They were sharing a table. And the table was holding.
Chapter 26: Legitimate
The lawyers came at nine in the morning, which in the Moretti house was an hour for emergencies, not paperwork. Mia found them in the long dining room β three men in gray suits, a fourth with silver hair and a briefcase so polished it threw back the light β and Luca at the head of the table built for thirty, eating nothing, drinking his coffee black while they spread the future out in front of him in blue folders.
"Stay," he said, when she would have backed out with her tray. "You should hear this. Some of it is yours."
She set the tray down and stood behind his chair, and for two hours she listened to the Moretti family being taken apart on paper and rebuilt as something else. The dock company first: the family's share of it, held for forty years under other men's names, brought into the light in Luca's own, with taxes paid back to a year that made the silver-haired lawyer whistle through his teeth. Then three restaurants β two failing, one closed outright β bought clean through a holding company with Luca's name registered at the statehouse like any grocer's. Warehouses sold. Debts that had never been written down anywhere were written down now, in ink, and settled or surrendered.
"Understand what this is," the silver-haired man said, tapping a page. "Once your name is on these filings, Signor Moretti, it is on them forever. There is no taking it back into the dark. The government will know what you own. Your enemies will know what you own. Your friends will read about it in the newspaper with their breakfast."
"I understand," Luca said.
"You'll be audited like a bank."
"I understand."
"You'll be poorer. Legitimate money is always poorer, at first."
Luca looked up then, over his shoulder, at Mia β as if she were the one who had to be consulted. "I have been rich in the dark for twenty years," he said. "It bought me a house I eat alone in. Sign it."
He signed. Page after page, that steady hand she had watched hold a fork like a weapon in a silent room, and when he was done he dated the last sheet and slid the folder across the table to the lawyers, and the room let out a breath nobody had noticed holding.
But it was the second signature that mattered, and everyone in the room knew it. An hour later, in the library, Vittorio Castellano arrived with two men and his cane, and the peace papers were laid out between the don and the boss like a treaty between nations. The docks divided, the old routes renounced, the routes that remained written down as plain commerce with plain names. The two men read in silence for a long time. Nonna Sofia sat by the window with her hands folded, watching her grandson and the man her village had sent across the ocean in the same decade, and said nothing at all.
Vittorio signed first. Then he turned the pen around in his fingers and offered it handle-first to Luca, the way old men do when the paper is not business but sacrament.
"Your grandfather," Vittorio said, "would have shot me for suggesting this."
"My grandfather," Luca said, signing, "ate alone too. It didn't save him."
Not everyone in the house signed so easily in his heart. Marco found her in the pantry at noon, counting jars she did not need to count, and leaned in the doorway with his arm still stiff from the healing of it.
"Restaurants," he said. "A dock company with his name at the statehouse. My brother is hanging our lives in a shop window and calling it morning."
"He's hanging them in the light," Mia said. "There's a difference."
"Is there? In the light, piccola cuoca, everyone can aim." But there was no venom in it the way there would have been a year ago β only the tiredness of a man watching a world he understood being dismantled by the brother he would die for. "My father hid money in mattresses. His father hid it in walls. Now Luca wants to pay taxes on it and put our name in the telephone book."
"Your father ate alone too," Mia said quietly. "I've seen the photographs in the hall. Thirty chairs, one man." She set the last jar straight. "Maybe the money isn't the thing being saved here, Marco."
He was silent a long moment. Then, gruffly, like a man surrendering an argument he had never wanted to win: "Giulia asked if the new restaurant will have her cake on the menu. The midnight one. I told her to ask the chef." He pushed off the doorframe. "She'll ask. Answer carefully β she negotiates like her grandfather."
That evening, when the house had emptied of suits and signatures, Luca found Mia in the kitchen running her hand along the great stove, the way she did when she was thinking. There was a roll of architect's drawings under his arm. He spread them across the steel counter she kept clean as an altar, and weighted the corners with a copper pan, a lemon, a jar of salt, her own wooden spoon.
"The social club on Taylor Street," he said. "Closed six years. The family is converting it β mine will be the first name on the new registry, and the building will be legitimate down to its bricks. It is going to be a restaurant." He turned the drawing to face her. A long room. A kitchen drawn open to the diners, the way she had told him once, months ago, that food should never hide. "I'm not offering you a job, Mia. Jobs I can fill. I am asking you to design this kitchen β your ranges, your stations, your cold room, built the way you work β and to be its chef." His finger rested on the space above the door in the drawing. "With your name over it."
She looked at the drawing a long time. Her name. Over a door. In letters men would read from the street.
"Chefs have schools for this," she said at last. "Credentials. I have a diner and a dead father's debts."
"You have the best palate in Chicago and a memory God gave to archivists," Luca said. "And you fed two families into peace at my table. Schools," he said, with the closest thing to contempt she had ever heard from him, "can be hired. You cannot." He rolled the drawings carefully and put them in her hands. "Take a week. Refuse me if you want β the door out is still yours, and it stays yours. But if you stay, stay for this."