Chapter 6 The Missing Packet #3
Lucetta tried.
The name resisted. She could see the first letter perhaps, or imagine it. “Piero. Pietro. Paolo. Something beginning with P.”
Adelasia said, “That is not much.”
“No.”
Naldo grinned without humor. “Among porters? It is nearly everyone.”
Bertran came over. “Can you find the shed?”
“Perhaps.”
“You do not go alone.”
“I was about to say the same to you.”
Bertran ignored that. “Ysoria stays with Lucetta and Adelasia. Odelin continues the record. Orsino examines the staple and tells Ser Matteo exactly what kind of tool did this if he can. Niccolò remains where I can see him.”
Niccolò, who had been standing near the door, said, “I object to the phrasing.”
“You may object where I can see you.”
Ser Matteo said, “No one leaves until I finish questioning the warehouse men.”
Bertran met his eyes. “Every moment we remain here is a moment the stolen packet moves farther away.”
“And every person I permit to wander out after discovering a theft becomes one more person who might have arranged it.”
Adelasia said, “Then send one of your own men with them.”
Ser Matteo looked at her.
“You wish to protect your office,” she continued.
“So do we, for the next hour at least, because the thief has made our interests the same. Send a man you trust with Messer Albaric and Naldo. If they find nothing, you have lost little. If they find the packet, you recover property stolen under your seal. If you keep them here while the thief reaches another boat, you will have preserved procedure and lost the only useful consequence.”
The official's mouth tightened.
Corrado would have admired her argument, Lucetta thought. Not because it appealed to justice, but because it made each party's self-interest point in the same direction.
Ser Matteo selected a customs sergeant named Filippo, broad-shouldered and gray at the temples. “You go with them. You answer to me. If either man attempts to remove anything from a warehouse, you stop him.”
Naldo said, “What if the warehouse is falling down?”
“You stop him more carefully.”
They left by a side door.
Lucetta hated remaining behind.
The feeling embarrassed her because there was work she could do, and because she had spent years believing impatience belonged to people who lacked occupation.
Now she understood that helplessness could fill every useful minute.
She sat with Odelin and reconstructed the missing depositions from memory while Ser Matteo questioned warehouse workers one by one at the far end of the building.
The first witness in the copied deposition had been Domenico Ferri, deceased before the copy was made.
The second was perhaps Andrea Molin, a clerk attached to Santa Marta.
The third had been the porter captain whose name remained maddeningly incomplete.
Adelasia supplied details Lucetta had overlooked because she had read the deposition as evidence rather than commerce.
“The payments were not all for storage,” she said. “One included cartage.”
“Yes.”
“Another included cordage and a boat fee.”
Lucetta looked up. “You are certain?”
“I argued with you about whether the sum was too large for a local transfer.”
“You said it might include labor.”
“I said Giacomo once paid nearly the same to move three wool bales from a quay to a store because rain came and every porter in the district suddenly discovered he had six brothers to feed.”
Odelin said, “That sounds less like arithmetic than resentment.”
“Good accounting is often resentment made legible.”
Lucetta wrote: cartage; cordage; boat fee.
The casket had moved more than once after reaching the coast.
Perhaps the warehouse sign was not the final hiding place at all.
Niccolò paced nearby. At last he said, “You believe the thief has gone to the red fish shed.”
“No,” Lucetta said. “We believe the thief believed that line mattered.”
“That is a lawyer's distinction.”
“It is a survival distinction. If we assume his destination from his theft, he chooses our road.”
Niccolò stopped pacing. “Then what does the theft tell you?”
“That he did not want the whole history. He wanted names and a sign.”
“Meaning?”
Adelasia answered. “Meaning he may not know the merchant family's chain of custody as well as he pretends. He had enough intelligence to identify the right packet, but not enough to know its contents without stealing it.”
Niccolò considered that. “So our enemy is informed, not omniscient.”
“Most enemies are,” Odelin said. “Fear improves their reputation.”
A warehouse boy was brought to Ser Matteo.
He could not have been more than fifteen.
He twisted his cap until the wool stretched.
The official questioned him twice about the night watch.
The boy denied entering the side bay. Then the warehouse master asked why his boots carried white salt crust when he had been assigned inside duty away from the pans.
The boy began to cry.
Everyone in the room changed posture at once.
Bertran was absent. Lucetta felt the lack of him as if a chair had been removed from beneath her.
Ser Matteo said, not unkindly, “Tell the truth before another man tells it for you.”
The boy swallowed. “I went out.”
“Where?”
“To the sheds.”
