"What will he do?" Enzo asked, though he already knew the shape of the answer.
Frank's face was grave. "He will stop trying to make her look guilty, and try instead to take her. Or the ledger. Or both. He cannot afford for that book to reach the council in full, or for Clara to speak, now that people are listening."
That evening Clara heard the guards changing shifts outside, more of them than the night before, and understood that the house had moved from watching to waiting.
Across the water, Aldo Romano stood at a window with a glass he did not drink from and listened to a man tell him the police had left the Valenti house with nothing. He did not shout. Those who knew him feared his quiet far more. "Then we do it the other way," he said at last. "No telephones. No uniforms. When the weather turns, we go ourselves." He set the glass down untouched. "Bring me my daughter first. I want to know exactly what she has been paying for."
Chapter 20: Gia's Choice Begins
Gia Romano came to the Valenti house the next morning without her father's driver, which everyone who understood such things noticed at once.
She drove herself, in a plain dark car she kept for errands her father did not track, and arrived before ten in a coat buttoned to the throat despite the mild weather. The guard at the gate telephoned the house before he let her through, as he had been instructed to do with every visitor now, and Gia waited without complaint, her hands tight on the wheel, looking at her own face in the mirror as if rehearsing how not to cry.
Frank met her in the hall. He did not ask why she had come alone. He said, "Mr. Valenti is in the study," and then, more quietly, "Are you quite sure you want to be seen here today, Miss Romano?"
"No," Gia said honestly. "That is rather the point. May I see him before I lose my nerve entirely?"
Enzo stood when she entered, because his manners held even when his trust did not. She asked for a seat at once, because her knees would not have held her standing through what she had come to say, and sat opposite his desk, folding her hands in her lap to stop them shaking where he could see.
"My father knows about the clinic," she said. No greeting. No preamble. She had practised the first sentence in the car and she delivered it before she could soften it into nothing. "Someone in his house kept the receipts. Or someone at the clinic talked. He asked me last night what I had been paying for. I lied. I am not a good liar, Enzo. He knew."
Enzo's expression did not change, but Frank, by the window, went very still.
"I paid Clara's bills because she had no one," Gia said. "I told myself it was charity. Then I told myself it was guilt, because I knew — not everything, not at first, but enough. I knew my father had chosen her for something. A girl with no family, no money, a dead boyfriend, a baby coming. He chooses people the way other men choose tools. I paid because if I paid, perhaps I was not part of it. That was cowardice dressed as kindness, and I know it, and Clara may know it too, and none of that is why I am here."
"Why are you here?" Enzo asked, not unkindly.
Gia drew a breath that hurt. "Because last night, after he questioned me, he took a call in his study and left the door open, because he no longer bothers to hide things from me. He thinks frightened people stay frightened in the same direction. He is planning to wait for bad weather — a storm, a night when the roads are bad and your house is cut down to its own guards — and send men who are not in his usual colours. They are to take the ledger if they can find it, and Clara if they cannot. His words were: bring me the book or bring me the girl, and the second will fetch the first."
The room was silent except for the soft ticking of the clock Enzo's mother had wound every Sunday of her life.
"When?" Frank asked.
"He did not say a date. He said when the weather turns. He has a man who watches forecasts the way priests watch feast days. It will be soon. The radio this morning said there is something building out over the Atlantic." She looked down at her folded hands. "I have told you this knowing exactly what it makes me. If he learns I came here — and men like my father learn everything eventually — I will have nowhere. Not his house. Not, I think, this one, whatever courtesies you offer me today. An engagement can be ended by scandal. A daughter who informs is ended differently."
Enzo studied her for a long moment. He was thinking, Gia knew, of the afternoon she had screamed on the stairs — of whether that scream had been panic or performance, a question he had never put to her directly. She made herself meet his eyes and let him look. Whatever he found there, he seemed, at last, to accept it as real.
"There is a further step," Frank said carefully, "and I will not pretend it is a small one. Telling us is one thing. The council is another. If this reaches the council in full — the frame-up, the orders, the suitcase — it will carry ten times the weight coming from Aldo Romano's own daughter than from any document we could lay on the table alone. I am asking whether you understand that, not whether you agree to it today."
"I understood it in the car," Gia said. "I understood it before I understood anything else. That is why my hands are shaking." She gave a small, unhappy laugh. "I am not brave, Frank. I want that recorded somewhere. Brave people in books do not rehearse sentences to a mirror and then drive too fast because they are afraid of turning round. I am doing this frightened, and I will probably testify frightened, and if I weep in front of the council my father will say hysteria, and some of them will pretend to believe him because it is easier."
"He will say worse than that," Enzo said.
"I know." Gia rose, because if she stayed seated she would begin to bargain, to ask for promises no honest man could make. "I will testify. Not today, and not because you ask it prettily. When the council sits again, I will come, and I will say who ordered the suitcase packed, and who chose Clara, and what I paid and why. Write down that I said so, Frank. You write everything down. Let it be written while I still mean it completely."