Inside, where the verse should have been — where some printed angel should have wished the child long life and God's blessing in gold letters — there was nothing written at all. There was a bullet, taped flat to the card with a single strip of tape, the way a pressed flower is taped into a book. It stood there in its small brass patience among the christening wishes, and it did not need a single word of handwriting, because everyone at that font understood its language fluently, and it said, in its language: we know where she sleeps.
Vittorio did not tell June who had sent it. She would learn, in time, how much that not-telling cost him, and for whom. He told her only what he had done, and he told it the way a man lists the stops of a train he has been riding in the dark for twenty-nine years.
He had not wept. He wanted that understood too, later, when the hour was older and the inventory nearly done; he had not wept and he had not raged, because both of those were luxuries for men whose enemies could not count. He had finished the christening. He had stood at the font with his daughter in her white dress and answered the priest in the responses, in a voice the congregation afterward described as steady, and he had smiled for the one photograph — the photograph that would end its life in a deposit box in Baton Rouge, behind a brass key, beneath a mattress — and all the while, behind the steadiness, the arithmetic had been running, cold and very fast, the arithmetic his father's house had taught him before it taught him to shave.
A bullet in a christening card was not a murder. It was a promise of one, made politely, in advance, the way his world made all its worst arrangements. It meant the child's name and the child's day and the child's church had been sold by somebody, or found by somebody, and in his world the difference between sold and found was a detail for accountants. It meant that every year Anna Salerno grew older in New Orleans, she would grow older inside a target that other men's ambitions could aim at whenever the King needed reminding of the price of his throne.
"There is a way a man protects his family in my position," Vittorio said. "You will notice it is not the way other men protect theirs. Other men stand in front. In my position, a man who stands in front of his family is simply the first of them to be buried, and the rest are buried as a lesson with his name on it." He looked down at his hands. "The only protection I had to give them was distance. So I gave them all of it. All at once. Like a man cutting off a rope."
It was done in a single night.
He came to the apartment over the club at eleven with Benny and two suitcases and the look she had never seen on him, and Celeste read the whole of it off his face before he had closed the door — he said this with a kind of wonder, twenty-nine years later, in the study, to the housekeeper: she had not asked what happened. She had asked only: How long do we have? By one o'clock the apartment was a shell with the curtains still warm. The white dress went into a suitcase. The silver cup from her aunts went into another. Benny drove them himself, in an unmarked car, on the long way out of the city that avoids all the lit roads, with Anna asleep in a laundry basket lined with a blanket, because the car seat had been bought in Vittorio's name and Vittorio's name, that night, was the most dangerous object in Louisiana.
There was money. There would be money for years, arriving the way money arrives in his world when it is meant kindly — through Benny's hands, through intermediaries, in amounts that did not rhyme with each other. There were new names, drawn from a dead woman's family Bible: Lawson. Celeste Aubry, who had sung her own name off handbills on Frenchmen Street, became Celeste Lawson of Baton Rouge, a widow, and the child became Anna Lawson, father deceased, and the lie was built so carefully that in the end the only person it had to convince completely was Anna herself.
"I did not go to the car," Vittorio said. "Understand that too. I stood in her kitchen among the boxes and I did not go down to the car, because a man saying goodbye at a car at one in the morning is a picture somebody can keep. I have never — " he paused, and the pause had a shape, " — I have never said goodbye to my daughter. It is possible that is a mercy I arranged for myself and called it hers. I have had twenty-nine years to consider the possibility. I consider it most nights."
The money went out for years. School shoes became school fees; the envelopes changed their shape as Anna grew, the way a father watching from very far away must guess at the size of a life. And then, when Anna was nine, the money stopped — not because he had stopped sending it, but because Celeste, who had never once in all those years sent back so much as a word, sent back one line.
Benny had carried it. Benny had stood in this same study, in another October, and laid a plain envelope on this desk, and the King of New Orleans had opened the only letter he would ever receive from the woman he loved, and it had contained eleven words.
Let her hate a ghost, not a target.
"Eleven words," Vittorio said, "and she was right in every one of them. A ghost can be hated safely. A ghost cannot be followed home. I stopped the money that month. I stopped everything, except — " For the first time since June had sat down in the petitioner's chair, the composure of the man across the desk moved, not breaking, but shifting, like a great ship shifting at anchor. "Except the writing. That night I sat at this desk and I wrote the first of them. She had had a birthday. I had missed it the way I intended to miss all of them, thoroughly and forever, and I found that my hand had other instructions." He looked at June, and the lamplight was not kind to either of them, and it did not matter at all. "You found the rest beneath my mattress, Miss Calloway. You know where I keep them."
Chapter 11: Twenty-Nine Letters
He did not take the cedar box back upstairs at once.