Chapter 9: The Dead Brother

The hood fell back, and the sun hit Santo's face.

He had a scar along his jaw, and short dark hair gone grey at the temples.

I had looked at that face for two days, and I had not once seen what was in front of me.

Dario saw it at once.

All the color went out of his cheeks.

"Ettore," he said.

It was a whisper, and the loudspeaker was still live, so it went out over the whole bay.

A woman on the nearest boat screamed.

A man dropped his phone into the sea.

Four of Dario's men stopped dead on the deck with their hands halfway to their jackets.

One of them lowered his gun altogether.

"Don Ettore?" he said.

"It can't be," said another.

"Hello, Dario."

Santo's voice was perfectly level.

He turned his head slowly and looked over the rows of boats, the black ribbons, and the cameras.

I stood next to him with my mouth open.

Santo, Ettore.

The man who had pulled me out of the cage was the brother Dario had told me about only once, in the dark, when he was drunk.

My elder brother died, he had said. The sea took him. I do not talk about it.

I had never asked how, and he had burned every photograph of his brother before I ever met him.

"Two years ago," said Ettore Castellani, to forty boats, "my brother invited me to dive the Christ with him by night."

"He locked me in a steel cage at the foot of the statue and left me there."

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