Chapter 6
Lorenzo did not go to Pavia the next morning.
Fifteen years earlier he would have. At twenty-three, anger had convinced him that speed and courage were the same thing, and he had spent a decade learning the difference at considerable cost.
He sent Vittorio instead — not as a representative of the Duca family, but as an old lawyer looking into a property transfer connected to an estate matter. Vittorio drove south before sunrise, visited the municipal office first, then the kennel, then a hospice outside the city whose name appeared on a recent medical filing attached to Sophia Danalov’s address.
He called Lorenzo shortly after noon.
“You need to hear this sitting down.”
Lorenzo remained standing at the study window. Leo was asleep under the desk. Mia was in the garden with Elena, drawing circles in chalk on the flagstones, and he could hear her voice through the glass, thin and bright and completely unaware of anything.
“Go on.”
Vittorio exhaled. “Rocco Danalov is dead.”
Lorenzo’s hand tightened on the phone.
The words should have felt familiar. For fifteen years Rocco had existed in the category of the possibly dead — a man without a grave, whose absence had slowly become indistinguishable from death. He had been hated on the strength of a question. He had been hated for so long that the hatred had worn smooth, the way a stone wears smooth in a pocket, and Lorenzo had stopped noticing he was carrying it.
Hearing it confirmed made the room feel suddenly smaller.
“When?”
“Three weeks ago. Heart failure. The hospice records are clear. He was there eleven days.”
Lorenzo looked down at Leo, curled into the same shape on the same shoe he had claimed on the first afternoon. Three weeks.
“The puppy arrived eight days ago,” he said.
“I noticed that too.”
“Then Rocco didn’t send him.”
“No.” A pause. “He was already dead.”
Lorenzo turned from the window. Somewhere in the garden Mia shrieked with laughter at something Elena had said.
“Who did?”
“That,” Vittorio said, “is where it becomes interesting.”
San Rocco Working Dogs sat behind a low stone wall beyond a stretch of farmland outside Pavia — six adult dogs, a training field gone to seed, a kennel building with a rusted sign. The property belonged to Sophia Danalov, forty-one, unmarried, registered as a veterinary assistant and canine trainer. She was Rocco’s daughter. She had lived with him under a different surname for nearly fourteen years, and had legally restored Danalov only after his death.
Lorenzo listened without interrupting.
“Did you speak to her?”
“No. She isn’t there.”
“Where is she?”
“Gone. Two days after the funeral she left the property with luggage and hasn’t come back. A neighbor says she mentioned staying with friends near Turin.”
Lorenzo’s jaw tightened.
“Convenient,” Vittorio said, “perhaps. But before I assumed the worst, I obtained a copy of the probate inventory.” Papers shifted. “Rocco left almost nothing of value. A small savings account. Kennel equipment. Several boxes of records. And a sealed veterinary transfer document, dated four days before his death.”
Lorenzo did not move.
“The document describes a male puppy. Golden coat. Approximately eleven weeks old, descended from one of the kennel’s older working lines. Temporary name, B. The recipient field is blank.”
“Temporary name B.”
“Yes. And attached to it was a handwritten instruction. In his own hand — the notary confirmed it.”
Vittorio unfolded the photocopy near the receiver and read it slowly, the way a man reads something he does not fully understand.
“If I cannot walk through the gate myself, send one who still can.”
Lorenzo closed his eyes.
He could hear Rocco’s voice in the sentence, even after fifteen years — not sentimental, not explanatory, a command disguised as a proverb. It was exactly the sort of thing the man had said to a nine-year-old boy in a kennel yard, cleaning mud off a dog’s paws, explaining why he marked everything he owned.
“Anything else?”
“One more page. Different ink. Added recently — within the last year, the examiner thought.” A pause. “It names a man called Carlo Bellini.”
Lorenzo opened his eyes. “Who is he?”
“Seventy-three. Former kennelhand. Worked for Rocco for years. He lives about twenty minutes from the estate road.”
Lorenzo turned back toward the desk. “Find him.”
Vittorio hesitated. “I already did.”
“You already did.”
“He was expecting someone.” Another pause. “That’s the part that worries me. Carlo Bellini has been sitting in that house waiting for someone to come. And when I mentioned Rocco’s name—”
May you like
Lorenzo sat down.
“—he didn’t deny anything.”
