June had come down early — the deep clean after the flood was still working its long tail through the house's schedule, and Aggie had her starting in the private wing before the day staff arrived. She was carrying a folded stack of pillowcases against her chest when she turned the corner of the upstairs landing and saw him.
Vittorio Salerno was grey.
Not pale — she had seen him tired, at 3 a.m., at his window, and tired had a color she knew. This was grey, the grey of ash over a coal, and one of his hands was clamped on the doorframe at shoulder height with all the strength she had seen him use to lift a mattress, while the other pressed flat against his own chest, fingers spread, as if he were holding something inside by hand.
"Sir—"
"Do not—" It cost him visibly to speak. "Do not call out."
June set the pillowcases down on the landing table without a sound, the way she had been trained by eleven months of that house, and went to him. Up close she could hear his breathing: shallow, rationed, furious at its own limits. Sweat stood on his upper lip. His eyes found hers and held them with an effort that frightened her more than the grey did, because Vittorio Salerno afraid was a sight she had no shelf for.
"Chair," he said.
She got her shoulder under his arm — the King of New Orleans, leaning on the night housekeeper in the dawn landing, his weight real and considerable and human — and walked him the six steps into the study and down into the leather chair by the desk. His hand stayed pressed to his chest. The other found the chair's arm and gripped it white.
"Coat," he said. "In the hall. Pocket."
June understood the way you understand things in emergencies: whole, without steps. The overcoat hung on the stand by the study door where Benny had left it the night before. Inside breast pocket, where another man would keep a gun, there was a small flat tin, the kind mints came in. She brought it. His fingers, when he tried the catch, were clumsy with pain, and after one attempt he did a thing she would remember longer than the fear: he held the tin out to her, open-handed, and let her open it for him.
Two small pills rolled in the tin like dice. She put one in his palm. He put it under his tongue and closed his eyes, and they sat in the grey light together — she on the edge of the desk because there was nowhere else and he had not told her to leave — while the house woke up around them by degrees: a kettle somewhere below, Aggie's voice, the day arriving with its sleeves rolled.
The color came back the way tide comes back. Not all at once. First the terrible ash went out of his face, then his breathing found a lower gear, then the hand on his chest unclenched finger by finger and lay quiet in his lap, and he looked, by slow degrees, like the man who had lifted a mattress in the moonlight three nights before.
"You'll want to know what that was," he said at last, hoarse.
"I want to know you're not dying in the next ten minutes, sir. The rest can queue."
A sound left him that in another man would have been a laugh. "My heart," he said. "It has opinions. It has had them for years. A muscle that clenches when it should beat — the doctors have Latin for it, which I paid them to keep to themselves."
"Doctors," June said. "Plural. There's a doctor?"
"One. In Metairie. He is paid in cash, he keeps no file with my name, and he believes I am a retired importer with a suspicious nature." Vittorio turned his head on the chair's wing to look at her. "No one in this house knows. Not Aggie. Not Marco. Not Cesare. Benny knows I am sometimes unwell, the way a driver knows weather. That is all."
June thought of Marco, doing his homework. Of calendars counted by men. Of what a sentence — *the King's heart is bad* — would be worth in the wrong corridor of this city: not money, exactly; something more dangerous than money. A timetable. Every enemy the Salerno family had would hear, inside that one sentence, an invitation with a date on it.
"Why does no one know, sir? If you'd fallen—"
"If I fall, I fall," he said. "A king with a bad heart is a regency waiting to be declared, June. My brother would have doctors and priests around my bed in an hour, all of them sincere, all of them measuring me for the past tense. Marco would grieve beautifully and start moving furniture before my body was cool. Weakness in my world is not pitied. It is scheduled."
He sat up slowly, testing the machinery, and she watched him decide not to reach for help this time.
"You will say nothing," he said. It was not quite an order. It had the shape of one, but there was something underneath it she had not heard from him before — not trust, precisely; a request wearing trust's coat.
"I've had practice, sir," June said. "Letters. A key. Now this. You keep handing me your secrets like laundry."
"And you keep folding them."
"I keep not selling them. There's a difference. One's a virtue. The other's just—" She stopped, surprised at her own anger, and found it was not anger. It was fear, arriving late, in work clothes. "You could have died on that landing and I'd have been the one who found you too late because nobody in this whole house is allowed to know their king can fall down."
Silence. The kettle below clicked off.
"Yes," Vittorio said quietly. "That is the price of the crown. Other people pay it. I am sorry you are learning the exchange rate."
He stood — carefully, with the chair's help, refusing her offered hand with a shake of his head that was somehow not unkind — and buttoned his jacket over the place where his hand had pressed, and by the time he reached the study door he was, to any eye but hers, entirely the man the city feared: upright, unhurried, grey only at the temples where grey was distinguished.
At the door he paused.
"June. The tin stays in the coat. The coat stays by the door. If it happens again and I cannot speak—" He met her eyes. "You have already done it once. That is the whole of the medicine I trust."
She nodded, and he went down to his breakfast and his empire, and June picked up the pillowcases from the landing table and carried the third secret down the stairs with them, folded in with the linen, saying nothing to anyone.
Chapter 16: The Staged Theft