Chapter 11Caterina
Caterina
He waits for the door to settle behind me.
Then for the gravel under the terrace to go quiet.
He is not in a hurry. He picks up the second cup, not for himself; for me.
He sets it down at my left and slides the saucer half an inch with two fingers until it is centered.
Pino is not a man whose hands do anything by accident.
"Kid."
"Twenty-nine."
"Kid."
I let him have it.
"Three years ago," he says.
I wait.
"Cosimo had my brother beaten."
He says it the way you read the time off a clock on the wall.
"For what."
"Forty dollars."
"Off the till."
"Off the till."
His thumb is on the rim of his own cup. He hasn't poured for himself. He's not going to. Pino does not eat or drink in front of people whose mouths he hasn't decided about.
"Brother walks now," he says. "Talks fine. Doesn't hear out the left."
"And."
"And I have worked for Massimo since the second week of that month. Sir works for sir. The other one signs the checks. That's the arrangement."
"Does he know you're telling me."
"He knows I'm sitting here."
"That isn't the question."
"He knows the answer to the question, kid."
I lift the cup. The espresso is the bottom of the pot, which Massimo already drank the strong inch out of, and what I get is the second strong inch, and I drink it and set it down.
"Tour," I say.
He stands.
The kitchen corridor at 7:40 a.m. smells like rosemary somebody bruised between their fingers and coffee that has been on the burner ten minutes too long.
The corridor is narrow. Service runs. Two doors on the left to the pantry, one to the back stair, one to the laundry.
One on the right to the morning room. One at the end to the east wing.
Pino walks it slow. Tour pace. Like he's pointing out the molding.
"Camera," he says. Eye flicks up. "There. Eats the corner from the back-stair door to here. Doesn't eat the inside of the pantry. Doesn't eat the gap between the pantry door and the wall when the door's at sixty degrees, which is where it sticks."
"It sticks."
"It sticks. Don't fix it. He'd notice."
He walks me past the pantry door, lets it kiss its frame at sixty degrees, smiles half a millimeter at the gap.
"Next."
He points his chin at the laundry. "Camera there pretends to eat the laundry. Eats the laundry door. Inside of the laundry's blind. Linen room off the back of the laundry. Linen room is blind end to end. No mic. Checked it Tuesday."
"You checked it Tuesday."
"I check it Tuesdays."
"Of course you do."
He walks me to the back stair. Pats the banister twice the way a man pats a horse he likes.
"Treads three and seven creak. Skip 'em.
Top landing camera's a dummy. Has been since June.
Cosimo replaced the working one with a dummy and never came back to install the second working one because he forgot. He forgets that kind of thing now."
"East wing."
"Coming."
We turn into the east wing corridor. Carpet runner. Quiet under flats. Two doors. A long window onto the boxwood. Pino stops in front of the second door.
"Guard outside the green room, eleven to two.
Sallie. Twenty-three. Wears earbuds under his cap and tells himself it's one earbud and tells himself the volume's low.
It is neither of those things. He goes deaf at eleven.
Comes back to the world at 1:58 a.m., which is when he panics and pulls the buds and pretends he's been listening the whole time. "
"You let him."
"I like Sallie."
"You like him."
"Sallie's brother's the one who can't hear out the left."
I look at him. The brother who cannot hear out the left is Pino's own, the one Cosimo had beaten for forty dollars off a till. Which makes Sallie his brother too, and makes I like Sallie a much larger sentence than the one I heard.
He does not look back. He looks at the carpet.
"All right," I say.
"All right."
"What's behind the green room door."
"Linen press. Service hall to the blue sitting room. South side. The blue sitting room has two doors. The one nobody uses comes out behind the press. Other one comes off the main hall, which is the one a guest knocks on at four o'clock when she's been called."
"Called."
"Yeah."
I look at him. He looks at the carpet still.
"Tell me," I say.
He opens his mouth.
A door behind us, the laundry, off its frame at sixty degrees, and Chiara's hand on my wrist. She does not say anything. She tips her head. I follow. Pino stands in the corridor with his hands in his trouser pockets and lets Chiara have me like he was waiting for her to.
The linen room is blind end to end. Pino's word for it.
Chiara closes the door with two fingers on the latch.
The room is dark and smells of bleach and the green soap the laundress uses on the altar cloths.
