Chapter 9Massimo
Massimo
The desk lamp is the only thing on in the study and I unfold her page under it.
Read it once. Read it again. Four lines, black ink, the curl on her g's the same as the curl on the number she wrote on the receipt at the boathouse table.
I hold the paper to the lamp like an idiot, like heat will show me a second message under the first. It doesn't. There isn't one. She doesn't need a second message.
I know what Rocco did. Tell me what you're not telling me and I'll give you Saturday.
I pour grappa from the bottle Nonna keeps in the cabinet behind the Calvino because she thinks I do not know which book she keeps it behind. I sit. I do not drink.
Twenty minutes. I run it.
Version one: I tell her about the page and the chapel and Sunday and not the rest. She takes Saturday. She gets through the sacristy with me. We come out the other side.
She finds the drive in the safe three months later when she's looking for something else and she watches twenty-two minutes of her father in a room with Piero and a man whose name she will look up and the floor goes out from under her.
She does not come back from that. Not because of the footage. Because I sat across from her and decided what she got to know about her own father.
Version two: I tell her tonight. She walks. She drives. The canal.
Version three: I tell her tonight. She doesn't walk. Saturday goes the way I drew it. Sunday goes the way I drew it. And every morning after Sunday she wakes up next to a man who knew and chose the minute he chose to know it.
I run version three twice. Three times. It does not get cleaner with repetition. It stays the same dirty shape it was the first time.
I drink the grappa. Set the glass down too hard. The page does not move under it.
She has Saturday. I do not have Saturday without her. That math has been done for a day and a half and I am not redoing it in the dark because the math is already done and I am not the kind of man who reruns a settled number.
The chip's in my pocket. I leave it there.
I sleep two hours on the couch in the office. Wake up before the house. Boots, coat. No tie. I find her on the terrace before anyone else is awake, which is where I would have looked first because she counts exits and the terrace has three.
She's at the wrought-iron table with a cup in front of her.
Espresso. Not steaming. She has been out here a while.
The wool blanket from yesterday is over the back of the chair, not on her.
She's in the dark sweater again. Hair up.
Hands flat on the table either side of the cup, which is the hand position of a woman who has decided not to fidget in front of me.
"Move over," I say.
She moves the cup. Not over. An inch. Enough.
I sit. The iron's cold through the trousers. The lake past the boxwood is the color of a knife left in the sink overnight. I do not look at it.
"You read it," she says.
"Twice."
"And?"
I take the espresso pot off the tray on the other chair and pour myself a cup. Do not ask if she wants more. Pour her one anyway. She watches my hand do it.
"Cosimo's man stripped the button-cam off Gemma before she went in the water," I say. "Boathouse. October eleventh. Piero did it himself. He's that kind of careful."
Her hand goes around the new cup. She does not lift it.
"The cam was running for the meeting before.
Twenty-two minutes of footage. Audio's clean.
Piero pulled the drive and walked it back up the hill before sunrise and my father put it in the safe in this house and catalogued it as Amato insurance, which is what my father does with things he's deciding whether to use. "
"It's still in the safe."
"It's still in the safe."
She goes very still. Her whole body draws inward to the breastbone, six inches from me now instead of thirty feet.
"What's on it," she says.
I do not look away.
"Twenty-two minutes of Rocco negotiating Gemma's removal with Piero," I say.
"Bay Ridge accents on one side, Sicilian on the other.
They are not arguing. They have agreed already; this is the part where they price it.
The price is a name. Your father's name.
Not as the man who ordered it. As the man whose name guarantees it.
Rocco puts Antonio Amato up as collateral on the contract.
Piero accepts it. Footage ends with Rocco saying 'we're square' in English and Piero saying nothing in any language. "
"My father didn't order it."
"No."
"His name bought it."
"Yes."
She lifts the cup. She drinks. She sets it down. Not carefully. Just down.
"Was he in the room."
"No."
"Did he know."
"The footage does not answer that."
She nods once. The smallest nod. The nod of a woman logging a fact she will not be done logging for the rest of her life.
I sit with my forearm on the iron and count the boxwood from where I am sitting. I get to nine. I bet she got to nine.
"Why am I hearing this now," she says.
"Because you asked."
"I asked yesterday."
"You asked for what I wasn't telling you. I'm telling you."
"Took you a night."
"It did."
She looks at me. Full on. Not at the lake, not at the cup, not at the door. At me. Her eyes are dry. She is not going to cry in front of me and probably not after either. She is one of the quiet ones.
"You ran versions," she says.
"I ran versions."
"How many ended with you not telling me."
"All of them."
"Why."
"Because all of them ended in the canal."
She breathes out through her nose. Slow. She picks up the cup again. Drinks. Sets it down very deliberately this time, in the middle of the saucer, dead center, like she is placing a piece on a board.
"Saturday night we move together," she says. "Or not at all."
"Caterina."
"Together. Or not at all."
"I hear you."
"And the drive comes to me. The minute it's out of the safe. Not Sunday. Not after the sacristy. The minute."
I do not answer.
I pick up the pot. I refill her cup. The espresso is darker than it was, the bottom of the pot, the strong inch. I pour it slow so it does not splash on the back of her hand where it is around the cup, and the back of her hand stays where it is and lets me.
She accepts it. She does not say thank you. There is no thank-you in the shape of the morning. She lifts the cup with the new pour in it and drinks and sets it down and her hand stays around it, and the answer is in her hand staying around the cup.
"Good," she says. Quiet. To the table.
"Good," I say.
I take the page out of my coat. I slide it across the iron and stop it under her right palm.
She lifts the palm. Folds the page in half along its own crease.
Slides it into the inside pocket of the sweater, against her ribs, on top of whatever else she has against her ribs, which is more things than I have catalogued and fewer things than she thinks she has.
She does not ask for the drive again. She has asked once. She is not a woman who asks twice.
I sit with her. Five minutes. Ten. The light comes up over the boxwood the wrong color, weak, gray-pink, the kind of light that does not commit to being light. Something moves in the cypress that I do not look at. Her ankle touches mine under the table. She does not move it. I do not move mine.
I put my hand flat on the iron next to hers. Two inches between us. She looks at the gap once and does not close it and does not widen it.
Footsteps on the gravel below the terrace. Soft. Not Pino's gait. Then they go around to the kitchen steps and a minute later there are different footsteps, harder, on the flagstone, and that is Pino, and Pino has a tray.
He rounds the corner of the terrace with the breakfast tray balanced on his left forearm. Pastries, a second pot, two clean cups. He clocks us before he clocks the table, which is the order Pino clocks rooms in.
He stops.
He does not look surprised. Pino has not looked surprised since 1998. He looks at me, then at Caterina, then at the two inches of iron between our hands and the espresso pot empty on the tray and the page-shape pressing through her sweater. Back at me. Not surprise. The other thing.
He is doing math.
I watch him do it.