The Wrong Wall at Midnight
Lena
The man in my kitchen did not knock.
I had been drawing the same face since two in the morning. When I finally looked up from the sketchbook, he was standing between my refrigerator and the window, and the rain was running down the glass behind him as if the city were trying to wash him away.
He was tall enough that my hanging lamp touched his hair. Black coat, wet at the shoulders. Black gloves. A face that would have been handsome if anything in it had moved. A thin pale scar cut through his left eyebrow, and his eyes were the grey of the Delaware River in February.
I slid the sketchbook under a pile of menu designs for the bakery on Tenth Street. My hand found the palette knife beside my cold coffee.
“Miss Moss,” he said. His voice was low and very calm. “Lena Moss. Moss Signs and Murals.”
“The shop is closed.”
“I’m not here for a sign.”
He set something on my table. My paint box. The old wooden one with MOSS SIGNS stenciled on the lid in my grandmother’s careful letters. The one I had dropped in the alley behind Abate’s Fish at midnight, less than a day ago, when I ran.
So that was how they found me.
“I was sent to make you disappear,” he said.
I would like to say I was brave. I was not. My knees went soft under the table, and my heart hit my ribs so hard I could hear it in my ears. But my fingers stayed tight on the palette knife, and my voice only shook a little.
“Then do it somewhere else. My landlady sleeps downstairs. She’s eighty-one.”
Something crossed his face. Not a smile. The memory of one.
“Mrs. Pellegrino,” he said. “She hems my trousers.”
Of course she did. This was South Philadelphia. Every grandmother on the block had hemmed some dangerous man’s trousers.
He looked at the menus on top of my sketchbook. He looked at my hands, which were blue to the wrist, because I had been mixing ultramarine all week for the sky of the mural. Then he looked at me, and I understood that he had seen everything in the room in the first second and was only now deciding what any of it meant.
“Tell me what you saw last night,” he said.
Here is what I saw.
Mr. Abate let me paint the back wall of his fish market only after closing, because in daylight his customers walked into my ladder and got blue on their good coats. The mural was for the market’s hundredth year: a woman in a long red dress holding a lantern over the stalls of Ninth Street, with the whole city sleeping behind her. I had painted her face three times. I was finally happy with it.
At midnight, the market street empties. The awnings are rolled up, the fruit crates are stacked, and the only sound is the rain in the gutters. I like it. I like having the city to myself.
Two men came into the alley under my ladder.
One was old, in a grey hat, with a walk I knew. Everyone on Ninth Street knew it. Bruno Lazzaro bought cannoli every Sunday and paid the schoolboys to carry them home for him so they would have money for the movies. The other man was younger, in a long pale coat. They argued in Italian, quietly at first, then not quietly. The old man reached up and took the young man’s face in one hand, the way a grandfather holds a boy’s chin, and then his fingers curled and dragged down along the jaw.
The shot was not loud like in films. It was a flat crack, like a board breaking.
Bruno Lazzaro sat down against the wall, under my lady with the lantern, and did not get up.
Then came the strangest thing. Music. A tiny, sweet tune, slow as a lullaby, like a music box, coming from the dark where the young man knelt beside the body. Six or seven notes, repeating.
I moved. I did not mean to. My foot knocked the paint box off the ladder shelf, and it hit the ground with a crash that filled the alley. The young man’s head snapped up, and my headlamp swung across his face. For one second I saw him perfectly. Dark hair. Wide mouth. Fresh red lines on his jaw where the old man’s fingers had been.
I jumped the last six rungs and ran. I did not stop until I was on Montrose Street, up three flights of stairs, behind a locked door, being sick in my kitchen sink.
I did not call the police. My grandmother raised me on Ninth Street, and her first rule was older than I was. On this street, you see nothing. You hear nothing. You paint the signs, you take the money, you go home.
So I went home, and I drew his face, again and again, until the morning came grey through the window, hoping that if I put him on paper enough times he would leave my head.
He did not.
“Nothing,” I told the man in my kitchen. “I saw nothing.”
“You dropped your paint box and ran three blocks in the rain for nothing.”
“I’m afraid of the dark.”
“You paint in alleys at midnight.”
I said nothing to that. He waited. He was very good at waiting. I had the feeling he could stand in my kitchen until the building fell down around him.
