Chapter 19: The Sit-Down
The message went to the Castellanos the way messages between their world and Luca's had always gone: not by phone, not by letter, but by a man standing in a place where he could be seen standing, saying a thing he could later deny saying. This time the man was Father Anselmo, who had buried Morettis and Castellanos for forty years and owed earthly loyalty to neither, and the place was the back pew of St. Rita's after the noon Mass.
He came to the lake house at dusk with his hat in his hands and ate two of Mia's almond biscuits standing up in the kitchen, because he said it was a sin to carry news on an empty stomach.
"Vittorio Castellano will hear you," he told Luca, in the dining room, with Marco against the wall and Mia β by Luca's order, which surprised everyone including Luca β seated at the table with her notebook. "That is more than I expected, and considerably more than his son advised. Rocco told him, in my hearing, that if he sat at your table he would not walk back from it."
"And what did the old man say?" Luca asked.
"He said his son has confused a dinner with a war before, and it has always cost him the dinner." The priest turned a biscuit crumb on the tablecloth with one finger. "There are conditions. His own taster present, seated below the salt, with access to your kitchen before and during the meal. His driver remains outside with the engine running β his words, Luca, forgive me β and the meeting is at your table but on a neutral day. A saint's day. Saturday."
"One condition of his is unspoken," Marco said from the wall. "Name it, Father."
Father Anselmo looked at Mia, and the room went very still.
"He knows about the girl," the priest said. "Everyone knows about the girl; a waitress who knocked a poisoned plate out of your hand is not a thing your world keeps quiet, Luca. Vittorio asked me three questions about her. Who feeds her. Whether she eats from the same dishes she serves. And whether the food she makesβ" he hesitated, and something in his old face softened with wonderβ"whether it tastes like anything his wife used to make. He would not say more. His condition, made plain, is this: she cooks. Not your chefs, not your grandmother's staff. The waitress cooks the dinner, every dish, or he sends his regrets and we bury more boys in the spring."
The silence after that had a shape. Marco's arms came uncrossed. Luca looked at Mia across thirty feet of polished table, and she understood that the most dangerous negotiation in Chicago in twenty years had just been handed, entire, to a diner waitress who still owed eleven hundred dollars on a car that didn't run.
"Then I'd better know what he eats," Mia said, and opened the notebook. "Father. Everything you know. What did his wife cook? What does he refuse? What's the dish he asks for when he's ill, the one only old men ask for? And where was he born β not the city, Father. The village. Old men don't dream about cities."
The priest talked for an hour. Some of it she had from Nonna Sofia already, whispered over Sunday sauce; some of it was new, and she wrote it all in her small cook's hand, and none of them β not Luca with his wars, not Marco with his suspicions β interrupted her once.
"You understand what he's done," Luca said. "If this dinner fails, it fails with your name on it. If a man so much as coughs wrong on Saturday, two families will say the waitress spoiled the peace, and there will be men in this city who will want that debt collected. I can protect you from a great deal, Mia. I cannot protect you from a story."
"I stopped a plate with my hand the first day I met you," Mia said. "I've been in the story since before I knew there was one." She turned the notebook toward him, page after page of the old man's life in her small hand β the refusing of pork since his heart frightened him, the anchovy toast he asked for when he was ill, the forbidden sweet wine he would ask for anyway. "He's seventy-eight, Luca. He's buried a wife and he's about to bury a son's war, one way or another. Men like that don't come to a table for terms. They come to find out if there's anything left in the world that tastes like it did before they became frightening."
"You think you can cook a man backward into his own life."
"I think," Mia said, "it's the only door he left unlocked. He asked for me, Luca. Not your chef. Me. He already knows it too."
That night the house turned into an arsenal of a different kind. Mrs. Ricci inventoried the dining room like a quartermaster: thirty chairs reduced to twelve, the long table shortened by its leaves, the good silver counted and recounted. Marco walked the grounds and chose where men would stand and where, by the ancient rules, no man would stand at all β there was to be a corridor of peace from the Castellano car to the front door. His own taster, a silent Calabrian named Pietro who had eaten before Marco for eleven years, was briefed to stand in Mia's kitchen and watch her hands; the Castellanos' man would stand beside him and watch them both.
"Two tasters," Marco said to her at midnight, in the kitchen doorway, while she tested a broth for the third time. "Two families. One table. And a menu that exists nowhere on paper, because my brother won't allow it written down in case the Castellano boy decides Saturday needs fireworks." He watched her salt the broth with her fingertips, by feel, the way her grandmother had taught her. "No pressure, waitress."
"There's one thing neither of you has asked," Mia said. "What I am cooking toward. You all think a dinner is a dinner."
"And it isn't?"
"It's a door," Mia said. "Every dish is a room he has to walk through to get to the next one. By the time he reaches the coffee, I need Vittorio Castellano to have remembered who he was before he ever heard the name Moretti. I can't cook that out of a cookbook, Marco. I have to cook it out of memory itself. His. Mine. Your grandmother's. So tomorrow I am going to do the hardest thing I have done in this house β harder than the plate, harder than the dark."
"Which is?"