Chapter 39

Chapter 39

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“I’m not going to run,” he said, around the cigar. “I’ve been running for fourteen years and I’m very tired.” He looked at Dante. “Do it, then. Read it. Give them the names. Let them write it down.”

“You’re not going to stop me.”

“I’m going to watch,” Vittorio said. “I want to see what my brother’s son does with the only thing I ever wanted.”

Allesia opened the ledger.

She read.

She read for eleven minutes, in the rain, in a cemetery, while four journalists wrote down everything she said — the names of the shell companies, the account numbers, the dates of the transfers, the pages in Bianca Moretti’s handwriting where she had circled the word PROTECTS beside Lorenzo Bellini’s name and written a line in the margin: He is afraid of Vittorio. He is not a thief.

She read the last page, the one Bianca had written in the small room at the end of the west corridor, and she read the part about the four minutes and the back stairs and the fact that a woman had lain at the bottom of a staircase and breathed while a man stood at the top and decided.

When she finished, the rain had stopped.

Vittorio stood beside his brother’s wife’s grave with an unlit cigar in his mouth and his hands in his pockets.

He looked, Allesia thought, smaller than he had in the boathouse.

“That’s the whole of it,” he said.

“That’s the whole of it,” she said.

He nodded slowly.

Then he took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at Dante.

“Your father would have burned it,” he said. “You’re better than him. That’s the thing I never could stand about you.”

Two police cars came up the gravel drive.

Matteo had called them from the car, forty minutes earlier, with the names and the dates and the account numbers and a photocopy of the four pages that mattered, and the two detectives who got out of the first car were men who had been on the Moretti payroll for a decade and who were, tonight, for the first time in their careers, not going to be able to pretend they hadn’t seen anything.

Because there were four journalists standing in the rain with their names on it.

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Vittorio Moretti looked at the detectives. Then at the reporters. Then at his nephew.

“I’ll see you in court,” he said.

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