A soft metal sound came from my bedroom. The scrape of a shoe on the fire escape.
He moved before I understood what I had heard. One step, and he was between me and the bedroom door. Another, and he had the window open and the cold rain blowing in. He spoke into the dark in Italian, so low I only caught a few words. Then, in English, as calm as if he were ordering coffee:
“Tell Paolo the Don gave this one to me. If he sends anyone else up a wall tonight, I will send them back down the short way.”
Feet clattered on the iron stairs, going down fast. A car door. An engine.
He closed the window and came back to the kitchen, and now there was rain on his face, too.
“Who were they?” I whispered.
“Men who don’t like to wait.” He pulled off his gloves, finger by finger. His hands were large and scarred across the knuckles, and there was an old white line across his left palm. “You understand what that was. Someone is in a hurry to see you quiet. The order came from the Don, but the hurry came from somewhere else.”
“And you? Are you in a hurry?”
“No.” He set the gloves on my paint box. “I want to know who killed Bruno Lazzaro. You are the only living person who saw it.”
My mouth went dry. “If I tell you what I saw, what happens to me?”
He did not lie. I will always remember that. He could have, and I would have believed anything that let me breathe.
“Then you are only a witness,” he said, “and the order stands. If I don’t carry it out, someone worse will.”
“So if I tell you, I die. And if I don’t tell you, I die.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m never telling you anything.”
He looked at me for a long time. At my blue hands. At the knife I was still holding as if it could save me. At the crooked sign above my stove that said Eat, You’re Too Thin, the first sign I ever painted, when I was nine.
“There is one door,” he said finally. “You will not like it.”
“I don’t like any of this.”
“The family has three rules. They are older than the Don. His father wrote them in 1952, at a table two blocks from here, and no one has ever broken them and lived. The first is silence. The second says that no hand of the family may touch the wife of a sworn man. Ever. For any reason.” He paused. “And a sworn man may claim one life from the family’s judgment by giving it his name. Once. Only once in his whole life.”
I stared at him. The rain ticked on the glass.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am never anything else.”
“You want to marry me.”
“I want you alive until you trust me enough to give me a name.” His grey eyes did not leave mine. “You keep what you saw. I keep you breathing. When you are ready, you tell me.”
“And if I’m never ready?”
“Then it will be a long marriage.”
A laugh came out of me, high and wrong. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Cassio Ferrante.”
I knew that name. Everybody under forty in South Philadelphia knew that name the way children know the name of the thing under the bed. The quiet man. When Cassio Ferrante came to see you, people said, it was very quiet afterward.
He watched me understand who he was. He did not look proud. He looked tired.
“It’s a quarter past eleven,” he said. “The oath has to be sworn at midnight, between one day and the next, so no day can claim it. Put on a dress, Lena.”
My cat chose that moment to come out from under the radiator, orange and fat and twelve years old, and sit on Cassio Ferrante’s wet shoe.
“Her name is Vermilion,” I said. “Millie. If I go, she comes.”
He looked down at the cat. The cat looked up at him.
“The cat comes,” he agreed.
He made one phone call from my landing while I changed. I heard only his side. I claim her. Under the second rule. Tonight. A long silence. Then, Yes, Don Aurelio. I understand what I’m spending.
My only good dress was dark green, with long sleeves and a skirt that moved when I walked. I had bought it for my cousin’s wedding two summers ago. I put my yellow raincoat over it because it was the only coat I owned, and my white sneakers, because my good shoes pinched, and I was not going to my own wedding with blisters. There was blue paint on the left toe. There was blue paint on everything I owned.
Cassio looked at the sneakers and said nothing. He carried Millie’s basket down the stairs himself.
The Chapel of Saint Lucy hides behind the Saint Lucy Social Club on Ninth Street, two blocks from the alley where Bruno Lazzaro died. I had walked past the club door my whole life. Old men sat outside it in summer, playing cards and watching the street. I had never once seen the inside.
It was small. Twelve wooden pews. Candles burning in red glass. At the front, above the altar, stood a plaster Saint Lucy in a blue robe, holding out a golden plate with two painted eyes on it. My grandmother told me once that Lucy was the saint of eyes and of light. I had thought it a sad, strange thing to carry.
Now it seemed like a joke made for me alone.
