Chapter 13 - THE RECKONING BEGINS
Dawn came gray and wet, and the cemetery on the north side was empty.
It was an old place, full of marble angels and iron fences and family plots with names carved so deep they would last another century. Bianca Moretti’s grave was under a stand of elms near the west wall, a low slab of gray granite with her name and two dates and nothing else, because Dante’s father had not been a man for poetry.
Dante had been here twice in eleven years. Both times alone. Both times at night.
Today he came before the sun.
He came with Matteo and four men, and he came with Allesia, who had refused to stay behind and had refused to argue about it, and who now stood twenty yards away behind a mausoleum with the satchel against her chest and her breath fogging in the cold.
They had been there forty minutes when the car came.
It was a dark sedan, unremarkable, the kind of car a man drives when he does not want to be remembered. It parked at the far end of the gravel drive and a single figure got out.
Vittorio Moretti walked up the path alone.
He did not look around. He walked the way a man walks in his own garden, unhurried, hands loose at his sides, and he stopped at the foot of his sister-in-law’s grave and stood there with his back to the trees.
For a while he did not move at all.
Then he spoke.
“You know,” he said, to the stone, “I do miss her. I know you won’t believe that.”
Dante stepped out from behind the elms.
“I believe it,” he said.
Vittorio did not turn.
“Of course you do. You always were the sentimental one.” He put his hands in his pockets. “How many men did you bring?”
“Enough.”
“There are never enough.” Vittorio turned around. In the gray light he looked older than he had in the boathouse — the silver at his temples, the lines around his mouth, the particular hollowness of a man who has slept badly for a very long time. “I thought you might come here. It’s what I would have done.”
“You said you’d give me a long life.”
“I meant it.”
“You sent men to a boathouse to shoot me.”
“I sent men to a boathouse to make a point.” Vittorio’s voice was mild. “They were instructed not to hit anyone. If they had been instructed otherwise, nephew, you would not be standing here. I have had fourteen years to prepare for this conversation, and I have never once needed to kill you.”
“Until now.”
Vittorio looked at him.
“Until now,” he agreed.
They stood facing each other across the grave, and the rain began, thin and cold, and neither of them moved.
“You’re going to give me the ledger,” Vittorio said. “Or you’re going to give me a reason not to spend the rest of my life taking your life apart. Those are the only two options on this table.”
“No,” Dante said. “There’s a third.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to read it.”
Vittorio’s face did not change, but something behind it went still.
“You’re bluffing.”
“I have it with me.”
“You wouldn’t read it here. You wouldn’t read it at all. It implicates your father. It implicates the family. It implicates the company your mother spent her life protecting.” Vittorio took a step closer. “You’d burn it before you’d read it in public, because you know what it would do to everything you’ve built.”
“I know exactly what it would do,” Dante said. “That’s why I’m going to do it.”
“You’re a fool.”
“I’m my mother’s son.”
Vittorio looked at him, and for the first time — for the first time in fourteen years, in this graveyard, in the rain — something came out from behind his eyes that he had kept locked away.
“You don’t know what she was,” he said. “You don’t know what she did. You think she was a saint. She was a woman who found a hole in the accounts and put her hand in it and pulled out everything she could. She was going to destroy this family. She was going to hand it to lawyers and journalists and men in suits who have never built anything in their lives. She was going to take everything your father and I made and give it to strangers.”
“She was going to stop you.”
“She was going to stop us.” Vittorio’s voice had risen, just slightly, and the sound of it in the empty cemetery was worse than a shout. “You have no idea how hard it was. You have no idea what it took to build what we built, in this city, with nothing. And she was going to give it away because it made her feel clean.”
“She died because of it.”
Vittorio went quiet.
“Yes,” he said. “She did.”
The rain came down harder.
Dante looked at his uncle across his mother’s grave and understood, at last, the shape of the thing he had been walking toward for three days.
“Did you push her,” he said, “or did she fall?”
Vittorio did not answer.
“Did you push her?”
“I was in the hallway,” Vittorio said. “She was at the top of the back stairs. She had the ledger under her arm, and she was going to the car, and I said her name.” He looked down at the stone. “She turned around.”
The silence went on for a long time.
“And then?” Dante said.
“And then she was at the bottom of the stairs,” Vittorio said, “and I stood at the top for a long time, and then I went down and I knelt beside her and she was still breathing, and I held her hand.” He looked up. “And then I went to find the ledger, and it was gone, and I have been looking for it ever since.”
Dante’s hand had closed into a fist at his side.
“She was breathing,” he said.
“She was breathing.”
“And you didn’t call for help.”
“I called for help,” Vittorio said. “Four minutes later. After I was sure the book was gone.” He smiled, and it was the worst thing Dante had ever seen. “That was the mistake. That four minutes. If I had called first, she might have lived, and I might have gone to prison, and neither of us would be standing here.”
The rain ran down Dante’s face.
Behind the mausoleum, Allesia stood with the satchel against her chest and did not move.
“I’m going to destroy you,” Dante said.
“No,” Vittorio said. “You’re going to burn the book, and you’re going to let me leave, and you’re going to keep your city and your company and your conscience, and you’re going to live the way I told you to live.”
“No.”
“Then you’re going to die the way your father did,” Vittorio said. “Slowly. In your own house. With everything you love in pieces around you.”
May you like
He turned toward his car.
And that was when Allesia stepped out from behind the mausoleum.
