Chapter 4Massimo
Massimo
I do not sleep.
The study's dark except for the monitor and the chip moving across my knuckles. The ring's off my hand; the blood came out of it four nights ago and I have not put it back on.
Forty-three seconds of her. That's the loop.
She walks in, she doesn't look around, she shuts the door behind her without letting it latch. Clean.
Then she's at the desk with her hand to her collarbone and the lipstick comes out and the lipstick stays out, and her thumb finds the corner of each page like she's done this a hundred times before. No fumble. No second take. The kind of hand that's been trained.
I run it again. I run it a third time. I am not watching for what she took.
I know what she took. I am watching her shoulders for the breath I keep expecting to see and not seeing.
There's a tell every amateur has, a little pulse at the base of the throat when they think the door's about to open, and she doesn't have it.
Whatever she's afraid of, it isn't being caught.
Forty-three seconds, and at second twenty-six she turns the page with her right hand, steady, and that is the thing I keep coming back to. Steady hand. Camera at her chest. Pearls warmed by then.
I close the laptop.
The chip keeps moving. Knuckle, knuckle, knuckle, back. It is a habit I picked up at twenty-three at a table in the back of a bar in Bensonhurst and never set down. Tonight it is the only thing keeping my hands off the phone.
I pick up the phone at 3:40 a.m.
"Wake him."
"He's asleep, capo."
"That's why I said wake him."
Forty minutes. That's what it takes a man at One Police Plaza who owes me a favor older than his marriage to pull a file off a desk he isn't supposed to know exists.
He sends it to a burner. I open it on the laptop and read it once, then twice, then I close the laptop again because reading it a third time will not change it.
Caterina Amato. Twenty-nine. Investigative reporter, financial crimes desk, byline on three pieces about Camorra freight that ran in a paper I have on my desk twice a week.
Two-year open file on the Valenti network with my name on three of the pages and my father's on every page.
Father: Antonio Amato. Bookkeeper. Mid-level.
Disappeared in 2007, age forty-one, leaving a wife, a twelve-year-old daughter, no body.
I get up. I walk to the safe. I move the morocco-bound book to the left.
My father's burn book is on the second shelf in. I take it down. I have read it twice in my life and I do not want to read it a third time and I open it anyway.
Amato, Antonio. Two lines in his handwriting. Closed.
Cosimo writes closed when the body is in a place nobody looks. He writes other things when the body is somewhere a fisherman might find it. The word closed in his hand is a sentence and a verdict, and there is a daughter twelve years old in 2007 who has spent seventeen years trying to read it.
I put the book back. I close the safe. I sit at the desk again and the chip starts moving without me telling it to.
I make the list.
What she wants: the book on the desk, the file on her father, a name from my father's mouth ideally taped, a way out of the house alive.
What I want: whoever sent her, whoever paid Renzo, whoever is making a run at my father before Sunday and is using a journalist and a dead bookkeeper's daughter to soften the ground. The Albanians don't read Calvino. Whoever briefed her does.
What my father does when he finds out. He will not raise his voice. He will look at me the way he looked at me the morning of Marco's funeral and ask if I have handled it, and I will say yes, and then I will have to have handled it.
What the city looks like if he lives past Sunday. I let myself think about that for one cold minute. Then I think about what the city looks like if he doesn't.
The math is not close.
I pour an espresso at 4:10 a.m. and let it go cold while I look at the lake. The water's flat. The boathouse light is off; somebody finally turned it. I drink the espresso anyway. It tastes like nothing.
I do not wake my father.
I dress at 6:00 a.m. White shirt. No tie. The jacket I leave on the back of the chair because I am sitting down to breakfast in my own house and I want her to walk in and see a man who has not bothered to armor himself for her. The ring stays in the drawer.
7:00 a.m. I'm downstairs.
The breakfast room faces east. The light is just starting, pale, low across the table. Tomas brings the coffee himself because Tomas knows by the way I sat down that this is not a morning to send a kid in with a tray.
"Anything?"
"No, capo."
"Pino."
"Outside. Smoking."
