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  Tito-G’s mother was shaking her hair the way movie stars do when she felt it tangled in her husband’s grip. Then she saw the knife and turned her head to protect her face.

  The butchering was swift, starting at the door of the Palace. Tito-G’s mother pleaded with Momma De Luca to get Frankie from the restaurant’s kitchen, her voice cut off when her husband thrust a knife into the back of her head. “I pray for a boy, and you give me a fracio!” Mr. Giarizzo yelled. Then he crossed over to the other side of the street and down to his family’s basement apartment, still looking for Tito-G, who wasn’t there. “I’ll get him,” Mr. Giarizzo bellowed. But his rage was bursting from his hands and couldn’t be held inside. So he thrust it upon Red-eyed Blue, who’d been trying to free himself from the apartment, mauling the window, while howling in his mistress’s defense.

  On that murderous day, Tito-G had been so seduced by Concetta’s singing that he begged the mailman to let him deliver her letters so he’d have an excuse to get upstairs to her apartment and closer to her song. The three letters, the mailman explained to Tito-G, had Concetta’s own writing on the envelopes and were delivered to her only twice a year and on the same days. They had been coming like that for at least as long as he’d walked that route, and coincided with the few times Concetta was joyful and would sing out a beautiful aria of her own will. Tito-G remembered those days well.

  “Do you know what you’re wanting me to give up here?” the mailman asked, rhetorically, because he figured that Tito-G did. Handing over the letters meant he’d miss the warmest of all hugs from Concetta—the kind a lonely man like himself would be unlikely to surrender. Such loving was like a badge, and the mailman’s disposition on the two days he actually got to see Concetta each year shone like pearls piercing the smile on his face for the rest of Bokeem to see.

  Tito-G didn’t think the mailman would forfeit his joy so easily. It surprised him when he did.

  He’d made it to the second landing and was standing quietly outside Concetta’s door, listening through his own tears. He didn’t hear the wails from across the street or the sirens from police cars as they spun sideways to block the road or the commotion of the chase. It wasn’t until he heard someone screaming his name that the horror of his crumbled life became real.

  Tito-G didn’t make a sound until he tumbled down the stairs and ran across to the Palace. The rumble stunned Concetta, and she leaned out from her window.

  She was horrified to see Tito-G crawling in the street towards the body of his mother then taking her in his arms, rocking over her, while Mr. Giarizzo was being dragged from the scene. Tito-G’s father was laughing, boasting about what he’d done. And when he saw the boy, he yelled out, “Ah, there’s my fracio. See what you’ve made of your father?”

  Mr. Giarizzo figured he’d be let off once the court heard about his “fracio” son and the mother who’d been the boy’s accomplice. Three days later, he died of a heart attack in the city jailhouse—so his autopsy reads.

  In the moments when he was rocking his dead mother’s body against the sound of Mr. Giarizzo’s boisterous mocking, Tito-G was sure he’d be dead, too. “Ah, there’s my fracio. See what you’ve made of your father?”

  After the police finished their work, Tito-G crossed back over to his apartment. He hosed down the sidewalk and onto the street, where blood had gushed from Red-Eye Blue, who’d staggered to his death, still trying to save Mrs. Giarizzo. Then he spray painted on the curb a yellow and black message: This once was the home of a man who loved his Bible more than his family

  Concetta sang sweet and for hours the day of the murders, because she knew the hands that scored her tender skin, tangled her hair, and bruised the lovely calves that steadied the flow of her skirts would do the same to her if she even hinted she’d been battered by him.

  She’d gone down to comfort Tito-G and was surprised to see her letters, blood-soaked on the ground at his knees. She’d waited months to read the voices of her childhood friends: Holland, Aoife, and the one who’d stopped using her name and now called herself Girl-X. Words like gossiping and giggling filled the pages between them all over again. It had taken all the imagination Concetta could muster to orchestrate these gifts—finding an address for dead Aoife and keeping up with the others as they moved—but the three stacks of pre-addressed envelopes she mailed once a year were worth it. Three letters returned in winter, then again each summer. Concetta’s life depended on them.

