Chapter 5Caterina
Caterina
"I've been waiting for someone to come in from the outside for four months," she says. She doesn't sit. "I need you to know I'm not my father."
She closes the door behind her. Locks it. Quiet click.
"That's a hell of an opening line."
"I rehearsed."
"It shows."
She almost smiles. Almost. She nods at the espresso closer to me and I pick it up. The cup is warm. The folder on the bureau is plain manila, no label, corners soft from being handled. The kind of soft that comes from two in the morning.
I drink. I wait.
"I keep the books," she says. "The real ones."
"Your father has an accountant."
"My father has three accountants. They keep the books that go to the lawyers. I keep the book that goes nowhere." She taps the folder with one fingernail. Short, bitten. "I started a year ago. Quietly. I was bored. Then I was not bored."
"Chiara."
"Don't."
"I was going to say you're twenty-four."
"I know what you were going to say."
I set the espresso down. The folder is six inches from my hand and I don't reach for it.
"Why me."
"Because you came in through the front door wearing a dead girl's pearls and you ate breakfast across from my brother yesterday without flinching, and I have been in this house twenty-four years and I have not met a woman who could do that." She tilts her head. "Also Nonna said."
"Nonna said."
"Nonna doesn't say. Nonna nods. She nodded at the door of my room last Tuesday after you got here, and she has not nodded at me about a person since I was nine years old, so." She shrugs. The shrug is pure Columbia Law: all hinge, no commitment. "Take it for what it is."
I look at the folder. I don't open it.
"What's in there."
"Three years of payments my father made that can't survive sunlight. Names. Routing. A judge in Brooklyn, a councilman in Mineola, two priests, which I don't want to talk about. A line item every other Wednesday that goes to a charity that does not exist; I checked the EIN."
"Chiara."
"I'm not asking you to do anything with it. Yet. I'm asking you to know it exists. And to know that I am the one who built it, and not him."
The chip on my chest is on. I should have turned it off the second Chiara walked in.
I didn't because I hadn't decided whether Chiara was someone I needed to record.
She has decided now. I reach inside the wrap of Gemma's cardigan, under the camisole, and switch it off with my thumb.
Chiara watches without changing her face.
"Good," she says, quiet. "I was hoping I wouldn't have to ask."
A key slides into the lock behind her.
Chiara stills.
The latch turns with a soft, deliberate click.
Ottavia steps in.
Black housecoat, slippers, the silver braid down her back the way old women in Sicily wear it before they put their hair up for the day. She does not knock and she does not apologize. Of course she has a key. Of course no locked door in this house is locked to her.
She closes the door behind her with the side of her hand and she stands in the room and she listens for a moment to nothing, the way a woman listens when she has lived eighty-one years in houses full of men.
Then she crosses to the bureau and sets a brass key down on the wood beside Chiara's folder.
The key is old. Big head, long shaft, the kind of key that opens a thing built before locks got small.
"That does not open the boathouse," she says.
I look at her. She looks back at me, dry as a stone.
"All right."
"You should know where the chapel is. Before Saturday."
"Saturday."
"Before Saturday."
She turns. She crosses back to the door.
She lets herself out the way she came in, which is to say she does not look at Chiara on her way past and Chiara does not look at her, and the door closes with the soft, deliberate snick of a woman who has spent eighty-one years closing doors quietly in a house full of dangerous men.
Chiara exhales through her nose.
"That's about as effusive as she gets," she says.
"I gathered."
"I'll let you read." She nods at the folder.
She picks up the empty saucer, leaves my still-full cup, takes hers.
At the door she stops with her hand on the knob.
"If you carry those numbers out of this house, you carry them out clean.
I don't care about him. I do care about her. Don't put her name anywhere."
"Understood."
She goes.
I lock the door behind her again. I stand with my back to it for a count I do not measure. Then I cross to the bed.
I spread the pages.
She is not lying. The handwriting is hers: neat, fast, lawyer-trained.
The columns line up. The dates run years long.
There are names in there I have been chasing for three years and names I have never heard of, and there is one entry, October eleventh, 2007, that I read twice and then I sit down on the edge of the mattress and read a third time.
I take Gemma's photograph out of the drawer.
I have been keeping it under the lining.
I lay it on the bedspread next to the ledger pages.
Gemma at a christening, smiling, left-handed, the small gold drop earrings her mother gave her at fifteen.
The earrings are in the jewelry box on the bureau.
I picked them up this morning and put them back down because I cannot look at my own face in the mirror with them on.
I sit on the bed with my dead girl on one side and my mission on the other and try to hold both.
The chip under my shirt is off but the shape of it is still against my sternum like a coin. A lie worn over a wound. I press my palm flat to it once and take it away.
I do not cry. I count exits instead, mouthing the numbers, and the count steadies my hands the way it has steadied them since I was twelve.
Four. The door. The window. The bathroom. The service stair behind the closet panel she found on day two.
Four.
I lock Chiara's pages in the false bottom of the suitcase, which is not a real false bottom and would not survive a serious search, but it is the best I have. I leave the chip off. I put the brass key in the pocket of Gemma's cashmere and go down the back stair at 4:00 p.m.
Massimo is in the hallway.
He is not waiting for me. He is reading a folded sheet of paper, one shoulder against the wall, the kind of unhurried lean a man does when he has all afternoon and no one to spend it on. He sees me, or doesn't, and steps aside.
The hallway is wide enough that he doesn't have to step at all. He stays exactly where he is.
My shoulder grazes his chest as I pass. Wool. The shape of him under it. He does not look up from the page.
"You sleep with your door locked now."
Not a question.
I don't answer.
His hand finds the small of my back as I pass him. Two fingers. A half second of pressure through Gemma's cashmere, low, exact. Then nothing. He keeps walking. I keep walking. Neither of us turns around.
I stand in the hallway after he's gone. I count my own breath. Lose count at three.
Goddamn it.
I find Chiara on the dock at dusk because I do not want to be in that house and because Chiara is the only person in it who has not, in the last six hours, put a hand on me with intent.
Chiara is in the same cardigan. Different cigarette.
She lifts the pack without looking at me and I sit down beside her and take one because I have not smoked in three years and tonight I am willing to be a woman who has.
"Long Island in November," she says.
"Specifically cruel."
"It's the light. There's none of it and what there is, is gray."
"I had a boyfriend like that once."
"Gray?"
"All the way through."
She snorts. I light the cigarette off hers; Chiara cups her hand around mine without comment, the way women have been lighting each other's cigarettes on docks since docks were invented.
The lake gets flat as a tray in November, Chiara says, the color of pewter somebody forgot to polish. I look at her sharply because I have heard a version of that phrase before, in another mouth, and Chiara catches the look and misreads it and laughs. Short, low, surprised at itself.
If I had met this woman at a bar in the city, I would have kept her. I do not let it show on my face.
Chiara stubs the cigarette. She turns her head toward the stairs.
Chiara sees him a half second after I do.
Massimo is at the top of the dock stairs. The last light is gone behind him and the sky is the flat dark of a bruise going yellow at the edge. He's been there long enough to have heard the laugh. His face does the thing his face does, which is nothing.
In his hand, held loose against his thigh, is a brass key. Long shaft. Big head.
Not the one on my bureau. Bigger.
Chiara's hand goes still on her knee.
He doesn't speak. He turns the key once between his fingers, the way another man would turn a chip.