Chapter 10
The captains came back a week later, all seven of them, and sat around the long table in the study for four hours, and Lorenzo told them everything — the ambush, the route, the code, the archive, Matteo, Rocco, and the fourteen years a man had spent in a kennel outside Pavia waiting for a way to reach him.
Nobody said much. That was how these rooms worked. But Perri stayed behind when the others had gone, and stood at the window for a while, and said, “Your father would have handled it differently.”
“Yes,” Lorenzo said.
“Good.” Perri put on his coat. “Then we’ll survive you.”
He left. Lorenzo sat alone in the study for a while with the collar on the desk in front of him — Rocco’s mark turned up, the arrow crossing the two letters, the way it had been when a three-year-old carried it in out of the rain.
Then he heard small footsteps in the corridor.
Mia came in with a folded sheet of paper held against her chest and Leo at her heels, and she stopped at the edge of the desk and looked at the collar, and then at him.
“I made you something,” she said. “Don’t look yet.”
“I won’t.”
“Close your eyes.”
He closed his eyes.
There was a rustle of paper and a small, serious silence while she decided where to put it, and then the sound of Leo collapsing onto the floor with the enormous sigh of a dog who has been walking for four whole minutes.
“Okay,” Mia said. “Now.”
Lorenzo opened his eyes.
The drawing was the same as before, mostly — the yellow dog, the green tree, the black rectangle of the house, the tall man with the long arms. But she had gone back over the tall man’s face in careful black crayon, and this time there was a mouth. A wide, crooked line that turned up at one end and did not quite meet the other, the way a mouth does when the person drawing it has seen it exactly once and is trying to remember it.
She looked at him, waiting.
Lorenzo looked at the drawing for a long time. Then he looked at the child, and the dog asleep on the floor, and the collar on the desk with the mark of a man he had wronged for fifteen years, and the empty chair in the corridor outside where somebody used to sit.
And then he smiled.
Mia’s face lit up. She pointed straight at him.
May you like
“That was one,” she said.
THE END
