Chapter 7
She came back up the servants’ stairs with the same silent certainty she had carried down, slipped into her quarters, locked the door, and knelt before the wardrobe.
“We go now.”
She lifted Dominic to his feet with his arm across her shoulders. She did not speak of the pain. There was no time for it.
She wrapped Lily in a long wool coat pulled over the child’s pajamas and buttoned it to the throat, and slipped small shoes onto her small feet, and stood her by the door.
Then, turning, her eyes fell on the bedside table.
The crayon drawing lay there, folded in half. Three stick figures holding hands in front of a tall house, drawn the week before, with a rabbit at their feet and a sun in the corner that was much too large for the sky.
Elena did not know why her fingers reached for it. She did not know why she could not leave it behind.
She tucked it into the inner pocket of her coat and said nothing about it to anyone.
She took Mimi from the pillow and put the rabbit into her daughter’s arms. The blue first aid tin went into a cloth bag. Nothing else. Everything else she left — the photographs, the sewing box, the small brass alarm clock her husband had given her on their first anniversary.
Exactly forty minutes after she had set the receiver down, a battered green grocery truck rattled up to the service entrance on the north side of the estate.
The driver wore a stained cap pulled low. He touched its brim at the guard without slowing. The guard, bored and half asleep at that hour, waved him through with a flick of the hand.
In the darkness of the service yard, three shadows slipped from a side door to the rear of the truck.
A man was already waiting there. He lifted the back panel without a word.
Dominic climbed in first, with Elena pushing from below. Elena lifted Lily up and climbed in after. They settled between crates of tomatoes and aubergines, and the panel came down, and the engine coughed and caught.
The tyres crunched over the gravel, swung onto the driveway, and rolled toward the main gate.
Elena pulled her daughter against her chest and buried her face in Lily’s hair so that the child would not feel her trembling.
The truck reached the gate. The guard lifted the barrier.
It rolled through.
It turned onto the long tree-lined avenue that led down to the country road, and the gravel gave way to smooth asphalt beneath the wheels, and the driver did not accelerate and did not slow.
And in that exact second, from the opposite direction, two white headlight beams rose over the crest of the hill.
Victor Moretti’s private car, returning to the estate earlier than anyone had expected.
The grocery truck did not slow.
The driver kept his hands loose on the wheel, his cap pulled low, his eyes fixed straight ahead, and he simply rolled past the black vehicle as though he were nothing more than an early delivery meeting a family member returning home at an unusual hour.
Inside, behind the crates of tomatoes, Elena pressed her hand flat over Lily’s mouth and felt her own breath stop in her chest until the tail lights of the black car had shrunk to red pinpricks in the truck’s mirror.
The truck turned onto the country road.
The country road fed into the parkway. The parkway rose toward the bridge, and the city lifted itself out of the darkness before dawn in a hundred thousand small waking lights.
The safe house was a narrow three-storey building of faded red brick on a quiet street in Bay Ridge, wedged between a shuttered bakery and a rowhouse with the curtains drawn tight. The paint on the door was the same tired green it had been for forty years. The name on the deed belonged to a Sicilian butcher who had broken bread with Don Antonio Moretti in the old country and who had been dead for eleven summers.
The truck swung into the alley behind the house. The rear panel lifted.
Salvatore Corsetti was already waiting there — gray hair, old eyes, a long overcoat buttoned against the dawn cold.
He took one look at Dominic’s leg, at the gray line of his mouth, at the bruised eyes of the woman and the small child beside her.
Something old and hard settled behind the older man’s eyes.
“Inside. Now.”
He carried more of Dominic’s weight than Dominic himself up the narrow back stairs into a second-floor bedroom with faded wallpaper and a single iron bed.
Bruno Ricci arrived within twenty minutes, broad-shouldered, sleeves already rolled. Vincenzo Greco came ten minutes after, older than Bruno, quieter, with a scar at the side of his throat that no collar ever quite covered.
Doctor Enrico Falcone was the last through the door, carrying a black leather bag that had travelled with the Moretti family since Dominic had been a boy. Three years ago he had delivered a baby in the servants’ wing on a night the power failed. He looked once at the small girl on the bed, and said nothing, and that was enough.
He worked in silence. He cleaned the wound with something that made Dominic’s jaw lock. He set the leg with two clean movements. He stitched what had to be stitched. He hung a bag of clear fluid from a nail he drove into the wall himself with the heel of his shoe, and pressed a needle into the back of Dominic’s hand.
“Infection has begun. The blood loss is considerable.” He did not look up as he spoke. “He will live. He needs sleep. Twelve hours at least, then broth. Nothing solid for a day. And he is not to be moved before midnight, not in a car, not for anyone. Those stitches will not hold.”
Dominic’s eyes had already begun to close before the doctor finished the sentence.
Elena did not wait to be asked.
She rinsed a cloth in the basin Bruno had set beside the bed, wrung it out, and began to wash the sweat and the blood and the cellar dust from Dominic’s face and chest with the same quiet, ordinary hands that had scrubbed countertops for three years.
He drifted beneath her touch, half awake, half somewhere else. Once — only once — his fingers closed weakly around her wrist, as though to be certain that she was still there.
Lily climbed onto the bed on the unbruised side and curled against his good shoulder, Mimi held tight against his arm. She did not let go.
Downstairs in the small kitchen, three men stood around a table.
“Three things,” Salvatore said. “First. Someone on our own trusted list is dirty. Victor could not have built what he built in that cellar without the help of a man whose name we know. We treat every name on that list as compromised until we can prove otherwise.”
Bruno’s jaw worked. Vincenzo said nothing.
“Second. The cage is empty by now. Victor will know by breakfast. He will move fast, and he will move angry.”
“Third,” said Vincenzo quietly. “This address does not leave this room. Not to anyone on the list. Not until we find the dirty one.”
The three men looked at each other.
They nodded once.
Morning came thin and gray through the kitchen window at the back of the house. The window looked out onto a small square of garden where nothing grew at that season.
Elena stood at the stove in a borrowed dressing gown, measuring ground beans into an old mocha pot. Her hands moved with the automatic rhythm of a woman who had spent the greater part of her adult life brewing coffee every morning for other people.
She had just poured the first cup when the stairs behind her creaked.
Dominic came slowly into the kitchen, one hand braced against the doorframe, the other resting on a wooden stick that Bruno had carved from a broom handle in the night.
His borrowed trousers were fresh. His shirt was Bruno’s, too wide at the shoulders. His face had colour again — a pale colour, but colour at last.
He lowered himself into the wooden chair across from her at the small square table.
She set a cup wordlessly before him. She poured one for herself and sat down.
For a long moment neither of them spoke. The coffee steamed. Somewhere above them a floorboard settled.
Then he lifted his eyes to her.
“Elena.”
“Mr. Moretti.”
“Dominic.” A pause. “In this kitchen — Dominic.”
She tilted her head once. The smallest possible gesture of acknowledgement.
Then she waited.
He wrapped his hands around the small cup for the warmth and looked at her over the rim.
“You could have reached for a telephone at any moment last night. From the corridor. From the kitchen wall. From a corner shop this morning, once we were out.” He set the cup down without drinking. “One call to my brother, and you and your daughter would have been wealthy for the rest of your lives.”
“Why did you not?”
She did not look away.
May you like
She set her cup down, folded her hands, and began to speak in the flat, even voice of a woman who had told this story to herself a thousand times in the dark, in the years when there had been no one else to tell it to.
“My husband’s name was Daniel Bennett.”