There were six men in the chapel. An old priest with eyebrows like snow, whom Cassio called Father Ignazio. A small, thin man with white hair combed straight back and a black cane with a silver lion’s head, sitting in the first pew as if it were a throne. Don Aurelio Varesi. Three men in dark suits along the wall.
And standing at the Don’s shoulder, smiling, the sixth.
Dark hair. Wide mouth. Four thin healing lines along his jaw.
The floor moved under my sneakers. My hand closed on Cassio’s sleeve so hard my nails bent.
“Breathe,” Cassio murmured, not looking at me. He thought I was afraid of the chapel, of the Don, of him. “Don Aurelio. His son, Paolo. You don’t have to speak to them.”
Paolo Varesi came down the aisle with his hands open, as if to welcome me. His eyes went over my yellow raincoat, my green dress, my blue hands, and came back to my face, and stayed there one second too long.
“Cassio,” he said warmly. “You sentimental animal. A painter.”
“Sit down, Paolo,” said the Don, without raising his voice, and his son sat.
Somewhere outside, a church bell began to ring midnight.
Father Ignazio opened a small book. The Don stood, leaning on his cane. “Who claims?”
“Cassio Ferrante,” said the man beside me. “Sworn to this table for sixteen years. I claim one life under the second rule.”
“What do you give?”
“My name.”
“Whose life?”
“Lena Moss.”
The priest held out a small silver knife on a white cloth. Cassio took off his coat and rolled back his left sleeve. He opened his hand, and I saw again the old white scar across his palm, and I watched him draw the blade straight along it, slowly, without a sound. Blood welled up dark in the candlelight.
He held out the bleeding hand to me.
“Give me your hand, Lena.” Quietly. Only for me. “It’s the last thing I’ll ask tonight.”
I put my blue hand in his red one. His blood was warm. His fingers closed around mine, rough and careful, and Father Ignazio wound a white ribbon around our joined hands, once, twice, three times.
“Speak, girl,” said the Don. “The table must hear it from your own mouth.”
The bell rang its ninth stroke. Paolo Varesi was watching me from the front pew, still smiling, with his hand resting flat against his chest.
“I take his name,” I said. My voice came out clear. I did not know from where. “I keep the silence of his house.”
“The table witnesses,” said the Don.
Cassio slid a chain from around his neck. On it hung a thin gold ring, worn smooth. He put it on my finger with his free hand. It was too big. It slid down to the base of my finger and turned there, loose.
“It was my mother’s,” he said.
“You may kiss your wife,” said Father Ignazio, in the tired voice of a man who has married many people at strange hours.
Cassio Ferrante bent his head and kissed me.
I had expected something cold, a stamp on a document. It was not cold. His mouth was hard and warm and certain, and his bleeding hand tightened around mine, and for three heartbeats the chapel and the candles and the smiling man in the front pew all went away. When he lifted his head, his eyes had changed. Something in them had moved at last.
“Now no one touches you,” he said against my ear. “No one but me.”
The twelfth stroke of midnight faded over the roofs of Ninth Street.
I had just married the man sent to kill me, in front of the man I had watched kill. Two people in that chapel knew what I had seen.
My husband was not one of them.
The Second Rule
Cassio
The Don kept me in the sacristy after, among the folded robes and the boxes of candles, with the door shut.
I had stood in that small room the night I was sworn, at eighteen, with my hand cut open for the first time and Bruno Lazzaro standing behind me like a wall. Bruno had been the one to wrap my palm afterward. Tight, he had said, so it heals white. A sworn man should be able to see his promise.
Now my palm was bleeding again, and Bruno was lying in a cold drawer at the city morgue, waiting for a funeral.
Don Aurelio lowered himself onto a wooden chair and set both hands on the lion’s head of his cane. He was seventy-six. Tonight he looked older.
“Sixteen years,” he said. “Sixteen years you never ask me for one thing. Not money. Not a house. Not a favor for a cousin. And tonight you spend the only claim you will ever have on a girl with paint on her shoes.”
“She saw who killed Bruno.”
“Then she is worth more alive than dead. I understood that much on the telephone.” He looked at my open hand, still bleeding. “Forty years ago, Bruno took a knife in the side that was meant for me. You know this story.”
“I know it.”
“I gave him a gold watch afterward. My mother’s lullaby played inside it when you opened the lid. Ninna nanna. He opened it every night at midnight, after his Rosa died, to say goodnight to her picture.” The old man’s voice did not break. It only grew quieter. “The police gave me his hat and his wallet. No watch. The Harrow brothers took that, too.”