Stacks of folded napkins on a shelf at my shoulder.
A bare bulb on a chain that she does not pull.
"Four o'clock," she says.
"Cosimo."
"Blue sitting room. Private audience with the bride. Don't be late."
"Why."
"Because the last woman who sat alone with him in that room left this estate in a car she did not arrive in."
A beat.
"Who."
"Doesn't matter. You don't know her. She was nineteen. She mattered to me."
I let that sit.
"Tell me about the room."
"Two doors. Wallpaper the color of a bruise that's about to go yellow. Two armchairs at the fire and a low table between them. He'll sit you across, not beside. He'll pour. Don't refuse it. Don't drink it either. Hold it."
"What does he want."
"The same thing he wants from every woman who sits in that chair. To watch her hands."
"Hands."
"Whether they shake."
I look at my hand on the shelf. Steady. Good. Four o'clock will be a different test.
"Chiara."
She looks up.
"Thank you."
She does not smile. She tucks a corner of my collar in and goes out the way she came in.
I count to ten. I open the door.
He is in the corridor doorway at the far end. Hands in his pockets. Not moving. He has been there long enough to have heard the latch.
He walks down the corridor and the carpet does not give him away. He stops a foot off me. He does not look at the linen room behind me.
"Olive groves," he says. "Three stories.
The blight in '04, the German buyer Gemma's father turned down in '06, the cousin who married into the Calabrian side and embarrassed everyone at Easter '09.
Pick the German one if he opens with weather.
Pick the blight if he opens with money. Pick the cousin if he opens with family. Do not pick the cousin first."
"Etiquette."
"Stand when he stands. Sit when he sits.
Don't cross your legs at the knee, only the ankle.
Take the chair he points to. Don't take the other one even if he leaves the room and comes back.
If he offers the grappa, accept. If he pours it himself, hold the glass at the stem and not the bowl, because Gemma did and her father did and Cosimo looked for it the once. "
"Habit."
"Thumbnail. Left palm. Gemma did it when she was nervous about telling the truth and not when she was nervous about lying, which is the wrong way around and which is why my father watched for it. Press it twice in the first five minutes. Once in the second ten. Not after that."
I press my thumbnail into my left palm. Feel the half-moon set. Do it again. The skin remembers fast; the wrist is what I have to teach.
He watches the hand.
Then he steps in. Closes the distance with one foot, not two.
His left hand comes up between us and goes flat against the front of Gemma's blouse, between the buttons, knuckles to my sternum, the camera pin pressed under his second knuckle while he resets the catch with his thumb.
Three counts. The back of his hand is warm through the silk.
He does not look at my face while he does it.
I turn my face up anyway.
His mouth is on mine before I finish lifting my chin, his free hand at the back of my neck, fingers in my hair at the nape, not gentle, not brief.
The wall hits my shoulder blades. His knuckles stay flat against my sternum where the camera pin is, and the camera pin presses back into the bone, and I breathe out against him, all the air at once.
A cough. Stairwell. Pino. Neither of us moves.
"Forty minutes," Massimo says against my mouth.
I take his lapels in both fists and pull him sideways through the linen room door. He locks it with one hand and keeps the other at my waist and walks me backward into the shelving. A stack of napkins slides off the edge and lands soft on the floor.
He starts at my collar. Top button. Next.
Unhurried, like the afternoon is his and he is working out which part of it to use.
I get his jacket off his shoulders. He shrugs out without looking away from my face.
I have my hands on his shirt buttons when he catches both my wrists in one of his and pins them above me to the shelf. The look on his face is not asking.
His mouth comes down on the side of my throat, open, and finds the pulse there. It is going fast. He stays on it, the flat of his tongue against the beat of it, until I understand he is reading my pulse with his mouth the way he reads everything else, and that he has decided he likes the number.
"Quiet," he says into my skin. Barely sound. A shape more than a word.
I am already quiet. That is the joke neither of us can laugh at. The whole house is listening and the only thing I am allowed is the thing my body does without my permission.
His free hand goes under the skirt. Slow. He drags it up the inside of my thigh and the muscle jumps for him and he stops, just short, and waits, because he wants me to be the one who closes the distance.
I close it. I push into his hand.
"Good." One word. It goes down my spine like the praise is wired to it.