Chapter 3 - The Brother at the Table
The dining room of the main house was forty feet long, dominated by a table of polished mahogany that had been shipped from England in 1912. It could seat thirty people, but tonight there were only two.
Alessandro sat at the head, his hands resting on either side of his plate. Across from him sat Dante Varga, the man he called brother.
They were not related by blood, but they had shared the same dirt in the streets of Red Hook when they were boys. Dante’s father had been a driver for Alessandro’s father, a loyal soldier who had taken three bullets in the spine during the war of eighty-eight and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, drinking cheap gin and telling his son that the Morettis were the only family that mattered. When Alessandro’s father went to prison, Dante had been the one who slept on the floor of Alessandro’s kitchen, a shotgun between his knees, while the rival families circled the block like wild dogs.
"You're quiet tonight, Al," Dante said. He was a large man, his shoulders thick under a gray silk suit, his hair cut close to his skull. He was chewing on a piece of rare ribeye, his knife scraping against the porcelain plate with a small, sharp shriek. "Something happen with the union guys in Brooklyn? Marco said you left early."
"The union is fine," Alessandro said. He had not touched his own steak. The meat looked too red, reminding him of the color of the water in the laundry sink. "We agreed on the percentage for the pier contracts. They'll start loading the container ships on Monday."
"Good. That's good money," Dante said, reaching for his wine glass. "So why the face? You look like you're attending your own wake."
"I was in the gardener's cottage this afternoon," Alessandro said.
Dante’s hand stopped an inch from his mouth. He set the glass down slowly, his eyes narrowing. "The cottage? What the hell were you doing out there? That's where the Rossi girl lives, right? The maid?"
"She has pneumonia, Dante. Or something close to it."
Dante let out a short, snorting laugh. "So? Let her go. We can get three more from the agency by tomorrow morning. My cousin has a girl who works in Queens—clean, doesn't speak a word of English, doesn't have a kid running around making noise."
"She has worked here for three years," Alessandro said. "Her work is excellent."
"Al, she's a maid," Dante said, his voice rising by a fraction. "Since when do you care about the help's lungs? We have three million dollars in cash sitting in the basement safe right now that needs to be moved to the Jersey accounts before the grand jury convenes next month. That's what we should be talking about. Not the woman who cleans the silver."
"I care because she is under my roof," Alessandro said, his voice dropping into that quiet, dangerous register that usually made Dante stop talking. "And her child was in my laundry room trying to wash my shirts because she thought her mother would be thrown out if she was too sick to work."
Dante stared at him for a long moment, the silence stretching between them until the grandfather clock in the hall chimed the half-hour.
"You're getting soft, Al," Dante said. He did not say it with his usual easy grin. His face was hard, the skin around his jaw tight. "That's twice this month you've talked about who is under your roof. First it was the old man who used to run the bakery on Grand Street—you told the Lucchese guys they couldn't touch him because his father used to buy bread from your grandfather. Now it's the maid. This isn't a charity. It's a family."
"I know what it is," Alessandro said.
"Do you?" Dante leaned forward, his elbows on the mahogany. "Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you're forgetting how we got this table. We didn't get it by worried about whether the kitchen girls had clean sheets. We got it because we were the meanest bastards from here to Montauk. Your father didn't hesitate when he had to clear the street. Neither did your brother."
"My brother is dead, Dante," Alessandro said softly.
"Yeah. He is. And you know why? Because he trusted the wrong people. He thought because he was nice to some guys from New Jersey, they'd respect the boundary. They didn't. They put six holes in his chest while he was waiting for his coffee."
Dante stood up, throwing his napkin onto his half-eaten steak. "I'm going down to the club. The guys from the docks are waiting for the envelopes. You want me to tell them you're busy planning the maid's retirement?"
"Tell them whatever you like, Dante," Alessandro said. "But don't ever speak to me about my brother again."
Dante looked at him for five seconds—five seconds where Alessandro could see the physical calculation happening in his old friend’s brain. Then, with a curt nod, Dante turned and walked out of the room, his heavy steps echoing down the marble hallway until the heavy front door clicked shut.
Alessandro sat alone in the forty-foot room.
May you like
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his gold watch, looking at the engraving on the back. A.M. - Keep the Line. His father had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday, the day he had killed his first man in a warehouse behind the navy yard.
He had thought he was keeping the line. But as he looked at the empty chairs around the table, he wondered if he had simply built a cage so large he couldn't see the bars anymore.
