It came at ten minutes to five, the hour when the law likes to knock, because a man woken out of his sleep will say things a man awake would carry to his grave.
Three doors took it the same minute, up and down the neighborhood, timed like a chord. Nunzio Ferraro, who kept the count for Don Aurelio and was called the Pencil because he was thin and because he was the instrument, heard it in a flat that smelled of coffee nobody had made yet. Across the avenue it found a collector named Rocco asleep with his shoes still on. And at the house with the green shutters, where nobody knocked at all if they valued the hand they knocked with, it found the Don.
Don Aurelio answered it himself, in a dressing gown, with his hair combed. That was the detail the detective would tell his wife about, years after. The old man had combed his hair for the law.
"You knock like a man who has never been answered politely," the Don said. "Come in. The coffee is already made, because in this house we are awake before our troubles are."
They searched it the way the law searches, drawer by drawer, and they found linen, and letters from a sister in Palermo, and a rosary worn smooth as river stones. There was no paper. There was never any paper, because the Don's whole empire lived where no warrant could reach, in his memory and in the fear and the gratitude of other men's. The detective, whose name was Hale and who was not a fool, understood by the second drawer that he had been sent to arrest a weather. You cannot put handcuffs on a climate.
At the Ferraro flat they found the paper. One little book, cloth-bound, in a drawer under the knives, and Hale held it the way a man holds a bird he expects to sing. Page after page of numbers, and beside the numbers, saints. Saint Anthony beside a two. Saint Lucy beside a nine. The whole year of the neighborhood written out in feast days, the envelopes hiding inside the calendar of heaven. It was the count of everything, and it said nothing at all, unless the man who wrote it chose to read it aloud.
Nunzio put on his coat without being told. He kissed his wife's hands, both of them, the way a man does who is not sure of the lending library rules on returns. On the stairs he passed Sal, who had come at the first telephone call and stood in the cold with the Ferraro boy's shoes in his hand, because the boy had run down barefoot and somebody had to think of the boy. That is the part the paper never prints. The knock is loud, and the family is quiet, and the quiet is organized by five in the morning into shoes, and bread, and money in an envelope for a wife who has not yet been told to be afraid.
In the cell downtown, they gave the Pencil coffee that had been made by an enemy and a chair with one short leg, and Hale, who was decent within the limits of his employment, laid it out for him like a menu. Names for freedom. A translation for a train ticket and a new life in a state where the winters mind their manners. All he had to do was read his own little book aloud, once, into the record.
Nunzio asked if he might have his rosary back. They said the rosary was property, and property was in an envelope, and the envelope was in a drawer. He nodded, as if this confirmed a long-held theory about the government, and he settled his hands in his lap like a man at a long Mass, and he said the only sentence he would say that day that anybody wrote down.
"Then I will count on my fingers. I have been doing it since I was six."
Before the sun was properly up, Sal stood in the Ferraro kitchen with an envelope of the Don's money, thick as a sandwich, and he would not sit down, and he would not take coffee, because he was not a guest, he was a delivery from a government that worked faster. "Nobody in this family pays for anything until Nunzio is home," he said. "Not the rent. Not the doctor. Not the boy's shoes." The wife looked at the envelope the way Morrelli once had, like a thing that was both a chain and a roof, because in the old neighborhood it was usually both, and the whole art of living there was knowing the difference by the weight.
At his desk, with the morning paper folded to a story that did not have the neighborhood's name in it yet, Don Aurelio ate his eggs and considered the little book he would never see again, and the man he might, and the detective who had combed his own hair too, out of respect or out of war. Then he said the name of a lawyer in Chicago, a name nobody in the neighborhood had ever heard spoken in that house, the way a man finally mentions a doctor he has been avoiding.
"Send for him," the Don said. "Before they teach my Pencil to write in English."
Mafia Honor is an original 1930s fiction series by Merci Web Design Studio. All names are invented.