  It was the one from Aoife she needed most because the dead girl’s letters had carried Concetta through the time the others stopped writing. But after a ten-year silence, they’d been coming regularly from all three since two Christmases past.

  She could not leave them. They were not a part of the scene, Concetta argued with herself as she submerged her hand in the pool of Mrs. Giarizzo’s blood and peeled them from the ground. Tito-G barely noticed Concetta’s intrusion until she brushed against his knee, startling him so that he flinched. The movement released Aoife’s letter, which had been stuck to his leg.

  Tito-G was convinced that Concetta’s song after the murders was given to him on that day for his grief too desperate to speak, the scene too horrid to recount. He believed, too, that Concetta’s singing when he stood outside her door had been another gift. It had saved his life. If he hadn’t been so captivated by her song earlier that day, his father would have found him at the Palace.

  Weeks, it took, to clean up the splattering from what used to be Mrs. Giarizzo.

  Momma De Luca committed herself to setting out a wash bucket and rags in front of the Palace so customers could discreetly wipe away specks of Mrs. Giarizzo that had still been missed, despite her many scrubbings of chairs and tables and the restaurant’s facade. And for weeks, dutiful patrons would quietly dip one of Momma De Luca’s rags in the water and pass over some small area then return then it to the bucket. Afterwards, Momma De Luca would come swiftly, carrying a warm, wet, soapy hand towel, and they‘d sponge down, take their place at a table, and give their order.

  The day that Momma De Luca retired the bucket, she walked over to Tito-G. He’d witnessed the cleansing from his old apartment stoop across the street, his mourning dress faded grey from days of being worn and washed, again and again. She clutched his hand to comfort him and said, “We are clean people again. Come home. Take a seat and rest yourself.” And she left him with her favorite blouse, a paisley print in blue.

  Tito-G did as she said. He put on that lovely blouse, then crossed the street to the Palace and staked his claim to the corner chair at a table right smack against the crime scene, where Momma De Luca had planted four bushes and set out a huge bouquet of yellow plastic flowers. There he’d waste his days until late evening, then retreat to wherever he had rested his head since the murders.

  When he came to get her on All Saints Day, Concetta could have told Tito-G that she’d sung her own pain, not his, the day of the murders. Before she’d surrendered to Michael Pianto and his mother, she had a real family of her own, two boys, ten and twelve, and a husband who thought she was special. That was before the day Maria Pianto put her into a sloppy hand-me-down wedding costume and turned Concetta over to the heavy-handed women with big hair and affection for tormented unions, who marched her down to St. Anthony’s Church on Milton Avenue and the aisle toward Michael Pianto. Michael had been propped up by his mother’s insistence that only a shamed woman like Concetta could appreciate a man with such a temper.

  Before the day she married Michael Pianto, Concetta Pianto had been known as Concetta Ferrari Rouledge and Concetta Ferrari before that.

  * Reputation *

  Concetta had lived her whole life in Yonkers until Sammy Rouledge came along and they got married and she moved with him to Brooklyn. Sammy had promised Concetta’s father that he’d honor her by being a most chivalrous husband and an attentive father whenever it pleased Concetta to become a mother.

  Her parents, Joseph and Anna Ferrari, and Concetta’s two older br
others had doted on her as if she’d been born of royal blood. So Mr. Ferrari applauded Sammy’s affection toward his daughter. But he was a lot less enthusiastic about Sammy’s occupation: a convenience store proprietor and common bookie.

  Reputation was everything to the Ferrari family. This was especially true for Mr. Ferrari, whose father had worked twenty years assembling car parts at the Siata automobile factory in Turin, Italy. He lived a miserly life, to his wife’s regret, so that his only son could get himself a business degree in America and a piece of the dream.

  Mr. Ferrari had done just that. In his first semester at NYU’s School of Commerce, Accounts, and Finance, he became fluent in English and eventually graduated in the top half of his class. He was a driven man, who refused to take his eyes off his books long enough to enjoy a girlfriend. Then he waited another three years after graduation for the right girl to come along. Of course, the future Mrs. Ferrari was a refined young woman, who hadn’t messed around all that much. They went on thirty dates and then married in a simple courthouse wedding because Mr. Ferrari was so bottled up that even one more date would have stretched his resolve beyond redemption. Reputation, that and his family, were all that mattered. No way, no how would Mr. Ferrari have allowed a man like Sammy Rouledge to tarnish either with his shady ways.

