Chapter 22: The Silent Partner

Nobody at the table spoke.

Nunzio's father laid the green book in front of the old man and stepped back with his hands behind him.

He looked uncomfortable, a heavy man in a grey suit who had been asked to stand in a room where he did not belong.

My mother walked to the head of the table.

She did not hurry.

She opened the book to a page marked with a slip of blue paper and turned it to face the seven captains.

"This is the ledger of Tessari Freight," she said. "The silent partner's copy."

"We know the partners," the old man said.

"You know the names on the door." She laid one finger on a line. "This is the name that isn't."

I stood and walked around the table to read it.

The page was in a clerk's careful hand, with columns of shares and payouts.

At the top of the left column, forty percent, was one entry.

D. Rossetti.

It had been there for eleven years.

Under it, in the margin, ran a list of payments in the same round pencil I had seen in my father's study.

Each one was marked with the Albano warehouse.

Cesare's stolen Tessari money had gone through Red Hook and the supplier accounts.

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