Chapter 4
SALVATORE
The box is sitting on the ground with its doors open and its seal cut clean, and Matteo is standing in front of it like it's a body.
"Forty feet of nothing," he says.
"What was in it."
"Copper. Wire. Nine hundred grand's worth, and it's got our name on the manifest, and it came off the ship with the seal on, and it went into the stack with the seal on, and I've got three guys who'll swear on their mother it was still on at six this morning."
"And now it's not."
"Now it's not."
I walk round it. Howland Hook at midnight is lit like an operating table, white and flat and no shadows anywhere, and the stacks go up five high on every side of us, and it's cold, the kind of cold that comes off the water and gets into the metal.
The seal's on the ground. I pick it up. Bolt seal, the good kind, and it's been cut with the right tool by somebody who's done it before.
"Who had the stack sheet."
"Me."
"Who else."
Matteo doesn't answer right away. He's twenty-seven and he's got my mother's face and none of her patience, and when he doesn't answer right away it's because he's trying not to say something.
"Who else, Matteo."
"It went round the table Sunday. You know it did. You were there."
I was there. Sunday, the study, five men and a sheet of paper with the week's boxes on it, which stack, which day. Me, Luca, Matteo, Aldo, Dominic. The same five men who've seen that sheet every Sunday for two years.
"Then it's Moretti's guy on the gate," Matteo says. "It's got to be. Some kid on the gate house, they slip him a"
"The gate house doesn't know which box is copper."
"Then somebody told the gate house."
"Yeah," I say. "Somebody told the gate house."
He hears it. He looks at me, and then he looks at the box, and he doesn't say anything else, because he's not stupid, he's just young.
Dominic's Escalade comes in through the terminal gate at twenty past twelve with the headlights on full and parks across two bays.
He gets out. He's got Paulie Gatto with him, who stands by the car and watches the stacks like the stacks are going to do something, and he comes over with his hands in his coat and looks at the empty box and then at me.
"Nine hundred," he says.
"Nine hundred."
"Third one."
"Third one."
"So." He turns to Matteo. "You want to tell me how a twenty-seven-year-old loses three boxes in a month."
"Talk to me, Dom," I say. "Not him."
"I'm talking to whoever's running this terminal."
"You're talking to me."
He stops. He looks at Matteo for a second longer and then he turns, slowly, so I can watch him do it, and gives me his attention like it's a favour.
"The Silvestri girl," he says.
"What about her."
"She's in the house."
"She's in the house."
"In Teresa's house. Sleeping."
"I know where she's sleeping."
"Do the men know?"
"The men know what I tell them."
"The men know what they see, Salvatore, and what they see is a rat's daughter walking up the drive on Wednesday and her brother's paper torn up by Sunday. That's what they see. And now three boxes." He spreads his hands. "I'm not saying anything. I'm saying what it looks like."
"It looks like what it is. The boy owes. She's working it off. She's in the house because that's where I can see her."
"You could see her from the pool house."
Matteo laughs. It's the wrong moment and he knows it and he does it anyway, one short bark, and Dominic's head comes round.
"Something funny?"
"Nothing. Nothing, Dom. Just," Matteo shrugs, "she came up to the gate on her own and asked for it. That's what Benny said. Walked up from the bus. Didn't cry, didn't beg. I don't know what a rat's daughter looks like, but that's not it."
"You don't know what she looks like because you haven't looked."
"I've looked."
"Then look harder, and keep your hands off the stack sheet till you do."
I put the seal in my pocket. I do it slowly, and both of them watch me do it, and it's a small thing, a piece of cut steel, but they both stop talking.
"Here's what's happening," I say. "Matteo, you're going to pull the gate logs for the last thirty days and you're going to bring them to me and nobody else.
Dom, you're going to go home. It's late.
You've got a restaurant to open in nine hours and a wife who doesn't like you out.
And nobody at this table says the name Silvestri to anybody who wasn't at this table. Understood?"
"Salvatore"
"Understood, Dom."
He understands. He goes back to the car and Paulie opens the door for him and the Escalade backs out across its two bays and goes, and Matteo lets his breath go.
"He's going to say it anyway."
"I know."
"Then why"
"So that when he does, I'll know it was him."
The gate house is a box with a window and a heater in it, and the kid inside is twenty-two and has been trying not to look at us for an hour.
I go in on my own. Matteo stays by the box. The kid stands up when the door opens and knocks his coffee over and doesn't pick it up.
"Sit."
He sits.
"Name."
"Danny. Danny Kowalski. Mr Vitale, I swear on my"
"Don't swear. I don't want your mother in this. Tell me who called."
He goes white. It's a good sign. A liar gets red.
