On Sunday evening the house settled into its ordinary quiet. The three routes lay out across the county like snares in the grass: the coast road in its salt wind, past and empty; the ridge road in its dark, past and empty; and the valley road, still ahead, unspooling through the warm night toward the cannery lights.
Dominic did not sleep. He sat in the study with the map open and the three cards squared beside it, and the brandy untasted at his elbow, and he watched the clock do its patient work toward the hour when his son's car โ his son's empty car, God be thanked for the other thing he had arranged and told no one, not even Adrian until the last moment โ would turn onto the valley road in the dark.
"Now," he said aloud, to the empty room, to the map, to the brother of his boyhood asleep or not asleep somewhere in this house, "we will see which of my lies has teeth."
Chapter 12: Benny's Hand
The valley road ran black and empty for eleven miles, and Adrian's car took it the way Adrian's car always did โ steady, a little fast on the straights, headlights washing the cannery fences and the sleeping vineyards in turn. At the wheel sat Dario, who had guarded the estate gate for nine years and had volunteered for the seat with the shrug of a man choosing a card. "If they are waiting for the young boss," he had said, "let them get an old surprise." Behind the dark glass in the back sat no one at all. The car was dressed like a habit: same plates, same hour, same dent on the rear fender where Leo had once met it with a bicycle.
Adrian rode half a mile behind in the follow car with Tomas and two watchers and a camera that cost more than the bakery on Lane Street, and he hated every yard of it. His hands would not be still. He kept them flat on his knees like a schoolboy and watched his own taillights' twin burn red ahead of them in the dark, and thought, with a clarity that felt like nausea, that this was what his father's world did to a drive down a road he had taken a hundred times to look at grapes.
It happened past the cannery turn, where the road narrowed between the drainage ditch and the old loading yard. A pickup slewed out of the yard gate and stopped across both lanes, doors opening before it had fully stopped. Four men came out of it and out of the ditch shadow with the unhurried confidence of men who had been promised an easy thing: a lone car, a lone driver, a dark road, a name.
The camera saw their faces. The camera saw the rifles. One man fired twice โ not at the glass but low, at the tires, businesslike โ and Dario, who had been waiting all eleven miles for exactly this music, threw the car into reverse and went backwards down the valley road at a speed that would have shamed Adrian himself, gravel and sparks and the pickup's lights swinging wild. Then the follow car's headlights came up over the rise behind him, full and sudden, and the whole arithmetic of the ambush changed in an instant. Four men discovered at once that the road held more than they had been sold. They ran for the pickup and the ditch and the yard, and they were gone into the dark between one breath and the next, leaving a warm rifle and a spilled toolbox and eleven miles of silence.
No one was hurt. That sentence would be said many times before morning, in many rooms, and every time Adrian heard it he thought of Dario's hands on the wheel, steady as a metronome, and of what the night had been designed to prove and had proved.
The watchers did their work the way Dominic's people had always done it: quietly, and all the way to the end of the thread. One fleeing car was followed at a distance to a lockup garage on the far side of the cannery, rented three months earlier under the name of a company that existed in a filing cabinet and nowhere else. The rental had been paid in cash, but the deposit had not, and deposits are where careful men grow careless. The account the deposit came from was a discretionary account โ family money, moving through family channels โ and the signature authority on the account belonged to Eddie Vane.
And there was more, because Dominic's watchers had been watchers for years and knew faces the way priests know sins. One of the four men on the road โ the one who had fired at the tires โ was a man named Krall who had run errands for Vane since spring. Hired muscle, twice removed, deniable at every joint. Except that the joints all pointed the same way, up the same arm, to the same shoulder.
Eddie Vane. Benny's lieutenant. Benny's creature, fed from Benny's table, paid from Benny's hand. Adrian stood in his father's study at four in the morning with the camera's memory card in his palm like a communion wafer and said it aloud, because it had to be said aloud once before it could be worked on: "It's Vane's channel. Which means it's Uncle Benny's money. Which means it's Uncle Benny's war." He looked at his father. "He set Ostrov killers on a road he fed us at Sunday lunch. He wanted you to find Ostrov gloves on it and declare the war that buries my plan in a month of funerals."
Dominic had not sat down since the phone rang. He stood now with the report's pages in his hand, and Adrian watched him read them the way other men read telegrams from a front.
"Proof," Dominic said.
"We have the accountโ"
"We have a thread," Dominic said. "One thread. A thread can be a plant. A thread can be Vane playing at being Benny, or Benny's enemy wearing Benny's coat, or โ may God forgive the house that needs the thought โ the Ostrovs buying a Serra signature to cut with." He set the pages down and squared them, corner to corner, with terrible gentleness. "I will not move against my brother on one thread. I will not move against any man on one thread. We gather it all. The money, the names, the catering firm, the dates โ twice over, from two directions, until the two accounts agree like witnesses who have never met. Not blood." He looked up, and his eyes were the eyes of the man two hundred guests had feared at a birthday table. "Not yet. Proof. Twice over. And then I will say my brother's name in the sentence myself."
At breakfast Benny came down late, expansive, smelling of aftershave and innocence, and asked Adrian how the cannery ledgers had gone in the small hours.