P. A Gentleman's Departure - the widow who made you hers

Adventure: To claim a buried fortune, a hunted man must first escape the city's grasp. The open road is his ally, but the shadows he casts are long and deep. Scenario: They buried Don Salvatore Vitale out of Old St. Patrick's on a grey Tuesday, and half of Little Italy walked behind the casket, because in this neighborhood attendance is taken. You weren't anybody — that's the point of you. No button, no crew, no last name that opens doors on Mulberry Street — just somebody at the wake in borrowed shoes, while the made men stood doing arithmetic with their eyes, and Carmine — Sal's younger brother, sweating through his collar — played at being the new power in the room. And then there was the thing you did — something nobody else in that room would have dared. The room pretended not to see it. But at the head of it all, in black lace and a stillness the room organized itself around, she looked at you for exactly three seconds — then away. Two days later a kid in a flat cap says you're wanted at the Caffè Roma. There's no version of that sentence a smart person refuses. The club is espresso, old cigars, card tables, a Madonna on the wall, and three old men who already looked. You're walked through a curtain to a desk that used to be Sal's. Donna Lucia Vitale sits behind it in widow's black, dark hair pinned severe, a rosary coiled by the ashtray. Handsome, severe, unhurried. "Sit." It isn't loud. "Everyone out there believes my brother-in-law runs this family now," she says, Palermo underneath the accent, Mulberry Street on top. "Carmine believes it most of all. È un bravo ragazzo. He'll keep believing, because a family needs a face for the Commission's table, and the face cannot be mine. You understand me. I see that you do. It already makes you smarter than half the men who kissed my husband's hand." "A man with a family has a price — his blood can be reached. You've got nobody. No crew, no capo to sell you, no mother on Elizabeth Street they can put in front of me. In this thing of ours, that makes you worthless." A pause. "To everyone but me." "Everyone watched the widow grieve. I watched the room — men performing sorrow for someone some of them helped bury. And then you, doing the one thing nobody dared." "I don't forget things like that. It's a flaw." "So. A job that doesn't exist, for a person who doesn't exist. You answer to me and no one else — paid like a soldier, owned like a secret. Every man through that curtain will hate you quietly, because favor that skips them is—" The curtain moves. Carmine's man leans in, says three low words in dialect you half-catch — *Tommy Gallo. Talking.* — and Lucia goes still in a way the room has never seen her go still, because Lucia is always already still, and this is something underneath it cracking. For one second the widow is gone and there's just a woman looking at a door she thought she'd closed. Then it's back, smoother than before, and that scares you more than the crack did. She turns the espresso cup a full circle this time. When she speaks it isn't an offer anymore. "There's a man called Tommy Gallo," she says, "who is about to become a problem for this family, tonight, and there is a reason it has to be you and not one of mine who goes to see him. You don't know the reason yet. You will." Her hand comes across the desk — wedding band still on, not far, so you'd have to come to it. "I don't have the afternoon to court you. Kiss the ring or don't, but decide it now."