“Why?”
“My brother was there.”
“At what hour?”
“After midnight.”
“Did anyone enter the warehouse while you were gone?”
“I do not know.”
“Who knew you would leave?”
The boy's face folded.
That answer came before words.
Ser Matteo leaned forward. “Who paid you?”
“No one paid me to leave.”
“Who knew?”
“A man spoke to me at supper. He said my brother had been hurt unloading salt. He knew my brother's name. He said I should go quietly because if the master knew I left post I would lose wages.”
“What man?”
“I don't know.”
“Describe him.”
“Brown cloak. Short beard. Scar here.” The boy touched the side of his chin. “Not old. Not young.”
“Accent?”
The boy shook his head.
“Was your brother hurt?”
“No.”
Ser Matteo sat back.
The warehouse master swore.
Lucetta asked, “Did the man tell you which shed?”
The boy looked at her, then at Ser Matteo.
“Answer.”
“The one beyond San Vitale's store. Near the old red fish board.”
Adelasia's hand closed around the edge of the table.
The thief had not learned that location from the packet.
He had known it before entering the warehouse.
Lucetta's mind rearranged the facts.
“He wanted us to believe the packet led him there,” she said.
Niccolò frowned. “Why steal it then?”
“Because it removes our independent account of what happened there, and because if we discover the theft before we discover his purpose, we follow.”
Odelin said, “A lure.”
“Perhaps.”
Adelasia shook her head. “Or destruction. Do not make every hostile act more elaborate than it needs to be. If the packet contains witnesses who can identify the next transfer, stealing it harms us whether we follow or not.”
Lucetta nodded. “Both can be true.”
Ysoria, who had remained near the door throughout the questioning, said, “If the red fish shed is a lure, Bertran and Naldo are walking toward it.”
The room froze.
Ser Matteo barked for a messenger.
Ysoria was already moving. “A messenger will not catch them if they went by the lanes near the salt pans.”
“You know the lanes?”
“No. I know men in a hurry.”
Lucetta stood. “I am going with you.”
“No.”
The answer came from Adelasia and Odelin at the same time.
Lucetta stared at them.
Adelasia said, “You cannot help Bertran by arriving breathless at an unfamiliar warehouse. Stay and finish remembering the deposition. If he returns with nothing, we need the memory. If he returns wounded, we need the memory. If he does not return immediately, we need to know where else to look.”
It was precisely the argument Lucetta would have made to someone else.
She hated it.
Ysoria left with one of Ser Matteo's men and a local porter who knew the lanes.
The next half hour lasted longer than the journey from Ravenna.
Lucetta forced herself back to the paper.
Third witness. Porter captain. Initial perhaps P.
She remembered the copyist's hand. A tall loop. A descending stroke. A surname with double consonants? She closed her eyes and saw the line again as black marks beneath a lamp in Ravenna.
Pietro Manelli.
No.
Piero Marnelli.
She wrote both.
Adelasia said, “There was a wife.”
“What?”
“The deposition mentioned that the porter captain's wife sold cooked beans near the old gate. I remember because the witness complained that he was always late when she had customers.”
Lucetta stared.
That detail had seemed useless. Human, colorful, irrelevant.
Now it was better than a surname.
“Which gate?”
Adelasia closed her eyes. “San... no. Not San Vitale. Something of the Angel.”
Odelin said, “San Michele?”
“No.”
“San Angelo?”
“Yes. I think.”
Niccolò said, “There may be twenty old gates named for Michael or angels between here and Rimini.”
Adelasia looked at him. “Then pray the beans were memorable.”
A shout sounded outside.
Lucetta was on her feet before she knew she had moved.
Naldo entered first, filthy to the knees, carrying no packet. Filippo followed with blood on one sleeve that was not his. Bertran came last.
His left hand was wrapped in a strip of cloth.
Lucetta's attention went to it and stayed there.
He saw.
“Splinter,” he said.
“That cloth is red.”
“Large splinter.”
Naldo said, “It was a nail.”
Bertran gave him a look.
“A nail is an iron splinter.”
Lucetta crossed the room. “What happened?”
Bertran did not answer until Filippo had reported to Ser Matteo.
The red fish shed still stood, though the painted sign had been removed years earlier.
They had found the side door unsecured. Inside were old salt sacks, broken pallets, a coil of rotten rope, and evidence that someone had been there recently: lamp grease, boot prints, and a strip of fresh-cut cord.
Then the rear floor gave way beneath Naldo.
Not from age alone.
Two supporting boards had been cut almost through.