Chương 5
She avoided his eyes. “Tomorrow is an important day. Do not destroy it because a melody made you sentimental.”
She walked out.
Vittorio cut into his fish.
“Your aunt has never tolerated conflict.”
“She married into this family.”
“Which is why she no longer tolerates it.”
Alessandro remained standing.
Vittorio chewed, swallowed, and dabbed his mouth with a napkin.
“Visit the hospital,” he said. “Pay the woman’s bills. Dismiss the housekeeper if it pleases you. But do not confuse guilt over neglected servants with evidence about your mother.”
“What would evidence look like?”
“You buried Corrado Lanza’s organization for what they did. You took businesses, routes, men. You made his sons leave Lombardy. At the time, that was evidence enough.”
“I was twenty-three.”
“You were capable.”
“I was angry.”
“Often the same thing.”
Alessandro looked at the ring again.
“Take it off.”
Vittorio’s knife paused.
“The ring,” Alessandro said. “Take it off.”
Elena’s abandoned place seemed suddenly enormous.
Vittorio pulled the ring from his finger and placed it beside his plate.
The skin beneath was pale and indented.
Alessandro picked it up. On the underside of the silver setting was a scratch, recent and diagonal. A strand of gray wool clung to one edge.
Sophia had been wearing a gray cardigan.
It proved nothing. It proved enough.
Vittorio watched his face.
“You are looking for betrayal,” the old man said softly. “Be careful not to invent it where loyalty has simply become inconvenient.”
Alessandro closed his fist around the ring.
“You can have it back when I’m finished.”
He left his uncle alone with the cooling fish.
At the hospital, Emma was asleep across two chairs beneath Alessandro’s jacket. Someone had cleaned her hands and covered the worst cracks with white gauze. The enormous rubber clogs sat side by side beneath her.
Sophia lay behind glass in a private room, an oxygen tube beneath her nose and an IV line taped to her arm. A nurse checked the monitor, then came out.
“She’s responding to fluids,” the nurse said. “The antibiotics will take time. The doctor wants observation through the night.”
“Can I speak to her?”
“For five minutes.”
“She has a child.”
“We know.”
“What happens to the child?”
The nurse gave him a measured look. “That depends on whether there is family.”
“There isn’t.”
“Then a social worker will assess the situation in the morning.”
“No.”
The nurse raised an eyebrow.
Alessandro lowered his voice. He was accustomed to rooms bending when he entered them. Hospitals did not bend easily, which irritated and steadied him at once.
“She will not be taken somewhere unfamiliar.”
“The social worker is not a kidnapper.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said it with your face.”
Emma shifted beneath the jacket. The nurse glanced at her and softened slightly.
“You can remain tonight if the mother consents,” she said. “There is a family room at the end of the corridor. After that, arrangements must be documented.”
“Document them.”
“That is what social workers do.”
Alessandro almost smiled. “Fine.”
Inside the room, Sophia watched him enter.
“You brought guards,” she said.
“They’re outside the ward.”
“I saw one through the glass.”
“He is terrible at being invisible.”
Her mouth moved as if she might smile, but fatigue erased it.
Alessandro pulled a chair beside the bed. The black onyx ring lay heavy in his pocket.
“Emma is asleep.”
“Where?”
“Outside.”
“You left her alone?”
“There are two nurses, a physician, Luca, and three armed men within thirty meters.”
Sophia stared at him.
“Two armed men,” he corrected. “Luca dislikes carrying.”
“That does not make me feel better.”
“It wasn’t meant to.”
She closed her eyes. Her breathing sounded less ragged than before, though each inhale remained shallow.
“Who came to your cottage?” he asked.
“You already know.”
“I suspect.”
“Suspicion is enough for men like you.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
Her eyes opened again. “That is a surprising opinion.”
Alessandro took the ring from his pocket and held it where she could see.
Sophia’s fingers tightened around the blanket.
“He wore that?”
She nodded.
“When?”
“Yesterday evening.”
“What did he want?”
“My mother’s things.”
“Why?”
“He thought I found something in the west archive.”
“Did you?”
She looked toward the glass wall. Emma’s curls showed above the edge of the jacket.
“Sophia.”
“I found a payroll book.”
“From what year?”
“Nineteen ninety-nine.”
The year his mother died.
“What was in it?”
“Names. Payments. Notes in the margins.”
“Whose names?”
“I didn’t keep the book.”
“Where is it?”
“Back in the archive.”
“Then why did Vittorio come to you?”
“Because he saw me reading it.”
Alessandro leaned closer. “When?”
“Three weeks ago. I heard the door behind me. He asked what I was doing. I told him Mrs. Fabbri sent me to count linens.”
“There are no linens there.”
“I discovered that.”
“Did he believe you?”
“No.”
“What did the book say?”
Sophia’s gaze moved to the IV drip.
“One payment was to my father.”
Alessandro searched his memory. “Your father worked here too?”
“He was a gardener.”
“What was his name?”
“Matteo Rossi.”
The name struck against something buried.
A photograph in a police file. A thin man with dark hair standing beside a delivery van. The accused inside man who had opened the service gate for Corrado Lanza’s killers.
“He let them in,” Alessandro said.
Sophia turned her face toward him.
“That is what your family told everyone.”
“He disappeared the next day.”
“He was killed the next day.”
“By Lanza?”
“By your father’s men.”
Alessandro sat very still.
Sophia’s voice weakened, but the words did not.
“My father was taken from our apartment before sunrise. My mother saw it happen. She went to the police and was told there was no record of an arrest. Three weeks later, his body was found near Pavia.”
“I was told he fled.”
“You were told many things.”
The monitor beside her bed continued its indifferent rhythm.
May you like
“Why was he paid?” Alessandro asked.
“The note said ‘garden wall repair.’ It was more money than he earned in a year. The payment was dated two days after he died.”
