Chapter 6 - The Room with the Green Books
The library on the first floor was cold.
It was a vast room with four high arched windows that looked out over the valley toward the south, its walls covered from floor to ceiling with twelve thousand volumes bound in red calfskin, dark pigskin, and yellow vellum.
A fire had been lit in the massive stone hearth, but its heat hadn't reached the leather armchairs that stood near the central table.
Mara sat on the edge of a straight-backed mahogany chair, her hands folded over her knees, her blood-stained apron removed and lying on the floorboards beside her canvas shoes. She had been given a cup of hot tea by a terrified junior maid who hadn't dared to look her in the eye before retreating through the double doors.
She hadn't touched the tea.
She was looking at her own reflection in the dark glass of the eastern window.
Without the apron, her pregnancy was stark, obvious, and almost absurd inside the grand, formal room. Her grey cotton dress was stretched tight across her stomach, the seams under her arms pulling where her breasts had grown heavy during the last three weeks.
The door opened.
Cristiano Vicari walked in. He had removed his heavy wool coat and stood in his grey waistcoat and crisp white shirt, his sleeves rolled twice to reveal forearm muscles that were ropey, pale, and covered in fine dark hair.
He didn't sit behind the desk. He walked to the hearth, picked up an iron poker, and shifted two heavy oak logs until a shower of yellow sparks roared up the chimney.
"Marco Villani was thirty-two," Cristiano said to the fire. "He had four trucks in Castellammare and a small house behind the fish market. He thought he was clever because he could write three different names on a bill of lading without getting caught by the customs inspectors in Naples."
Mara didn't answer.
"Two months ago," Cristiano continued, setting the poker back in its brass ring, "Marco took a black leather notebook out of a safe in my office in La Spezia. He thought it contained the delivery schedules for the wine shipments to Marseille."
He turned around, leaning his lower back against the stone mantlepiece.
"It didn't contain wine schedules," he said. "It contained thirty years of names. Judges in Palermo. Customs chiefs in Genoa. Senior officers in the Carabinieri who receive three thousand euros a month to look at their boots when our trucks cross the bridge at Ventimiglia."
Mara felt her throat go dry.
"I didn't take the book," she said.
"I know you didn't take it," Cristiano said. "You were in a safe house in Salerno while Marco was being shot in his car outside the fish market."
Mara’s head snapped up. "How do you—"
"I have sixteen people in Naples whose only job is to know who enters every house Marco Villani owned," Cristiano said flatly. "I knew you were in Salerno thirty minutes after you arrived. I knew you left on the five o'clock bus to Reggio. And I knew you bought Maria Santos’s birth certificate from a forged-document dealer named Ciro the One-Eyed behind the railway station."
Mara’s chest rose and fell in short, shallow hitches.
"Then why did you let me stay here?" she whispered. "Why let me scrub your floors for five weeks if you knew who I was?"
Cristiano walked slowly toward her.
He stopped three feet from her chair, his tall frame blocking the yellow firelight, casting a long, dark shadow across her knees.
"Because the Stelea brothers were looking for you," he said. "And as long as you were here, scrubbing my floors under a dead girl's name, you were six hundred kilometers away from their knives."
Mara stared at him.
"You... you protected me?"
"I protected my ledger," Cristiano corrected her, his voice devoid of soft edges. "If the Steleas found you, they would have tortured you until you told them where Marco put it. If they found the ledger, they would have sold it to the state prosecutor in Milan, and three of my shipping lines would have been seized by the federal court before the end of the month."
"I don't have the ledger," Mara said, her hands tightening into fists on her skirt. "Marco never gave it to me. He told me he buried it under the floor of the boat-house in Castellammare, but when I went there, the floor had been dug up two days before."
"I know," Cristiano said.
"You have it?"
"Bernardo dug it up three hours after Marco died," Cristiano said simply.
Mara let out a long, shuddering breath. Her legs felt weak again, as if the cold floorboards were moving beneath her feet.
"Then why am I here?" she asked. "If you have the book... why haven't you turned me over to the police, or sent me back to Naples?"
Cristiano reached into his waistcoat pocket.
He pulled out a thin silver key attached to a small disc of dark green horn. He laid it on the table six inches from her hand.
"The key opens the small house at the end of the vineyard," he said. "It has four rooms, a dry cellar, and a well that doesn't go dry in August. The woman who lived there—my mother’s sister—died three years ago. It has been clean since Tuesday."
Mara looked from the key to his face.
"I don't understand," she said.
"You're going to live there," Cristiano said. "You will have a doctor from Modena come every two weeks until the child is born. You will have six hundred euros a month paid into an account at the bank in Reggio under the name Mara Soto."
"And what do I have to do for that?" she asked, her voice sharp with instant, deep-seated suspicion born of two years with Marco Villani. "What does a Don want with a pregnant woman who knows how to cut a horse's jaw?"
Cristiano leaned down.
May you like
His face was twelve inches from hers now—close enough that she could see the tiny flecks of gold in his dark grey eyes, close enough that she could smell the cold, clean air of the mountains hanging in his hair.
"You're going to fix my horse," he said softly. "And when the child is born, we'll see if you still want to run to Pescara."
