Chương 7
A truck passed close to Daniel. The sound swallowed several words.
Then his voice returned.
“Emma’s rabbit has the first key. Elena knows how I stitch when I’m scared. The left side always pulls tighter.”
Elena looked at Blue.
The rabbit’s left ear curved inward, just as Daniel’s hems had when he tried to repair his own trousers.
“I love you,” he said. “Both of you. I am coming home now.”
The recording ended.
Emma touched the laptop speaker.
“Again.”
Elena closed the computer.
“No, sweetheart.”
“Papa again.”
“Not now.”
Emma’s face crumpled with confusion, not grief. Her memories of Daniel had become warm pieces without sequence: his humming, the roughness of his chin, the way he put socks on her hands and called them gloves.
Elena picked her up. Emma was heavier than she expected, or Elena’s strength had become unreliable.
“I need a bathroom,” she said.
Marco indicated a door across the hall.
“I know where it is. I clean this house.”
No one attempted to follow her.
In the bathroom, Elena locked the door and set Emma on the marble counter. The room was larger than the kitchen in their apartment. Gold fixtures shone beneath soft lights. A bowl of white roses sat beside folded hand towels no one was meant to use.
Elena wet a cloth and pressed it to her cheek.
Emma watched.
“Does it hurt?”
“A little.”
“Vivian is bad.”
Elena wrung out the cloth. “Vivian did a bad thing.”
“She is bad.”
“People are more annoying than that.”
Emma frowned. “What is annoying?”
“Something you’ll understand very soon.”
Emma accepted this and held Blue up to the mirror.
“Papa is in the computer.”
“His voice was.”
“Can he come out?”
Elena’s control broke, not dramatically, but in a sudden failure of breath. She lowered her head. No sound came at first. Then one did, thin and embarrassing.
Emma touched her hair.
“Mama needs water.”
“Yes.”
“You say water helps.”
“I do.”
Emma climbed down with great concentration, dragged the small gilded wastebasket toward the sink, and stepped on it before Elena could stop her.
“Emma—”
“I get water.”
The wastebasket tipped.
Elena caught her around the waist. Emma laughed. The sound was so ordinary that Elena laughed too, one short broken laugh against her daughter’s hair.
For half a minute, the villa, the twelve families, the files, and Daniel’s hidden life remained outside the door.
Then someone knocked.
“Mrs. Bennett,” Marco said. “There is a matter you should hear.”
Elena washed her face, lifted Emma, and returned to the library.
Cesare stood near the desk arguing quietly with Alessandro. Don Ricci had moved to the window. Vivian was alone beside the bookshelves.
Marco closed the door.
“One of the guests attempted to send a message through his watch,” he said.
“Who?” Alessandro asked.
“Piero Sarti.”
The Sarti family controlled trucking and warehouse properties across Lombardy. Piero, fifty-eight, had the ruddy complexion of a man who treated wine as hydration. Elena remembered him complaining earlier that the risotto was too warm.
“What message?” Cesare asked.
Marco looked at Elena before answering.
“Two words. Clear Arco.”
Cesare sat down.
Vivian whispered, “Oh, God.”
Alessandro’s expression did not change. “Was it sent?”
“No. We isolated the local signal when the doors closed. The watch attempted to route through a paired phone. We have both devices.”
“Bring him here.”
Piero arrived without dignity.
Two guards escorted him, but neither touched him. He entered shouting that detention was an insult, the network failure endangered his businesses, and his lawyer would have the villa searched by morning. His voice died when he saw the memory card envelope in Elena’s hand.
“You,” he said.
Elena had never met him.
“Do you know me?”
“No.”
“You know my husband.”
Piero looked at Cesare.
Cesare rubbed his forehead.
“Stop looking at other men,” Elena said. “They have not helped you yet.”
Piero’s mouth opened, then closed.
Alessandro took the chair behind the desk but did not sit. “What does ‘clear Arco’ mean?”
“A property transaction.”
“Which property?”
“A warehouse group.”
“Where?”
“Monza.”
Marco placed Piero’s watch on the desk. “The message was addressed to a number registered through a Swiss relay service.”
Piero spread his hands. “Then you already know it is private.”
“Privacy is not innocence,” Vivian said.
He glanced at her stained red gown. “You should not be speaking tonight.”
The remark struck its target. Vivian’s spine went rigid.
Alessandro leaned both hands on the desk.
“Daniel Bennett traced funds through Sarti companies. His last recording named Arco Nero Holdings. You attempted to send an instruction to clear Arco immediately after his evidence appeared.”
Piero stopped performing outrage.
“What evidence?”
“Enough.”
It was a bluff. Elena heard it.
Piero did too.
He looked at the closed laptop, then at Vittorio. “How much is there?”
Vittorio shook his head.
“How much?”
“Forty-seven files,” Marco said.
Elena stared at him. Revealing the number seemed reckless until she saw Piero’s reaction.
Relief.
A tiny release around the eyes.
Marco had been watching for it.
“More exist,” Elena said.
Piero’s relief vanished.
Daniel had told her not to give everything to one person. He had given her the next move from eleven months away.
She held the memory card envelope against her skirt.
“My husband left instructions for three locations,” she said. “This card is only the first key.”
No such instructions had appeared yet. The card contained a folder called LOCATIONS, but they had not opened it.
The distinction did not matter to Piero.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Elena felt every gaze in the room.
Money would help. The thought arrived without shame. Her rent had increased. Emma needed dental work. The old car failed twice a month. Elena had thirty-seven euros in her checking account until payday.
She pictured Daniel hearing the question.
May you like
He would make a bad joke first. Then he would ask why the truth needed to pass through the same men who had buried it.
“I want to know who killed him,” she said.
