Chapter 14 - THE CLIMAX
She walked out into the open with the satchel in both hands, and Vittorio stopped.
He looked at her for a moment. Then he laughed.
“The maid,” he said.
“My name is Allesia Romano,” she said. “My father was Giovani Romano. He worked for your family for eleven years, and he kept your sister-in-law’s ledger in a storage locker under Union Station for twenty years, and he taught me to keep my head down, and he died on the Ryan when I was nineteen.” She stopped ten feet from him. “You told me in the boathouse that you didn’t kill him. I want you to say it again. To my face.”
Vittorio looked at her.
“I didn’t kill him,” he said.
“You threatened him.”
“I threatened him.”
“You took everything he had and made him spend two years being afraid.”
“Yes.”
“And when he died anyway, you kept looking for the book. For twenty years. Because he’d beaten you.” Allesia’s voice was steady. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? Not the money. You’ve had the money for fourteen years. This is about the fact that a quiet accountant in a small apartment outsmarted you and you couldn’t find him.”
Vittorio’s expression flickered.
“He was a coward,” he said.
“He was careful,” Allesia said. “There’s a difference.”
Dante moved to stand beside her.
Vittorio looked from one to the other.
“So this is it,” he said. “The two of you, in a graveyard, in the rain, holding a book.” He shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re doing. You have no idea who I am in this city. You could walk into a police station with that ledger this afternoon and by tonight it would be ash and you would be under investigation for fraud.”
“I’m not going to the police,” Allesia said.
Vittorio blinked.
“You’re not.”
“No.” She opened the satchel and took out the ledger and held it up. “I’m going to read it. Here. Out loud. On the record.”
Vittorio looked past her — and for the first time, he saw them: two cars parked on the gravel at the top of the drive, and beside them, in the gray rain, three people with cameras and one with a recorder, standing very still, watching.
“Who are they?” he said.
“Journalists,” Dante said. “Two from the Trib. One from the Reader. One from a wire service. I invited them last night.” He put his hands in his pockets. “You said I’d burn it before I’d read it in public. You were wrong.”
Vittorio’s face went through something — disbelief, then calculation, then, at the very end, a kind of grim appreciation.
“You planned this,” he said.
“I learned from you,” Dante said.
Vittorio looked at the reporters. Then at the ledger in Allesia’s hands. Then at the grave at his feet.
“You’ll destroy the company,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Your mother’s company.”
“My mother’s name,” Dante said. “The company was always yours and my father’s. She just kept the books.”
Vittorio was quiet for a long moment.
Then he did something Dante had not expected.
He laughed. A real laugh, tired and old and almost warm, the laugh of a man who has been holding a door shut for fourteen years and has just felt the lock give.
“Well,” he said. “There it is.”
He reached into his coat.
Dante moved — one step, hand going to his jacket — but Vittorio only took out a small leather case and opened it and took out a cigar, and put it in his mouth, and patted his pockets for a lighter that he did not have.
“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.
Vittorio Moretti looked at the detectives. Then at the reporters. Then at his nephew.
“I’ll see you in court,” he said.
“No,” Dante said. “You won’t.”
They took him away in the second car, and the gravel crunched, and the rain started again, very lightly, and the elms moved over the grave, and the reporters went down the drive to their own cars, and Dante Moretti stood at his mother’s stone with his hands at his sides and did not move for a long time.
May you like
Allesia came and stood beside him.
She did not say anything. There was nothing to say. She stood beside him in the cold with the ledger under her arm, and after a while she reached out and took his hand, and he held it, and the two of them watched the light come up over the wall.
