Something in him had woken up. She did not yet know whether that was the most dangerous thing that had happened to her in that house — or the thing that had happened the night she'd walked through the wrong door, and it had simply taken a week, and a plate of ragù, to reach her.
Chapter 6: Marco
The walnuts were wrong.
Mia stood in the pantry at six in the morning with a handful of them in her palm, and she knew it the way she knew her own name — not by looking, but by the smell that rose off the shells, faint and green and bitter underneath the honest oil of the nut. Someone had dusted these with something. Not poison. She would have known poison now; she had thought of nothing else for eleven days. This was smaller and meaner than poison. Walnut oil gone off doesn't smell like this. This smelled like a lesson.
She set the handful down on the steel counter, carefully, the way you'd set down a thing you intended to come back to, and she finished the inventory the way she always did: jars by touch, lids by sound, everything her grandmother had taught her in a kitchen in Pilsen before Mia was tall enough to reach the stove. Taste is memory, her grandmother used to say. Your tongue keeps every receipt.
The pantry door swung open behind her without a knock.
"You start early," Marco Moretti said.
He was Luca's younger brother and he carried himself like the difference. Where Luca was still water, Marco was a held match. He leaned in the doorway in a shirt with the sleeves already rolled, and his eyes went not to her face but to her hands, and then to the walnuts on the counter, and something in her stomach settled cold and certain.
"You were checking my stores," she said.
"I was checking whether you check." He came into the pantry like he owned the air in it, which, she supposed, he did. "Eleven days you've been cooking for my brother. Eleven days I've been waiting to find out what you are."
"I'm the cook."
"You're a waitress from a diner on Cermak who appeared out of a service corridor at the exact minute somebody tried to kill my brother, and who happened — happened — to smell the one thing our own taster missed." He picked up one of the walnuts and turned it in his fingers. "In my business, luck like that is usually manufactured."
"So you manufactured some of your own." Mia nodded at the walnut in his hand. "Those were fine yesterday morning. I shelled the new bag myself. Somebody opened it in the night and worked something into the oil — something that turns a dish, just a little. Not enough to hurt anyone. Enough to make me look careless in front of your brother. Enough to find out whether I serve first and notice later, or notice first."
Marco's mouth did something that wasn't a smile. "And?"
"And dinner tonight would have had a bitter edge in the sauce that nobody could place, and your brother would have started to wonder about me, and in three weeks he'd have stopped wondering and sent me home. And whatever's really going on in this house would have gotten its cook back — the one who doesn't notice things." She held his stare. "You didn't sabotage a meal, Mr. Moretti. You sabotaged a witness."
The pantry was very quiet. Somewhere beyond the door the kitchen staff were beginning the day at half volume, the way everyone in this house did everything, and Mia could smell coffee and hear Mrs. Ricci's heels like a metronome.
"You got a mouth on you, waitress."
"I've got a palate on me. The mouth's included." She picked up the bag and held it out to him. "Take them. Test them, throw them, I don't care. But you tell your brother yourself what you did, because if I tell him, he'll think I'm fighting for my job, and if you tell him—" she stopped.
"If I tell him?"
"He'll know I'm not. Weapons don't report the hand that loads them." The words came out before she'd decided to say them, and they hung there between the shelves of oil and flour.
Marco looked at her for a long moment. Then he took the bag of walnuts, and the handful off the counter too, one by one, deliberate, and he dropped them all into the bin by the door.
"You're right about one thing," he said. "I wanted to know if you notice. Now I know." He paused with his hand on the door. "So notice this, and notice it good. My brother eats alone because the last person he trusted at a table is dead. Mrs. Ricci runs this house because her husband died proving he was loyal. Every soul under this roof is here because somebody decided they were useful or somebody decided they were safe, and those lists are not the same list." His eyes were flat and tired and not unkind, which frightened her more than the match ever had. "Everyone in this house is someone's weapon, waitress. The only question I haven't answered is whose you are."
He went out. The door swung twice and settled.
She became aware, slowly, that the kitchen beyond the pantry had gone quieter than a kitchen ever goes at six in the morning. When she stepped out with her apron full of shallots, she found three of the day staff arranged along the pass in attitudes of elaborate innocence, and Tomas, the oldest of the line cooks, studying a sauce that did not need studying. They had heard some of it. In a house like this, everyone heard some of everything; it was the house's second language.
"Mr. Marco tests everyone, signorina," Tomas said at last, without looking up from his sauce. "The porters get a wrong crate. The drivers get a wrong address. Once, he hid the boss's own cufflinks to see who would report them and who would keep them." He tasted, adjusted nothing. "Two men kept them. They work in Ohio now."
"And the ones who report them?"
"They work here." He slid the pan off the heat with the tenderness of a man defusing something. "You should eat something. You look like a girl who has been told a true thing before breakfast."
Mia stood among the jars with her heart going too fast and the smell of the spoiled oil still green in the back of her throat. She thought about Danny's textbooks on her kitchen table at home, and the envelope of cash in her sock drawer growing thicker by the day, and the way Luca had looked at her grandmother's ragù like a man remembering a country he'd been exiled from.