They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 04
Chapter 4 – S. Marchetti Is a Girl
Sixty-one missed calls in nine minutes.
MAMA. PAPA. DOMINIC. MAMA. GABRIEL. MAMA. MAMA.
Three hundred and seventy-two days of silence, and now my phone was shaking in my hand like something dying.
I was two miles from the gates of the Requiem on the morning my family finally noticed I existed.
I pulled onto the shoulder and watched the screen light up like a slot machine.
“You could answer,” Nonna said. “You could hear what she has to say.”
“She had a year,” I said, and turned it face down. “She can have a year back.”
Here’s the thing about the number sixty-one. That’s not love. That’s panic. Love shows up on day two. Panic shows up the moment somebody realizes there’s going to be a phone call from the Commission.
I drove the last two miles and stopped in front of twelve feet of wrought iron with a silver crown worked into the
middle of it.
The gate man came out of his booth, took one look at me, and actually laughed.
“Deliveries at the south entrance, sweetheart.”
I handed him the black card without a word.
He read it. He read it again. He read it a third time. Then he keyed his radio and said, in an entirely different voice, “Sir.
Marchetti is at the north gate.” A pause. “S. Marchetti is a girl.”
Behind me, three vans of new recruits had gone completely silent.
“Enjoy this,” Nonna purred. “You’ll be hearing that sentence for the rest of your life.”
The Requiem sits on a hundred and sixty acres of stone and glass that the Vittorio family has owned since 1911.
Forty of us in the intake year. By the end of the trial fortnight there will be twenty-eight, and the twelve who fail get
walked off the property and blacklisted from every family on the coast. Forever. No second chance, no appeal, no
other door.
Director Falco met me on the front steps holding my file like a man who’s just been handed a live grenade with a
ribbon on it.
“Miss Marchetti. You’ll be skipping the trial fortnight.”
“Sir?”
“The envelope you sent us contained three names. Two of them we already suspected.” He said it loudly. On purpose, I’m fairly sure. “The third had been on this campus for nine years. You did in one letter what my counterintelligence
section did not do in four. It would waste everyone’s time to watch you climb a rope.”
Thirty-nine people looked at me like I’d killed something they loved.
They gave me to a man named Emmett instead. Sixty years old, built like a retaining wall, and in fourteen days he
never once told me I’d done well.
He tested recall. He tested Commission law – ninety years of sit-downs, arbitration precedent, blood-debt statute. He gave me scenarios designed to end badly. Two families. One dead heir. Four hours before somebody’s sons start dying. Go.
On day nine he stopped mid-sentence and stared at me for a long moment.
“Who taught you this?”
“My father,” I said. “By accident.”
Because that’s the joke, isn’t it. Every hour I spent as a kid at the little desk in the corner of Rafael Marchetti’s study,
filing his papers, fetching his coffee, listening to him negotiate with monsters – he thought he was babysitting.
He was training the person who’d replace him.
The other recruits ate together, so I ate with them. It took four days to want to drown all of them. The worst was
Marco Greco’s cousin, Tino, jaw like a shovel, opinions like a landfill – and his shadow, a girl named Odile who told a room of forty people that “the little one” got a pass because somebody at the top wanted her in his bed.
“May I bite her?” Nonna asked.
“Behave.”
On the last morning of the fortnight they packed us into the hall.
Director Falco walked onto the stage. And behind him, without ceremony, came an old man in a charcoal suit who
owns half of everything east of Cleveland, and the room made a sound like all the air had left it.
Don Aurelio Vittorio. Capo dei capi.
“Today you learn whether you belong to the Requiem,” Falco said. “Twelve of you go home within the hour. I’ll name
seven Captains. Then Don Vittorio will name this year’s Unit Commander.”
Beside me, Tino Greco stretched out his legs and smirked at the ceiling.
Falco read the Captains. “Ines. Tomas. Renata. Fabi. Gio. Dara.” A pause that lasted a year. “Marchetti.”
Then the cuts. Eleven names, faces going white one row at a time.
Tino was still smirking when Falco said the twelfth.
“Greco.”
Odile’s name came right after his, and she screamed – a real one, unhinged – and Tino dragged her out of that hall
with his hand over her mouth and murder in his eyes.
I should have watched him go more carefully.
I didn’t, because the old man had stepped to the front of the stage.
“Unit Commander outranks every Captain in this intake,” he said. “It is the highest seat in this house that is not mine. I have watched all of you for fourteen days.”
His eyes found me in the back row and stopped.
“This year’s Unit Commander is Siena Marchetti.”
–
And in the ringing, disbelieving silence, a man three rows over whispered to the man beside him not quietly enough.
“Marchetti? The Marchettis reported their daughter missing this morning.”
