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I sent the old men an invitation. They’d hate to miss it.
He hasn’t told me where. He doesn’t know he doesn’t have to. On the screen behind his photo, the blue dot is still crawling south.
I hand my father the phone. He reads it twice, the way he used to read reports from the docks when I was a boy: slowly, looking for the thing underneath.
“He invited the jury,” he says at last.
“He wants them to watch me kneel. Then he wants them to hand him our territory, because a man who kneels can’t hold it.”
“And they would.” He sets the phone down. “That part he has right. A Don who can’t protect his own blood isn’t a Don.” His black eyes come up to mine. “So we give the jury a different verdict.”
“How?”
“You want the elders to ride in with you. They won’t. To them, this is still two young dogs in an alley.” He picks up the house phone. “But Luca has done something very stupid. He took a woman and a child out of their beds and told every old man in this city to come and watch. He thinks he’s inviting witnesses. He’s inviting a trial.” He starts to dial. “Every one of those men has grandchildren. By the time I’m done, they’ll come to wherever he is to see whether the rules still mean anything.”
“And if they just watch?”
“Then you’ll have to win it yourself.” He doesn’t look up. “That was always the job, Enzo. I just used to be too proud to stand next to you while you did it.”
He calls Manfredi first. Then Greco. Then Dellucci. I listen to my father work the way I haven’t heard him work since I was a teenager. No threats, no shouting. Just favors, called in one at a time in that dry, patient voice, and the story of a little boy carried out of his bed at gunpoint.
It takes him most of the evening. Somewhere in the middle of it, the blue dot stops. Queens. The edge of Newtown Creek. An old Santini warehouse I could find with my eyes closed. My father writes the address on the back of an envelope and calls all three of them back.
While he talks, I take a napkin out of my breast pocket. The number on it has gone soft at the creases.
Vasari answers on the first ring.
“It’s come to it,” I say.
A long breath on the line. “He hired my people for his outside crew tonight,” he says. “He thinks I’m flattered. He still hasn’t told us where. He’s being careful.”
“Newtown Creek,” I say. “The old Santini warehouse. He’ll tell your men at the last minute. Now you know first.”
“Then we’ll be early,” Vasari says.
“When I walk in there, I’ll be alone.”
“Then you’ll be alone inside,” Vasari says. “Outside is mine. The first shot fired in there, my men come through that door. Until then…” He pauses. “I can’t start a war with his men inside that building, Accardi. I can only finish one.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
“One more thing,” Vasari says. “He’s got spotters on both roofs across the creek and a man on the Kosciuszko with binoculars. Anything with more than one person in it comes within a mile of that building before midnight, he knows in thirty seconds.”
So that is the answer to the question every man in my dining room has been too afraid to ask. Why I don’t go now. Why I let my son sit in that building for five hours. There is exactly one way through that door that ends with him breathing, and Luca wrote it himself. Alone. Midnight. I spend the five hours putting everyone else where they need to be.
When I hang up, my father is watching me.
“They’ll come,” he says. “All three. They’ll stand at the door and they’ll watch, and that’s all I can promise you.” A beat. “It’s more than I’ve given you in fifteen years.”
“It’s enough.”
“There’s one more piece.”
Genevieve is standing in the doorway. I didn’t hear her come in. She has washed her face and put her hair up, and she’s wearing the black dress she wears to funerals.
“Luca doesn’t know you know about me,” she says. “He thinks I’m still his. If I call him, he’ll let me in. He likes an audience, and he likes it more when the audience is me.” She swallows. “I’ll tell him you’re coming alone. That’s the truth, so he’ll believe it. And then I’ll be inside, near them, when it starts.”
“No.”
