Chapter 8: Two Weeks

AMELIA

The dining room had twelve chairs, and that night only six of them were filled, which made the long table look like a road with nobody on it.

Vittorio sat at the head with his scarred hand resting beside his plate, and Luca sat at his right, pale but upright. Aunt Lucinda took the seat across from him in a dark green dress, her gold ring catching the candlelight each time she lifted her fork, and my mother and I sat at the far end, where the family always put the people who had not been born into it. Rico stood against the wall behind Luca with his gloved hands folded, and two soldiers guarded the doors.

Nobody had said a word for ten minutes, until the door opened and a man came in at a half run, still shrugging into his jacket.

"Forgive me, Uncle, forgive me, everyone." He was tall and athletic, with dark blond hair and green eyes that were so like Lucinda's that I looked from one face to the other without meaning to. "The office. Somebody has to read the contracts that you gentlemen only sign."

"You're late, Adrian," Lucinda said, with a smile that was not a scolding.

"I'm always late, Mother, and I'm always forgiven." He bent and kissed Marina's hand, and then he turned to me and gave a smile so warm and so well made that I almost smiled back. "And here's our graduate. You vanished from your own party, Amelia, did you know? I looked for you everywhere."

"I felt ill," I said.

"Everyone did, I hear." He dropped into the chair beside me and shook out his napkin. "The whole house is a hospital, and I'm the only one who's been out of it. Tell me, cousin, are we all going to die?"

"Adrian," Vittorio said.

"Sorry, Uncle."

"Eat."

He ate, and he talked while he did it, easily, about a hotel deal and a leaking roof on a warehouse and a banker who'd cried in a meeting, and I understood after a few minutes that he was filling the quiet on purpose, the way a man tosses a coat over a puddle. It was kind, and it was also a little too practiced to be only kind.

"Amelia, darling." Lucinda's soft voice cut across the table, and every head turned. "Luca tells me you've been such a help to him today."

"I've tried to be."

"It's a mercy, truly." She sipped her wine. "With the gates closed, you'd have nothing to do but count the paintings on the walls. And it's good for a young woman to be useful to this family." She said the last word gently, and put a small weight on it, like a thumb on a scale.

"Aunt Lucinda," Luca said, "Amelia's helped more than anyone."

"I don't doubt it, my dear." She turned her green eyes on my mother. "Marina, you must be so proud."

"I am," my mother said, and her fork shook against her plate.

Luca reached across the table for the bread basket, and when he set it down near my plate, his fingers brushed the cloth beside my hand. "Eat something," he said under his breath. "You've been pushing that fish around for ten minutes."

"I'm not hungry."

"You said that in the car, too, and then you ate a whole focaccia."

"The focaccia was warm."

"So is the fish." The corner of his mouth moved, and for a moment he looked like himself, before the drug and the doctor and the gates. I tore off a piece of bread so that he would stop watching me, and across the table I felt Lucinda watching both of us, her fork resting on her plate as if she had stopped to listen to music.

"Rico," Vittorio said, "report."

Rico stepped forward. "The camera feed in the east hall was cut by hand from the control panel, Don. The glass your son drank from is missing. The mask has a maker's stamp, and I'll have his name by tomorrow. Dr. Orlandi's lab results come in the morning."

"Anything on the Marchettis?"

"Their men have been quiet. Too quiet."

"Quiet is how they sound when they're busy." Vittorio set down his knife. "Adrian, you know the casino quarter. Who sells the heat drug?"

"Half the boys on Lantern Street, Uncle, but I can ask around."

"No," Luca said. "Rico has it."

"Rico has a hammer, cousin." Adrian's smile didn't change, but something behind it sharpened. "I have a telephone."

"We're not here to compare tools," Vittorio said, and both men fell silent. He looked down the length of the table, from face to face, and the room seemed to grow smaller. "I've made a decision, and I'll say it once, so listen. I sent word this afternoon to every family on the Council. We meet on the island in fourteen days."

My mother's breath caught.

"The island?" Adrian said. "Uncle, the last time the Council met on the island, it was for the war."

"It was." Vittorio's voice was steady. "My son was drugged in my house, and a woman went into his bed wearing a face that wasn't hers. If I say nothing, every Don in Rosavera will say the DeSantos are soft. If I make a noise in the wrong place, the Marchettis will say I'm blaming them to cover a wound. So I'll make my noise on the island, in front of everyone, with a name."

"A name," Luca said.

"Yours to bring me, and I'm giving you fourteen days." He didn't blink. "Find her, Luca. Find who sent her, and bring me both."

"Fourteen days is short, Papa."

"It's what the law allows between a summons and a sitting, and I won't ask the Dons to bend it for us." Vittorio's gaze didn't leave his son. "You've lost five days to a drug, a doctor, and a locked gate. Don't lose nine more."

"Who sits on the island, Uncle?" Adrian asked. "All of them?"

"Every Don with a seat, one guard each, and one witness from each family, and any person the Council chooses to call." Vittorio turned his glass a quarter turn on the cloth. "Anyone who was near my son at the gala will be asked what they saw, and they'll be asked in front of the Dons. Rico, make me a list."

"Yes, Don."

"Near him?" Lucinda said mildly. "How near, Vittorio? There were two hundred people in that room."

"Near enough to have noticed something. I'll know when I see the list."

I kept my face still, and I kept my hands in my lap, because I knew exactly which name would be at the top of Rico's page, and it wasn't a waiter's or a Capo's wife's.

"And if there's no name?" my mother asked, so quietly that I barely heard her.

Vittorio's dark eyes moved to her, slowly. "Then the Marchettis will say that the heir of the DeSantos can be drugged under his own roof and nothing happens, and they'll say it to the Council, and to the bankers, and to every dock worker on the harbor. A family that looks weak gets eaten, Marina. I've seen it done."

"And if there is a name?" Adrian asked.

"Then the Council decides what happens to her." Vittorio picked up his glass of water and drank, and put it down again. "That's the law, and I didn't write it. Whoever she is, wherever we find her, whatever her reason, I won't ask for mercy, and nobody at this table will ask for it either."

The silence that followed was so complete that I could hear the candle flames moving. Under the table, my mother's hand found mine and gripped it, cold and damp, and I couldn't tell whether she meant to comfort me or to hold on to something herself.

Luca stared at his plate. Rico's gloved fingers had tightened on each other until the leather creaked. Adrian looked into his wine, and for once he wasn't smiling, and I thought, as I hadn't thought before, that perhaps he was afraid of his uncle too.

At the far end, my mother's fork slipped out of her hand. It rang against her plate and spun on the china and finally lay still, and every face at the table turned to her.

"Marina," Lucinda said, in her low, kind voice, and lifted her wine glass an inch from the cloth. "You've gone pale, dear."