Chương 3
“Like friends?”
“More than friends.”
Elena rubbed Bruno’s ear between her fingers. “Did you know about me?”
“No.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
She looked at him then. Her hazel eyes were not identical to his. They were lighter, and the brown near the pupils broke into green at the edges. But the shape was his. So was the small downward turn at the outer corners, something he had seen every morning in a mirror without ever considering it belonged to anyone.
“Mommy doesn’t lie,” Elena said.
“I didn’t say she did.”
“She said you might.”
At Café Nate, Vittorio was gone.
The silver pistol remained on the table. The cash remained in its bundles. The ledger lay open to the same page, though the water drop from Elena’s jacket had blurred one line of blue ink.
Nate stood at the door to the back room.
“I told him you said to stay,” he said.
“And?”
“He said you didn’t mean forever.”
Damiano looked at Enzo.
Enzo already had his phone out.
Vittorio did not answer.
Paolo and Nicky searched the café. They found no one in the office, kitchen, alley, or upstairs storage rooms. Vittorio’s dark sedan was gone from the lot.
Elena remained near the bottom of the stairs. Bruno had stopped trembling beneath the towel. She had not.
Damiano picked up the silver pistol and removed the magazine. He cleared the chamber, placed the ammunition in his pocket, and locked the weapon in Nate’s office safe.
When he returned, Elena was looking at the open ledger.
“What is that?”
“Accounts.”
“Like math?”
“Bad math.”
Nate made a rough sound from the doorway. “That’s one way to describe it.”
The meeting before Elena arrived had been about missing money. Two hundred eighty thousand dollars had disappeared from collections made in Damiano’s name. Vittorio had placed the ledger on the table, blamed Nate, and suggested the pistol be left where the café owner could see it when he was questioned.
Damiano had permitted the pistol to remain.
He looked at it differently now, even though it was no longer in the room.
“Why did Vittorio know Mommy’s name?” Elena asked.
Nate dropped the towel he had been folding.
No one answered.
“He said it downstairs,” she continued. “When the phone showed the picture.”
Damiano remembered Vittorio saying, If they have Maeve.
He had heard the name and let memory explain what suspicion should have challenged.
“How do you know Vittorio?” he asked Elena.
“I don’t.”
“You looked at him.”
Her mouth tightened.
“Elena, look at me.”
She did, reluctantly.
“Was he in your apartment?”
“No.”
“Did you see him near your mother?”
“No.”
“Then why did you look at him?”
“Because he was wearing the ring.”
Vittorio wore a plain silver ring on his right hand, heavy and flat across the top. Damiano had seen it hundreds of times.
“What ring?”
“The man who grabbed Mommy had one. It scratched her cheek.”
“Was that man Vittorio?”
“I didn’t see his face. He put a pillow thing over my head.”
“A hood?”
“I could still see the floor.”
“What else?”
“His shoe had a cut in it. Near the lace.”
Enzo crouched beside her. “Which shoe?”
“The left one.”
Vittorio’s shoes had been new. Damiano remembered because Vittorio had complained that the left shoe pinched and had loosened the laces beneath the table.
Enzo stood slowly.
Nate sat in the nearest chair.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said.
Damiano closed the ledger.
“What does this book have to do with Maeve?”
Nate looked at Elena, then at Damiano. “Not in front of the kid.”
“She walked through a storm carrying a puppy to offer men like us. I think the room has already failed to protect her.”
Nate rubbed both hands over his face. He had coffee grounds beneath one thumbnail. “Maeve came here three months ago. Legal work.”
“What kind?”
“My landlord sold the building. New company started billing me for repairs they never made. Then Vittorio said he could solve it.”
“By collecting from the landlord?”
“By collecting from me.”
Damiano felt Enzo turn toward him.
Nate went on. “Insurance. Security. Whatever word he felt like using that week. Maeve helped me look at the lease. She saw deposits I’d been making for Vittorio. She asked questions.”
“You answered?”
“Not at first.”
“Then?”
“He broke my grandson’s windshield.”
Elena’s fingers stopped moving on Bruno’s ear.
Nate glanced at her and lowered his voice. “No one was in the car.”
Damiano said, “You should have told me.”
Nate laughed once. There was nothing humorous in it. “I am telling you.”
“You should have told me before.”
“And what? You would have apologized for the inconvenience?”
“I would have stopped it.”
“You were downstairs with a gun on the table.”
The words landed without volume.
Nate looked frightened after saying them. His eyes went to Enzo, then Paolo, checking whether fear had arrived too late to protect him.
Damiano pulled out a chair and sat.
Nate remained standing.
“Tell me what Maeve found.”
“Two sets of books. The one on the table is the clean dirty one.”
Paolo frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means it shows money people already expect to be dirty. Sports bets. Loans. Cash businesses. It doesn’t show the other collections. Contractors, landlords, immigrant shops, old people behind on debt. Vittorio kept those separate.”
“Where?”
“Maeve called it Book B.”
The message had demanded the ledger. The kidnappers believed Elena had brought the wrong thing.
“Did Maeve have Book B?”
“She copied parts of it. Maybe all. She wouldn’t tell me.”
“Who else knew?”
Nate looked at Enzo.
Enzo’s face hardened. “Careful.”
“I saw you talking to her.”
“When?”
“Last week. Out front.”
Enzo turned to Damiano. “She approached me.”
“You didn’t mention it.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Enzo looked toward Elena. “Because of what she asked.”
Damiano waited.
May you like
Enzo’s shoulders seemed to settle under a weight he had carried so long it had learned his shape.
“She asked whether your father ever told you why she left.”
