The Mafia's Confession

There is a hollow at the bottom of the wall behind my bed. On the other side of it is a confessional.

For three years I lay down at nine o'clock with my ear a foot above the floorboards and listened to this parish take itself apart, and I never repeated one word of it. Whatever else I have made of my life, I have that.

Then a man started coming on a Thursday, in a car that never stops running.

He always begins the same way. Bless me, Father, for I have.

He has never once said the word sinned. Sixty Thursdays, and he gets to the word have and the sentence dies, and then he tells a priest exactly what he has done, in order, calmly, like a man reading out a delivery list.

Last Thursday he said a name I had read in the paper on Tuesday, on page five, under a photograph of a white tent on a riverbank.

And he said, I want somebody alive to know that the paper is wrong.

Six weeks later a car came for me, because a man who needed a wife before Christmas had been told there was a quiet woman in a presbytery with nobody behind her.

I said yes.

Not because I was frightened of him. Because he was going to marry somebody, and whoever she turned out to be, she would sit across a table from him for forty years and never once know what he was, and he would never say a true thing out loud again as long as he lived.

So I married the only man alive whose confession I already had.

And here is the part I did not know for a year. He worked out that I could hear him eleven months before I found out that he knew.

And he kept coming.