Chapter 5 #2
The Colleoni villa had photographs too. Commissioned portraits, mostly. Gabriella was at the center of every frame, her boys arranged around her with the stiff, careful posture of people who had been told where to stand. The photographs in the Venice house were more relaxed, but nothing like these.
The first one to stop Dario was a baby, perhaps eighteen months old, sitting on a tiled floor, holding a diamond necklace.
She was studying it with a deep, focused interest. Tore stood behind her, grinning with complete, uncomplicated joy, and saw nothing unusual about a baby playing with a necklace of diamonds the size of her little baby fists.
"She kept pointing at the wall where I was keeping it for a client," Tore said, from just ahead. He had stopped too, looking back at the photograph with an expression so warm, it was almost uncomfortable to witness. "Every visit to that room. Point, point, point. So I let her hold it."
"And you weren't worried about her breaking it or anything?"
Tore shook his head. "No, she was very gentle with it, so we let her wear it until the client came to pick it up."
The next photograph: Frederica, five or six years old, in a dress so elaborately frilly and pink that it dwarfed her slender frame. She was holding a stuffed rabbit, and radiating annoyance.
"This was a job in Paris," Tore said, smiling. "We needed her to look unthreatening at the handoff. She was perfect. The people we were dealing with spent the entire meeting watching her and pinching her cheeks instead of watching Despina."
Dario chuckled. "Smart."
"Very, but Frederica threw the rabbit at my head in the hotel afterward." He said like he was describing a fond memory of a summer holiday. "My girl had a good arm, even then."
The third photograph was of Frederica, eight or nine years old, in the back seat of a car. She had an ice cream cone in one hand. She was eating it with the serene, unhurried focus of a child who was very pleased with life.
Through the rear window behind her, the blue and red lights of police vehicles strobed in the distance, blurring with speed, the gap between the car and the pursuit already substantial.
Dario looked at that photograph for a long time.
There was something about it he couldn't immediately name.
Not the comedy of it, though it was funny.
It was the absolute serenity of that child loving her ice cream, despite the sirens, because the people in the front seats had the situation handled.
She had simply eaten her treat and waited for the noise to go away.
That kind of certainty could only be built over the years by people who showed up every time they were needed.
If any of his brothers fucked up on a job or training, Gabriella never bailed them out because she never wanted them to rely on anyone but themselves.
"Frederica has always been very calm," Tore said, watching him with quiet attention. "Even when she was small. Despina thought it was concerning, but I saw it as a good thing to have under pressure."
"It's her nature," Dario replied, still staring at the photo. "It's also because she's never had to worry about no one having her back."
The older man studied him for a beat longer and gave a single nod. "The guest room is at the end. Towels in the cupboard. If you need anything, don't hesitate to ask."
He walked back toward the kitchen, humming a tune, and left Dario alone in the hallway.
Dario stood there for another moment, studying the other photos. Frederica, perhaps twelve, in tactical gear two sizes too large, standing very straight and looking directly at the camera with an expression that he knew was her war face.
Frederica, at what looked like a university graduation, caught mid-laugh at something just off-frame, unguarded in a way she would never have permitted if she had known the photo was being taken.
Despina and Tore, somewhere with mountains behind them, Despina's head tipped against Tore's shoulder, and both smiling because they knew they had the world in each other.
The guest room was small and painted cream, with a window that looked out over the garden and, beyond it, the aqua-blue harbor. The bed had clean sheets and a blanket folded at the foot. A glass of water was on the nightstand, with some painkillers for his hangover.
Dario sat on the edge of the bed and tried to make sense of why he was so overwhelmed. It was like he was a stranger in a foreign land and out of his depth.
He was sitting in a house that had photographs of a daughter doing lunatic things and loving every minute of it. It was where the parents finished each other's sentences and left notes on each other's crosswords, and the door was never locked because family meant you didn't need to knock.
It smelled like coffee and bread and decades of people who had chosen, every day, to come back to each other, no matter how fucked up their lives were.
He had been in a lot of houses, but none had been this kind of home before.
His father's old house in Venice was the closest thing he knew to a family home, but now it was as full of ghosts as the villa in Tuscany.
The last thought Dario had before sleep pulled him under wasn't about the files or finding Serapis. It was about a little girl in the back seat of a car, completely unafraid, eating her ice cream while the world tried to catch up with her.
He wondered if Frederica knew she still moved through the world that way because her parents worried about her and would bail her out of whatever trouble she got into.
He tried to imagine what that would feel like, but he was asleep before he reached an answer.