"I'll remember," Harper said. She thought of the three words, folded once, in cheap capitals. Let them keep their note. She had a promise, spoken at a table, in front of witnesses of her own.
Chapter 18: Stefano's Loans
Sylvia Grant did not believe in following men. She believed in following money, which, as she told Harper over the rim of a legal pad in the guest house kitchen, had the advantage of leaving receipts and the disadvantage of nothing at all. Men lied with fluency. Ledgers lied clumsily, in columns, and usually forgot to lie about the dates.
"Your box," she said, "cost somebody something. Boxes and copying and borrowed uniforms are small money, but loyalty is not, and silence afterwards is dearer still. Somewhere there is a payment. There is always a payment. Our task is to find whose book it darkened."
The loan business had a respectable name — Barone Community Credit, incorporated, taxed, advertised in parish bulletins — and an unrespectable history that everyone in Providence understood and no one said aloud at dinners. During the worst years of the feud, when Kovac pressure closed bank doors to half the city's small businesses out of pure fear, Stefano Barone's door had stayed open. Restaurants borrowed. Builders borrowed. Men on both sides of the quarrel borrowed, which was the elegant part, Sylvia explained: a debtor could not afford a side. Debt was its own neutrality, enforced monthly, at rates that grew teeth the longer the war lasted. Peace, for such a business, was not a blessing. Peace was banks reopening, rates falling, fear draining out of the market like water from a holed boat.
"Do not mistake me," Sylvia said. "Lending in a panic is not a crime, and half this city ate because that door was open. I am interested in a narrower question. Who owed him, two years ago, around the warehouse fire — and who was paid, rather than charged?"
It took nine days. Harper knew only fragments, because Sylvia, correctly, told her almost nothing she could be made to repeat in court, and Harper, who had learned the discipline of only-what-I-saw, did not ask twice. There were visits to suppliers who had once served Casa Loma and now served it again. There was a restaurant on Atwells Avenue whose owner wept, from relief or shame, Harper never learned which. There was, most importantly, a locksmith's shop near the harbour, two rooms and a bell over the door, whose late owner had borrowed heavily in the feud years and whose books, since his death, had been kept by a widow who answered Sylvia's questions with the exhausted precision of a woman who had already decided that fear was a luxury she could no longer afford.
What the widow kept, in a biscuit tin, because she had thought it might one day be a shield, was a single torn ledger page.
Sylvia showed it to Nico first, alone, and then — because the chain of the thing would matter later, and witnesses had become the family's unlikely theme — she laid a copy in front of Harper at the library table and let her look without commentary. It was a page of cramped, competent figures. Loans, dates, repayments, the ordinary machinery of obligation. And near the bottom, in different ink, a short run of payments going the wrong way: money out, not in, initials instead of names, in the weeks before the warehouse fire, and again in the week after it. Beside them, in the dead locksmith's hand, a physical note, the kind a man writes when a face is his only reference: scar, brow. Anchor, hand. Walks bad.
Harper's mouth went dry. She made herself read it twice more, the way she had been taught to read a scene: what is there, not what it means.
"I'm not saying a name," she said at last. "I don't know a name. That's still true. A man with a scar through his eyebrow, an anchor tattoo on his hand, and a limp was paid out of this book, around that fire. That's what's on the page. The rest is for Okafor, and for you. Not for my mouth."
"That," Sylvia said, with deep satisfaction, "is precisely correct, and precisely why you are still useful alive and talking, which certain persons find inconvenient." She took the copy back. "There is also a bookkeeper. Former, frightened, currently deciding whether his fear of Stefano outweighs his fear of a subpoena. He kept the fuller books. If he talks, the page becomes a pattern. If the pattern holds, the pattern becomes a trail. We do not have a trail yet, Harper. We have a tightening. Remember the difference, because everyone else will forget it on purpose."
Stefano came to dinner on Sunday, as he always did when he wished to be seen being family.
He was a handsome man in the well-kept way of men who have never once been surprised by a bill, with his cousin's dark colouring and none of Nico's stillness; Stefano moved through a room collecting it — a hand on a shoulder here, a remembered name there, wine appearing as if he had conjured it. He kissed Rosa. He brought Bianca, for her confirmation, a gold bracelet and a compliment that made her blush and Rosa narrow her eyes at its polish. He asked Harper, with real apparent warmth, how the paramedic studies went, and remembered, correctly, which module she was on, which she found more unsettling than any hostility. Hostility she could file. Charm this good was a door with nothing behind it that she could see.
Over the fish he gave his views on the peace, lightly, the way a man mentions weather he dislikes but expects to outlast. A pity about the chapel unpleasantness. A shame the Kovac people were nervous. One did hope, he said, that the family was not building its future on the word of — a pause, a smile, a glass raised in Harper's direction, entirely genial — enthusiastic amateurs. One did hope signatures would wait until everyone was quite, quite sure what the new world was worth, and to whom.
"Signatures wait on trust, cousin," Nico said mildly. "Trust waits on conduct."
"Conduct," Stefano agreed, delighted, as if Nico had made his point for him. "Exactly so. Let us all conduct ourselves beautifully." And he turned the conversation, with a storyteller's ease, to a debtor of his who had named a racehorse after him, and the table laughed, Harper included, a beat late, with her eyes open. The pattern, Sylvia had said, was tightening. Across the candles Stefano Barone laughed with his whole charming heart, and never once, all evening, asked what anyone had been doing near the harbour that week. Which was, Harper thought later, in its way, the loudest thing at the table: a man that careful about other people's business, asking nothing at all about the one piece of business that had everyone else in the house awake at night.
Chapter 19: The Peace, Postponed