"Tuesday," he says. "Tuesday night. Late shift. A guy calls the gate line and he's got the ship, he's got the container number, he says he's from the office and he needs the stack position for the morning pickup because the paperwork's wrong. And I. It's the office, he's got the numbers, I."
"You gave him the stack."
"I gave him the stack."
"What did he sound like."
"Sound like?"
"Old. Young. Where from."
He thinks about it. He actually thinks, which is more than most people do when I ask them something, and I wait, and the heater ticks.
"Not old. Not young. Like here," he says. "Like the Island. He said the office like he'd said it a thousand times. Like it was his."
"Did he give a name."
"He said Tommy."
There are four Tommys in the family and none of them work the office and one of them is Luca's. I put that where it goes.
"You're going to write down the exact time of that call," I say.
"You're going to get me the phone log for the gate line.
And you're going to keep working here, Danny, and you're going to keep your mouth shut, because the man who called you is going to call again, and when he does, you're going to say yes to him and then you're going to say it to me. "
"Yes sir."
"And pick up the coffee."
He picks up the coffee.
The house is dark when I get in. One a.m. Benny's in the booth and lifts a hand and I lift one back, and I come up the drive with the lights off and park by the garage and let myself in through the side.
Stone floor. Lemon. The kitchen light off, which means Rosa went up.
I go towards the stairs.
I don't get there. There's a sound in the house that shouldn't be in it, and I stop with my hand on the newel post and listen, and it's not a sound. It's not anything. It's a kind of rhythm, very faint, wood on wood, coming from the back of the house where nobody goes.
The music room.
I go down the corridor without turning a light on. The doors are shut. Through the glass in the top of them there's moonlight, and a shape in it.
She's got the cloth off. Not all of it. The keyboard end, folded back on itself, the way you'd turn down a bed. And she's sitting on the stool in a T-shirt and the same black jeans with her hair down, which I haven't seen, and the lid is closed, and she's playing it.
On the lid. Her fingers on the closed wood. Both hands. Moving the way they'd move on the keys, wrists up, fast in the right hand and slow in the left, and no sound at all except the tap of her fingertips on the varnish, and her head down, and her lips moving.
Humming. Under her breath. So low I'd never have heard it from the hall.
I open the door.
She doesn't stop. She heard the latch, she must have, the house is silent, but her hands keep going, and she says without looking up, "I'm not touching anything."
"You're touching it."
"I'm touching the lid. It's a lid."
I come in. There's a chair by the wall with a sheet over it and I take the sheet off and sit in it, and it's close to the piano, closer than I'd have picked if I'd been thinking, and I'm not thinking. I sit down. I put my elbows on my knees.
She keeps playing.
I don't know the piece. I don't know pieces.
My mother played and I didn't listen the way I should have, and after her nobody played, and then Enzo, on Sundays, when my father had people up, and I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and I was somewhere else.
So I don't know what this is. It goes up and it stops and it comes down again.
It goes round. There's a part in the middle where the left hand does something slow underneath and the right hand goes very fast, and her face changes for it, and then it comes back to the beginning.
Her fingers are long. Not delicate. Strong, and the nails cut short, and there's a little callus on the side of the right index finger that I don't know the reason for.
She gets to the end and stops with her hands flat on the lid.
Neither of us says anything. The moon's coming through the gap in the curtains and it's on the side of her face, and she looks at the wood in front of her, and I look at her, and the house does what it does at one in the morning, ticks and settles, and it's the longest I've sat still in a room with another person in two years.
"That was his," she says.
I don't ask who. She doesn't say. She gets up, and she folds the cloth back down over the keyboard, carefully, like it matters, and she walks past my chair to the door without looking at me, and stops there.
"Goodnight, Mr Vitale."
"Goodnight."
She goes. I hear her on the stairs, and then the third-floor hall, and then the door at the end of it, which sticks, and then nothing.
I sit in the music room for a long time.
Dominic's car is in the drive when I come out to lock the side door.
He's not in it. He's standing on the gravel by the garage with his coat done up, and he's been waiting, and I don't know how long, and I don't like not knowing.
"I sent you home."
"I went. Then I came back."
"Why."
"Because I said what I said in front of Matteo and you don't listen when Matteo's there, so I'm saying it again." He comes closer. Not too close. He's known me since I was born and he knows where the line is. "It's not the men I'm worried about. Let them talk. It's her."
"Say it."
"She's sleeping in that room. Over the piano. Where her father used to sit. And she's going to walk round this house for ninety days and she's going to open doors, Salvatore, because that's what that kind of girl does, and one of the doors is going to be the basement."
I don't say anything.
"Your father made you watch," Dominic says. "I was there. I stood next to you. I saw your face." He puts his hands back in his coat. "You want her to hear that from you, or from me?"