He poured a glass of the good Barolo he kept for signing things, and did not drink it. He thought of his wife, forty years dead a widow's length of grief away in the family plot, who had once said β laughing, flour on her own wrist, God rest her β that Benny would love the family to death if Dominic ever let him hold it too tight.
When the study clock struck two, Dominic Serra closed the green ledger, put it in the centre drawer of his desk, and telephoned his son.
"Adrian. Eight o'clock, the study. Wear a suit." A pause. "And nobody else hears my voice tonight. Tomorrow I send for your uncle β and I send for him to the study, boy. Not the cellar. Remember that I said so, whatever comes."
Chapter 17: The Line
They brought Benny to the study at nine in the morning, and that was the first shock, though he hid it the way he hid everything β behind the smile he had worn at two hundred birthday guests.
Benny Serra had dressed for the cellar. Dominic saw it at once and wished he hadn't: the old sweater, the soft shoes, the shirt with nothing in the pockets. A man does not choose an outfit for a conversation about money. He chooses it for a drive he might not come back from, and Dominic's heart β that traitor organ, sixty years old and still capable of ambushing him β folded once, hard, at the sight of his little brother standing dressed for an ending.
"Sit," Dominic said. "Coffee's hot."
The study door stood open. There were two chairs angled by the desk, like a doctor's office or a confessional, and on the desk between them lay a green ledger neither man had to name. Benny looked at it the way a man looks at weather coming over the ridge.
"Sal's dead, then," he said.
"Sal is dying. He sent me his regards and his bookkeeping." Dominic opened the ledger at the page marked with a strip of cloth. "Read your autumn, Benny."
Benny read. Dominic watched his brother's face do the arithmetic Sal Ruffo's handwriting made unavoidable: the holding company, the catering firm bought eleven weeks before the party, the bonuses to Eddie Vane dated the week after the birthday. Benny's mouth made one small attempt at a joke β "tidy to the end, old Sal" β and gave it up. The silence in the study grew the particular weight of a held breath.
"Tell me about my son's car," Dominic said at last, quietly. "From your own mouth, brother. I've had it from paper. I want it from blood."
And Benny β to his credit β did not reach for a lie. He leaned back, and the smile went off his face like a light out of a window, and underneath it he was simply a frightened, ageing man who had loved the wrong thing too hard.
"I had the line cut," he said. "There. It's said. I had Vane hire the hands and I had the line cut, and I need you to hear the whole of it β I wanted him scared. A scare, a wreck on the valley road, the boy shaken white and the family with its blood up and the Ostrovs to blame β and Adrian's fine clean plan dead by Christmas, because a family at war doesn't file paperwork, it rallies." His hands had begun to shake; he folded them like a schoolboy. "His plan was killing us slow, that's the truth of my heart. Banks. Taxes. Names on paper for any policeman to read. A Serra with an accountant is a Serra in a cage. I was saving this family the only way I knew."
"The line was cut nearly through," Dominic said. "On the mountain road, at night, that is not a scare, Benito. That is a coffin with the lid off. My mechanic's hands shook showing me."
"Vane's enthusiasm!" The words burst out of him. "I said nick it β a nick, a leak, a failure on a bend at twenty miles an hour β and Vane, that greedy rat, Vane cut it to the last thread because a dead heir paid better than a frightened one and he thought war would make his fortune. I found out after. After, Dom. I stood in that garage too."
"You aimed the gun," Dominic said, "and now you argue about the pulling of the trigger." He let that sit, and then he asked the question he had carried all morning like a stone in his pocket. "The bakery. The fire. A woman and a six-year-old asleep over the shop, Benito. Tell me about the fire."
What happened then stayed with Dominic all his life. Benny stood up β slowly, the way a man stands in church β and put his right hand against his own heart, and his voice came out of some older and cleaner room in him.
"On her grave," he said. "On your wife's grave, Dom β the woman who fed me every Sunday for thirty years and called me Benito when the whole world called me Benny β I swear it. I never ordered harm to that child, or her mother, or any child breathing. Vane heard the little girl could name voices. A six-year-old witness, in his head she was a noose with pigtails, so he panicked and set his warning fire alone β and if I'd known beforehand, I'd have put it out with my own hands and him in it. That fire was none of my ordering. Let her judge me on it. She always could read me."
Dominic believed him. That was the hell and the mercy of it: Benny lied the way other men breathed β about money, women, loyalty, across six decades β but on her name his brother had never once lied, not at nine years old, not at fifty-nine. Some things even Benito Serra kept holy.
Before Dominic could answer, the open study door filled with a small, grave procession. June Lane came in holding her daughter's hand, with Adrian behind them looking apologetic: this had been agreed, reluctantly, the night before. Poppy would listen to a voice and say if it was one of the kitchen voices from under the table. Nothing more. Poppy carried a dented tin against her chest like a shield.
"Benny," Dominic said, and heard his own voice go strange and careful. "Say the words. The ones from that night."
Benny looked at the child, and understood, and β God help him β obeyed. "The heir's car," he said, flat and low. "The brake line. The mountain road. Tonight, after the party."
Poppy listened with her whole body, the way children listen to thunder to decide about it. Then she shook her head.