Chapter 14: Every Restaurant

We watched the departures board on Tommaso's phone until the flight said DEPARTED.

Six-oh-eight a.m.

Raffaele Bellandi was over the Atlantic with a carnation's worth of charges behind him and nobody's hand on his collar.

At ten, a judge ordered him to surrender his passport.

Nonna's lawyer called it "a very firm order to an empty chair."

Italy almost never sends its own citizens back to stand trial somewhere else.

As long as Raffaele stayed home, the New York charges couldn't touch him.

Nonna heard the lawyer from her bed.

She made me lean down.

"Then you don't chase him," she said, slowly, every word careful. "You fix what he broke. Then you sit in the chair."

The next morning, I sat in her chair.

It was a leather chair at the head of a long table on the top floor of a building on Park Avenue.

Nine people in gray suits watched me sit down in my denim jacket.

I didn't make a speech.

I put a list on the table.

Every restaurant, bar and shop that had bought a bottle from L. Dorrington Wine Co.

Thirty-one names.

"We're going to all of them," I said. "In person. With real wine."

For the next ten days, Tommaso and I lived in the dented Ponte van.

The back was stacked with real Ferri Barolo, every bottle numbered by his mother's hand.

"You drive like a grandmother," I told him on the BQE.

"You've met your grandmother. She'd have run that cab off the road."

"Is that a compliment to her or an insult to me?"

"Yes," he said.

The first steakhouse was on Lexington.

The owner met us at the bar with his arms folded.

He'd read the front page.

"So you're the heiress," he said.

"I'm the one whose name was forged," I said. "These are yours."

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