The Harrows ran the docks along the Delaware and had wanted Ninth Street for twenty years. It was what everyone said. It was what Paolo had said at the Don’s table on Friday morning, very sure, banging his fist so the glasses jumped.
“Bring me the names, Cassio,” said the Don. “Whatever your wife saw, I want it.”
“When she trusts me.”
“Make her trust you faster.” He pushed himself up from the chair. At the door, he stopped. “She is family now. She sits at my table on Sunday. And you remember the third rule.”
I did not need to remember it. Every sworn man could say it in his sleep.
“If a wife betrays the table,” I said, “her husband closes the matter with his own hand.”
“With his own hand,” the Don agreed, and went out.
Paolo was waiting under the club awning, lighting a cigarette in the rain.
We had grown up in the same house. When my father died and Bruno found me stealing oranges from the stalls on Ninth Street, half-starved and twelve years old, it was the Varesi kitchen he brought me to. Paolo was fourteen. He gave me his old shoes and told everyone I was his little brother. For a few years, I believed it.
“Congratulations,” he said, and put his hand on my shoulder. “She’s pretty, in a dirty kind of way. All that blue.”
“You sent men up her fire escape.”
“Papa wanted it done. I was helping.” He smiled. He had always had a good smile. Women in Atlantic City paid for his drinks to see it. “You know me. I don’t like loose ends.”
“The Don gave her to me.”
“And now you’ve given her your name.” He blew smoke at the wet street. “You were always soft about strays, Cassio. Bruno’s oranges. Now a painter.”
The scratches on his jaw were scabbing now, four neat dark lines. On Friday he had laughed about them at the table. A jealous girl at a club, Thursday night, he had said. A girl with long nails and no sense of humor.
I looked at them now and thought nothing about them at all. I want that to be clear. I was not clever that night. I was grieving and bleeding, and I had just married a stranger.
“Goodnight, Paolo,” I said.
In the car, Lena sat with the cat basket on her lap and said nothing for six blocks.
Then she put the basket on the floor, pulled a clean folded rag out of her raincoat pocket, and held out her hand.
“Give it to me.”
“It’s fine.”
“You’re bleeding on my dress. Give it to me.”
I stopped at the light on Christian Street and gave her my hand. She wrapped the rag around my palm, tight, with quick, sure fingers, and tied it off with her teeth. The rag smelled of turpentine. Her hair smelled of rain.
“Painters always have rags,” she said, to no one.
“Thank you.”
She looked at me then, for the first time since the chapel. Her eyes were brown, very dark, and red at the edges from no sleep. She had a smudge of blue paint under her left ear that she did not know about.
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “I don’t like you.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to keep not liking you.”
“That’s your right,” I said. “You’re my wife.”
The light turned green.
I live in a narrow brick house on Catharine Street with a walled garden behind it. Three floors. Two bedrooms. A kitchen with a long table that was Bruno’s before it was mine. I had owned the house for nine years, and I had slept in it perhaps two hundred nights.
Lena stood in the front room in her yellow raincoat and turned in a slow circle.
“There’s nothing on the walls,” she said.
“No.”
“Nothing. Not a calendar. Not a picture.” She sounded offended, as if I had hurt someone she loved. “Who lives like this?”
“Someone who isn’t home.”
The cat climbed out of the basket, sniffed my boots, and went straight up the stairs as if she had lived there for years.
I gave Lena the rules in the kitchen. I had planned them in the car. She would not leave the house without me, or without Gino Russo, who would sit outside in a grey car every hour I was gone. She would not open the door to anyone. She would sleep on the second floor, below my room, where I could hear her.
She listened with her arms crossed. Then she gave me hers.
“You don’t come into my room. You don’t touch my sketchbooks. And you don’t ask me again, about that night, until I’m ready.”
“I can promise the first two.”
“And the third?”
“I won’t ask with my mouth,” I said. “I can’t promise what my face does.”
“Your face doesn’t do anything.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about.”
She almost smiled. She caught it and killed it, but I saw it. It was the first thing all night that made my chest feel less like a closed fist.
