Chapter 5
Vittorio Salvi was seventy-one years old, retired, and disliked Matteo Richi enough that he had not set foot on the estate in six years. He owed the Duca family nothing except an old favor, which made him the only man in the north of Italy Lorenzo could call without the call being reported back to a desk in the security room.
“Vittorio.”
“Señor Duca.” A pause, the dry rustle of a man settling into a chair. “It has been a long time.”
“I need a name traced. A company called Balandi Veterinary Supply. It served kennels across the north. Closed about eight years ago when the founder died.”
“And what do you want to know?”
“Where its vehicles went.”
Another pause. “Are you going to tell me why?”
“No.”
“Good. I dislike explanations.” The line clicked.
Lorenzo put the phone down and went back to being a man with a dog.
That was the strange part of the following days, the part he would remember afterward with something close to disbelief. Nothing stopped. The organization did not pause to accommodate a mystery. There were transfers to authorize and a shipping dispute to settle and a problem in Naples that required no more than a sentence from him to become somebody else’s problem. He signed where necessary, listened where necessary, spoke only when words changed an outcome.
And in between, there was Leo.
The puppy gained weight. He learned the kitchen schedule faster than most new staff, and developed a personal theory that everything Lorenzo owned had been purchased for chewing. The theory reached its most expensive expression on a Tuesday morning, when Lorenzo came back from a call and found Leo under the desk with one of his handmade Italian shoes between his paws, half the heel wet and the edge of the leather carrying a perfect row of tiny tooth marks.
Lorenzo stood over him in silence.
Mia, sitting on the rug with crayons, looked from the shoe to Leo to Lorenzo. “He likes that one.”
“That shoe cost more than some people’s cars.”
Mia considered this and nodded. “Leo likes expensive things. Because he lives here now.”
Lorenzo looked at her. She had already returned to her drawing.
Leo bit the shoe again. Lorenzo took it away, placed a wooden chew toy in front of him, and watched him reject it with visible disappointment. From the doorway, Elena made a sound suspiciously close to a laugh and disguised it as a cough.
“Excuse me, Señor.”
He looked back at the ruined shoe. “Apparently I have become unreasonable.”
“No,” Mia said. “Leo has.”
For half a second, something moved in Lorenzo’s face. Mia saw it and pointed immediately. “That was nearly one.”
The moment closed. But not entirely.
It was that same afternoon, sitting in the garden while Mia drew and Leo hunted a beetle through the grass, that she asked him the question.
She had produced a new sheet of paper and climbed onto the bench beside him to display it. The drawing contained a yellow dog, a green tree, a black rectangle that appeared to represent the house, and a very tall man with very long arms.
“That’s you,” she said.
Lorenzo studied it. “I see.”
“And that’s Leo. He’s bigger than me.”
“He is not bigger than you.”
“I like him more.”
Lorenzo glanced at her. She had already gone back to coloring. A moment later he noticed something else.
“Why do I not have a mouth?”
Mia paused. “I don’t know what your smile looks like.”
The answer landed without ceremony. She had not meant to wound him. That made it worse.
Lorenzo looked at the faceless figure for a while. Mia selected a red crayon and began coloring Leo’s collar.
“Do people get lonely,” she asked, not looking up, “if there are lots of people in the house, but nobody talks to them?”
His eyes lifted slowly. “Why do you ask?”
“Because Mama says being alone and being lonely are different.”
“Your mother is usually correct.”
“So are you?”
He could have said no. It would have been easy. He had been lying to himself with considerably greater sophistication for fifteen years.
Instead he watched Leo chase his own tail across the grass and said, “I don’t know.”
Mia nodded as if that were a sufficient answer. “Okay.”
She did not ask again.
Lorenzo was still sitting there when his private phone rang, near eleven that night, with Leo asleep against his hip and the house dark around him.
“Señor Duca.” Vittorio sounded different — careful, deliberate, the way a man sounds when he has found something he did not expect. “Balandi sold three vehicles when it closed. Two were scrapped.”
“And the third?”
“The third was sold to a kennel outside Pavia.” Papers shifted on the other end of the line. “It’s still registered. It’s still on the road. And I have the name of the woman who owns it.”
Lorenzo sat up slowly, and Leo, disturbed, put one paw on his thigh and went back to sleep.
May you like
“Go on.”
“San Rocco Working Dogs,” Vittorio said. “Registered to a woman named Sophia Danalov.”