  Mr. and Mrs. Ferrari shared only one shame between them. Only one, but it was devastating.

  They’d been married just seven months and were living in a three-room starter flat in Manhattan, where Mr. Ferrari was working at a slaughter house in the Meatpacking District. His shifts were unbearably long. And there was no time to attend to Mrs. Ferrari need for affection. Sleep, eat, work seven days a week. Sex only on Friday and within the few spare moments before Mr. Ferrari went to sleep. This went on for as many months as they’d been married. Nothing Mrs. Ferrari could do aroused her husband the other six days in the week.

  She’d had enough the evening she greeted him at the door, wearing just her wedding ring and holding a slice of his favorite dessert, strawberry angel food cake, in her hand, without a plate.

  “Welcome home, honey,” she said, thinking, surely, he’d take the hint.

  “It’s Tuesday! What the hell are you thinking?” he retorted.

  As if this insult wasn’t enough to justify Mrs. Ferrari’s slamming the door in her negligent husband’s face, he piled on another.

  “Get me a fork. I might as well eat the damn cake.”

  Mrs. Ferrari seethed for days over the Tuesday slight. She was beautiful and sexy but drying up like an old maid confined to a monastery of well-disciplined monks.

  No way would she ever cheat on her husband. But that didn’t stop her from trying to see if she could if she wanted to.

  She decided to test the intensity of her mojo on a handsome man named Theodore Smith. He’d been eying her for months and made a habit of stopping in view of her kitchen window and grooming his hair, whenever he spotted her toiling at her sink.

  An arms-length experiment, she rationalized, the day Mrs. Ferrari unbuttoned her blouse and exposed her breast to her admirer. Bad timing.

  Mr. Ferrari had been feeling pretty frisky himself that day and had taken the afternoon off from work. He walked into his apartment at the moment Mrs. Ferrari began rubbing her nipples and the comb was falling from Theodore Smith’s hand.

  Mr. Ferrari hurled the only blow he’d ever throw at his wife before he yanked her from the window. Mrs. Ferrari was hysterically defiant and unleashed an il dolce suono/a mad song—the same wretched aria sung by the broken hearted Lucia di Lammermoor.

  She couldn’t be soothed nor quieted, though Mr. Ferrari tried. Her voice, even with all that pain, was beautiful to the ear.

  Outside their window, the people slowed and looked to see from where the music came. And Mr. Ferrari’s eyes lower, as his shame lifted above the neglect that had cause his beloved wife to suffer. There was never a day after that when he forgot to love his wife. And he swore he’d rattle the ground beneath his feet before he’d ever let a man neglect his daughter. It was an odd pledge at the time. The couple had no children, yet. After birth of Concetta, twelve years later, he’d prove that he hadn’t forgotten.

  Mr. Ferrari died the summer before Sammy’s troubles took his daughter down.

  Concetta had had a proper upbringing, just like her mother, but Sammy hadn’t waited for her the way Mr. Ferrari had for his bride. Then again, Mrs. Ferrari hadn’t waited for Mr. Ferrari, either, and she’d been good enough. Things might have been different for Concetta had she not spent all those years away at Saint Gabriel’s Girls Academy. It’s not as if she’d been cloistered. There had been plenty of mischief to indulge her curiosity whenever she was away at school, where she’d been a head huntress of evil spirits, presiding over séances in hopes of coaxing the demons from Holland’s dreams.

  There wasn’t much else about Saint Gabriel’s that had excited Concetta. The campus was classically appointed and the grounds lovely. The dorms were comfortable, but nothing like what she was accustomed to at home. She also wasn’t used to the torment leveled against her for being Italian and rich. A “Mafia princess,” some of the girls called her. But that wasn’t all—Concetta didn’t speak Spanish, like most of the other girls. They all spoke English, too, but most of them refused to use it with her as a way of shutting her out.

