Zero, What a God!

Chapter 6

The stonemason behind St. Anne's Church looked Vittorio's uniform up and down. "Our cheapest headstone costs more than you make in a month, guard."

Vittorio had ridden straight from Mercer Street in his uniform, with the windbreaker still hiding the torn shirt, past the bakery and the harbor cranes, while the church bells rang half past eight.

The message from S. still sat unanswered on his cracked phone.

The stonemason had read the patch on his sleeve before he bothered to read his face.

A month of his pay was a number Vittorio knew by heart, because for half a year he had counted it in twenty-dollar bills at the kitchen table.

He took a creased envelope from his jacket and set it on the workbench between a chisel and a coffee mug. "I'm not asking for the cheapest, sir. I want the best gray granite in your yard, with her name cut deep enough that the rain can't wash it out."

The envelope held five hundred and twenty dollars, one bill for every week since the funeral. On the weeks it came up short, he had skipped his coffee at the gas station and eaten the stale crackers from the guard post.

Hearing that, the stonemason snorted and wiped marble dust off his hands. "Five hundred and twenty won't buy the corner of that granite, son. I cut stone, I don't sell it on installments. Whose grave are we talking about?"

"Teresa Moretti. She's behind the chapel, by the old fence, under a metal marker," Vittorio said.

The old man grumbled under his breath and flipped open a ledger stained with coffee rings. He ran a thick finger down the page, then stopped and frowned.

"Moretti, here it is. That one's already started, son. The deposit for the gray granite came in on Tuesday, cash, full price, left in an envelope at the parish office. I cut the first letters yesterday afternoon."

"Who paid it?" Vittorio's hand froze on his own envelope.

"No name on it. Whoever it was didn't want any thanks, and the priest never saw a face." The stonemason shrugged and closed the ledger with a thump.

Tuesday was the same day Dr. Graves's office had stopped his pills. Who in Port Halden had cared enough about a dead housekeeper to buy her a stone and then hide from her son?

Teresa had cleaned for rich families all her life, and none of them had come to her funeral. Six months ago, Vittorio had stood at that grave with the priest, Grandpa Walter in his wheelchair, and the woman from the laundromat downstairs. Now a stranger had beaten him to the last thing he could still do for her.

He put the envelope back in his pocket and walked around the chapel to the old fence. Wet grass soaked the hems of his uniform trousers, and behind the church, a lawnmower coughed and died.

Teresa's grave was still a bare mound with a metal marker. The grass on it had come in thin and patchy, and a plastic daisy someone had left there was bleached white by the rain. Vittorio knelt on the damp ground and brushed a dead leaf off the marker.

"Celine Rhodes says someone threw you, Ma, and I believe her. You were scared of heights your whole life. You wouldn't even stand on a chair to change a light bulb, so you never walked to the edge of that ravine on your own."

Then he let the memories come one at a time, the way the Corps had taught him to sort a battlefield.

The first memory was a blizzard. He was fourteen and barefoot, standing in a line of shaking boys. The hooded instructor the recruits called the Commandant stopped in front of him and drew a knife across his left forearm, from wrist to elbow.

"Revenge has a price, boy, and you pay it in pain. Every time you want to quit, look at this arm and remember who you came here to bury. The snow does not care about your mother, and I care even less."

Vittorio turned his left arm over. A thin white scar ran from his wrist to his elbow, and Teresa had once traced it with her finger and asked him where it came from.

He had come to Leviathan as an orphan who wanted to avenge his mother. He remembered wanting it so badly that he could not sleep, yet her face was gone. His first mother was a blank space in a snowstorm.

His second lay under this patchy grass, and someone had thrown her into a ravine. Twice now, someone had taken a mother from him.

The next memory came colder, from the ice cliff, where a thin girl with a braid shouted that the climb was impossible and the Commandant shot her in the knee without turning his head.

At fourteen, Vittorio had climbed past her blood on the ice and told himself that the weak stayed at the bottom. Now the thought turned his stomach.

After that came fire on a cliff road. A voice crackled over the radio in his ear, calm and close, saying his name, and the memory went dark before he could put a face to it. He knew that voice, and the harder he reached for it, the further it slid away.

Vittorio took the empty pill bottle from his pocket. For two years, Dr. Graves had promised that the pills would bring his memory back slowly, one session at a time.

His memory had come back two days after Graves stopped them. Had those pills been opening the door, or holding it shut? If Graves had sealed his head on purpose, that orange bottle was the first piece of proof, so Vittorio slipped it back into his pocket.

BZZZT!

His cracked phone buzzed against his ribs. Celine had sent a photo from a number he had never given her. It showed a navy suit on a padded hanger, with a white shirt and a dark tie laid across it.

[I chose navy. It will be waiting for you, so do not argue with me.]

Vittorio caught himself smiling at his phone beside his mother's grave. He wiped the smile away, then let it come back, because Teresa used to scold him for hiding the good parts.

He touched the cold metal marker once. "She's bossy, Ma. She ran past my gate for six months without a word, then tried to pay me a bag of cash for a ride home. You would have liked her."

A second message from Celine followed. [Prestige Motors, ten o'clock. Ask Robert Finch for Zero's car.]