Chapter 8: Deaf in His Own House

Gaspare had checked himself back into University Hospital before dawn.

I knew because the charge nurse called me at the penthouse to ask if the Don's captain was allowed to have a pistol on his nightstand.

"No," I said. "Take it. I'm coming in."

He was on the fourth floor in a private room, propped up on pillows with a drip in his arm and his face turned to the window.

I closed the door behind me and took the pistol out of the charge nurse's hands and put it in my bag.

"You don't need that in here," I said.

"I don't need anything in here."

"You need antibiotics and a fever check. Sit forward."

He sat forward.

I checked the dressing and the drip and the monitor, and he said nothing until I was done.

Then he said, to the window, "He doesn't know it."

I put the stethoscope down.

"Say that again."

"He doesn't know Italian. Does he?"

Gaspare turned and looked at me, and his eyes were red-rimmed and blank.

"Three years I've been laughing at jokes he never got," he said. "I've been translating for him in my head, deciding what he thought."

"I don't know," I said.

"You know."

I looked at the floor.

"I know he said bene last night and then he looked sick," I said.

"What else?"

"He's never said another word to me in Italian. And he never asked the cook to repeat what Tommaso said."

"What did Tommaso say?"

I told him.

I told him the whole thing, Friday and the port and the crane and the widow.

Gaspare listened with his good hand clenched in the sheet.

"I stood behind that chair," he said. "I was proud to."

"They weren't shooting at you."

"I'm the Don's friend, Margo. They wouldn't have cared who got in the way."

"Do you know why Cesare can't speak it?"

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