Clara's hand found the tin's ribbon and held it like a rope. "He would have hated a fuss," she managed.
"He would have hated a fuss," Enzo agreed, and almost smiled, "and cashed every cheque for the baby and pretended he had won it on the horses, so your pride and his could both survive." He nodded once, to her, to the letters, to the dead. "Rest now. Frank, make copies of everything. Originals stay with her. What is hers stays hers."
Chapter 11: The Printer on Mott Street
The passports gave up their secret the way forged things usually did, not in the grand lie but in the small workmanship. Frank held the Clara Bennett passport under the study lamp on the fifth night and turned it slowly, watching the photograph — Clara's real face, lifted, he now believed, from a clinic intake scan — sit a fraction too high on the page, the laminate edge feathered where a careful man had hurried. On the rear cover, pressed so faintly into the board that he needed a fingertip before he needed his eyes, was a maker's blind stamp: a chrysanthemum, eight petals.
He knew that mark. Every investigator in five boroughs who had ever chased paper knew some version of it. The flower belonged to a print shop below a noodle house on Mott Street, in Chinatown, where Arthur Lau, seventy-one, grandson of a man who had printed menus and funeral notices and, in other decades, whatever else was paid for in cash and silence, ran two ancient presses and asked his customers exactly one question: when do you need it?
"It may not be Lau himself," Frank told Enzo before he went. "The stamp could be copied."
"In Mott Street?" Enzo said. "Nothing is copied. Everything is inherited."
Frank went at opening time, when the street was still delivering itself, crates of greens and ice and fish going down into basements, shutters rattling up on gold-fronted shops. The noodle house above was steaming its first broth. Below, down six worn steps, the print shop smelled of hot metal and solvent and old paper, a smell Frank associated, not unpleasantly, with every dishonest document of his youth.
Arthur Lau was smaller than memory, white-haired, his apron inked to abstraction, reading glasses on a cord. Behind him a press turned slowly, printing calendars for a temple fair, bright red and gold, innocent work in plain sight. He looked at Frank once and knew him, the way tradesmen of certain trades always know the men who arrive without an order book, and his hand moved, almost without thought, to still the press, as if even innocent paper should not be moving while they talked.
"I print nothing illegal," Lau said pleasantly, in the tone of a greeting.
"Not for twenty years," Frank agreed. "Which is why I am surprised." He laid the passport on the counter between them, open at the photograph of a pregnant woman neither of them had wronged yet in person, and he watched Lau's hands. The hands gave him away before the face did. They withdrew, just slightly, from the counter's edge, the instinct of a man who does not want his fingerprints anywhere near what he is looking at.
"I did not print that to be used," Lau said, very quietly.
Frank said nothing. Silence, properly held, was half his profession.
Lau turned and, after a hesitation that seemed to cost him, unlocked a drawer and took out a job book bound in oilcloth. His finger travelled down columns of neat figures and stopped. "Four documents. Two passports, two supporting cards, identity of a woman supplied to me complete: photograph, signature study, dates. Rush order. Paid three times my price, in cash, by courier. I was told they were for a film. A production. Pictures to be shown at a distance, never used at a border." He looked up, and his contempt for his own foolishness was naked. "I am old, Mr. Deluca, not stupid. I told myself film because I wanted the money for my granddaughter's schooling and because telling myself things is how a man survives this street. But I knew. A film does not require the signature studied. A film does not require the laminate correct to the year of issue."
"Who sent the courier?" Frank asked.
"I do not know his name."
"Arthur." Frank let the name sit on the counter beside the passport, an old courtesy and an old warning at once. "The woman in that photograph is seven months pregnant. She works as a maid. Men arranged for her to be arrested holding your workmanship, at a party, in front of cameras, and to lose her child to a cell or to a state home while lawyers argued. Your granddaughter's schooling is a fine thing. Hers is a life."
Lau closed his eyes. When he opened them he went, without another word, to the back of the shop and returned with a courier's receipt book, the pink carbon copies printers keep when everyone else keeps nothing. The signature on the collection slip was not a name Frank recognised. The notation beside it, in Lau's neat hand, was: Paid — Romano a/c, per D. S. — and a telephone number with a Staten Island code.
"D. S. collected in person once, the first visit," Lau said. "The courier came after. A heavy man, polite, a scar through one eyebrow. He said the account was Signor Romano's private office and discretion was already paid for. He said—" Lau stopped.
"Say it."
"He said the old gentleman himself would be grateful, and that gratitude from that house was worth more than the cash." Lau's mouth twisted. "I have lived seventy-one years in fear of exactly two things, Mr. Deluca: fire in a paper shop, and gratitude from Aldo Romano. I took the order anyway. May God and this woman forgive an old printer his arithmetic."
Frank copied the number, the notation, the job book page, photographing nothing, because Lau's terror of Aldo was real and paper in Frank's own hand could not be tortured out of a camera that did not exist. On the steps up to the street he paused, because Lau had followed him, apron and all, into the cold stairwell.
"If I am asked," Lau said, "I will deny the book. I will burn the book. I have a family."
"I know," Frank said. "Then pray I never have to ask. And Arthur — if a heavy man with a scar comes back to tidy up his account, you telephone this number before you telephone your regrets." He gave him the card with Enzo's private line, watched relief and fresh fear fight in the old man's face, and climbed toward the noise of Mott Street with the chrysanthemum passport in his inside pocket, feeling less like evidence now than like a flower pressed in a book about how close an innocent woman had come to being erased by other men's stationery.