Chapter 5 - The Ledger in the Wall
The police didn't come for three hours.
When they did, they came in three unmarked sedans with New York plates, led by a lieutenant from the Westchester barracks who didn't look at Rafael’s face, didn't ask about the blood on the floor, and didn't touch the small wooden box that sat on the mahogany desk upstairs. He walked into the study, laid a manila envelope on the corner of the blotter, and tipped his hat to Sophia as she walked past him in the hallway carrying a tray of lukewarm water and clean linen.
“It’s done,” the lieutenant said.
Rafael didn't look up from the small desk lamp. He was sitting in the high-backed leather chair, his left hand bare, the pale skin around his thumb dark with old bruises where the nylon cord had cut through.
“And Marco?” Rafael asked.
“He’s in the car,” the lieutenant said, his voice flat as a dockside plank. “They’ll find him somewhere near the bypass by morning. A heart attack, probably. The papers will say he was sixty, though everyone knows he lied about his age since the war.”
Rafael nodded once. He reached out with his right hand—the gloved one—and picked up the small brass key that had been lying on the blotter since Marco dropped it. He inserted it into the lock of the walnut box in the middle of the drawer.
The lock turned with a dry, stiff resistance, like an iron gate that hadn't been opened since the winter of twenty-two.
Inside the box were three things: A small, faded photograph of a woman with dark hair standing in front of a citrus grove in Palermo, her face half-hidden by a straw hat. A baptismal certificate from the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, dated October twelfth, nineteen hundred and twenty-eight, with the name Sofia written in violet ink. And a bank book from the Union Trust Company of New York, showing a balance of four hundred thousand dollars, untouched for thirty years, registered in the name of Tomas Rossi’s daughter.
Rafael picked up the photograph, looked at it for exactly eight seconds—the same number of seconds he had spent looking at the windowpane twenty-four hours before—and then laid it back down.
Downstairs, in the small back room off the kitchen, Emma was asleep on her narrow cot with the calico cat curled into a tight orange ball against her stomach. Her red coat was draped over the back of the chair, the missing button replaced by a small bone toggle that Sophia had found in the bottom of her sewing basket.
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The wind off the Sound had finally died down, and the grandfather clock in the hall gave one clear, unhesitating chime as the hands moved past midnight.
Rafael stood up from the desk, pulled the black leather glove back over his left hand, finger by finger, until the seams were straight and tight against the skin. Then he turned off the desk lamp, walked out of the study without looking back, and closed the heavy oak door behind him for the last time that year.
