The Don's Omega

The butter was the problem. The butter was always the problem.

Alfie had the dough block on the marble at ten past four, the radio murmuring a Phillies replay low enough to count as a mood rather than a sound, and the back door propped open with a milk crate so the October air could come in and keep the kitchen honest. Laminating was a temperature game. Anyone who had ever tried to make croissants at home and pulled a sad, greasy brioche out of the oven knew this in their bones. The butter had to be cold enough to hold as a sheet and warm enough to bend, and his hands ran hot. His hands were the enemy.

He rolled the block long, folded it in thirds and turned it.

A curl dropped into his eye. He pushed it back with his wrist, which put flour on his eyebrow, which he accepted as the cost of doing business.

“Third turn,” he told the dough. “Then you rest, I get coffee, and we both pretend we like each other.”

The dough had never once pretended anything in its life. It sat there being beautiful.

Out front, Miele was dark. He liked it best at this hour, before Gem came in shouting about parking and the first regulars pressed their faces to the glass like kids outside a pet shop. The display cases were empty and wiped down. The chalkboard still read PUMPKIN MARITOZZI: BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND (DEMAND = GEM). East Passyunk was asleep apart from a garbage truck groaning somewhere near the fountain.

He had the rolling pin halfway down the block when the front window came in.

It sounded like a tray of glasses dropped on tile, followed by a longer, finer sound as the rest of the pane gave up on being a pane and slid out of its frame onto the display case and the floor. Cold air shoved in off the street. The radio went on talking about a double play.

A brick skidded across the floor and stopped against the leg of the café table by the window.

Alfie looked at it.

Then he looked at his hands, still on the rolling pin, still on the dough, and thought quite clearly: the butter’s going to break.

He had no idea why that was the thought.

There was a square of glossy card taped to the brick. He had crossed the kitchen and rounded the counter before he’d decided to do either, stepping over glass in his work clogs, and he was crouched by the table with flour on his knees when he saw what it was.

A Polaroid.

The colours had gone the orange of old photographs, but the room was clear enough. Concrete walls. A pipe in the corner with rust bleeding down from a joint. A cheap chrome kitchen chair, and a boy tied to it with his wrists wrenched behind the backrest and zip ties biting into them. The boy’s head hung forward. His hair was curly and too long, and blood had crusted at his temple where it met the hairline.

Alfie had a scar there, a thin pale line you had to move his hair to find.

He knew that chair. He knew that pipe, and the drip that had fallen from its joint every twenty-two seconds, because he’d counted them for three days.

He hadn’t known anyone was taking pictures.

The radio got quieter, though the dial hadn’t moved. The sound drifted further off, as if someone had carried the radio into another room and shut the door, then come back for the kitchen and carried that off too. He stopped feeling the cold on his arms. His hands went on holding the photograph, and they seemed to belong to someone standing slightly behind him.

The butter, he thought again, from a long way away.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

He came back on the floor.

That was how it usually went. Nobody warned you that the worst part of dissociating was the landing: realising you’d been gone and your body had been left to handle things without supervision. He was sitting behind the counter with his back against the lower shelves and his knees up, and the Polaroid lay face-down on the tile beside his foot. He didn’t remember putting it there, or walking back around the counter. Yet here he was, wedged between the day-old bread bin and the sacks of sugar like a raccoon who’d made some choices.

Someone was hammering on the back door.

“Alfie! Alfonso, I swear to God—”

Gem. So the milk crate had been kicked out of the doorway, or he’d moved it himself and locked up, which would be a new and alarming skill.

The clock above the walk-in said 4:52. He’d lost nearly forty minutes.

“Coming,” he said. It came out a croak, so he tried again. “Coming. I’m coming.”

His legs were stiff. He hauled himself up on the counter and saw the front of his own shop properly for the first time: the empty frame, the glitter of glass over everything, the brick by the table. Across the street a light had gone on in an upstairs window. Nobody had come out. On Passyunk at five in the morning, a broken window was somebody else’s business until it was yours.

He opened the back door and Gem nearly fell into him. She was in her enormous purple puffer with her keys still bristling between her fingers, and her face went from furious to frightened as she looked past his shoulder.

“What the fuck,” she said.

“Someone threw a brick.”

