Chapter 5: A Toast That Moved a Room
What Nico did next, he did with a smile.
He waited for Luka's fishing story to reach its small, courteous laugh — a beat of warmth at the table, genuine enough — and then he set his napkin down, and stood, and lifted his glass, and a head of a family standing with a glass in his hand is a thing any dining room in Providence knows how to respond to. Chairs stilled. Ellis paused at the bar. Ferrante, across the room, turned with an expression Harper could not read from where she stood in the space Nico's man had opened for her.
"Before dessert," Nico said, "forgive an interruption. Aldo will tell you I am not a man for speeches at his table."
"You are a man for other people's speeches, Nicholas," Ferrante called, dry, and the room laughed softly, and Harper watched Nico accept the joke like a man with all the time in the world.
"Thirty years ago this spring," Nico went on, "Elena Ferrante stood in this doorway and told this room that Casa Loma would outlast every one of our tempers. She was right, as she usually was. Some of us at this table were boys she fed when we had done nothing to deserve feeding." He lifted his glass a fraction higher. "To Elena. And to this house. And because Elena insisted that a toast was a thing you stood for — all of you, on your feet, and by the terrace, where she liked the light. She would have been offended by a toast made sitting down in the dark."
It was masterful. Harper understood it even as she felt it happen to her own body, the social gravity of it: to refuse to stand for a dead woman who had fed you would be an insult no one at that table, on either side, could afford on a night built entirely out of not insulting each other.
Chairs scraped back. Glasses rose. Luka came up first among the Kovac men, because not to would have been noticed, and put a hand briefly over his heart in Elena's direction, which Ferrante acknowledged with a bowed head that cost him something real.
"The terrace, please," Harper said, finding her voice, finding the role Nico had written for her without ever discussing it. She moved as servers move, guiding without touching, opening a path with a lifted hand and a murmured, "Mind the step, sir, the light's better just there." Nico's men drifted outward with the group, not shepherding, merely present at the edges, the way furniture is present. One of them took up a place by the banquet platform with a glass in his hand and an air of a man enjoying the evening air, and Harper understood that the platform, and whatever waited under the table behind them, was now quietly covered by someone who would not move.
Harper would remember the movement afterward in fragments, the way you remember a tray beginning to fall. The scrape of chair legs. The soft percussion of glasses lifted from linen. Ferrante rising last of all, because a host does not hurry, and lending the whole migration the dignity of tradition rather than the haste of flight. Rosa, at the kitchen door, took one look at her employer's face and began, without a word, to draw her own staff back toward the pantry with offers of a taste of something, a break, a story, so that the room emptied from both ends like water finding two drains.
No one had said the word danger. No one needed to be protected from a word. They only needed, Nico seemed to understand instinctively, a better reason to be somewhere else than the reason fear would have given them, because fear makes people look back, and looking back makes people stop.
Only one man lingered.
He was the youngest of the Kovac party, sharp-faced, the one who had said least all night, and he had risen, glass in hand, but he had not moved toward the terrace. He stood by his chair, by Table Nine, looking down at the table as if he had left something in the geography of the plates — a phone, perhaps, or the thread of a conversation he wanted back.
"Sir," Harper said, at his elbow, with the pitcher still, absurdly, in her hand. "They're pouring something special on the terrace for the toast. Mr. Ferrante's cellar. He asked that everyone—"
"I left—" The man glanced toward Nico, who was watching the room the way a conductor watches an orchestra he has already cued, and something in that calm made argument seem untidy. The young man's hand hovered once, above the tablecloth, near his own place setting, and Harper's whole body went to a wire's tension. Then Marco appeared on his other side, beaming, a bottle raised like a flag.
"For Elena, my friend, you do not drink the house pour. Come, come, I will show you what the old man keeps hidden." Marco's arm did not quite touch the man's back. It did not need to. Hospitality at Casa Loma was a force of nature, and the youngest Kovac man, outnumbered by courtesy, allowed himself to be moved, step by step, glass by glass, into the bright group at the terrace windows, where Luka was telling Ferrante something that made the old man, for one moment, genuinely laugh.
Harper breathed.
The dining room, behind the group, stood mostly clear. Table Nine sat empty under its white cloth and white roses, nine chairs pushed back at nine angles, glasses catching the light, as innocent as furniture and as dangerous as a held secret. Other diners, sensing the occasion without understanding it, had drifted toward the windows too, drawn by the free pour and the little ceremony of it, and Ellis moved among them with the bottle, generous, unhurried, keeping faces turned outward, toward the night over Federal Hill.
Harper found her place again at Nico's side, as she had been told to. He stood with his glass raised like everyone else, his gaze on Ferrante, his posture a portrait of a guest honoring his host. Only she was close enough to see his free hand, down at his side, where no camera of manners would look.
He made a signal. Small. Two fingers, once, toward his own man at the platform — and in the same motion caught Ferrante's eye across the room and held it.
Ferrante's face changed, just slightly, the way a house changes when a door is closed somewhere inside it.
Nico lowered his hand. He lifted his glass the last inch.
"To Elena," he said to the room, and drank, and everyone drank with him, and the next step, whatever it was, had already begun.
Chapter 6: The Gas Leak Drill
The toast had done its work, but a toast only buys minutes.