LOGINThe smoke came faster than she expected. It lay along the foot of the great doors in a gray band, then began to climb.Someone near the back started to cough. A child began to cry in a thin, rising note. Blair felt the walls of the church come in an inch, and then another inch, and her breath stopped halfway down.She put her hand in her pocket. The knife was there, sticky. Under it her fingers found the small flat shape of the boat key, and she closed her fist on the teeth of it until they hurt.In for four. Out for four."Don Gaetano!" She was on her feet. "The priest. Where's the priest?"He was kneeling behind the altar rail with the host held against his chest, an old man with a white fringe of hair and a face the color of paper. He looked up at her as if he had never seen anyone before."Father. Is there another door?""The sacristy." His voice shook. "There's a door in the sacristy. It goes to my garden. It's never locked, the bar's only on the outside of the front, nobody woul
For about two seconds nobody in San Michele understood what they had heard.The priest at the altar had his book open and his mouth halfway to the first word. The coffin sat on its stand in the aisle with white lilies on the lid. Down in the pews a child coughed.Then a woman at the back tried the great door. She pulled the iron ring. She pulled it again."It's stuck," she said, quite loudly. "It won't open."The sound that went through the church was not a scream. It was lower than that, a rustling, a hundred people shifting on wooden seats and turning their heads at the same moment.Alessandro stepped up onto the stone base of the front pew. He was in black, with his bandaged arm held close to his side, and every face in the nave swung round to him."Sit down."He didn't shout. He used the voice she had heard at the cannery, the one that was not a request."Everyone sit. Nobody goes to the south door. Nobody runs. Marco."They sat. It was the strangest thing she had ever seen. Two h
Lorenzo had drawn San Michele on the back of a market flyer. A long rectangle with a bell tower at one end.Two doors, a main one and a small one on the south side. A choir loft over the entrance."Two on the roof, Nando said. They'll want the bell tower for the street and the loft for the aisle." He tapped the loft. "I'd put one of mine in the loft tonight, before the priest locks up, and one in the tower. I'd rather they found nobody on the roof than found us.""And inside?" said Alessandro."Six men in the pews with the mourners. Ordinary coats. Marco knows every face in this town, so anyone he doesn't know sits near the front, where we can see their hands."Blair looked at the drawing. "He says the doors will be shut.""At eleven the sacristan shuts the main doors for the Mass. That's custom, so it won't look like anything." Lorenzo didn't look up. "It may be the whole idea. A shut church is a room with one door and the wrong people in it."Nobody said anything about the small doo
Peppe Calafato was in surgery for four hours and came out of it alive. Blair heard that at two in the morning from Marco, who had been sitting outside the theater since noon, and she lay awake after that with her eyes on the stripe of hall light on the ceiling, hearing the cheese woman say, tell me how. She slept in the end, not for long.On Sunday morning they went back to the cannery. Marco had left the steel door open again without being asked.The two prisoners sat on kitchen chairs a few yards apart. The scooter rider was called Nando Spadaro, twenty-two, with the shaved head and the swallow on his neck. Someone had cut his trouser leg away and bound his thigh with a pressure bandage, and there was a dark stain coming through it. He was grey and sweating and looking at nobody. Santino sat very still on the other chair with his bound hands between his knees and his eyes on the concrete.Lorenzo took the chair in front of Nando and talked to him for ten minutes, courteously, about
The cart was on its side. The oranges had gone everywhere, down the stones and under the stalls and into the gutter, and the whole lane smelled of crushed fruit. Marco's man with the red balloon lay on his face a few feet away with one hand still closed around the string. The balloon floated above him, bumping gently against an awning.A woman in an apron was kneeling beside Peppe. It was the one from the cheese stall. Blair hadn't heard her come. She had both hands on the wound, hard, and was looking at Blair with a white, set face. "Tell me how.""Both hands. Lean. Don't let up for anything, not even if he asks." Blair took her wrists for a second and moved them an inch. "There. What's your name?""Nunzia.""Nunzia, you're doing it right." She got up and ran.Rosalia was on the cobbles behind the cart with her back against the stool. Someone had dragged her there. Her black dress was dark in a wider patch than it ought to have been, below the ribs on the left side, and her cigarette
The harbor market started early and was loud by nine. Fish lay in rows on beds of ice. A man with a megaphone was selling socks, nine pairs for five euros, and from somewhere a radio was playing a song Blair half knew. The smell was fish and wet stone and the cut stalks of artichokes.She had dressed for running: jeans, trainers, a dark jacket with deep pockets. She had nothing in the pockets but the orange from Rosalia's kitchen, which she hadn't been able to eat. Lorenzo had been firm about the rest. If the carabinieri came, nobody was going to find a pistol on Miss Capri. Marco's men were armed, and there were seven of them somewhere in the crowd in ordinary coats, one with a string bag, one with a child's red balloon he'd been handed and clearly hated."If I say down, you go down," Alessandro said, low, at the entrance. "Don't think about it. Don't look for me. Down.""I know.""And if you see anything, you say it.""I'll say it."He took her hand and tucked it into the crook of h



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