"Go," the housekeeper said. "The kitchen will keep. Kitchens always keep. Brothers are the emergency, signorina. Always brothers."
Chapter 16: The Price
Mia did not sleep. She sat at the steel counter with her phone in both hands and watched the screen go dark and lit it again, dark, lit, as if the doing of it could change the last message. Danny's roommate, Tomas, had texted at eleven. Cops everywhere. They took D in cuffs. Say he's a lookout. Sis they won't let me near him.
At midnight she called the precinct and got a recording. At one she got a tired woman who said Daniel Callahan would see a judge in the morning, and no, she could not speak to him.
At two she stood outside Luca Moretti's study door with her heart slamming against her teeth.
She had made a rule the day she took this job. Take the money. Keep your head down. Never ask the man for anything outside the contract, because a favor from Luca Moretti is a rope, and one day he will pull it. She had kept the rule through the poison, the threats, the blackout. She had kept it right up until the police put her nineteen-year-old brother in the back of a wagon for standing in the wrong warehouse with a box cutter in his hand.
She knocked.
"Come."
He was at his desk with a ledger open and a glass of something amber untouched beside it, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He looked up, and whatever he saw in her face closed the ledger.
"My brother," she said. "Danny. The warehouse he works at β it's a Castellano front. I didn't know. He didn't know. The police raided it tonight and arrested him as a lookout. He's nineteen. He thinks he's alone in it. Mr. Moretti β Luca β I have never asked you for one thing. I'm asking you now."
She had expected a price named coldly. A refusal dressed as kindness. What he did was pick up the telephone and dial from memory, the way a man dials a number he has saved for a bad year.
"Counselor. It's Luca Moretti. Wake up Judge Abernathy. Tell him the Moretti family is calling in the Aldridge matter, and tell him I said tonight, not this week." A pause. "There's a boy. Daniel Callahan, nineteen, holding at the Twelfth. He was stocking shelves in a building whose name he doesn't know. I want him in front of Abernathy at eight, and I want him walking out of it." He listened. "Then be better than good. That's why I pay you to be awake."
He set the phone down. "Coffee," he said. "You'll make it. You've been crying and my hands aren't steady either. We'll share the failure."
She made coffee in his study like it was the most normal thing in the world, and they drank it standing up, and Luca made two more calls in a voice so level it was almost gentle, and across the city men in suits got out of beds and into cars. The great slow machine of debt and memory that men like Luca Moretti actually rule the world with turned, once, toward Danny Callahan.
At half past seven Luca drove her himself β himself, in an unmarked car, through a Chicago morning the color of wet newspaper. He parked across from the courthouse and did not go in. Judges, he said, prefer not to be seen preferring. Mia sat alone in the second row, in her work clothes, her cook's hands folded so tight the knuckles went white.
Abernathy was seventy, and he looked at Danny over his glasses, and then at the file, and then at the prosecutor in a way that made the prosecutor very interested in the bottom of the page. No knowledge. No record. Three shifts of employment. The state, the judge said, had caught a fish so small it embarrassed the net. Released on his own recognizance, charges held pending a review the judge strongly suggested would find nothing to review.
Danny came out of the side door at twenty to nine, still in his warehouse vest, his shoelaces in an evidence bag. He saw Mia and walked into her arms on the courthouse steps and shook, once, hard, the way he used to at nine years old when the thunder woke him.
"Don't thank me," she said into his hair. "You eat. Then you sleep. Then you tell me everything."
In the car Danny slept against the window before they'd gone three blocks. Mia looked at Luca in the rear-view mirror, and Luca looked back, and neither said a word all the way home.
That night, with Danny fed and asleep in a guest room Mrs. Ricci had made up without being asked, Luca called Mia to the dining room. Thirty chairs. He sat at the head of the long table and put her, with a gesture, in the chair at his right β the chair no one sat in.
"You'll want to know the price," he said.
"I know there's a price."
"There is." He turned his glass a quarter-turn. "No more lies between us, Mia. That's all of it. Not the big ones only β all of them. The next time something touches your life that touches this house, I hear it from you first, in this room. Not from Marco. Not from a police report. That's the price. Can you pay it?"
She thought about ropes. Then she thought about a judge saying the word recognizance, and her brother's shoelaces in a plastic bag, and understood she had already spent the thing she was afraid of spending.
"Danny's job came through a friend of a friend, three weeks ago," she said. "He sent me a photo of his first paycheck, proud as anything. Behind him, on the paperwork on the wall, there was a crest. The Castellano crest. I saw it that night and I said nothing to you. I told myself it didn't touch this house." She made herself hold his gaze. "And the recipe card Salvatore gave me β the numbers aren't quantities. I think it's a code. I've been carrying it in my memory like a stone, saying nothing, because I was afraid that the day I became useful in that way was the day I stopped being able to leave."
The silence went on long enough that she quietly inventoried what she would take from her room. The coat. The notebook. Her father's rosary.
"Mia," he said at last.
"Yes."
"You're still sitting in that chair." He said it almost wonderingly. "Get up from it when you lie to me again. Until thenβ" He pushed the untouched plate at his setting an inch toward her, the old ritual standing in for everything he did not say. "Eat first. Then tell me about the card. Every number. From the beginning."