"Tell him boathouse key. Kitchen hook. Thursday."
He doesn't ask. He goes.
I sit at the head of the table because that is where I sit when my father is not down yet, and my father will not be down for another hour because last night ran late and Lucia heard him in the chapel at 2:00 a.m., which means he prayed, and which means he won't be steady on his feet until 9:00 a.m. Good. I want the room.
I pull her chair out a thumb's width from the table. Not enough that anybody coming in would notice. Enough that when I stand for her my hand finds the back of it without searching.
The chip is in my pocket. I leave it there.
Four ways in: the door she'll walk through, the service hall door at my back, the French doors to the garden, the arch to the foyer. She'll clock three of them in the first second because she always does, and she won't see me watching her do it because she never has.
Last night. Second dinner.
I went at her sideways. Cosimo steers the table toward the Sunday liturgy because he wants to hear her on saints and I let him because I want to hear her too.
He asks her about her name day. She gives him a smile that isn't quite a smile and says her mother named her after a great-aunt with no saint at all, which is the kind of answer that lands warm in my father's ear because he loves a woman with a stubborn mother.
Then I ask.
Gemma wrote my mother for two years from her finishing school in Lugano. Every letter she signed off with the saint's day she shared her birthday with, because her mother had drilled it into her at six and she was the kind of girl who never stopped doing the thing her mother drilled into her.
Santa Gemma Galgani. April eleventh.
That line was in every letter, and it was in the file I sent her with, and it was the kind of thing a forger memorizes and waits to be asked.
"Which saint's day did you share with, again?"
I ask it like I've forgotten. Like I'm sorry to make her say it twice.
She looks at me and does not look away. She picks up her glass and holds my eye over the rim, and the thing in her face is not panic. It is the calculation of a woman sorting through her lies for the most useful one.
"I've never shared my birthday with anyone," she says. "Saint or otherwise."
She pours herself more Barolo, two fingers too full, the way nobody raised at a Sicilian table pours wine because at a Sicilian table you pour for the man next to you first and you pour to the curve of the bowl, not past it. Her wrist doesn't know that. Her wrist has learned to pour at a bar.
I watch the glass. The level. The shine on it.
Enough.
I tell Pino in the hall after: boathouse key on the kitchen hook by Thursday. He nods once and walks away, because Pino does not need the rest of the sentence. Pino has been pulling boathouse keys off kitchen hooks for my father since I was nine.
I am not going to hand her over.
I sit with that decision for two hours and a cold espresso and I have not moved off it.
I am going to use her first. She wants the burn book.
She wants her father. She wants whoever paid Renzo.
Three things I want too, and she is closer to one of them than I will ever be, because she has spent seventeen years reading the page that I have read twice.
What my father does when he finds out is a problem for after Sunday.
7:58 a.m.
I hear her on the stairs. She walks the way she walked into the foyer that first morning, weight back on her heels, slower than she'd move alone. Practice. Discipline. The pearls today. I'll know when I see her.
7:59 a.m.
I set my coffee down. I square the cup to the saucer. I am not nervous. I am the other thing, the thing that lives under nervous and runs cleaner and has no name for itself.
The door opens.
Her eyes do it before her body's all the way through the frame. Garden door. Service arch. Foyer. Three exits counted in under a second, mouth moving a hair on the count, and she does not know I have been watching for that tell since 4:00 a.m.
I stand.
I stand the way you stand for the woman you are going to marry, slow, full, both hands clear of the table, and I watch her clock it and file it away without a flicker.
I pull the chair the rest of the way out.
She crosses to it. No hesitation. She sits the way Gemma would have sat, light, weight forward, but she finds the napkin first and that is not Gemma and we both know it.
I pour her coffee with my own hand. Not Tomas. Not the kid. Mine. The pot is heavy and the pour is even and I do not spill a drop, and her hand closes around the cup.
I sit. I watch her drink.
I have decided I am going to keep her alive. What that costs is a question I am leaving on the table for now.
"Sleep all right?"
She lifts her eyes over the rim of the cup. Holds mine.
"Like the dead."