Chương 3
“That is a dangerous sentence from you.”
“I need a tablet analyzed. Quietly.”
“What kind?”
“If I knew, I would not be calling.”
Another pause.
“Who gave it to you?”
“A three-year-old.”
Sal laughed once.
Massimo did not.
The laugh died.
“I’ll be there before dawn,” Sal said.
“You cannot enter through the gates.”
“I remember where the cameras don’t overlap.”
“Dean replaced the system.”
“Dean replaced the screens. He kept the conduit because your grandfather built walls like bunkers and rewiring costs money.”
Some part of Massimo, long dormant, stirred with irritation.
“You sound pleased.”
“I enjoy occasions when arrogance and budget constraints cooperate.”
The call ended.
Massimo remained by the window. Beyond the glass, the lawns stretched silver beneath security lights. The hedges were cut into perfect lines. The fountain had been shut off for winter, leaving a dark basin where Nina had once found him crying.
He tried to move his toe again.
It did not obey.
Hope, he discovered, could humiliate a man more efficiently than despair.
At four twenty, a panel behind the north bookcase opened with a scrape.
Sal Moretti stepped through in a brown work jacket, carrying a canvas tool bag. He had gone gray at the temples. His beard was uneven, as if he had trimmed it in a moving vehicle.
Massimo had known him since he was fourteen.
Neither man offered a hand.
Sal noticed the wheelchair first, though he tried not to. His gaze moved from Massimo’s legs to the envelope on the desk.
“That it?”
Massimo nodded.
Sal pulled on nitrile gloves and examined the pill beneath the desk lamp.
“No imprint I recognize.”
“Can it be tested?”
“I know a toxicologist in New Jersey.”
“Someone we own?”
“No.”
“Then why would he help?”
“Because his wife thinks I sell restaurant equipment, and he owes me eight thousand dollars from a poker game.”
Massimo looked at him.
Sal shrugged. “You asked for quiet, not respectable.”
He sealed the envelope inside a plastic evidence pouch.
“What happened?”
Massimo described Nina, the warm cloth, the sensation, and the moving toe. He kept his voice flat. Saying it aloud made it sound less credible.
Sal did not mock him. He crouched beside the wheelchair and studied Massimo’s foot.
“Do it now.”
“It does not perform.”
“Neither did you when your father watched.”
Massimo’s eyes cooled.
“That got your attention.”
“Get out.”
“Move the toe.”
Massimo stared at him for several seconds. Then he looked down and tried.
Nothing happened.
Sal rocked back on his heels.
“Could have been a spasm.”
“I am aware.”
“Could also have been movement.”
“I am aware of that too.”
Sal stood and rubbed his lower back.
“You still taking everything Hale gives you?”
“Yes.”
“Stop.”
“That would announce suspicion, and sudden withdrawal from half those drugs could kill me.”
Sal’s mouth twitched. “There you are.”
“Who?”
“The irritating man who used to consider consequences before letting Dean make decisions for him.”
Massimo looked toward the dark windows.
“I owe him my life.”
“Maybe.”
The word landed harder than an accusation.
Sal lifted the tool bag.
“I’ll test the pill. You do nothing different. Same meals. Same medicine. Same miserable face.”
“My face is not miserable.”
“It has frightened three generations of men. Misery is an improvement.”
At the bookcase, Sal paused.
“I need to ask you something.”
Massimo waited.
“After Brooklyn, when you woke up at St. Catherine’s, who was already in the room?”
“Dean. Hale. Camille.”
“Not the hospital trauma team?”
“They had left.”
“Not me?”
“You were being questioned by the police.”
“That is what Dean told you.”
Massimo’s hand tightened on the desk.
Sal disappeared behind the bookcase before Massimo could answer.
Breakfast was served at eight.
Camille sat at the far end of the dining table in cream silk, scrolling through messages on her phone. Dean ate standing up, as he often did now, his plate resting beside a stack of financial reports. He had begun holding morning meetings in Massimo’s dining room without asking permission. At first it had seemed practical. The wheelchair made the basement operations room difficult to reach.
Practical things accumulated until they became surrender.
Dr. Hale arrived at eight thirty, eleven minutes late. He was a thin man in his fifties with silver spectacles and the anxious neatness of someone who believed clean cuffs could compensate for dirty work.
“Traffic,” he said.
“No one asked,” Dean replied.
Hale opened his bag on the sideboard.
Massimo watched every movement.
The doctor checked his pulse, blood pressure, pupils, and breathing. Then he pressed a metal instrument against Massimo’s shin.
“Anything?”
“No.”
Hale moved lower.
“Here?”
“No.”
The instrument touched the big toe.
A faint pressure registered. Not pain. Not temperature. A distant awareness, as though someone had knocked on a door several rooms away.
Massimo looked past the doctor at Dean.
“No.”
Hale continued the examination. His fingers were cold. Sweat darkened the hair near his temples despite the cool room.
“You’ve had more spasms?” he asked.
“None.”
“Changes in sleep?”
“I wake at three.”
“That’s not new,” Camille said without looking up.
Hale prepared the morning tablets in a porcelain cup. Six pills. None resembled Nina’s.
“What is each one?” Massimo asked.
The doctor paused.
“You know the list.”
“I want to hear it.”
Dean glanced up from the reports.
Hale named them: medication for pain, muscle spasms, blood pressure, inflammation, sleep, and clot prevention.
“The yellow one?” Massimo asked.
“Gastrointestinal protection.”
“I thought that was the white capsule.”
“The capsule was changed last week.”
“Why?”
“Availability.”
Massimo picked up the yellow pill.
“Which pharmacy?”
Hale removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a cloth that did not need to be used.
“Your prescriptions come through the private dispensary.”
“Whose?”
“Massimo,” Camille said, “must we interrogate the man before coffee?”
He put the pill back.
“You are right. Coffee first.”
Hale watched him swallow all six.
May you like
Massimo kept them beneath his tongue.
He drank water, waited until Hale turned to record his blood pressure, then transferred the tablets into the folded handkerchief inside his sleeve. It was a trick he had once used with a federal informant who insisted on meeting in a Russian bathhouse. The memory almost amused him.
