Chapter 16: Sunday Sauce

The four soldiers in the bead curtain looked at each other.

Vittorio turned around to face them.

"Put them away," he said.

They didn't. Not right away.

One of them glanced at his phone, like he was waiting for somebody else to tell him.

That was the moment I understood how much trouble my husband was in.

"I said put them away."

Slowly, one by one, they did.

Vittorio folded the autopsy page and put it in his shirt pocket over his heart.

Then he walked out through the beads without looking at anyone.

I followed him to the curb.

The sun was coming up over 18th Avenue.

A man was hosing down the sidewalk in front of the butcher's and pretending not to see us.

"What are you going to do?" I said.

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Not today." He leaned on the roof of his car with both hands.

"Half my captains eat at Davide's table. He stood up for them when my father was sick. He paid their kids' tuition."

"He shot your brother."

"I know what he did." His voice cracked across the middle.

"If I go at him with one page and a feeling, they'll say the Don lost his mind over his wife and an Iannone."

"They'll put Davide in my chair by Christmas, and you'll be the first thing he cleans up."

I didn't have an answer for that.

He looked at me over the car roof.

"Come home, Noemi. Let me put you somewhere he can't reach."

"Sign the papers."

"Tell me whose it is."

"The day Silvia takes a test."

"Then I want a test first. Before I sign anything." He opened his car door.

"I won't call the note Tuesday. I won't call it at all. But I'm not signing away a child that might be mine."

He drove away.

Papa was asleep behind the wheel of the van with his mouth open.

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