Cammarata family. You wear the ring on your left hand so people see it when you shake. You're early for a man who's meant to be in a meeting at nine thirty."

The smile on Remo's face stayed where it was.

Everything behind it moved.

"I don't know you," he said.

"No," said Massimo. "Not yet."

For a moment nobody spoke.

I saw Remo weigh it. A stranger who knew his name and his ring, a doorman who wouldn't talk, a woman in sweatpants he thought he owned.

He was not stupid. He only thought I was.

"Fio," he said, turning his shoulders to me and away from Massimo. "Let's go home. I'll take care of you."

I coughed into my sleeve.

"I can't, Remo. I'll be sick on you. Sunday. I'll come Sunday."

"Sunday."

"Please."

He looked at the tulips in his hand, and then at me, and I watched him decide it was cheaper to leave.

"Sunday," he said. He pressed the flowers into my arms, and kissed my forehead with dry lips. "Don't let this guy get in your head."

"I won't."

"You don't know how people are."

"I know," I said.

He nodded and walked out through the glass doors.

I stood holding the tulips until his coat was out of sight.

Then the woman in running clothes whispered something to the old man, and he laughed softly into his collar.

The doorman did not look up.

"Mr. Greco," he said, "should I tell him the next time that she isn't here?"

"Tell him exactly that," said Massimo.

I turned.

"You had his ring hand right," I said.

"I read his file on the plane."

"You have a file."

"I have several. Yours is the thickest."

I thought he was joking, but he wasn't smiling.

In the elevator I set the tulips on the floor and looked at myself in the mirrored wall.

My eyes were red. My hair was a mess.

Remo had not once looked at my face.

Upstairs, my phone buzzed on the shelf beside the tracker.

I took it down.

A message from Cinzia, with a photograph attached.

The picture showed my own building from across the street, the fifth-floor window with the lamp on.

Under it she had typed:

Pretty view. Fifth floor, right? Open the door, Fio. It's me.

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