Now We're Even

Osteria Mirella is closed between three and five. The chairs are up on the tables, the candles cold in their green bottles. Fosca's pastry case is dark. The only light comes from the kitchen, through the round window in the swinging door.

You stand at that door for a long moment with the garment bag over your shoulder. You think about leaving it in the car. You think about the gun on your right hip. You think about Paulette saying if it gets bad, you call me, and how your phone is in your pocket, and how you don't take it out.

You push the door open.

The kitchen is empty except for him. No Zeno, no prep cooks, no dishwasher singing along to the radio. Just steel and white tile and the low hum of the walk-in, and Saverio Scalise standing at the long counter in his shirtsleeves with a bottle of grappa and two small glasses.

"Lock it," he says.

You turn the bolt on the door behind you.

"Sit."

You don't sit. You put the garment bag down on a stool and stand across the counter from him, and you wait.

He pours two glasses of grappa. Pushes one toward you. Doesn't drink his.

Then he reaches under the counter and sets something down on the steel between you.

It's small. A black battery pack the size of a deck of cards. A recorder no bigger than a lighter. A coil of thin wire. A roll of medical tape with a thumbprint of dust on it.

Your rig. The one that was behind the kick panel of the Lincoln. The one that burned in Chelsea.

The kitchen goes very quiet. You can hear the walk-in compressor. You can hear your own pulse. You're aware of your right hand, and how close it is to your hip, and that he's watching it.

"Don't," he says softly. "You won't need it. I'm not armed, Ethan. Check if you like."

You don't move.

"Ercole didn't find it," he says. "I did. Before he took the car. While Sciarra was cutting your shirt off, I was in that front seat with my thumb under the panel." He touches the coil of wire with one finger, lightly, the way you'd touch something that might still be warm. "You click it twice when you put it back. Did you know that? Two clicks, two taps on the wheel. You're a creature of habit. It's very dangerous."

Your throat is dry. "How long?"

He doesn't answer that. Instead he picks up the rig, all of it, and carries it to the deep steel sink by the dish station. He drops it in. Then he picks up the bottle of grappa and pours, slow and steady, until it's soaked.

He takes a match from a box on the shelf above the stove. He looks at you across the kitchen.

"Your people have a lot on that?" he asks.

You think of eighteen months. The fish contracts. The ice routes. The uncle who talks too much in the car. And the drive to the Fish Pier, the last night, with Saverio's voice saying my mother used to take us to Revere Beach.

"Some," you say.

"Anything that puts you in a box in the harbor if the wrong man finds it?"

You don't answer. You don't have to.

He strikes the match.

The grappa catches with a soft whump, a sheet of blue flame that rises out of the sink and goes yellow at the top. The tape curls and blackens. The plastic of the recorder sags and bubbles. A thin, acrid smoke rises toward the hood, and Saverio reaches up without looking and flips on the fan.

He watches it burn. You watch him watch it. The firelight moves on his face, on his jaw, on the scar across his right knuckles.

When it's down to a lump of black, he turns on the tap and the fire dies in a hiss of steam.

He dries his hands on a towel. Comes back to the counter. Finally picks up his glass of grappa and drinks it in one swallow.

"Now we're even," Saverio says. "You took a bullet for me. I give you your life back." He sets the glass down. "Don't make me regret it."

You stare at him.

"Why?" It comes out raw. "You know what I am. You know why I'm here. Your father..."

"My father," he says, very calmly, "doesn't know anything I don't tell him."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

"Saverio." It's the first time you've said his name to his face. You see it land; you see him hear it. "You could have given me to him. You could have let Ercole find it. You could have let them shoot me in that car and saved yourself the trouble. Why didn't you?"

He looks at you for a long time. You can't read anything in his face except that he's thinking, very carefully, about what not to say.

"Drink your grappa," he says.

"I don't want the grappa. I want to know why."

"And I want a lot of things." He picks up his jacket from the hook by the door and puts it on, one arm and then the other, settling the collar. "You're not going to get an answer today, Ethan. Maybe not ever. You can decide whether you can live with that."

He walks to the door and unbolts it. His hand is on the push plate.

"How long have you known?" you ask again. Quieter this time.

He stops. He doesn't turn around. His shoulders rise and fall once under the dark wool.

"Weeks," Saverio says.

The door swings shut behind him. You stand alone in the kitchen with the smell of burnt plastic and grappa and the fan roaring overhead, and on the stool beside you the garment bag sits where you left it, the new wire sewn into its lining, waiting for you to decide what kind of man you are.