Underneath the plywood board beneath the feed bin, in a hollow of old tar paper and pigeon down, was a rusted tin box the size of a loaf of bread. Agent Duffy lifted it out with two fingers and laid it on the roof. It had a tiny brass lock, which he did not have to break. The lock was already open. Inside, wrapped in a faded blue silk handkerchief that I recognized as one of my own, sat a leather pouch, and on top of the pouch lay a folded letter in the square hand of my husband.
The letter was addressed to me. My dear Toni, it began, and I put my hand over my mouth and could not read further. The agent offered, very gently, to read it to me. I shook my head. I sat down on the bucket of Frank by the trap, in my church shoes, with the pigeons murmuring above me, and I read it myself, a word at a time, while the wind pulled at the pages. Nicky stood beside me and held my shoulder, and the others looked away.
Frank wrote that on the night of the raid in 1988, as the agents were handcuffing him on the roof of the Bellomo loft in Newark, he had seen a small pouch fall from a bird. It was a pouch of uncut stones, thirty or forty of them, bright as ice. In the confusion, he had picked it up. He did not know why. He had slipped it into his coat. And when he was released on probation, he had carried it home to Bayonne, and hidden it, and told no one.
A man can be undone by one small bad decision on one confused night, and spend the rest of his life trying to forgive himself in a pigeon loft.
“I meant to give it back the next morning,” he wrote. “And then I thought, if I do, they will say I stole it, and I will go to prison, and Toni will be alone with the baby. So I waited a day. And then a week. And then I understood that every day I waited made it worse. I told the judge the birds were destroyed, and that was a lie, but it was a small one, I loved them too much to see them killed. The pouch was the lie I could not forgive.”
He had been so ashamed, he wrote, that he could not look at it. He had put it under the board and gone back up to scrub the floor every Saturday, not to keep the loft clean, but to stand on top of the secret and make himself remember. For thirty six years, he had waited for the right way to give it back. He had waited for the children to grow, and then for the grandchildren. He wrote that he was a coward, and that he loved me, and that the pigeons would know what to do.
“When I am gone,” the letter said, “let Nicky find it, because he is a good boy and will do the right thing. If you read this, Toni, forgive me. I was not a thief. I was only a frightened man who did not know how to come in from the roof.” I set the pages down on my lap. Agent Duffy was kneeling on the plywood with his hat off, and his eyes were wet. He said, quietly, “Mrs. Lombardi, I have waited thirty six years for this too.”
The stones were appraised by the Gemological Institute in New York at one million, one hundred thousand dollars. Every one was returned to the insurers of the original shipment. The Bureau closed the 1988 case that week, with a statement that said nothing about my husband. When the insurance company learned the whole story, they sent a representative to my kitchen with a check. It was the standard reward for the recovery of stolen property, ten percent. I looked at the number and had to ask for a glass of water.
With part of the reward, I paid off the mortgage on the two family house on Avenue C. With part, I sent Nicky to the community college for a course in marine engineering, which he had wanted for years and been too proud to ask for. And with the rest, I did something Frank would have understood. I built a new loft on the roof, white and bright, with forty brass perches and a landing board wide enough for a hundred birds.
Mr. Wasko, ninety years old, supervised the carpentry from a lawn chair with a cane across his knees. Nicky did the hammering. On the day it was finished, we painted a name on the front in blue letters. FRANK AND ANTOINETTE LOMBARDI. And then, beneath it, in smaller print, Lofts Never Lie. Nicky read it aloud and shook his head and laughed. Then he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and said, “Nonna, you are going to need a bigger ladder.”
On the first Sunday in September, we released all forty birds from the new loft at once, and they rose into the blue morning above Bayonne like a handful of thrown rice. They circled the roof three times, and the sun caught them silver. Then they turned south and were gone. The gray cock with the white flight feather led them. I stood at the rail with Nicky beside me, watching. By supper they were all home, every last one, fluttering down on the landing board.