“I can see someone threw a brick. Why weren’t you answering your phone? I called you nine times. I thought you were dead in the walk-in. I thought you’d locked yourself in with the cream and gone out like a Victorian.” She grabbed his forearms and looked him up and down, and her voice dropped. “Hey. You went somewhere, didn’t you.”

He didn’t answer. Gem had worked for him for three years and seen it twice, which was two times more than he’d have liked.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m calling the cops.”

“No.”

“Alfie, there is a brick in the—”

“Gem.” He picked the Polaroid up without turning it over and pushed it into his apron pocket. His fingers were clumsy. It took him two goes. “I need you to go home.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I need you to tape a sign on the door that says we’re closed for a family emergency, and then go home.”

She stared at him. Gem Castellano was twenty-six, five foot one, and had once walked a man out of Miele by the ear for telling her to smile more. She did not look like someone who went home.

“What’s in your pocket?”

“A bill.”

“You’re lying to me with flour on your eyebrow.”

He scrubbed at his face and made it worse. “Please.”

She went, eventually. First she taped up the sign, swept the worst of the glass off the pavement, and made him drink half a glass of water while she watched with her arms folded. She informed him she’d be back at six whether he liked it or not.

When she was gone, he stood in the middle of the kitchen with his phone in his hand.

In his family there was only one person you called when a brick came through your window with your childhood taped to it. There had only ever been one. Alfie had spent a decade building a life in which he’d never have to make this call, and the whole time some part of him had known the number was still sitting first in his favourites, under Papa.

He pressed it.

His father picked up on the second ring, sounding wide awake. Sandro Genovese was sixty-seven and retired, and he still slept like someone who expected the phone to ring.

“Alfonso.”

“Hi, Papa.”

A pause. His father had always been able to read him from one word. “What happened?”

Alfie told him about the window, the brick and the photograph. His voice stayed level right up until he got to the chair, and then it stopped cooperating. He heard his father get out of bed. He heard a door, a drawer, keys.

“Don’t touch anything else,” Sandro said.

“I’m not a crime scene, Papa. I’m a bakery.”

“Stay inside. Lock the back. I’m sending someone.”

“I don’t need someone. I only called because—” He had no idea why he’d called. He’d called because he’d been twelve for forty minutes on his own floor, and twelve-year-olds call their fathers. “I wanted you to know.”

“I’m sending someone,” his father said again, in a tone Alfie hadn’t heard since he was fourteen and caught climbing out of his bedroom window to go to a Green Day show.

Then he hung up.

Alfie regretted it at once, with his entire body. He sat on the stool by the marble and looked at the croissant dough, which had gone soft and slack while he was gone, the butter weeping at its edges. Forty minutes in a warm kitchen. The lamination was ruined. It would bake up greasy and flat, a shameful puddle where there should have been a honeycomb.

He dropped it in the bin, and for some reason that was what made his eyes sting.

He was scrubbing the marble with a bench scraper, harder than marble had ever needed scrubbing, when headlights swung across the front of the shop.

A car pulled up at the curb, long and black and polished. It was the kind of sedan that never appeared in South Philly except at funerals, and at the sort of christening where nobody asked what anybody did for work. The engine cut. The driver’s door opened, and a lean man with prematurely grey hair and a leather jacket climbed out and scanned the street in both directions. Then the rear door opened.

The man who got out of the back had to duck to do it.

He straightened up, and kept straightening, and Alfie had the brief deranged thought that the car must have been storing him folded. He was enormous: broad in the shoulders under a charcoal overcoat cut so well it looked as if someone had weighed him first and given the wool exact instructions. Black hair combed back. Dark stubble along a hard jaw. He stood on the pavement between the little swept piles of glass and looked down at them. Then he looked through the empty frame at the brick. Then he lifted his eyes and looked directly at Alfie.

Alfie knew that face.

Everybody in Sandro Genovese’s world knew it. He’d seen it across the church at his mother’s funeral, and at the back of rooms, and once in a newspaper photograph beside a headline that used the word alleged three times in one paragraph. He had never heard it speak to him, and he’d made sure of that.

Damone Messina stepped over the ruined sill as though he’d been invited through a door.

“Alfonso,” he said. “Your father sent me.”