They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 08
Chapter 8 What’s Under Cross Street
Two old men, seventy soldiers, and one girl standing on a white line in the middle of the road.
Gaspare Fiole is seventy-four and built like a bull that’s been dying angrily for a decade. Elio Ardenne is eighty, thin as wire, with a cane he does not need.
“They sent a child,” Fiole said.
“They sent a Commander of the Requiem,” I said. “First question. Why do you want this building?”
Fiole opened his mouth to bark something about his grandfather’s name.
And I said, before he could: “Careful. I’ll know.”
Because here is the thing about a house in your head where nothing is ever thrown away.
“October 1994,” I said. “My father’s study. You came to see him, Don Fiole, and you sat in the green chair, and you said, and I quote – Rafael, nobody touches Cross Street. Not for money, not for God. Let it rot. I was eleven. I was under the desk with a coloring book. You gave me a butterscotch on the way out.”
Gaspare Fiole’s face went the color of ash.
“Second question.” I turned to Ardenne. “What’s buried in there?”
The old man’s cane hit the asphalt.
Both of them stopped breathing at the same instant. Seventy men shifted, confused, waiting on orders that never
came.
“Nobody has opened that door in ninety-four years,” I said. “You’ve spent two years and a fortune making sure the other one doesn’t own it. You don’t want the building, my lords. You want it shut.”
“There’s nothing in there,” Fiole growled.
“Then you won’t object to the Table sending a survey team.”
Ardenne sat down slowly on the warehouse step and put his face in his hands.
It took forty minutes and most of a bottle of Fiole’s whiskey to get the story, and I sent my entire unit thirty yards back so two old men could stop performing.
In 1931, both families buried a girl in that building.
Nineteen years old. Married off from a third family to seal a peace between them. Dead fourteen months later. The
marriage was burned out of every record, the door was sealed, and for ninety-four years each family has lain awake
terrified the other would one day open it and use what was inside.
“Whose daughter?” I asked.
Fiole looked at the ground. “Doesn’t matter. She’s been dead a hundred years.”
“Whose. Daughter.”
“They never gave the name,” Ardenne said.
He said it badly. Old men lie with their hands.
“The Marchetti girl,” Fiole said, and Ardenne hissed at him, and the whole street tilted eleven degrees.
I kept my face perfectly still. I’ve had a year of practice keeping a face perfectly still while my chest caves in.
“Here’s your settlement,” I said. “You cede the building jointly, in perpetuity, to the Table. Neither family owns it. Neither family can open it. The Table consecrates it, seals it, and posts a warden. You both stop paying seventy men to stand in a street, and you both start sleeping.”
Silence.
“And you put her name on a stone,” I said. “Whoever she was. She was somebody’s girl before she was your problem.”
Fiole, who has hated Ardenne since before the moon landing, was the one who broke.
“Fine,” he said hoarsely. “God forgive me. Fine.”
They signed at ten p.m. on the hood of my car, and Ardenne’s hands shook so badly that Fabi had to hold the paper
flat.
As they left, the old man stopped in front of me and stared at my face for a long, long moment.
“Forgive an old man,” he said. “You have Vittoria Marchetti’s eyes.”
“You knew my grandmother?”
“I was at her wedding.” He was very pale now. “Child. Does anyone know what you are?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.” His hand closed on my forearm and his voice dropped to nothing. “You recited a sentence from 1994. Word for word. With the butterscotch.”
Every hair on my body stood up.
“Say nothing,” Nonna said sharply.
“Good night, my lord.”
“They killed the last one,” he said, and his eyes were wet. “Not quickly. In a house, over nine years, by the husband
who found out what she could do. He’d bring men to dinner and sit her at the table and have her recite it all back to him afterward. That’s what’s behind that door, girl. That’s what our families agreed to bury.”
He let go of my arm.
“Go home. Get behind your father’s walls,”
“I don’t have a father,” I said, and got in the car.
I closed a two-year war in ninety-one minutes. Don Vittorio called it the fastest arbitration in the history of the Table.
My unit was insufferable the entire drive back.
I didn’t hear a word of it.
Because I finally understood what Renata had tried to tell me. Two bloodlines on record.
And I was doing arithmetic I didn’t want to do: a girl with my grandmother’s eyes, buried in 1931 – and a family that
stopped saying my name the morning after my seventeenth birthday.
We pulled through the gates at dawn.
Ines went up the steps ahead of me to unlock our wing, and stopped dead.
Before we left, she’d wedged a playing card in the door frame at ankle height, because a few of them had had a
feeling somebody was getting into our quarters.
The card was lying on the floor.
