"You want coffee first, boss?" Benny asked.
"No," Vittorio said. "I want my room."
Benny did not ask about the room. He knew about the flood — everyone in the family's orbit knew about the flood by then. A pipe over the private wing. Furniture hauled out in the dark. The great bed stripped down to its bones. He kept his eyes on the drive and said nothing at all.
Inside, the house smelled of wet plaster and lemon oil. The night staff melted sideways as Vittorio passed, eyes down, trays steady. Aggie Pryor met him at the turn of the stairs with her keys in her hand and her face arranged in the expression she wore for all emergencies, which was the expression of a woman reading a grocery list.
"Your room's aired, Mr. Salerno," she said. "Dehumidifiers since two. The mattress was dried and remade — "
"Who remade it?"
Aggie's pause was the length of a held breath. "Calloway did the heavy work, sir. The new girl. Under my eye, most of it."
Vittorio looked at her for a moment, and Aggie decided, wisely, to be needed elsewhere. He climbed the stairs alone.
His bedroom stood in the pale disorder of a place that had been rescued in a hurry. The rug was gone, rolled and taken down to dry, and the floorboards shone dully. Everything in the room had been moved, cleaned, argued with, and forgiven — everything except the shape of the bed in the middle of it, remade with clean linen, tall and white and innocent as an altar.
Vittorio closed the door behind him. Then, after a moment, he locked it, a small sound in the quiet room, and Benny, waiting on the landing below by long habit, heard it and understood that whatever happened next was not for an audience.
He took off his jacket and laid it over the chair. He rolled his sleeves to the elbow, one fold, then another, as he had done every morning for twenty-nine years when no one was watching the King be a man instead of a monument. He went around to the far side of the bed, the side away from the door, and knelt.
Other men checked a pulse with two fingers at a wrist. Vittorio checked his the way his father had taught him, without ever meaning to teach him: by going, first thing, to the place where the thing he loved best in the world was hidden, and laying his hand over it to be sure the world had not taken it in the night.
The straps were where his fingers expected them, flat against the slats, buckled, taut. The cedar box sat between them, edge flush with the tick he had cut into the wood in another decade. He drew it out an inch, then two, and lifted the lid with the care of a man opening a reliquary in a church he no longer believed in.
Twenty-nine letters. He did not count them; a father does not count his children to be sure they are all in the room. He read the weight of the box instead, the way he had read it on a thousand mornings, and the weight said: all of them, every birthday, every unsent year. The drawing, folded once, laid on top, where it had lain since a year he did not let himself name before coffee —
The drawing was out of line.
It was nothing. It was less than nothing: a fraction of an inch, a corner of folded paper eased past the edge of the envelope stack where he always, always squared it. A stranger would have sworn the box had never been opened. A maid would have sworn she had put everything back exactly as she found it, and believed her own oath.
Vittorio did not move for a long time.
He had squared that corner on the morning of Anna's twenty-ninth birthday, and he remembered the squaring of it the way other men remember signing their names. He knew. The way a man knows a stair in the dark has been replaced by air, he knew: somebody had been beneath his mattress.
His first feeling was not rage. Rage came later, on schedule, like weather. His first feeling was older and uglier than rage, and he was almost surprised by it, at fifty-nine, after everything: it was shame. Some stranger's hands had moved through the only tender thing he owned. Some living person, walking around his house with a face and a name, had read him — Vittorio Salerno, the King of New Orleans — in the one language he had never dared to speak aloud.
He closed the lid. He strapped the box back into its dark with hands that did not shake, because his hands had stopped shaking in public and in private around 1989 and had never been permitted to start again. He washed his face in cold water, and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was already the face the house required.
Downstairs, the day staff were arriving. Vittorio ate nothing. He drank one coffee standing at the kitchen's back door, which scandalized the cook, and he asked three questions in an ordinary tone of voice, which terrified her more than shouting would have.
Who had been in his room. Who had lifted the mattress. Who had been alone with it, and for how long.
The answers came back to him by noon, carried by Aggie with a list in her apron pocket and her mouth set in a line. Names were given. Times were given. Most of the night staff had worked in pairs, in doorways, in sight of one another, hauling furniture and wringing sheets.
One of them had been alone with the bed.
Vittorio read the name on Aggie's list twice, and the second reading was not for the spelling. Calloway. The new girl. The one with the brother in the hospital and the agency shoes and the habit — Aggie had mentioned it once, with approval she now visibly regretted — of answering a question exactly as it was asked.
"Question them all," Vittorio said at last, and put the list face down on the desk. "One at a time. Politely. Start at midnight."
"And the girl, sir?"
He looked out of the window at his own gardens, where the light had finally come up and everything appeared forgiven. "The girl," he said, "I will ask myself."
Chapter 7: The Question at 3 A.M.
The questioning began at midnight, and it was worse than shouting, exactly as everyone in the house had known it would be.
Shouting would have been weather. A man could stand in shouting with his shoulders up and wait for it to pass, and afterwards there would be something ordinary to sweep up. This was not weather. This was Benny Osei in the small sitting room off the kitchen, with a pot of coffee gone cold on the side table and a list in a leather folder, asking questions in the tone of a man discussing the rain — and Aggie Pryor in the doorway, saying nothing, which from Aggie was a kind of screaming all by itself.