"Nineteen ninety-six," Vittorio said. "I was forty years old and I had been the head of this family for six years, and I believed — because I was forty, and a fool in the specific way that powerful men are fools — that I had already had everything in life that was going to happen to me. The rest, I thought, was administration."
There was a club on Frenchmen Street, in the Marigny, with a door that stuck in wet weather and a ceiling fan that had never once kept time with any band that played under it. He had gone there on a night when he was supposed to be elsewhere, and Benny had said, we have twenty minutes, boss, there's a place. And Vittorio Salerno, who did not have twenty minutes for anything that was not strategy, had gone in out of the rain for twenty minutes, and stayed for three hours, and gone back the next night, and the next.
"Her name was Celeste Aubry," he said. "She sang."
He did not say she was beautiful first. June noticed that, and filed it away with the fraction of an inch and the leaning handwriting, in the small archive she was becoming. He said she sang the way other people told the truth: without raising her voice, and without asking permission, and without once looking at the room to see whether the room approved. She sang old songs. She sang them like letters from people who had gone away and were not coming back, which — though neither of them knew it that first night, over the stuck door and under the fan — was precisely what she would become.
"She had no people in the life," he said. "I want you to understand that. She was not a moll. She was not a cousin of anyone, she was not a message anyone was sending me. She was a church girl from Algiers who could read music and would not take money she hadn't earned. She thought what I did for a living was — " the ghost of something crossed his face, " — she called it 'the shipping.' For a year I let her call it that. It was the only mercy anybody offered me in that entire decade, and it was a lie I told by smiling."
The family treated it as a season. He said this without bitterness, which was how June knew it was the bitterest part. A season: the word his brother Cesare had used, at a Sunday table, in front of their mother, with the pleasantness of a man discussing weather over roast pork. Kings had seasons. Seasons turned. Nobody in that house, including Vittorio, had understood that she was not a season.
Because she would not be hidden in the way the family meant hiding. She would not take the apartment in the Quarter with the rent in an envelope. She sang in her club, she kept her own hours and her own name on the handbills, and when she laughed at something he said she laughed with her whole face turned up to him, in public, in rooms where men he owned were drinking. "She made me ordinary," Vittorio said. "You cannot imagine what that cost a man in my position to love. It cost nothing. That was the catastrophe. It cost nothing, and so I thought it could go on."
In the spring of 1997 she told him she was carrying his child, and he had been prepared, by forty years of his father's house, for every response in the catalogue: anger, arrangement, the envelope, the drive to a clinic in another state with a false name on the chart. He had not been prepared for his own. He had sat in her small kitchen over the club with a glass of water going warm in his hand and he had heard himself say, before any council of his pride had been consulted: Then we'll be married in June. She had studied him across that table with the look she gave a song she was deciding whether to trust, and she had said: Not in June. When it's born. So it knows it was chosen, not managed.
"Anna," he said. "She was born in October, in the middle of the night, in a hospital where I paid cash and signed nothing. Six pounds. Hair like — " He stopped. His hands, in his lap, had folded themselves without consulting him, the way the handwriting leaned. "She had her mother's mouth. She had my — Benny said she had my temper. She was three hours old and Benny stood in the corridor of a maternity ward at four in the morning holding two cigars he did not know what to do with, and I stood at the glass and I was — " The King of New Orleans searched, with great care, for a word in the language he used to speak. "I was a father," he said. "It is the only title I have ever held that I did not have to frighten anyone to keep."
For eleven days, it had been possible: eleven days in which Anna Salerno — for she was Salerno in those eleven days, in his mouth and in Celeste's — existed in the world unthreatened, in a small apartment full of flowers sent by no one, because he had forbidden flowers, because flowers could be traced.
The christening was Celeste's idea, and her mother's before her, and it was the one battle of the whole year that he had lost gladly. A child would be christened. Her people did not leave children unchristened like parcels at a depot; there would be a church, and a white dress, and godparents. He had argued security. She had argued heaven. Heaven, eleven days into the child's life, was undefeated.
"The christening was on a Sunday," Vittorio said, "at the church on Dauphine where her mother had been married. I was to stand at the font with my daughter in a white dress and be, for one hour, nothing but a man whose child was being blessed." He rose then, slowly, and stood at the window as he had stood when she came in, with the unslept city below them going slowly grey. "I have stood at a great many tables since, Miss Calloway, and made a great many men afraid. I want you to know that I would burn every one of those tables to stand at that font again." His voice did not rise. It did not need to. "The cards were laid out on a table by the church door. Gifts. Wishes. Her aunts had seen to all of it. And one of the cards, in an envelope the color of cream, with no name on the front — one of the cards was for me."
Chapter 10: The Bullet in the Card
The card was cream, and heavy, and it had no name on the envelope, and Benny Osei opened it because opening things was Benny's portion in life — and Benny, who had stood in doorways for thirty years and never once been seen to hurry, went the color of old paper.