Chapter 5: The Mask on the Dresser

AMELIA

"Even if she had a reason?" I asked.

Luca let go of my hand and looked at the narrow bed between us, at the sweater I'd left half folded on the blanket. "A reason wouldn't change the law," he said. "Papa would listen for a minute, maybe two, and then he'd ask what she was doing in my room wearing another woman's face."

"And what would you ask her?"

"Why she ran." He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead, and I saw that his fingers were still shaking. "Come with me. Dr. Orlandi is waiting in my room, and I want you there when she talks."

"Why me? Rico can listen better than I can."

"Rico hears every answer as a threat, and the doctor hears every answer as a symptom." He stood up slowly, like a man twice his age. "You hear what people leave out."

I almost laughed, because the person in this house who left out the most was standing in front of him in a wrinkled gray sweater, but he was already at the door, and I followed him down the west corridor with my bag still half packed behind me.

The east wing smelled of floor polish and cold coffee. A guard at the end of the hall stood straight when Luca passed and kept his eyes on the wall, the way men do when they've heard that the heir is hunting somebody, and I walked beside Luca with my wrist tucked into my sleeve. I had left through his door only a few hours earlier, and I'd promised myself I would never see it again in daylight.

Inside, the curtains were open, and the morning showed everything I'd hoped the dark would keep: the blanket twisted off the foot of the bed, the pillow still dented where my head had been, yesterday's black shirt thrown over a chair. I looked at the window and kept looking.

Dr. Celeste Orlandi sat on the arm of a leather chair with her medical bag open on her knees. She had short dark hair and olive skin, and the calm face of a woman who had stitched up a hundred men who swore they were fine, and she studied Luca the way a mechanic studies an engine that has been run too hard.

"Sit," she said. "Shirt off, and don't tell me you're fine, because your pupils are telling me otherwise."

"Amelia stays," Luca said.

Celeste's brown eyes moved to me and back again. "Is she a nurse?"

"She's family."

"Then she can hold the lamp." She nodded at the tall brass lamp beside the bed. "Closer, Miss Raines, and keep it steady."

I held it. Rico Falco leaned against the dresser with his arms folded, tall and silent, his shaved head catching the light and the scar on his neck pale against his collar, and he nodded to me once, the way he always did, and said nothing.

Celeste worked fast; she looked into Luca's eyes, counted his pulse against her watch, drew a vial of blood from the crook of his arm, and let a few drops fall onto a white card the size of a playing card. Then she sat back and watched the card the way a person watches bread rise.

"How much do you remember?" she asked.

"The toast," Luca said. "The room tilting. Sofia's name, because I thought she was there, and then pieces."

"What kind of pieces?"

"Hands. A voice. The feeling that I was safe." He stopped, and I kept my eyes on the lamp. "After that, nothing I can put in order."

"That's normal, and it's what I'd expect." Celeste lifted the card toward the window. "Two lines, and I'd bet my license on both. The first is a sedative, the kind a vet gives a horse, only in a tiny dose; it slows your thinking and makes you stop arguing with yourself. The second is a heat drug, and any boy with a backpack in the underground casino quarter can sell it to you; it speeds the heart and makes a person reach for whoever is closest."

"Together?" Rico asked.

"Together, they pull a man's guard down and keep it down." She looked at Luca. "I'll send the blood to the lab, but I don't need the lab to tell me that someone planned this. Nobody takes these by accident, and nobody mixes them in the dark without knowing how much to use."

"It was in the toast," Luca said.

"Most likely in the glass, and the glass is the thing I'd like to see."

"I'll find it," Rico said.

I set the lamp down because my arms had begun to tremble, and Luca's gaze moved to the dresser behind Rico. "Show her," he said.

Rico stepped aside. The white mask lay where I had left it, with its gold teardrop under the left eye and its ribbons trailing over the edge of the wood, and I couldn't look away from it, though I tried.

"I haven't let anyone touch it," Luca said. "I wanted you to see it first."

"Me? What would I know about masks?"

"You noticed that the guard at the east door has a limp, and that Mrs. Rosi's son hasn't visited in a month, and that the cook hides sweets in the flour bin. Tell me what you see."

Rico lifted the mask by its edges with his leather gloves, the way a jeweler lifts a stone, and held it in front of me. I had tied those ribbons myself, in the dark, with my own fingers.

"It's handmade," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "The paint on the teardrop is thick, so a person painted it and not a machine, and the lining is silk. Nobody puts silk in a mask they plan to throw away."

"What else?"

"The ribbons." I pointed near them without touching the cloth. "There are two knots, one on top of the other, so someone tied it to stay put."

"Or so she wouldn't lose it in a hurry," Rico said, in his quiet voice. "Whoever she is, she's careful and she's frightened, or she's good at looking frightened."

"Or she only wanted to be mistaken for Sofia," I said.

Luca flinched, so slightly that I might have imagined it. "She managed that."

"I'll find the maker," Rico said. "A mask like this has a name stamped somewhere, and a man who made it will remember who paid." He slid it into a paper bag without letting his bare skin near it and sealed the bag with a strip of tape, and Celeste wrote on the front and handed it back.

"Boss," a guard called through the door, "the Don is on the stairs."

"Let him in."

Vittorio DeSanto entered the room like weather arriving. He was a big man with silver-black hair and a deep, slow voice, and the scar across the back of his left hand showed white as he closed the door behind him. His cold dark eyes passed over Celeste, over Rico, over his son, and stopped on me.

"Why is she here?"

"She's helping me, Papa."

"My wife's daughter is helping you." He said it flatly, as if tasting it. "Celeste, speak."

Celeste told him, in fewer words than she'd used with us, and he listened without moving. When she finished, he was silent for so long that I heard the guard's boots pass in the hall and fade.

"Someone put a drug in my son's glass," he said at last, "in my house, at my party, in front of two hundred guests, and then sent a woman in a borrowed face to his bed. And not one of my men saw her."

"The east camera went dark at eleven thirty-four," Rico said. "I'm still working out why."

"Work faster." Vittorio turned to Luca. "Do you know who she is?"

"No."

"Do you know who sent her?"

"No, Papa, but I'll find out."

"The Marchettis lost the harbor contracts to us in the spring," Vittorio said, "and they've been smiling at me ever since. A smile like that is a message." He flexed the scarred hand once, slowly. "Rico, close the gates. No one leaves this house until I have a name. Staff, family, cousins, cooks, all of them; the guests are gone, but everyone who slept under this roof last night stays under it."

"Yes, Don."

"And you," Vittorio said, and his eyes came to rest on me. "I'm told you planned to move out today."

My mouth had gone dry. "Yes, Don Vittorio."

"That's postponed. Tell your mother I said so." His voice never rose. "I said everyone, and I meant everyone, including Marina's daughter."

"Papa, she's been..."

"She'll sleep where I can see her, Luca, and that's the end of it."

He left, and his soldiers' boots followed him down the corridor. Celeste packed her bag without looking at anyone, and Luca sank onto the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his head low.

I stood in the middle of the room with a half packed bag that I could no longer carry out of the house, and somewhere far below us I heard the long iron scrape of the front gates swinging shut.