For a moment, after the truce was spoken, no one moved to rise. Then Sal Moretti, with the groan of old knees, stood and blessed the table in the old formula, peace in the house and bread on it, and the elders filed out past one another without touching, each calculating anew. One Romano uncle, passing Enzo, paused to say, very low, that some men in that room were tired of paying for other men's pride. He said nothing more, and Enzo asked nothing more. But Frank marked the man, and the moment.
Driving home through the darkening streets, Frank said, "He knows about the book. Or knows there may be one. That folder was empty, Enzo."
"I know what was in the folder," Enzo said. "Nothing was in the folder. That is why he believed everything was. Now he will hurry. Men who hurry make telephone calls they would otherwise make carefully."
He looked out at Staten Island rising ahead of them across the water. "Double the men at the house. Quietly. And, Frank — Clara is not to be told she was discussed like cargo in that room. She has been discussed enough."
Chapter 18: A Bag Packed to Run
Clara decided to run on the night of the council, though she knew nothing of councils. What she knew was simpler and, to a frightened woman, more persuasive: the house had filled, quietly, with extra men. A driver she did not recognise was drinking coffee in the hall at midnight. The gates, which had always closed at ten, now closed at dusk. Frank Deluca, passing her on the stairs, had asked with unusual gentleness whether she slept well, and she had read in his gentleness what she always read in changes around her — that the danger had grown, and that everyone was being kind about not saying so.
She waited until the house settled. Then she took from the bottom of her wardrobe the small carpet bag she had arrived with, a lifetime and a widowhood ago, and she packed it the way she had packed it the day she fled her empty flat for live-in work: with sense, and with grief, and in a strict order that kept her hands from shaking visibly.
Two dresses that would still close over her belly. The good shawl. Her marriage certificate, wrapped in a handkerchief. Tommy's last letter, and the photograph of him squinting into the sun outside St. Mary's. The clinic card with her next appointment. A little money, saved from her wages in notes folded small, which would take her — she had worked it out over three sleepless nights — to her cousin in Pittsburgh, who owed her mother a kindness and had a spare room, and where no Valenti or Romano name meant anything at all and a baby could be born as simply his mother's son.
She did not pack the baby's things. The house had given her a drawer of tiny clothes, laundered and folded by Rosa with fierce tenderness, and she stood looking at them a long time before she understood why her hands would not move. To take them was to admit she was stealing him from safety. To leave them was to admit she was taking him into nothing. Either way, a mother was supposed to know. She sat down on the bed with the half-packed bag at her feet, eight months pregnant, exhausted to the bone, and cried without sound, because even now she was a servant in her habits and did not want to trouble the house.
"If I go," she whispered to the child, "they stop fighting over a door I am standing in. Mr. Valenti keeps his marriage. Miss Romano keeps her father. Nobody has to hand anybody over. It is only me that goes. That is the smallest price. It has always been the smallest price."
The flaw in the plan, which she knew even as she zipped the bag to the halfway point, was the gate, the men, the road at night, her own body already heavy and slow. The greater flaw arrived before she had solved the first. A knock, soft, and then Gia's voice through the door, asking — not commanding, asking — whether she might come in.
Gia saw the bag. To her credit, and Clara would remember it long afterwards, she did not cry out or reach for it or speak of ingratitude. She closed the door behind her, sat down in the room's one chair without being invited, and looked at the bag the way one looks at a letter one has also, at some point, written.
"Pittsburgh?" she asked quietly. "Or Ohio, for Tommy's mother? You would go where someone once loved you. I understand that arithmetic. I have done it on a map of places where my father's name does not reach. There are fewer than you would hope, Clara. That is the first thing. The second is that my father wants you frightened and moving. A girl who runs looks guilty. A girl who runs can be found by men who are not Enzo's, on a road, with no witnesses, carrying a bag."
Clara's hands tightened on the strap. "I am trying to protect my baby."
"So am I," Gia said, and startled them both. "That is why I paid your clinic bills when I did not even know if kindness was permitted me. Anonymously, like a coward, but I paid them. I will not watch my father spend you and your son to break a contract he was too proud to refuse in public." She rose, and held out her hand, not for the bag but for Clara's. "Stay. Not because this house is safe. Because leaving is the one move he has already planned for."
They were still standing so, hand in hand beside the guilty bag, when Enzo came to the open doorway with Frank behind him, having been told by a night man whose conscience had won an argument with his orders. Enzo took in the scene in one glance — the bag, the wrapped certificate, the two women — and Clara waited for the anger of a master whose protection had been, as it must look, refused.
It did not come. He crossed the room, knelt — Enzo Valenti, on one knee, on a servant's floor — and zipped the bag fully shut, then set it, deliberately, on top of the wardrobe, out of easy reach and out of the reach of midnight decisions.
"A bag packed is not a sin, Clara," he said. "Every person in this house has packed one in his life. I packed mine at nineteen. Frank keeps his by a door to this day, and lies about it. But you will not carry yours alone, at night, in your condition, into my enemy's best opportunity. If the day comes when you must go, you will go in daylight, with money that is yours, papers that are yours, an escort, and an address I have verified myself. Until that day, you stay, and the cost of your staying is mine. That is what protection means. It is not a favour I withdraw when it becomes expensive."