Enzo looked at Clara. "You were meant to carry the case that buried you," he said. "Instead you have found the one thing in it that may keep you alive. Do you understand what you must not do now? You must not mention this book to anyone. Not to the girls in the kitchen, not to Gia, not to a priest. Anyone."
"I understand," Clara said.
But as Frank retied the twine with hands that were not quite steady, she understood something else as well, and it frightened her more than the police ever had. The suitcase had not contained one frame, but two. And the second, smaller secret was dangerous enough that men might kill to keep it inside the lining where it belonged.
Chapter 14: Aldo Romano
Aldo Romano believed a man should be able to look at a room and know, at once, what every person in it was worth to him. He had practised the gift for fifty years, since he was a boy running errands in Red Hook for men who paid him in sandwiches and slaps, and by the age of sixty-eight he rarely misjudged. Waiters were worth a nod. Priests were worth a donation and distance. Sons-in-law, even rich ones, even feared ones, were worth exactly what they could be made to lose.
He sat that morning in the sunroom of his house in Dyker Heights, a broad, spotless room that smelled of lemon polish and coffee, and read the report his man had brought him about the engagement party that had not gone as planned. No police raid. No maid led out in tears before the cameras his cousin had so helpfully invited. No scandal. Only music, dancing, and Enzo Valenti smiling beside Gia as if the alliance were a love match blessed by heaven.
Aldo folded the paper once, precisely, and set it under his cup.
He had never wanted this alliance. That was the truth no one at the council table said aloud. Twenty years earlier, in a feud no Staten Island family had forgotten, a Valenti cousin's carelessness — or ambition, Aldo had never accepted the official story — had cost him his younger brother, Marco, in a warehouse fire ruled accidental by men who knew better than to rule otherwise. Aldo had buried his brother, shaken the old Valenti patriarch's hand at the funeral because custom demanded it, and kept his hatred tidy and fed ever since.
Peace, when it came, had been forced on him by money and age and younger men who preferred trade routes to graveyards. The terms insulted him still. Joint docks. Shared books. His daughter offered like a signature at the bottom of a contract he had not written. Gia was to be the seal on a peace that gave the Valentis respectability in Brooklyn and gave the Romanos, in return, promises.
Aldo did not deal in promises. He dealt in leverage.
So he had built his own insurance, quietly, over two years: side shipments through the Romano warehouse that never touched the joint books, cash skimmed and washed, passports printed by his own printer for men who needed to disappear for a price. It was not greed, he told himself, though he liked money well enough. It was protection. If the alliance broke — and alliances always broke — the Romanos would not be left begging at a Valenti table.
The suitcase had been the cleanest part of the plan. A pregnant maid was, in Aldo's cold arithmetic, perfect. She was staff, therefore invisible. She was a widow, therefore pitiable and easily doubted. She had carried the case herself, in front of witnesses, because a housekeeper had been ordered to make certain she did. Plant it in her room, tip off the police during the party when the house was full of important guests, and let the discovery do the rest. Enzo would be shamed before both families as a man who could not control his own house, or worse, who used a pregnant girl as his courier. The alliance would collapse, but on Romano terms, with Romano hands looking clean and Valenti honour in the gutter where, in Aldo's mind, it had always belonged.
That it had failed — that Enzo had hidden the girl, moved the case, kept his smile for the photographers — told Aldo his son-in-law-to-be was either luckier or better informed than expected. It did not tell him to stop. It told him to press elsewhere.
"Send for my daughter," he said to the man by the door.
Gia arrived within the hour, dressed simply, her engagement ring the only bright thing about her. She kissed her father's cheek because she had been raised to, and sat where he pointed, because she had been raised to do that too. Yet Aldo, who misjudged few people, had lately begun to misjudge her, mistaking her quiet for obedience.
"You looked well at the party," he said. "The Valentis entertain generously, with other families' patience."
"I did what you asked, Father. I smiled. I danced. I stood where I was told to stand."
"And the maid?" he asked, as casually as if he were asking after the weather. "The Bennett girl. I hear she is still in that house. Still under his protection."
Gia kept her face still. She had learned that skill at his table before she learned long division. "She is staff. She is pregnant. Where would she go?"
"That is not an answer a wife should practise," Aldo said softly. "Listen to me, Gia. That girl is a crack in his house. Cracks spread if you know where to tap. I will need you, in the coming weeks, to be my eyes there. What Enzo hides, who Frank Deluca visits, what is said about a certain case. You will tell me."
"I am to spy on my future husband in his own home?" she said.
"You are to remember whose blood you carry into it." He lifted his cup and drank, watching her over the rim. "Women and staff, Gia. That is how houses fall. Not by gunfire. By the people no one watches, carrying things no one checks, hearing things no one thinks they understand. I have used that truth all my life. Do not become its exception."
Gia rose when he dismissed her, with a wave of two fingers, and walked through the immaculate house where her mother's portrait still hung in the hall, a woman who had smiled in every photograph and, as Gia remembered, almost never at home. In the car she sat with her hands clenched in her lap, thinking of clinic bills she had paid anonymously for a girl she was now ordered to betray, and of how her father's love had always been a room with the door locked from the outside.