15. Found Money
FOUND MONEY
VALERIA
“Valeria.” Ottavia calls it from the terrace before I am ten steps onto the grass. “Take the flashlight off the hook. That path is a disgrace, and I have been saying so for thirty years.”
I take the flashlight.
It is 6:20 p.m. on Wednesday and the light is going off the water, and I am walking down to the boathouse because it is the only building on this property where nobody will come and find me a chair.
Two days of the new arrangement. He finds a thing at 2 and I know it at 2, not after dinner, and on Tuesday he brought me the worst page in the house four minutes after he read it and stood there while I looked at his brother’s initials.
The protocol is exact and the protocol is functioning and it has the temperature of a bank lobby.
He does not put a cup at my elbow anymore. He used to do it on the way past without deciding to, and it turns out that is the piece I keep finding under my hand at 4 in the afternoon.
The boathouse has not been used since his father died. There is a hull on trestles with its varnish gone chalky, and a paraffin lamp somebody keeps filled out of habit, and a daybed under a dust sheet that the staff shake out twice a year for no reason anyone can name.
Silvio Corva stood in a dining room two weeks ago and proposed that I be brought down here and put in the ground by Sunday.
So I have taken it. I come here to think and I have not told anybody that is what I am doing.
Lorenzo comes down the path at 6:42 p.m. with his sleeves rolled and a courier envelope in his hand.
“Six-forty,” he says. “You get it at six forty-two. Dr. Kelleher’s amendment. She filed it yesterday afternoon and the courier copy came to the gate while I was on the phone with Nadia.”
“Read me the language.”
“Page four. The device recovered from the decedent’s jacket is inconsistent with the unit dispensed and exhibits a partition not present in the manufacturer’s specification.” He holds it out and I do not take it, because I can hear it fine. “She uses the word counterfeit twice.”
“In a public filing.”
“On a docket a reporter can pull with a library card.” He puts the envelope down on the trestle. “Nadia thinks a week. Ten days if we are lucky and the county clerk is slow.”
We stand with it for a moment.
In a week the story stops being a woman who buries husbands and becomes a man whose medicine was swapped, because the person who built that device has spent two weeks burning every road behind him and is about to learn that a doctor in Pelham kept her photographs.
“She needs men,” I say.
“She has four since Tuesday and she has not noticed them, and I would like to keep it that way.”
“Then that is done.” I put my hands in my coat pockets. “Shelve it. I have been holding a docket clock all day and I came down here to not hold it for twenty minutes.” My notebook is up on the high shelf by the door, shut and dry and out of all of this, and putting it there took me two attempts.
“All right.”
He does not leave. He also does not come nearer, which I have started to feel in the room like a draft.
Then something under the floor screams.
It is not a large sound, and both of us are on the boards before either of us has decided anything.
“Behind the hull,” I say.
There is a gap in the old planking down by the water end where two boards have lifted off a cross brace, and under it the tide is coming in against the piles.
The screaming is not coming from the water. It is coming from a ledge on the brace about eighteen inches in, dry, and it is furious.
I get down on my stomach in a good coat and put the flashlight in my teeth.
“Left of the brace,” I tell him around it. “There is a shelf. It has wedged itself in behind the bracket and it is not stuck, it has simply decided.”
Lorenzo goes flat beside me and puts his arm in past the elbow, and the tide comes through and gets him across the shoulder and the side of the head, and he says a word in Italian I have not heard from him before.
“Translate that.”
“No.”
The screaming goes up an octave. Something takes hold of his hand with everything it has.
“It is fighting me.”
“Of course it is fighting you, you are a stranger with a large hand.”
“It weighs nothing and it has bitten through my thumb.”
“Then bring it out bitten.”
The tide comes through twice more and gets both of us to the collarbone, and I am laughing with a flashlight in my teeth on a wet floor, and he is laughing too, and it goes through the middle of three days of bank lobby and takes a wall out.
Two of the most dangerous people on this coast, flat on our faces in tide spray, taking orders from something that weighs less than the flashlight.
Then his arm comes up, and there is a kitten in his fist.
It is orange, it is soaked to a shape that no animal should be, it has one ear folded the wrong way like a returned envelope, and it is howling into his face from four inches with its whole body vibrating.
It is not frightened of us at all. It is four ounces of pure opinion, and its opinion of both of us is low, and it says so, continuously.
