CHAPTER 24
"A dead mother always writes letters too late. It is the nature of motherhood."
VALENTINA ROSSI
Mondello welcomed me back as if I'd never left.
The driver Luca had sent with me—Tonio, the same one from the yacht—dropped me at the front door at nine forty in the morning.
He didn't get out of the car. He stayed parked about thirty meters from the front of the house, at the corner of the square, the window cracked, a cigarette going.
The other two soldiers were inside an unmarked black van at the corner of the street. "The Don asked for three," Tonio had said when we left Posillipo. "I know you asked to go alone. But the Don asked for three."
I didn't argue, and I went into the house.
Rosalia wasn't there—I'd given her three days off, with the excuse that I'd be shut up in my room, faking the flu so no one would visit.
She didn't believe a word of it, but she took the days.
I crossed the main room. The house smelled the same as it had four weeks ago—dried basil on the kitchen counter, wax on the furniture, and underneath, always underneath, what was left of my mother's perfume, soaked into the walls over twenty-nine years of marriage and still not gone ten years after her death.
I went up the stairs and down the hall, into the back bedroom.
It was my mother's room.
It had been, at least. After she died, my father locked it and no one went in again. The key stayed in his drawer; I'd taken it at fifteen and had a copy made in secret in central Palermo, on a winter Saturday when he was in Rome. I'd known how to get into that room for eight years.
I turned on the light.
My mother's vanity. The closet shut. The bed covered with the white sheet Rosalia changed once a month, even though no one slept in it.
The painting of Saint Sebastian on the wall behind the armchair—the saint pierced with arrows that my mother had prayed to for nine years without my ever knowing why.
I walked over to the painting and took it down off the wall.
Behind the painting, on the wall, a square of plaster painted a little sloppily compared to the rest.
I'd never noticed it. At fifteen I'd searched for hidden things in the baseboards, in drawers, behind the mirror, but I'd never thought about walls.
Bianca had been right.
I knocked lightly with my knuckles. Hollow.
I took the dagger from my boot and used the tip to scrape the plaster along the edge of the square.
In about three minutes, I had the edge loose. I pushed, and a slab of plaster about twenty by thirty centimeters gave way into the wall, revealing a dark hollow.
Inside the hollow: the box.
Gray steel, the size of a shoebox, with a small padlock. I took it out and set it on the floor. Then I took Bianca's gold key from my pants pocket and fit it in.
I opened it.
Documents. Brown paper folders, about twenty centimeters high, with labels typed on an old typewriter. Operazione Levante 2012-2015. Conti Esteri Zurigo. Trasferimenti Cayman. Contratti Privati Moretti-Rossi. I leafed through them without reading—this wasn't the time to read.
It was the time to take them and go.
I put everything into a cloth bag I'd brought. And then, at the bottom of the box, beneath the last of the documents—I saw an envelope.
White. Small. Sealed with tape gone yellow over almost ten years.
The handwriting on the front was my mother's.
Per Salvatore. Solo per lui. Aprile 2012.
I sat down on the bedroom floor, facing the open wall, the box at my feet.
I had no right to open it.
But I'd already opened everything, and I'd already opened up the truth of my whole life over the last three weeks.
I broke the seal and took out the paper.
It was her handwriting, three pages of it…
Salvatore
I know about the scheme. I've known since two thousand ten. I saw the papers in your study and I read all of it. I didn't ask you, because I wanted to understand it on my own first. And because I knew you'd lie to me, and I didn't want the humiliation of hearing your lies to my face.
I stayed quiet for two years. I won't anymore.
Salvatore, I'm going to die.
The doctors told me in January. Cancer. Advanced stage. They give me three years at most.
I'm not going to tell you. You'll find out late, the way you find out everything in this house. But I need you to know one thing before I go.
If you don't stop the scheme, Salvatore, if you don't undo everything you did to the Morettis, to Don Marco, to his son, Luca, whom you've loved like a son since he was a boy in Capri—if you don't stop now, before I die—you'll pay in a way that will cost you far more than money.
You'll lose both your children.
I don't know how, I have no way of knowing, but I know it. A mother knows certain things, and I've been a mother for twenty-five years.
Matteo is just like you in his pride, and pride will kill him.
Valentina is just like me in her stubbornness. She'll find out everything, one day. And when she does, she won't forgive you.
I ask you for only one thing, Salvatore. For the twenty-six years we spent together. For that first night in Mondello in nineteen eighty-six. For Matteo's birth in the rain. For Valentina's birth in the August heat.
Stop this.
Or else they die. Both of them. In different ways. But both.
—Lucia
I read it three times.
On the third time I cried. Not because of the letter—I cried because of the name at the end.
Lucia.
I hadn't heard my mother's full name in so many years. At home everyone called her mamma. Her letters, the few I'd kept, she always signed with just the first letter. L.
The first time in ten years that I saw her whole name written in her own hand—it was in a letter warning my father that he was going to kill her children.
And he hadn't stopped.
She died in two thousand thirteen. Thirteen months after that letter.
And in two thousand fifteen he took Matteo from Capri by force. And in two thousand nineteen he faked Matteo's death. And in two thousand twenty-three he promised me to Luca.
She had warned him. She had written it down.
And he had kept the letter in a steel box behind a painting of Saint Sebastian, in the room he'd locked so no one could come in.
He had read it and gone on anyway.
I put the letter in the inside pocket of my coat. Next to the other two—Francesca's, and Bianca's.
Three letters against my chest now.
I put the padlock back on the box, set the box inside the bag with the documents, and the plaster back in the hole. Then I hung Saint Sebastian back on the wall.
I went down the stairs with the bag in my hand and the calm of someone who has just discovered, once and for all, that there was no longer a man called my father in the world.
Tonio looked up when he saw me come out of the house.
"Signorina?"
"We're going back to Posillipo."
"Are you all right?"
"I am."
I got in the car. Five hours to Posillipo if traffic cooperated.
And in five hours, I would lay my head in Luca Moretti's lap, and he would read my mother's letter.
And then, together, we would decide what to do about Salvatore Rossi.