They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 06
Chapter 6 – The Punch at the Table
Sunday night, I asked Renata to cut my hair.
It came off just above the shoulders, all one length. Two people had grabbed it in training and put me on my back with
it, and I have precisely enough ego to hate losing twice.
When I walked into the common room, my unit whistled and drummed the table like animals.
“You look like a woman about to ruin a man’s month,” Nonna observed.
“That’s the idea.”
Monday morning, I put on the Commander’s black for the first time. Silver crown at the collar. The single bar on the sleeve that means every Captain in this intake answers to me.
Fabi handed me a coffee without looking up. “You know they all still think you’re a man, right? The other Capos. They’ve been calling you him for a year.”
“Well,” I said. “Last time I checked, I lack the necessary equipment.”
“You’ve got the balls, though, Commander,” Dara said into her cereal.
I was still laughing when I came up the steps of the main house nine minutes late.
Director Falco was waiting outside the doors with the expression of a man watching someone carry a lit match into a
fireworks factory.
“They’re all inside.”
“Wonderful.”
I opened the door.
Seven Capos around a long table. The old man at the head. A young man at his right with a jaw you could cut yourself
And near the window, arms folded, a tall one with gray eyes who looked up when the door opened and went
completely, comically still.
“Apologies for my lateness, Don Vittorio,” I said. “One of my people had to remind me that I lack the necessary
equipment to qualify as a man, and I lost track of time.”
Somebody choked on his water.
Every head at that table snapped toward me at once, and I watched seven grown men rearrange twelve months of
assumptions in about a second and a half.
“I’m Commander Siena Marchetti.”
I crossed to the old man and bowed, small and correct. “Good morning, sir. It won’t happen again.”
Don Vittorio’s face did not move at all. His eyes were absolutely dancing.
“Commander Marchetti. My congratulations to your unit on finishing three weeks early. The first in forty-one years.”
Actual, audible gasps.
Somebody down the table muttered in Neapolitan to his neighbor – I’d have that in my bed by Friday and I did not turn my head. I just filed the voice, the pitch, the exact words, the time. 11:04 a.m. Forever.
“My son,” the old man said. “Cassio.”
The jaw. He shook my hand and said, deadpan, “How did your unit take the news you’re not a man?”
“They pointed out that I have the balls anyway, sir.”
Somebody made a strangled noise.
“God,” I said. “I need to send a team out to look for my filter. It’s been missing since Tuesday.”
Cassio Vittorio laughed out loud. The gray-eyed one bit the inside of his cheek hard enough that I heard the click of
his teeth.
“And this,” said the old man, “is Capo Dante Ricci. Your neighbor these past twelve months, I believe.”
“Capo.”
“Commander.” His voice did something inconvenient to my spine, which I chose to ignore, because I was working.
“Would you excuse me one moment, sir? There’s something I have to do.”
I walked down the length of that table.
Marco Greco was leaning back in his chair, smirking, opening his mouth to say something clever about my height.
I hit him once, everything I had, right on the hinge of the jaw.
He came off the chair and hit the floor like a sack of wet laundry.
Nobody moved. The old man did not move.
I crouched down where he was scrabbling on the carpet and made my voice very quiet and very pleasant.
“Captain Renata Sala. Friday. The corridor outside the kitchens. Four fifty-one p.m. You said, and I’m quoting you exactly: Then I’ll file a fitness report Monday, and your little girl commander won’t be able to save you.”
Greco’s face went gray.
“If you ever threaten a woman’s career to get her into your bed again,” I said, “the Table will be the least of your
problems. Are we clear?”
He tried to get up. I shifted my weight forward maybe two inches.
He stayed down.
“Siena,” the old man said. Not Commander. “Explain.”
So I did. All of it. And then I asked the question that stopped every man in that room breathing.
“How many women have been washed out of the Requiem on a fitness report, sir? And how many of those reports
were filed by a Capo they said no to?”
The door opened. Two of Don Vittorio’s own men came in and lifted Greco off the floor.
They took him out through the door that doesn’t lead outside.
“After this meeting,” the old man said into the silence, “I will speak with each of you. One at a time. If any of you has
ever used that tactic, I suggest you think hard about what you’d like your last honest sentence to be.”
Six men went very pale.
Dante Ricci didn’t. Dante Ricci was looking at me like a man who’d just found something he’d stopped believing was
real.