At three in the morning, I was sitting in the hall chair at the top of the second-floor stairs with my gun on my knee, listening to the rain and the old house, when her door opened. She stood in the gap in a grey sleep shirt that came to her knees, barefoot, with the gold ring loose on her finger.
“Are you going to sit there all night?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Paolo doesn’t like loose ends.”
She looked at me a long time in the dark. Then she went back inside and left the door open, the width of a hand.
On Saturday morning, a judge who owed the Don a large favor married us again in his chambers at City Hall, under the big clock tower, with a typed paper and two signatures. The Don’s lawyer stood as witness. It took eleven minutes.
“A wife on paper is a wife in every courtroom in this country,” the Don had told me on the phone. “Not only in my chapel. Do it properly.”
Lena signed Lena Moss in fast, beautiful letters, the letters of someone who painted words for a living. Then, after a pause, she wrote Ferrante after it, smaller.
That afternoon I found her at my kitchen table with a small round tin of sewing thread, winding bright blue thread around the back of my mother’s ring, around and around, until it sat snug on her finger.
“So it doesn’t fall off while I’m painting,” she said, when she saw me looking.
I had to leave the room. I don’t know why. I stood in the garden in the cold for some minutes, looking at the long blank white wall at the end of it, and breathing.
Sunday dinner at the Don’s house is older than any of us.
The house faces Marconi Plaza, tall and brick, with stone lions on the steps that Paolo and I used to ride as boys. Every Sunday at two o’clock the whole family sits down: the Don at the head, his sworn men down both sides with their wives and children, cousins at the far end, and the newest wife at the Don’s left hand, where he can see her face. It is the place of honor. It is also the place where nothing can be hidden.
Lena wore the green dress again, with a black cardigan I had bought her on Saturday after City Hall, and the white sneakers with the blue toe, because she refused the shoes I offered. She held her chin very high going up the steps.
Bruno’s chair was empty, three places down from the Don, with his grey hat on the seat.
The Don stood and broke the first loaf with his old hands, slowly, and gave the first piece to my wife.
“Welcome to the table, Lena,” he said.
“Thank you, Don Aurelio.”
“You are too thin. Eat.”
She looked up at him with a quick, surprised light in her eyes, and I knew she was thinking of the sign above her stove.
Paolo sat across from her. I watched him the way I watch every room, without meaning anything by it. He talked and laughed and poured wine for the women. He raised his glass when his father toasted Bruno, and his eyes were wet. Twice he touched the left side of his chest, flat-handed, as if checking for something in an inside pocket. Twice Lena dropped her eyes to her plate when he did it.
I noticed. God forgive me, I noticed, and I thought she was afraid of the whole table. I thought she was a girl from Montrose Street in a room full of men who had done terrible things, and I rested my arm along the back of her chair so she would know I was there.
After the coffee, the women took their coats from the hall. I stopped for one minute in the doorway to let the Don’s cousin Tullio tell me about his bad knee.
One minute.
When I turned, Paolo was behind my wife at the coat rack, holding up her yellow raincoat for her to put her arms in, smiling, bending his head near her ear. He said something. It was short. I could not hear it.
All the color left her face. Not slowly. All at once, as if someone had pulled a plug.
I was across the hall before Tullio finished his sentence.
“Take your hands off my wife’s coat.”
Paolo let it go and lifted both palms, laughing. “Cassio. I’m being polite. Someone has to teach her how we do things.”
“I’ll teach her.” I took the coat and put it on her myself. Her arms were shaking so badly she missed the sleeve twice. I put my hand on the back of her neck, under her hair, and her skin was ice. “Goodnight, Paolo.”
“Goodnight, brother.” His eyes went to Lena and stayed there, warm and pleasant. “Goodnight, painter.”
I drove four blocks before I pulled over under a dark streetlight on Oregon Avenue and turned off the engine.
She was staring straight ahead. Her hands were locked together in her lap so tightly that the knuckles had gone white, and the blue thread on her ring stood out like a vein.
“Lena,” I said. “Look at me.”
She did not.
“I said I wouldn’t ask about that night. I’m not asking about that night. I’m asking about now.” I kept my voice low. I kept my hands on the wheel, where she could see them. “Who in that house are you afraid of?”
She turned her head. Tears were running down her face without a sound, and she did not wipe them. She looked at me as if I were already a dead man, and she was sorry.
“If I tell you,” she whispered, “you’ll die.”
