25. Bait #2
“Because it is the only lever he has ever shown anybody,” I say.
“Because in eleven years of a man being careful, that is the one place he is not careful. And because I have spent five weeks being furious with people who decided what I could carry without asking me, and now I am about to do it to a woman in Woonsocket who is going to be a prop in something she will never be told about, and to you, and I am asking anyway, and I would like the record to show that I know exactly what that makes me.”
The finches carry on.
“Well,” Renata says at last. “At least you said it out loud. Nobody else who has used this house ever did.”
She gets a pad.
Fabrizio makes it better.
That is the part I keep coming back to. We are in the study at two o’clock and I have the draft on the table and I read it out, and Lorenzo says it is good and Tazio says it is good, and Fabrizio Serra sits with his hands folded and his coffee going cold and says, “It will not work.”
“Say why.”
“Because you have written an emergency.” He leans forward.
“Signora, look at the ten years. What does that fund do when there is an emergency? It sends money. Always. It has never once sent a person in ten years except at the very beginning, when it moved her. An emergency is the one thing it knows how to answer without coming.”
I put the page down.
He is completely right.
“So do not write an emergency,” he says.
“Write an administration. Nothing urgent, nothing frightening, no hospital. Say that the facility requires an authorized signature on a form, and that it is bureaucratic and stupid, and that Signora Alba is sorry to trouble the fund with something so small.” He shrugs.
“Small is what he cannot ignore. A big thing can be solved with money. A small thing needs a person and a pen.”
Tazio makes a noise of appreciation.
“And one more,” Fabrizio says. “Have her put a date on it. Give him a Thursday. Men who are careful will always choose the day you offer them, because refusing a day means proposing a different one, and proposing means deciding, and deciding leaves a fingerprint.”
I sit and look at this man in his good coat with his cold coffee, my husband’s brother, the one who found Gilda Renzi and put a cloth over her face, and I say, “How do you know that?”
“Because I have been arranging things for this family since I was nine years old,” Fabrizio says, “and a thing that is arranged always looks like an accident to the person it is arranged for.”
And everybody at that table nods, including me.
Renata posts it from the box on her own corner at twenty past four in the afternoon.
I watch her do it. She walks down her path in a coat and a hat with her stick and she puts it in the slot and comes back and does not look at me, and goes inside and shuts the door, and I stand on her pavement on Doyle Avenue with my hands in my pockets and I feel like something scraped off a shoe.
We drive home.
Keane has the Providence box under watch from six. Nadia has the facility set up so that if anybody calls to check, there is a facility, and there is a Concetta Vanni in it, and there is a form. Tazio has four men who can be in Rhode Island in ninety minutes.
It is the best thing I have ever built in my life.
The reply is at our gate at twenty-five past nine that night.
Five hours.
That is the first thing Lorenzo says, standing in the hall with the envelope in his hand, and he says it twice, five hours, and then he stops saying anything.
That letter went into a box on Camp Street at four twenty.
It has not been collected. It has not been to Providence.
It has not been anywhere. And there is an envelope at the south gate of a house in Westchester, handed to a man on the wall by a boy on a bicycle who was given twenty dollars outside a pizzeria in Yonkers and cannot describe anybody.
It is addressed to me. Not to the fund. Not to Renata. To Signora D’Amato, in that small even hand with nothing hurried in it anywhere.
I read it standing up.
Signora,
Concetta Vanni has not been moved and has not had a fall and is at home this evening, and I would rather you heard that from me than spent the night worrying that you had frightened her, because I do not think you would have slept.
I do not mind that you tried. It was well made. The small administrative thing was the correct instinct and it very nearly worked, and if it had come from anybody else I would have gone.
You should not be angry with the old woman. She wrote it exactly as you asked, and she has not betrayed anybody. She is simply not a liar, and it is in every line.
You will want to know how I saw it. I will not tell you that, because you would use it, and because the answer would frighten you more than it would help you.
I want to say one thing to you plainly, since we have both decided to stop pretending.
You have spent nine years being told that you are the reason men die.
You are not. You were never the reason. You were the only part of it that was worth anything, and everybody who has ever stood near you has known that and used it, including the man whose ring you are wearing, and I am aware that you have recently found the minutes and I am sorry that you had to find them rather than be told.
You keep asking who I am. That is the wrong question, and it is beneath you.
Ask why.
And when you decide you want the answer, do not come to me for it. Go and find what Isabella D’Amato wrote on the ninth of December, 1995, and read it standing up, and then you will know everything about me that matters and you will not need to be clever anymore.
Nothing in this is to be named after anybody.
Whatever happens, you will be taken care of.
Lorenzo reads it over my shoulder for the second time, and I can hear him not breathing.
“The ninth of December, 1995,” he says.
“Do you know what that is?”
“No.” He says it slowly, like a man checking a room in the dark. “My mother died in the February. So it is eight weeks before.”
“Lorenzo.”
“I was fourteen,” he says.
I stand in the hall of that house with a letter in my hand from a man who has just told me, kindly, that I am the only part of my own life that was ever worth anything, and I find that my eyes are stinging, and I am so angry about that I could put my fist through the wall.
Because it is the kindest thing anybody has said to me in nine years.
And because it is true.
And because he is going to kill my husband.
“He wants me to understand him,” I say.
“Valeria…”
“That is the whole letter. Every line of it.” I fold it along the crease he made, because I am not going to be the one who damages this document. “He does not want to be caught and he does not want to be feared and he does not even want to win, particularly. He wants one person alive to know why.”
“And you are going to give him that?”
“I am going to take it,” I say. “That is different, and he knows it is different, and he has decided to hand it to me anyway.”
I put the letter in the bag with my gloves.
“Get me into your mother’s papers,” I say. “All of them. Tonight.”