Chương 4
Within seconds, the phone rang again.
V.
She answered.
Raphael’s head came up.
Elena said nothing.
For three breaths, neither did the caller. Then a man spoke with a voice so ordinary it could have belonged to someone calling about a dental appointment.
“Miss Marlowe.”
She kept the phone away from Raphael.
“You have something that belongs to me,” Victor Vale said.
“I have a pharmacology exam in the morning.”
“I admire that.”
“Do you?”
“My daughter was in nursing school.”
The past tense bothered her.
“What happened to her?”
“She discovered nursing students are expected to pay rent.”
“I’ve made the same discovery.”
“Then we understand each other.”
“No. We have both heard of rent.”
Vale exhaled through his nose. It might have been amusement.
“Mr. Orsini is unwell,” he said. “He becomes confused when he drinks. He may accuse people. He may tell stories.”
“About my brother?”
The silence changed.
Raphael closed his eyes.
Vale said, “He told you that.”
“He told me enough.”
“Raphael has never understood the danger of partial truths.”
“And you do?”
“I understand that partial truths are what keep families alive.”
Elena looked at Raphael. His skin had gone gray around the mouth.
“What did you give him?”
“Help him downstairs, and I’ll tell you.”
“If I bring him down, you’ll kill us both.”
“I have no reason to kill you.”
“You killed Daniel because he opened a box.”
“Daniel died in a traffic accident.”
“You should choose a lie that doesn’t insult both of us.”
Vale was quiet long enough that Elena heard rain striking a metal vent somewhere outside.
Then he said, “Ask Raphael who approved the shipment.”
The call ended.
Elena lowered the phone.
Raphael did not ask what Vale had said.
“Who approved the shipment?” she asked.
He rubbed his thumb across the cut on his lip. “I signed the distribution expansion.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“I approved the company. Not that cargo.”
“But your signature made the route possible.”
“Yes.”
“And when Daniel died, you protected the men who killed him.”
“Yes.”
“So Vale lied about the accident, and you made the lie survive.”
Raphael’s breathing caught. He pressed a fist to his chest.
Elena was beside him before her anger could object.
“Pain?”
“Pressure.”
“Where?”
“Center.”
“Does it move?”
“No.”
She checked his pulse again and disliked what she felt.
“You need a hospital now.”
“The drive first.”
“No.”
“If Vale gets it, Daniel becomes an accident again.”
“You do not get to use my brother to make me help you.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
Raphael’s face tightened, whether from pain or restraint she could not tell.
“I buried what happened to him because exposing Vale would have exposed me,” he said. “That is the sentence without decoration. I told myself I needed time. Then I told myself I needed leverage. Then I stopped telling myself anything. You came to work here, and every night I stood outside your door with a confession I was too much of a coward to deliver.”
“You expect me to believe guilt made you count nights?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
His eyes found hers.
“Wanting you did.”
The honesty was ugly because it asked for nothing and excused nothing.
Elena stood.
“You employed me.”
“Yes.”
“You knew I needed this job.”
“Yes.”
“You knew what happened to Daniel.”
“Yes.”
“And you stood outside my room because you wanted me.”
“Yes.”
“That is not romantic.”
“No.”
“It is not love.”
“I didn’t call it love.”
“Good.”
He lowered his gaze.
Elena went to the sink and washed the blood from her palm where the vial had cut it. The water ran pink, then clear. She watched it longer than necessary.
Her mother used to leave a faucet running when she was angry, as though the bill might punish someone else. Elena had forgotten that until now.
Behind her, Raphael shifted against the table.
She shut off the water.
“I’m getting the drive,” she said.
He looked up.
“Not for you. Not to save your reputation, your money, or whatever is left of your empire. I’m getting it for Daniel. Then I’m calling an ambulance, and after that I’m giving everything to the government, including you.”
“That was my plan.”
“Then for once you can be useful by surviving it.”
Raphael reached for the table and pulled himself upright. His knees shook.
Elena took his arm despite herself.
The lower service passage began behind a movable shelf in the laundry room, but reaching the laundry room required crossing forty feet of servants’ corridor. Vale’s guards were searching in pairs now. Their voices traveled through the heating grates.
Raphael showed Elena an old brass release hidden beneath the stair tread. She pressed it with the end of a spoon. A section of paneling opened inward, revealing a narrow stone stair that descended behind the kitchen wall.
Cold air rose from below.
Elena returned for her textbook, slid the vial into a plastic specimen bag she found in the first-aid cabinet, and wrapped Raphael’s bloodstained handkerchief around the phone to muffle its vibrations. She took the half-full water glass too.
Raphael watched her.
“What?” she asked.
“The glass.”
“It may contain whatever poisoned you.”
“I poured from the bottle.”
“And drank from the glass. A first-semester student knows not to discard possible evidence.”
“You’re in your third semester.”
Elena froze.
He looked ashamed before she could accuse him.
“One hundred seven nights,” he said.
She wanted to hate him cleanly. He would not allow even that.
They descended.
May you like
The passage was too narrow for them to walk side by side. Elena went first with the phone light low, one hand against damp stone. Raphael followed, breathing through his mouth. The stairs ended in a corridor where pipes ran along the ceiling and old electrical wire sagged in ceramic brackets.
The mansion above them had always seemed silent at night. Beneath it, Elena heard its private organs: pumps, water lines, the furnace turning on, rain ticking inside a drainpipe. The house was not quiet. It was simply built to keep its noises from the people who owned it.
