"Then I stay," Clara said, through tears that were, at last, the ordinary tears of relief, "because you ask it like that. I stay."
Gia helped her, later, to unpack the dresses. They folded Tommy's letter back into its handkerchief together, and put the photograph on the bedside table where morning would find it first, a small act of defiance against every story strangers had tried to tell about him. Enzo carried the drawer of baby clothes himself to the bedside, where decisions could see them. And downstairs, past midnight, the telephone in Frank's office rang once with news from the man he had set watching Aldo's hurry: a second tip-off was already being prepared for the police — and this time, someone had made certain it would not fail.
Chapter 19: The Tip-Off That Failed
The call came in at four seventeen on a grey Tuesday afternoon, and by four twenty-three it had already begun to fail.
It was made to a precinct on Staten Island from a pay phone no one could find afterwards, by a man who gave no name and asked for no reward. He said a pregnant domestic employee at the Valenti house was acting as a courier. He said there was a brown suitcase in her room containing cash from a warehouse robbery and forged passports in several names, and if the police moved quickly they would find her with it still in her possession. He used the word courier three times, as if repeating it would make it true.
The desk sergeant who took the call wrote everything down in a careful hand, then did what careful men in his position had learned to do in that part of the city. He called his captain. His captain called a number that was not written anywhere official. And that number reached Frank Deluca while Frank was standing in Enzo Valenti's study with the windows open to the damp air off the water.
Frank listened without interrupting, thanked the caller without using his name, then set his phone face down on Enzo's desk and said, quite calmly, "It has started."
Enzo did not look surprised. He had been expecting this since the council meeting, since he had refused, in front of men who measured their words like money, to hand Clara Bennett over to anyone. A refusal like that did not end an argument. It only moved it somewhere less polite.
"Tell me exactly," Enzo said.
Frank told him. The anonymous tip. The brown suitcase. The room. The timing, which was meant to be perfect — police at the door during a house full of guests, a frightened girl, a case opened in front of witnesses who would carry the story to every family table in the city before midnight. Clara taken away for questioning, pale and pregnant, with nothing she could use to defend herself. The Valenti name dragged through it. The alliance finished by the appearance of Valenti shame.
"It would have worked," Frank said, "if the suitcase were still where Aldo left it."
But it was not. That was the simple, ruinous fact at the centre of Aldo Romano's plan. The suitcase had been in Enzo's possession since the afternoon on the back stairs. It had been opened in his study, inventoried and photographed item by item under Frank's supervision. The cash had been logged by serial number and locked away. The forged passports — Clara's frightened face under names she had never used — had been sealed in an envelope in the house safe. The clinic cards had been copied, the originals preserved. And the ledger, the small, terrible book hidden in the lining, was no longer in the lining at all. Frank had removed it himself, to a place he declined to name even to Enzo unless Enzo asked directly, which Enzo, understanding him, did not.
So when the police came, as Frank advised they should be allowed to come, they were received in the front hall by Frank himself, in a good suit, with coffee offered and declined.
There were two detectives. The older one did most of the talking, courteous in the way men are courteous when they already suspect they have been used. He explained that a tip had been received, and did not pretend it was more than it was. He asked, because the form required it, whether there was a brown suitcase on the premises matching the description, and whether Clara Bennett was employed in the house.
"Miss Bennett is employed here," Frank said. "She is eight months pregnant and resting under medical advice. As for a suitcase, you will need to be more specific. A house this size has many."
It was not a lie. It was also not the whole truth, and both detectives understood that, and for a moment they stood in a silence that was almost companionable — professionals watching a clumsy piece of work come apart.
Upstairs, Clara knew nothing of it until it was nearly over. Rosa kept her in the small sitting room at the back of the house with the door closed and the radio on, and brought her tea she did not want and biscuits she could not eat. Clara sat with her hands folded over her belly, listened to the muffled male voices below, and felt the baby move, restless, as if he too could hear that something was wrong. She thought of the bag she had packed to run, and, with a clarity that steadied her, that she had not run. She had stayed, and she had told the truth. It would have to be enough, because it was all she had.
Downstairs, the detectives did not insist on searching Clara's room. The tip, they said, would be recorded as unsubstantiated. The older detective, at the door, paused and said to Frank, in a voice meant only for him, "Someone wanted us to find something in a hurry. That usually means it isn't there any more, or it never was."
"Someone wanted a photograph," Frank said. "A girl, a case, a policeman. Photographs don't need to be true. They just need to exist."
The detective nodded slowly. "Tell Mr. Valenti we're sorry to have disturbed the house."
When the car had gone, Enzo came down from the study, where he had remained so no one could say he had stood over the conversation, and looked at the closed front door.
"He will not stop," he said.
"No," Frank agreed. "He built that plan for months — the printer, the cash, the clinic cards. He meant her to be found with all of it, with you standing beside her. Now the police have gone away empty-handed, and Aldo has nothing to show for it except a failed telephone call. A man like Aldo does not accept an empty hand."