Sunday Nights

Being Saverio Scalise's shadow turns out to mean walking a lot, saying very little, and watching people be afraid of him.

Monday he takes you to Scalise Fish & Ice on the Fish Pier at five in the morning. The air smells like diesel and salt and the inside of a cold refrigerator. Men in rubber aprons stop talking when he walks in. He shakes hands with each of them, asks about a daughter's wedding and a son's knee surgery, and every one of them answers like a schoolboy.

Tuesday it's the Circolo Sant'Agata on Salem Street, where old men drink espresso out front and younger men play cards in the back. Saverio sits at the corner table with his back to the wall. You stand behind him with yours to the other wall. Men come to the table one at a time, speak quietly, and leave. He doesn't write anything down. He doesn't have to; you've already noticed he forgets nothing.

Wednesday a man in a good suit says something about Saverio's father that he shouldn't. Saverio doesn't move. He just looks at him, and keeps looking, and the man's voice trails away into nothing, and then the man apologizes, twice, and leaves without his coat.

"How do you do that?" you ask on the sidewalk.

He buttons his collar against the wind. "Do what?"

"Make a grown man forget his coat by looking at him."

He glances at you sideways. "You didn't forget yours."

"I'm used to you."

"It's been three days, Ethan."

"I'm a fast learner."

He makes a sound low in his throat that might, in a different man, be a laugh.

Your shoulder hurts all week. You carry your gun on the right side now, which feels wrong, and you sleep badly in the apartment across the hall, which is small and clean and smells of old wood and someone else's oregano.

Through the floor, every night, you can hear the Osteria closing up. Pans clanging. Somebody singing in Italian, badly. Doors. And then, across the hall, the click of Saverio's lock, and his footsteps, and silence.

Osteria Mirella is the heart of everything. It's long and narrow, brick walls, candles in green bottles, a wood oven at the back that glows like a dragon's mouth. Fosca Scalise runs the pastry counter by the window. She's twenty-eight, dark curls piled on her head, flour on her forearms, and she looks at you for exactly four seconds the first time Saverio brings you in.

"So you're the one," she says. "The one who jumped on my brother."

"I wouldn't put it that way."

"I would." She pushes a cannoli across the counter at you. "Eat. You look pale. He said you bled like a tap."

"Fosca," Saverio says, warning.

"What? He did." She grins at you. "Welcome to the family, Revere."

Zeno Lattanzi runs the kitchen. He's sixty-six, with a white mustache and forearms like a dockworker, and he speaks to you exactly once all week, on Thursday, to point at the floor where you're standing and say, "Not there. There," and move you eight inches to the left so the waiters can get by.

"He likes you," Saverio says afterward.

"How can you tell?"

"He spoke to you."

On Sunday night the restaurant closes at nine and the staff are gone by ten, and then Saverio does something you've heard about for eighteen months and never seen.

He cooks.

Nobody is allowed in the kitchen on Sunday nights. Everybody knows it. Ercole once walked in to ask a question and came out and didn't talk about it. You stand at the swinging door, unsure, until Saverio says without turning around, "In or out, Ethan. You're letting the cold in."

You go in.

He's taken off his jacket and rolled his sleeves to the elbow. He has an apron tied around his waist, an old blue one with flour ground into the seams, and he's rolling pasta dough with a long wooden pin, thin and even, turning it, rolling it, his forearms flexing with every stroke.

You make yourself look at the stove instead.

"Bologna," he says, as if you'd asked. "Four years. I was going to have my own place. Then my mother died and I came home." He folds the sheet of dough and starts cutting it into ribbons, fast, without looking. "This was her restaurant. My father named it for her after."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I." He lifts the ribbons, shakes the flour off, drops them into the boiling water. "Sit."

You sit on a stool by the steel counter. He makes you a plate of tagliatelle with butter and sage and black pepper, and puts it in front of you, and leans against the counter with his arms folded while you eat.

It's the best thing you've ever put in your mouth. You tell him so.

He looks at you for a long time. "You mean that."

"I don't lie about food."

"Just about other things," he says.

Your fork stops halfway to your mouth.

He's still watching you. His face gives you nothing. Then he pushes off the counter and turns to the sink and starts washing the pot, and the moment's gone, if it was ever there.

On Monday you meet Paulette at the Suds Palace, coat collar up, sunglasses in February like an idiot.

"His right hand," she says. "His actual right hand. Hasselbeck nearly cried." She digs in her bag. "He wants you wearing again. On your body now, not in a car. We're building you a new rig. Smaller. Sewn into a jacket lining. I'll have it Thursday."

You think of Saverio leaning against the steel counter. Just about other things.

"He's careful," you say.

"So be more careful." She studies you. "You okay, kid? You look like you haven't slept."

"I got shot."

"That's not what I mean."

You don't answer that.

That night, back across the hall from him, you lie on top of the covers in the dark and listen. His lock. His footsteps. Silence. Your shoulder throbs in time with your heartbeat.

At 12:41 your phone lights up on the nightstand.

An unknown number. No name. One line.

Are you awake.

No question mark. You know exactly who it is before you read the second text, which arrives while you're still staring at the first.

Your light's under the door, Ethan. Don't lie.