Chapter 6 - The Feast of San Gennaro
The transition did not happen in a courtroom; it happened in a series of quiet, bureaucratic erasures.
By Friday, the lease on the 14th Street walkup had been dissolved, the landlord signing a release form with a pen that Dante’s lawyer had provided—a pen that had remained on the desk as a gift, alongside an envelope that smelled faintly of cedar.
My boxes—the four cartons of poetry, my mother’s three small oil paintings of the Maine coastline, and a battered box of copper saucepans that had belonged to my grandmother—were unpacked into a four-room suite on the fourth floor of the limestone mansion on 72nd Street.
The rooms were not gold-leafed; they were quiet. High ceilings, tall windows that looked down into a walled garden where an ancient wisteria vine climbed the brick, and a fireplace that burned split birch that didn't hiss.
Dante did not come to my rooms.
He ate his breakfast at seven in the small conservatory on the second floor, read three international newspapers, spoke to men in low voices while Paul stood by the French doors, and left for the docks before eight.
I saw him only in the evenings, when he would sit in the library with the doors open, the light from his desk lamp cutting a yellow rectangle across the hallway runners.
"You're not eating the figs," he said on the seventh night.
I was standing in the doorway of the library, wearing one of the sand-colored silk shirts and the hand-cobbled loafers. I had spent the afternoon reading a history of the Brooklyn Navy Yard that I’d found on the third shelf.
"They're too sweet," I said.
He looked up from a blueprint of the Red Hook terminal. "They're from my sister's orchard in Calabria. She packs them in bay leaves. Try one with the cheese."
I walked to the low table near the leather sofa and picked up one of the dark, shriveled fruits from the porcelain dish. It smelled of sun and dry earth. I bit into it; the honey and salt hit my tongue at the same time.
"My sister thinks I am keeping a nun," Dante murmured, not looking up from his pencil marks on the blueprint.
"Tell her you're keeping an archivist," I said, sitting on the opposite end of the leather sofa. "I found three boxes of invoices from 1952 in the attic. Your grandfather was paying three dollars a ton for bunker fuel to a man named 'Lucky' who didn't provide a street address."
A low, rumbling sound came from Dante's chest—the first genuine laugh I had heard from him. It transformed his face, smoothing the sharp edge of the broken eyebrow and making the silver in his eyes look less like lead and more like clear water.
"Luciano," he said. "He was particular about invoices. He liked paper. He said men who didn't keep receipts were men who were planning to be state's evidence."
The grandfather clock in the corner struck nine—nine heavy, bronze chimes that resonated through the floorboards.
"Tomorrow is the festival," Dante said, setting his pencil down.
"San Gennaro?"
"We walk the street," he said. "Little Italy. Mulberry between Canal and Houston. My family has led the procession behind the statue of the saint since 1924."
"Why are you telling me?"
"You will walk with me."
I froze, the fig halfway to my mouth. "Dante, no."
"Yes."
"The whole city will be there," I said, the panic that had been sleeping under the quiet of the last seven days suddenly rearing its head. "The reporters. The police. The other families. If I walk with you, I'm not Arthur Hayes's granddaughter anymore. I'm... I'm yours."
Dante stood up from the desk. He didn't have his jacket on; his black suspenders framed the broad, lean expanse of his chest, and his shirt was rumpled at the elbows. He walked to the sofa and stood looking down at me, his shadow falling across my lap.
"Marcus has been seen in Queens," he said, the softness leaving his voice. "He was at the Bella Vista lounge three nights ago. He was speaking to a man named Sal Moretti."
The name landed between my shoulder blades like an ice cube. "Giancarlo Moretti's brother?"
"The same," Dante said. "Sal believes that because I took the docks, I am weak on the street. He thinks Marcus is an informant who can give him the layout of this house."
"Marcus doesn't know the layout of this house!"
"Sal does not know that," Dante murmured. "He sees a discarded husband with a grievance. He will use him until Marcus is no longer useful, and then he will throw his body into the canal. But if you walk beside me on Mulberry Street tomorrow—if every captain from here to the Bronx sees my grandmother’s ring on your hand—Marcus becomes untouchable."
"Your grandmother's ring?"
Dante reached into his trousers pocket.
He didn't bring out a velvet box. He brought out a ring of dark, heavy gold, set with an emerald the size of an acorn. It wasn't modern; it had been cut by hand in the nineteenth century, the facets slightly uneven, the stone showing the dark, mossy inclusions that the Italian jewelers called giardino—the garden.
The gold was worn smooth along the band, thinned by sixty years of being worn by a woman who had buried three sons and one husband without ever leaving her kitchen.
"It is not an offer, Emma," Dante said, his voice dropping into that dark, velvety cadence that made my pulse jump in my throat. "It is a sign. In our world, a woman with a bare hand is fair game for any fool with eighty thousand dollars of debt. A woman with this ring is a border that cannot be crossed without artillery."
He held it out between his thumb and forefinger.
The green light from the emerald caught the lamp glow, casting a small, liquid square of emerald across the white linen of his cuff.
"Put it on," he whispered.
"Dante... once I put this on, I can't go back to the library. I can't go back to the archives."
"You were never going back to the library, Emma," he said, taking my left hand in his. His grip was firm, warm, and absolute. "You spent four years being small for a man who didn't have the stomach to be large. Try being dangerous for a while."
He slid the gold over my knuckle.
May you like
It didn't fit like modern jewelry; it had a cold, heavy weight that sank into the flesh, the emerald resting against my third finger like an iron seal.
The pale, un-tanned band of skin where Marcus’s cheap platinum had left its mark was completely, perfectly covered.