  Concetta’s Italian was pretty good. She could have managed the Spanish if she’d had more confidence, since the languages are so close. Naturally, she had plenty of company among the nuns, all of whom were Italian speaking. But there weren’t enough prayers and meditations between them to distract the girl from all the giggling and gossip to be had if only she had friends her own age.

  Irish Aoife, brown-skinned Girl-X, and Holland, the haunted one, refused their classmates’ prejudice against Concetta and took her into their fold.

  Holland and Aoife were the first to invite her in. The other girl, the uptight one who kept changing her name before settling on Girl-X, was polite at first but nothing more. It wasn’t until Concetta said she’d grown up playing with her colored neighbor’s kid, Jessica Geneva Jackson, and her parents never objected that they eased into a real friendship. None of them cared about the Mafia rumors—John Gotti was everyone’s hero—and from what they could see, when Concetta arrived at school in her three-limousine spectacle, her dad was just as well dressed and charming. Plus, they agreed that Concetta’s brothers were handsome as all get-out.

  They were best friends, the four of them, even after Aoife hanged herself. Concetta made sure of it.

  She’d convinced herself that Aoife was an angel, even when the girl was still alive. The others thought so, too, which was why they chose Aoife to communicate with Holland’s demons during the séances.

  Concetta had been in Paris with her family that Christmas break when Aoife died. She felt something had gone wrong, but figured one of the girls would tell her about it in their letters. She’d made packets of note cards and envelopes, already addressed, and had given a set to each of them before they’d left school for the holidays so they could keep in touch. Holland had been the first to write, and then a letter from Girl-X arrived at the dingy flat in Montmartre, near the Moulin Rouge, that Concetta’s father had mistakenly rented over the phone because he thought the place was near the Musée du Louvre. Aoife had only written one brief and disturbing note: I’ll be away but I can’t say where. Pray for me, and keep my sparkling hazel eyes in your memory.

  Concetta hoped there’d be a second letter explaining more, but none ever came. Later, she found out that Aoife had sent the same message to each of them.

  Concetta returned to school that spring semester already sensing the absence of Aoife. Father Michael confirmed it at that sham of a Mass they were hurried into their first day back at Saint Gabriel’s. Concetta’s palm sizzled when Father Michael admonished her dead friend’s sin, suicide. And she looked to see whether the cross from her rosary had branded itself there the way it h
ad when she’d led the séances where Aoife wrestled with Holland’s demons. It had.

  The burning faded, just as it always did. And Concetta passed her fingers over her palm to witness the cooling. Holland, sitting in the pew ahead, and Girl-X near the door, rubbed their palms, too. They all knew Aoife was still alive in some way. They’d hear her voice through her letters. Concetta would make sure.

  * The Intercessor *

  Concetta picked Cecilia Tselel’s address as the place to where letters to Aoife’s would be sent. The woman was known to leave her mail overflowing in her mailbox before she finally collected it and threw the entire lot in the trash unread.

  Concetta had never spoken to her—her parents didn’t allow it. “That lady Tselel’s place is perfect,” she mused as she addressed the envelopes to be sent from the girls to Aoife. She knew they’d be tossed unseen, and her secret kept.

  Concetta was almost sorry for Cecilia Tselel. The woman was suffering. Her husband died too soon. And without his income, taxes were eating away her home, along with the termites. The house was paid for and well-tended over the years. And there was plenty of savings and insurance money to keep her comfortable. Things would’ve been good for her had she not been toppled by an avalanche of bad luck.

  It started with a phone call from her son. He was finally getting married at fifty-three. And he wanted his mother to spot him “a few bucks,” until his loan came through. Sixty-two thousand, he asked for. He’d pay her back in forty days.

  Now, this man, Tselel’s only son, isn’t the type of guy you loan money to. The bank foreclosed on his house, after he gambled away months of mortgage payments making multiple bets on a horse named Slow and Steady. You’d think the chance of Slow and Steady not winning was a no-brainer. But this horse came with a promise. The best in the races were being paced by their jockeys, who’d taken payoffs, Tselel’s son’s bookie had told him. Four races later, the man was broke and his house was in foreclosure. He needed the sixty-two grand to purchase another home for his new wife.