Chapter 2 - The Sound of the Second Clock
The grandfather clock in the main hallway did not chime on the hour; it emitted a low, bronchial groan that the staff used to gauge the weather. A dry groan meant the wind was coming from the east; a wet, clicking rattle meant rain. By six in the evening, the clock had begun to click like a dry bone in a tin bucket, and Sophia Rossi was standing by the stove in the basement kitchen, stirring a pot of polenta with a wooden paddle that had worn thin on one side from twenty years of scraping against iron.
The kitchen was the oldest part of the house, built before electricity, when the estate was still a summer home for a New York textile broker who lost his fortune in the panic of twenty-nine. The stone walls were thick—fourteen inches of granite and lime mortar—and they kept the sound of the world outside at a low, muted hum. Above her head, the heavy footsteps of Marco Bruno crossed the parquet of the ground-floor study, then stopped. Then started again. Two steps forward, one step to the right, a pause. It was the rhythm of a man who was waiting for a phone call that was ten minutes late.
Sophia didn’t look up when the back door opened, because the back door always opened at six-thirty when the milk crates were dropped on the stone landing by the delivery boy from Greenwich. But the footsteps that followed didn't smell like milk or damp cardboard. They smelled like wet wool and cheap cigars—the brand with the green band that the guards smoked down by the gatehouse when Rafael was away in the city.
“She’s out in the hall again,” a voice said. It was Vane. He was twenty-four, with a scar that ran from his left ear down into the collar of his shirt like a dirty pencil line. He had been with the Contini organization for eighteen months, brought in by Marco from a crew out of Yonkers after the docks on the river had been cleaned out by federal marshals. “The kid. She was looking for her shoe by the pantry.”
Sophia didn't stop stirring. The polenta was beginning to pull away from the sides of the pot in a thick, yellow skin. “She lost her red boot in the mud by the carriage house. Tell her to wait until morning.”
“She’s not waiting,” Vane said. He didn't move away from the doorway. His shadow stretched across the brick floor, long and thin and slightly crooked where it hit the edge of the coal box. “She’s got that cat with her. That orange one. The one with the torn ear. Bruno doesn't like cats in the house. You know that. He says they shed in the upholstery.”
“Biscotti stays where he wants,” Sophia said, her voice flat, carrying the hard, grey weight of someone who had lived too long in rooms without thermostats. She set the wooden paddle across the top of the pot and finally turned around, wiping her hands on her apron. The apron was white once, but seven years of coal smoke and stove grease had turned it the color of an old tooth. “The boss never said anything about the cat.”
“The boss isn't here,” Vane said.
The kitchen went very quiet. The grandfather clock upstairs gave its wet click.
“What do you mean, he isn't here?” Sophia asked. Her hands stayed flat against the table, palms down, fingers spread wide as if she were steadying herself against the deck of a rolling ferry.
“I mean the study is empty,” Vane said, his voice dropping into that flat, wet register that men used when they were trying to sound older than they were. “His car went out the gate at four. Not the black one with the driver. The grey sedan. The one with the plates from New Jersey. He didn't take his coat. He didn't take his gloves.”
Sophia looked at the wall above the dry sink where the spare set of heavy brass keys hung on three iron nails. The middle nail—the one with the small tag marked Main Study / Private—was bare. The key was gone. But Rafael never left the house without the small brass key in his pocket; he used it to wind the pocket watch his father had given him before the war in Sicily, the one with the cracked crystal that he kept in his waistcoat even when he was wearing a sweater.
“Go back upstairs, Vane,” she said, her voice dropping into a register that made the young man twitch his left shoulder. “And if you see Emma, send her down here. The wind’s coming around from the river, and she’ll have her cough back by morning.”
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Vane lingered for a second, his fingers drumming against the seam of his trousers where he carried the small steel-framed knife he’d bought off a sailor in Bayonne. Then he spat on the brick floor—not quite close enough to her shoes to be a fight, close enough to be an insult—and turned back toward the stairs.
Upstairs, in the third-floor study, the window was still sweating. The glove Rafael had left on the sill was cold to the touch, and the white droplet had frozen into a tiny, jagged tooth of ice at the bottom of the wood frame.
