Chapter 5
“Sophie,” he said. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
She thought for a while. She wanted to get it in the right order. Grown-ups liked things in the right order.
“It was six days ago. The sunny day, when Mama did the ironing.”
Dante nodded once. His eyes never left her face.
“I was playing hide-and-seek. By myself, because there wasn’t anybody else.”
“That’s a good way to play it.”
“I know. Nobody peeks.” She drew her feet up under the throw. “I went behind the glass house where the flowers live in winter.”
“The greenhouse.”
“And behind that there’s the little place with the white rose bush. The tall one. Mama says it’s the Senora’s. She says it was planted the year you were a baby.”
Dante said nothing. He saw his mother in a wide straw hat, kneeling at that bush every May.
“I got right under the branches. You can, if you’re careful. The thorns don’t touch you if you go slow. I was being very quiet.”
“Good.”
“And then two men came.” She lifted her chin a little. She wanted him to know she’d paid attention. “One of them was Uncle Vince.”
Dante’s face stayed as it was. Only the muscle at the hinge of his jaw moved once, and stopped.
“How did you know it was him?”
“He smells like the brown cigars. And the little gold lighter. The one with the letter on it.” She traced a V in the air. “He leaves it on the kitchen counter sometimes. I like the shine.”
Dante inclined his head an inch. “Go on.”
“The other man had a long black coat, like it was wet. And his voice was scratchy, like he’d been coughing all day.”
“Did he use a name?”
“He said one to Uncle Vince.” She pronounced it carefully, in three separate pieces. “Cav-a-lero. I didn’t know what it was. It sounded like a horse.”
Dante’s hand, resting on his knee, closed slowly into a loose fist. Then it opened.
“What else did they say, sweetheart? Even the words that didn’t make sense.”
She frowned at the ceiling.
“The scratchy man said, ‘The boy is soft.’ That’s what he said. The boy.”
“Keep going.”
“And then he said, ‘We take the roof at the sixth toast.’ I thought roof was funny, because there’s lots of roofs. And then, ‘The shipment stays yours.’ I don’t know what shipment means.”
“That’s all right.”
“Then the scratchy man gave Uncle Vince a paper thing. A big envelope, like the ones Mama gets from the bank.” She paused. “Then I coughed. Because of the pollen.”
“And they turned around.”
“Both of them. Really fast.” She swallowed. “I was a little scared. But Uncle Vince laughed. He picked me up out of the bush. He said, ‘This is Elena’s little rabbit.’ He said the other man was Mr. Green from the flower company.”
“Did Mr. Green say anything to you?”
“He said, ‘Hello, little lady.’ He patted my head.” She wrinkled her nose. “His hand was cold. And it had a long white line, from his thumb all the way to here.”
She drew a slow line along the inside of her own forearm.
“A scar.”
“Yes, that’s the word. And then Bruno ran past, chasing a squirrel, I think, and I forgot about it. Until you asked.” She looked up at him, worried now, because his face had gone very still. “Was that bad, Mr. Dante? Did I do something bad?”
He didn’t answer right away.
In the small warm drawing room, with a five-year-old holding a pillow full of stars, the world had rearranged itself around one name.
Cavalero. Frank Cavalero, boss of the West Coast families. His father’s oldest enemy, the man Dante’s father had walked out of a red-checkered restaurant to meet twenty years ago and never walked back from.
*The boy is soft.* The boy was him.
*The sixth toast.* At every Moretti dinner, the sixth toast belonged to the head of the house. The one the whole room turned to hear. *We take the roof.* They would take the house.
A scar from thumb to wrist. Rocco Delaney. Cavalero’s shooter. A face from a police file Dante had read at nineteen.
The envelope. A down payment.
And Vincenzo. His father’s brother. The only man in this house he’d ever called family. Vincenzo had sold him to the man who killed his father, and a five-year-old girl had been lying under the white roses that afternoon without understanding a single word.
He looked at her. She was still watching him, small teeth pressed into her lower lip.
“No, sweetheart,” he said. “You didn’t do anything bad. You did something very brave, and you didn’t even know it.”
She let out a small breath. She hugged the pillow.
He reached across very slowly and rested his hand, for one second, on top of her head. The exact place where, six days ago, a man with a scarred hand had patted her.
Then he took it back.
“Sophie. From tonight, Bruno stays with you. Every night. Do you understand?”
She nodded, very serious.
“He’s my dog now.”
“He’s your friend now.”
May you like
At 4:30 that morning, Dante walked across the wet lawn. Sophie was asleep in his mother’s old sitting room on the third floor, on a couch he had covered with a wool blanket himself. Bruno lay stretched on the rug beside her. Tommy stood outside the door with a Glock and a thermos, having asked no questions. He had listened once, nodded once, and climbed the stairs.
Dante knocked on Elena’s door.
