Chapter 6: Eleven Minutes

AMELIA

The security room sat in the basement behind a steel door that opened only for a thumbprint, and in seven years under this roof I had never been allowed past it.

Eight screens glowed along one wall, each showing a piece of the house: the front gate, the garden, the kitchen door, the ballroom with its floor bare and shining now. A young technician named Teo rolled his chair aside when Rico came in, and Rico took his place without a word and began to type.

"Start at ten," Luca said. He stood behind the chair with his arms crossed, and I stood beside him, because he had asked me to and because there was nowhere else for my hands to be.

"Ballroom, 10:06." The screen showed the gala as a crowd of crimson masks and black suits, so tightly packed that I couldn't pick out a single face. Then Rico zoomed in on the champagne tower, where a heavy gray-haired man stood beside a woman in an ivory gown and a white porcelain mask. They were speaking, and I could tell from the way her shoulders rose that it was not a gentle talk.

"Don Bellini and Sofia," Luca said.

"At 10:12 she leaves." On the screen Sofia turned and walked toward the side corridor, and nobody followed her. Rico switched cameras, and we watched her cross a stone hall, push through a door, and step into the dark with her mask shoved up into her hair. "Her driver says she cried in the car, and then she asked him for a cigarette, though she hasn't smoked in two years."

"That sounds like Sofia," Luca said quietly.

"So she's cleared?" I asked.

"She was in her car by 10:15, and her driver and the gate guard both logged her out." Rico tapped a key. "At 10:15 her father checks his watch. At 10:48, this."

The ballroom again, the stage at the far end, Vittorio with one hand raised. A woman in a green silk dress and a green mask crossed the floor carrying a crystal glass of dark red wine, and she pressed it into the hand of a man in a crimson half-mask, and he drank it to the bottom.

"That's you," Rico said.

"I know it's me."

"Aunt Lucinda gave you the glass," I said, before I could stop myself.

Luca glanced at me. "She gives everyone everything," he said, and there was no suspicion in his voice at all. "It's the family toast, and she has made it since I was twelve. Blood orange and sparkling wine, and she pours the whole tray herself."

"Forty-two glasses on the tray," Rico said. "I'll ask her what I ask everyone."

"Do. She won't mind."

I said nothing more. I was remembering a green silk shape standing beneath a gold lamp in the east corridor, a raised glass, and one word shaped by a mouth that made no sound, and I knew that if I told Luca what I had seen, he would ask what I'd been doing in that corridor, and I would have to answer him.

"East hall," Rico said. "Eleven twenty-two."

The picture was gray and grainy. A woman in a blue dress half carried a staggering man in a black suit along the carpet, her smile fixed in place for anyone they passed, and I watched myself unlock the second door, ease him inside, and close it behind us.

I had never seen my own face from the outside before. I looked young and tired and afraid, and I wanted to look away, but Luca was watching the screen, so I watched it too.

"Eleven thirty-one." The door opened, and I stepped out alone and shut it softly and stood with my back against it for four long seconds. Then a woman in a black apron came out of the shadows holding a stack of towels, and we spoke, and I walked away toward the stairs. "That's Mrs. Rosi."

"She told me Sofia had left," I said.

"At eleven thirty-four..." Rico let the clip run, and the screen filled with a hissing gray static. "The camera dies, and it doesn't come back until six this morning."

"A fault?" Luca asked.

"It's no fault. Someone cut the feed from the control panel, and that takes a key and a code." Rico turned his amber eyes toward me. "Miss Raines, after you left the corridor, where did you go?"

My mouth was dry, but I'd had years of practice. "I went down to the ballroom to look for Sofia," I said. "I checked near the champagne and the dessert table, and then I asked a waiter for water."

"Which waiter?"

"A tall one, with a mustache."

"We hired forty waiters, and thirty of them have mustaches." He didn't smile. "And then?"

"I went to my room and stayed there."

"Did anyone see you go?"

"No."

"Rico," Luca said, in a low warning voice.

"I ask everyone, boss. I'll ask the Don's wife next, and your aunt after that." He tilted his head at me, almost kindly. "I'm not accusing you, Miss Raines, I'm counting; and right now the number of people who can say where you were between 11:34 and morning is zero."

"It's zero for half the house," I said, and my voice shook only a little.

"That's true, and that's why I'm counting." He turned back to the screens.

Luca touched my elbow, light and warm. "Go and sit down. You've gone white."

"I'm fine."

"You always say that." He gave a tired half smile, and I looked at the floor, because he had said almost the same thing in the dark to a woman in a mask, and I couldn't bear to hear the echo.

Teo brought me a folding chair and a paper cup of water, and I held the cup in both hands and let it shake. On the screens, the ballroom emptied in fast motion; Vittorio shook hands, women kissed cheeks, waiters carried trays through a swinging door, and a stout woman in a black apron directed them like a general.

"Is that the pantry door?" Luca asked, pointing.

"Yes, boss. Everything from the stage goes through there." Rico paused the clip. "Which brings me to the thing I came down here to tell you before I got distracted by cameras."

"Which is?"

"Mrs. Rosi's staff cleared the stage at two this morning. Every tray from the toast went to the pantry, and she counted the glasses when they came back." He took a small notebook from his jacket, though I think he knew the numbers by heart. "Forty-two glasses were poured. Forty-one came back, dirty, and went into the wash. One didn't."

"Which one?" Luca asked, and I already knew.

"Yours. The glass you drank from, boss, the one that held the drug." Rico shut the notebook. "It never reached the pantry. It's not on the stage, or under the stage, or in the trash, or in the garden; my men have been through all of it."

"Maybe a guest picked it up," I said. "Someone who wanted to keep a glass from the party..."

"Nobody keeps a used glass, Miss Raines." Rico looked at me for a moment longer than I liked. "And the glass is the only thing that could prove what went into it. Dr. Orlandi can't test a drink that doesn't exist."

"So the mask isn't where it started," Luca said slowly. "The mask is where it ended."

"No, boss." Rico stood up and pulled on his leather gloves one finger at a time. "The mask is where the plan ended, but it isn't where the cleaning ended. Somebody walked back to that stage after midnight and took your glass away, and that somebody knew which glass was yours, and knew the back stairs, and knew when the cameras would die."

"The Marchettis don't know our back stairs," Luca said.

"No, boss, they don't." Rico's voice was soft. "Whoever took that glass lives in this house, or works here, or visits so often that nobody looks twice at them."

I set the paper cup down on the floor because I could not trust my hand with it. On the dead gray screen I could still see the shape of the corridor, and the green silk, and the lifted glass, and I knew that I could not say any of it out loud.

If I said it, I would have to say why I had been there to see it.