Why Cry When You Made Me Leave? novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Boathouse
Corrado Aldobrandi takes her in; she trades her photographed ledger for his protection, and a summons arrives to sign a release in front of the families.
I didn't get in the car.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Corrado Aldobrandi," the man said.
"You're wet through, and the Cardinale guards are watching us from the gatehouse."
"Get in, and I'll answer the rest where it's warm."
I looked back at the compound lights on the hill.
Nobody had followed me out.
Nobody ever would.
I got in.
He didn't speak while he drove, and I didn't ask him to.
He took the coast road down to the Quay, the old working end of Brogary where the cranes stand dark at night.
The Cardinales hadn't let me near it in my whole life.
He parked outside a long wooden boathouse with a single yellow window.
Inside, it smelled of coffee, diesel and onions frying.
An old woman stood at a stove in a man's cardigan.
Two young men in work boots looked up from a card game and went very quiet.
"This is Miss Sabbadin," Corrado said.
"Nobody asks her anything, and nobody goes near the door without telling me."
The old woman looked at me, then at the dress ruined by the rain.
"She'll want something dry," she said.
"And soup."
"I don't want soup," I said.
"You'll eat soup," she said, and gave me a towel.
Ten minutes later I sat in somebody's grey sweater with a bowl in my hands.
Corrado sat across the scarred table, turning an unlit cigarette between two fingers.
His nose had been broken and set badly once.
The scar through his eyebrow went all the way to his temple.
He looked at me.
"Ask," he said.
"Why did you call me Sabbadin?"
"Not tonight."
I put down the spoon.
"Then why am I here?"
"Because Baldassare Cardinale shut every door in Brogary against you in one hour."
"He thinks you'll come crawling back to the house to sign what he wrote."
"I'm the one door he didn't think of."
"You're not a door," I said.
"You're a man who sat outside the gate of a house you hate, in the rain, on the night I walked out."
"You knew I would."
His mouth moved, almost a smile.
"I hoped."
"So what do you want from me?"
"Baldassare, on his knees," he said.
It came out so evenly that I believed it.
I leaned back and looked at him.
At nineteen I had learned to read a ledger faster than any of the men my father kept around.
I could read a man too, a little.
Corrado Aldobrandi wasn't lying.
He also wasn't telling me everything, and he wanted me to know it.
"I'm not selling myself for a bed," I said.
"I didn't ask you to."
"I'm making a trade."
I reached into the neck of the sweater and pulled out the tiny memory card I had taped inside my bra nine days ago.
I set it on the table between us.
"Four point one million dollars," I said.
"Taken from my father's dock accounts over three years, in forty-one small transfers."
"Every one of them is photographed, with the dates."
"My fiance did it, and he forged my adoption papers to stop me from reading them out loud."
Corrado didn't touch the card.
"Ex-fiance," he said.
"Yes."
"You want him ruined."
"I want him ruined in front of people who matter."
"I want my sister to watch."
"And I want my father to look at me while it happens."
"That's three things."
"I can count," I said.
He picked up the card, weighed it in his palm, and put it in his shirt pocket.
"You give me what's on this," he said.
"You tell me how the Cardinale books work, who signs, who looks away."
"I give you a bed, a lock on the door, and my men."
"And no questions about the name," I said.
"For now."
"I don't like that."
"I know," he said.
"Do we have a deal?"
I held out my hand.
He shook it, once, with a dry hard palm that wasn't gentle and wasn't careless either.
He let go a little late.
Behind him, one of the card players cleared his throat and stared hard at the ceiling.
The old woman put a second bowl of soup in front of me and said nothing at all.
A phone buzzed on the shelf.
Corrado read the screen, and the little ease that had come into his shoulders went out of them.
He turned it around and slid it across the table.
The text came from a Cardinale number I knew by heart.
"Friday, ten o'clock, the hall on Hill Street, all the families seated."
"Miss Emanuela will sign the release in front of them, or the old man in St. Agnes goes without his oxygen."
I read it twice.
The old man in St. Agnes was the driver who had told me the truth.
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