Chapter 3 - The Empty Chair in the Dark
The cellar under the Monteverdi estate—or the Contini house, as the locals still called it, though no Contini had lived there since the Prohibition years—was not a place for wine. The soil was too wet, the water table too high; any bottle stored down there for more than two seasons came out with the corks rotted and the labels turned to gray pulp. It was a place for things that needed to be forgotten. Old coal bins, copper boilers from the thirties that weighed half a ton each, and a small, bricked-off coal chute that opened onto the lower garden behind the stables where the ferns grew six feet high in the summer.
Rafael Contini had not used the cellar since he was fourteen years old and his uncle had locked him in the dark for forty-eight hours to teach him how a man holds a secret when his ribs are cracked.
He was sitting now on an iron chair with his wrists lashed behind the backrest by four turns of heavy nylon cord—the kind used for rigging small boats. His shirt was torn from the left shoulder down to the hip, and the dark stain across his ribs had dried into something that looked like rusted iron in the weak yellow light of a single 40-watt bulb dangling from a frayed cotton cord.
Across from him, sitting on an upturned wooden crate that had once held Italian lemons, sat Marco Bruno.
Marco was cleaning his fingernails with a small silver penknife. He was fifty-two, with thin gray hair brushed straight back from a forehead that seemed to grow larger every year. He wore a heavy wool suit that cost more than Sophia’s car, and his shoes were clean, the leather shining with the dull, oily luster of good wax.
“You should have taken the flight to Lisbon, Rafael,” Marco said without looking up from his thumb. “I had the tickets in the glove box of the Buick. First class. Window seat. You could have watched the coast disappear just like your old man did back in fifty-six.”
Rafael didn't move his head. His breathing was shallow, rhythmic, controlled through the nose—the way they taught them at the monastery in Palermo before the world got small. His left hand, still encased in the black leather glove, was jammed hard against the iron frame of the chair where the cord had bitten deep into the wrist, cutting off the circulation until the fingertips had turned the color of lead.
“The tickets were for Tuesday,” Rafael said. His voice was lower than it had been upstairs, slightly gravelly from the cold air of the stone floor, but there was no shake in it. “Today’s Monday.”
Marco looked up then. His eyes were small, wet, and gray like river stones under water. He closed the penknife with a soft click that seemed to bounce off the damp brick walls.
“Plans change when people start asking questions about the orphanage in Yonkers, boss,” Marco said, standing up and dusting an invisible speck of lint from his lapel. “Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have got a grand jury empaneled for next month. They found the ledger from the bank in Newark. Forty thousand a month for eleven years adds up to a lot of questions about where the tobacco money went. And you—sitting up there in your museum, wearing your gloves like an old duchess—you were getting ready to sign the plea deal to protect the name. Weren't you?”
Rafael’s eyes didn't shift from Marco’s tie. “The ledger in Newark was burned in seventy-four.”
“Copies, Rafael,” Marco smiled, showing teeth that were slightly too white for his face. “People make copies. Especially when they think the boss is getting soft. Especially when the boss starts spending his afternoons watching a cleaning woman’s kid chase a cat instead of checking the shipping manifests from Marseille.”
A small sound came from the darkness near the foot of the stairs—a dry, metallic scrape, like a piece of tin being dragged across gravel.
Both men turned their heads toward the shadows.
The cellar stairs were steep, twelve stone steps worn down in the middle by fifty years of boots carrying coal and firewood. At the top, a narrow sliver of yellow light from the kitchen hallway fell across the dust motes.
A small red sleeve appeared first. Then a pink boot with a loose tassel dragging behind it like a dead worm.
“Uncle Rafael?”
The voice was tiny, high, and slightly stuffed up from the evening damp. It didn't sound like an intruder; it sounded like someone who had woken up from a nap in the wrong room and couldn't find her shoes.
Marco’s face didn't change, but his right hand dropped four inches toward his coat pocket where the Smith & Wesson sat in its leather holster.
“Stay where you are, little one,” Marco said, his voice dropping into that smooth, grandfatherly tone he used when he was talking to the delivery boys at the gate. “Go back up to the kitchen. Your mother’s got your milk on the stove.”
“You're sitting on my box,” the voice said from the darkness.
A three-year-old girl in a red coat that reached her ankles stepped out of the shadow of the coal bin. Her hair was half out of the pink clip, falling across her forehead in a damp tangle. In her arms, clutched by the middle like a sack of flour, was a large calico cat with one torn ear and a look of profound, ancient boredom on its face.
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Emma stopped three feet from Marco’s polished shoes, looked down at the shattered pocket watch lying on the floor between his feet—the glass face crushed into a hundred glittering diamonds—and then looked up at Rafael.
“Your hand is dirty,” she said.
