Chương 2
Lorenzo accepted each sentence with a lowered chin.
He kept looking for a yellow coat.
Nora and Lily were gone.
Near the cemetery gate, one of Lorenzo’s guards approached. Daniel Rosetti was thirty-nine and had worked beside Lorenzo since both men were young enough to mistake loyalty for friendship.
“Car’s ready,” Danny said.
“Find Nora Hart.”
Danny glanced toward the line of vehicles. “Now?”
“She was my father’s assistant. She attended his funeral with a child nobody knows. Then she left before the burial.”
“She was probably embarrassed.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Danny’s face shut down. “You want her brought in?”
Lorenzo looked at him.
“Located,” Danny corrected. “I’ll locate her.”
Lorenzo climbed into the rear of a black sedan. Marco tried to join him, but Lorenzo closed the door before his cousin reached it.
They traveled through rain-slick streets toward Beacon Hill. Wipers beat across the windshield with metronomic irritation. On Tremont Street, pedestrians crowded beneath awnings. A delivery rider pedaled through standing water with a paper bag strapped beneath his jacket. Outside Massachusetts General, a woman in scrubs smoked beneath a tree and stared at nothing.
Lorenzo’s phone vibrated continuously.
Messages from captains. Condolences from elected officials. Questions about when the organization would meet. A photograph from an unknown number showed Vincent alive at a charity dinner six years earlier, lifting a glass toward the camera. Lorenzo deleted it before noticing who had sent it.
His father’s death had been medically ordinary. Congestive heart failure, worsened by kidneys that had begun failing in the spring. Vincent had refused another hospitalization after his final admission. He had died at home three nights later with a private nurse in the hallway and Nora Hart seated beside the bedroom door.
Lorenzo had arrived fourteen minutes too late.
For those fourteen minutes, he had blamed traffic, the rain, a stalled truck on Storrow Drive, his father’s stubbornness, and the nurse who had not called earlier. Since then he had settled on himself.
At the Calder house on Mount Vernon Street, men filled the entry hall with wet coats and lowered voices. Caterers moved among them with trays of coffee and food nobody touched. Vincent’s housekeeper, Mrs. Donnelly, had placed framed family photographs on the piano. Lorenzo turned one facedown as he passed.
In the library, Marco, Vale, Danny, and four captains waited around a long walnut table.
Lorenzo remained standing.
“My father has been dead three days,” he said. “Half the city is already guessing who inherits what. We will not help them.”
Vale folded his hands. “No one here would disrespect Vincent’s memory.”
“You spent the burial speaking to Donato from Providence.”
“He offered condolences.”
“He offered trucks.”
Vale’s eyes did not change. “Business does not suspend itself for grief.”
“No,” Lorenzo said. “But it can remain quiet until the ground settles.”
Marco lowered himself into Vincent’s chair.
Lorenzo looked at him.
Marco stood again.
The captains discussed collections, pending contracts, a gambling dispute in Revere, and two businesses whose owners had taken Vincent’s illness as permission to postpone payments. Lorenzo answered in short sentences. He delayed every proposal involving retaliation. No new territory. No demonstrations. No bodies. Nothing that would invite federal attention while leadership changed.
Vale listened with his head slightly inclined.
“You disagree,” Lorenzo said.
“I haven’t spoken.”
“That has never prevented you.”
A few men looked down.
Vale’s mouth moved toward a smile but stopped. “Mercy during transition is often mistaken for weakness.”
“By stupid men.”
“Stupid men still carry guns.”
“So do frightened ones.”
The room tightened.
Marco rubbed his thumb over a water ring on the table. Danny stared at a shelf of leather-bound histories Vincent had purchased by the yard and never opened.
Vale said, “Your father understood that hesitation has a cost.”
“My father is no longer available to clarify what he understood.”
The library door opened before Vale could respond. Mrs. Donnelly entered carrying a small cream envelope.
“This was delivered for you,” she told Lorenzo. “The young woman from the funeral left it with one of the kitchen staff.”
Lorenzo took it.
His name appeared in Nora Hart’s narrow handwriting. Beneath it she had written: Alone.
Vale’s gaze settled on the envelope.
Lorenzo slipped it into his inside pocket.
“We’re finished,” he said.
No one moved at first.
Then chairs scraped back. Vale buttoned his overcoat and approached Lorenzo at the door.
“Your father’s assistant handled private correspondence,” he said. “Some of it involved all of us.”
“Is there something you’re worried she might have written?”
Vale’s eyes rested on Lorenzo for a moment too long. “I worry about people who mistake proximity for importance.”
Lorenzo opened the door. “You should go.”
When the house had emptied, he returned to the library and locked it.
Nora’s envelope contained no letter. Only a hotel key card and the address of a modest hotel near Copley Square. On the back she had written 8:30 and Please do not bring Daniel Rosetti.
Lorenzo read the last line twice.
At eight fifteen, he left through the rear service entrance wearing a dark raincoat over his funeral suit. He took no driver. The city smelled of wet brick, diesel, and restaurant vents. He walked downhill, caught a cab on Charles Street, and got out two blocks before the hotel.
He carried a pistol beneath his coat despite Nora’s request that he come alone. Lorenzo respected distinctions.
The lobby television showed flood warnings along the North Shore. A family argued quietly over a luggage cart. Someone had burned microwave popcorn near the elevators.
Nora opened the door to room 614 before Lorenzo knocked.
“You came,” she said.
“You asked.”
“I wasn’t sure that would matter.”
“Then why ask?”
May you like
She stepped aside.
The room held two double beds, a desk, a child’s backpack, and several plastic grocery bags. Lily sat cross-legged on the bed nearest the window, wearing white pajamas patterned with small blue whales. Her wet curls had dried into a restless cloud around her face. She was lining up packets of hotel sugar along the bedspread.
