Chapter 6 - The Watcher in the Hall
Clara’s private room was quiet save for the rhythmic, low-frequency hiss of the oxygen machine and the soft drip of the intravenous line.
She was asleep, propped up on three goose-down pillows, her skin no longer translucent white, but flushed with the pink hue of returning circulation. Her breathing had lost that terrifying, rattling scratch; it was deep, even, and unobstructed.
Rosie sat in a large leather armchair beside the bed, her legs curled beneath her, watching her mother’s chest rise and fall.
Moretti sat on the windowsill across the room, his long legs crossed, looking at a stack of documents Silvio had brought him in a leather folio. Every few minutes, he would scribble a signature with a heavy gold fountain pen, his movements crisp and decisive.
"Who was Carmine?" Rosie asked suddenly into the quiet.
The pen stopped scratching. Moretti did not look up from the paper immediately. "A business associate."
"Silvio said he thinks you're meeting someone behind his back."
Moretti closed the leather folio with a soft snap. "You hear too much for a child."
"When you live on Verona Street, you have to hear everything," Rosie said matter-of-factly. "If you don't hear the super coming up the stairs, he locks the door while you're at the grocery. If you don't hear the boys on the corner, they take your change."
"Carmine is a man who thinks everything belongs to him because he is loud," Moretti said, setting the pen on the windowsill. "He runs the docks on the west side. He forgets that the water doesn't care who owns the pier."
"Does he want to hurt Mama?"
Moretti’s eyes darkened, the cold slate returning to his gaze with an intensity that made the hair on the back of Rosie’s neck stand up. "Nobody touches your mother. Ever again."
"You did," she whispered.
The room fell into an excruciating silence.
Moretti did not move. His hands rested flat on the leather folio, his fingers still. "What did she tell you about me?"
"She said you were a storm," Rosie said, looking at her mother’s sleeping face. "She said you were the kind of storm that makes the trees fall down, and when the storm passes, people look at the wood and build houses out of it, but they forget the wind that broke them."
A faint, bitter smile touched Moretti’s lips. "Clara always was a poet. Her father was a butcher, but she read books about ancient Rome until three in the morning."
"Did you love her?"
Moretti looked away from the child, turning his gaze back toward the dark window pane where the rain had finally begun to slacken into a misty drizzle.
"Love is a luxury for people who have ordinary lives, Rosie," he said quietly. "In my world, you have loyalty, you have debts, and you have blood. When your mother left ten years ago, she thought she was saving you from the dark. But she forgot that the dark doesn't stay in the alleys. It follows you into the rooms with broken radiators."
He stood up, walking over to the bed. He looked down at Clara, his face softening for a split second—a micro-expression of old, buried grief that vanished before it could take root.
"She will sleep for twenty-four hours," Moretti said. "The fever has broken. Dr. Rossi says the lungs will clear in a week."
"Where do we go when she wakes up?"
"To my house," Moretti replied.
"Where is your house?"
"In Brooklyn. On the hill. Behind the iron gates."
"Are there trees?"
"Yes," Moretti said, his voice dropping into that quiet, gravelly cadence. "Many trees. None of them fall down."
A soft knock sounded at the door.
Silvio stepped into the room, his face taut with tension, his hand resting casually inside his trench coat near his left armpit. "Boss. Carmine’s car just pulled up to the front gate. He has four men with him."
Moretti did not look surprised. He reached over, picked up his charcoal jacket from the chair, and slipped his arms into the sleeves with unhurried grace.
"Did he bring Frankie?"
"Yes. And the two cousins from Staten Island."
Moretti adjusted his cuffs, checking the platinum signet ring on his finger. "Stay in this room, Silvio. Lock the deadbolt from the inside. If anyone comes through that door who isn't me, empty the magazine into their chest."
"Understood, Mr. Moretti."
Moretti looked at Rosie. "Stay in that chair, little bird. Don't look out the window."
"Are you going to break their collarbones?" she asked, her voice small.
May you like
Moretti paused at the door, turning back to look at the small girl sitting in the oversized leather chair, her clean sheepskin boots dangling above the Persian rug.
"Only if they don't listen," he said.
