Frank, to her surprise, did not reach for a pen. "It will be remembered," he said, "which in this house is stronger."
At the door she stopped. "Tell Clara — no. Do not tell Clara anything from me. She has no reason to take comfort from my name. Just — keep the back stairs guarded. My father always liked back stairs and side doors. He says front doors are for people who expect to be announced."
Then she drove away alone, past the guard, past the gate, back towards her father's house, where she would sit at his table that evening and lie again, less badly, she hoped, than the night before. In the study, Enzo stood at the window until her car was out of sight.
"She has begun," he said.
"Yes," Frank said. "Now we must be worthy of it. Double the night guard. And, Enzo — check the weather."
Chapter 21: The Storm Lockdown
The storm Gia had warned them about arrived on Thursday night, not politely, but all at once, as if the sea had been holding its temper for days and had finally lost it.
By seven the rain was coming sideways off the water. By eight the wind had found every loose thing on the Valenti property and was worrying at it — a gate chain, a shutter, the tarpaulin over the woodpile behind the kitchen. By nine the lights in the house had flickered twice, recovered twice, and every person in the building understood that a third flicker might be the last. Enzo gave his orders standing in the hall, without raising his voice, and the house moved the way houses move when they have been quietly preparing for exactly this.
Lockdown, in that house, did not mean panic. It meant doors. The front doors barred and chained, the side door to the garden locked and then watched, the back stairs — Enzo said it himself, remembering Gia's parting words — guarded by a man inside and a man out, though the man outside was brought in to the scullery doorway once the rain made standing useless. It meant shutters closed on the ground floor, curtains drawn above, the generator checked and its fuel counted aloud by Frank and written down. It meant Clara moved, before the worst of it, from her small room to an interior bedroom with no outside wall she could be taken through and no window larger than a serving hatch, with Rosa installed beside her like a small, furious fortress.
"I am not an invalid," Clara protested, while Rosa was already arranging pillows.
"You are eight and a half months pregnant in a house men may try to enter by force," Rosa said. "Tonight you are whatever Mr. Deluca says you are, and he says you are to stay in this room with the door locked from inside, and I am to stay with you, and anyone who wants either of us will have to discuss it with me first." She said it with such satisfaction that Clara, despite everything, laughed, and then winced, because the baby chose that moment to press hard against her ribs.
Frank placed the ledger question beyond reach in the simplest way: he did not bring it into the house's conversation at all. Wherever it was, it was not in Clara's room, not in Enzo's study, not in any place a frightened search in the dark would find it. Men breaking in for a book would have to tear the house apart in a storm with its guards awake, and Aldo's men, Frank calculated, had been sent for a quick thing, not a siege. Quick things fail when a house is ready. It was the readiness, more than any gun, that Frank trusted.
They came at half past eleven, when the wind was at its worst and the lights had been out for twenty minutes.
The generator kept the hall and the kitchen lit with a thin, brownish light that made everyone's face look ill. The rest of the house was candle and torch and shadow. The first sign was not a sound at the doors — Aldo's men were too good for that — but a sound that should not have been there at all: the garden gate on the service side, which had been chained at six, giving one soft metallic complaint against the wind, as if testing whether anyone was listening.
The guard in the scullery heard it. He did not shout. He lifted his torch twice, the agreed signal, and Frank, watching from the darkened kitchen doorway, lifted his own once in answer and felt the whole house change its breathing.
What followed was not a battle. Clara, locked in with Rosa, heard only fragments of it and was grateful for the rest of her life that she heard no more: a heavy thud somewhere below that might have been a door meeting a shoulder and holding; men's voices, low and then suddenly loud; Enzo's voice, unmistakable, saying "Enough" with a finality that carried up the stairs better than shouting would have; a crash of glass that turned out, later, to be a conservatory pane the wind took at the very moment two men were being walked firmly off the property through it, so that for years afterwards the story grew a broken window it did not entirely deserve. There was no shot. Enzo had forbidden it unless a life was directly at stake, and his men, disciplined even in the wet and the dark, obeyed him. Aldo's men discovered what Frank had counted on: that a house expecting you is a different country from a house surprised, and that wet men outnumbered in a corridor they do not know, with the lights coming suddenly back on as the generator caught, tend to remember urgent business elsewhere.
It was over in less than ten minutes. Two of the intruders were held, politely and immovably, in the kitchen, dripping onto Rosa's clean floor, until Enzo himself came down in shirtsleeves, his hair wet from a brief step outside he would never explain, and looked at them for a long time.
"You came for a pregnant girl in a storm," he said at last. "Tell Aldo that sentence exactly as I said it. Word for word. He will understand what it will sound like when the council hears it." Then he had them released into the storm at the main gate — not harmed, not robbed of so much as a wet coat — because Frank had advised him, in front of witnesses, that mercy documented was worth more than vengeance whispered about, and because Enzo, even furious, could count.