“It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen,” I say, with love.
“It has a tail like a wet shoelace.”
“Give it here.”
I get my coat off and wrap it and it fights the coat as well, and then it stops all at once and hooks its claws into the lining and starts a noise like a badly maintained motor.
“Somebody in the village will take it,” Lorenzo says.
“No.”
“Valeria.”
“It has no papers.” I sit back against the trestle with a small wet engine in my ruined coat.
“It has no provenance, no chain of custody, no line item, no schedule, no clause, and no entry in any ledger anywhere on this earth, and there is not one person alive who can produce a document about it. Nobody placed it. Nobody priced it. Do you understand how much I need something like that in my life right now?”
He looks at me. He sits down on the wet boards beside me with his shirt stuck to him.
“Then it needs a name.”
“It does.”
“Achille.”
“It weighs four ounces.”
“Nero.”
“It is orange.”
“Argo.” He is warming to it. “The dog waited twenty years.”
“It waited eleven minutes, and it bit you.”
“Sentinella.”
“You are naming a boy who screams at water.” I hold it up, and it goes rigid and furious, wearing its wrong-way ear like a hat it refuses to acknowledge. “Soldo.”
“Soldo is not a name. It is a coin.”
“It is a small coin. It is what you find in a coat you have not worn since last winter, and it makes your entire day for no reason you can defend.” I put it back in the lining. “Found money. Nothing on any statement, no tax on it, nobody’s business but mine.”
Lorenzo looks at the thing in my coat for a while.
“Soldo,” he says.
The kitten climbs out of my coat, crosses my lap, walks the length of his thigh, and goes headfirst into the inside of his jacket, where it turns around twice and goes to sleep.
“That is treason,” I tell it.
“It knows who carried it out of the hole.”
“It knows who is warmer. It is a mercenary and I respect it.” I lean my head back on the trestle. “Also this building has now produced one live animal and zero corpses, which is an improvement on what Silvio Corva had planned for it, and I want that noted somewhere.”
“Noted.”
He takes his jacket off with the kitten in it and folds it onto the chair by the lamp, and then he stays crouched there with his back to me for a moment too long.
“I want you off the exposed edges,” he says.
“Here we go.”
“Kelleher’s filing goes public inside a week. Nadia handles all contact with her from Monday. Providence goes through Priya and a courier. You do not drive yourself anywhere, including the village, including the end of this road.”
I stand up.
“Stand up and say it to my face.”
He stands up and says it to my face.
“No,” I tell him. “I said no to the first version of this at the contract table, in front of your capos, and you struck it. Do not hand me the same clause with a bow on it because you are frightened.”
“I am frightened.”
“Then be frightened out loud, every day, in detail, and let me decide what I do with my own hours.” I am closer to him than I was, and my voice has dropped.
“I have been the exposed edge since I was twenty-four. The difference is that now I know it, and you want to take the knowing and wrap it in drivers and couriers and hand me back the not-knowing and call it love.”
“I want you alive.”
“My father wanted me provided for.” I watch that one land. “He decided my risk for me too. He was generous about it. He even rounded up.”
“That is not fair.”
“It is exactly fair. It is the fairest thing I have said all week. Nobody prices me again, Lorenzo. Nobody. Offer me terms like a partner or get off my building.”
“It is not what your father did, and I am not going to…”
He kisses me.
Or I kiss him. I have gone through it since, and I cannot get the order right.
We are wet to the skin and cold and shaking with it, and his mouth is hot, and I have three days of not being touched sitting in my body like unpaid interest, and I get both hands in his shirt and put him against the hull hard enough that the whole boat shifts on its trestles.
Then I stop with my mouth an inch off his.
“Listen to me first.”
He goes still, all at once and all the way, hands open at my waist, and that stillness is the sexiest thing he has done all year.
“The page from Monday is still open. Nothing that happens in this building tonight closes it.” I am breathing like I have run here.
“I want you. I have not forgiven you. Those are two separate entries and I am not going to net them off against each other to make myself feel tidier, and if you need this to mean I am finished being angry then we stop now and walk up to the house.”
He puts his forehead against mine.
“Say the terms again.”
“You are unforgiven, and I want you anyway. Take it or do not.”
“I will take it.” His hands are shaking and it is not the cold. “And it is going to cost me every night for as long as it lasts, and I am still taking it.”