Chapter 13: The Page I Wrote

Nobody in the kitchen spoke.

On the screen Paola went on smiling at the lens, and then she walked out of the frame.

"She knew the camera was there," I said.

"She wanted it there," Tullio said. "She wanted somebody to find it, once she was done."

Gabriele's hand came down on the table beside mine.

"There is a second file," Tullio said. "I almost didn't open it."

He clicked it.

The picture was a basement, green and grainy, with rows of steel cabinets.

I knew every one of them.

"The vault," I said. "There's no camera in the vault."

"I put one in myself for the audit, and I never told the boss," Tullio said. "The date is Monday, the night before the meeting."

The vault door opened.

Paola came in alone, in a dark coat, with her hair tied back.

She did not look around.

She went to the second cabinet, knelt at the bottom drawer and opened it with a key.

"That's Tullio's key," I said.

"It was on my ring that morning," Tullio said. "I found it back in a different pocket. I thought I'd forgotten."

Paola pulled out a thick brown folder.

She laid it on the cabinet top and turned pages with two fingers, quickly, knowing what she was looking for.

She stopped on one page.

She stood still for a long moment.

Then she took out her phone and photographed it, once, twice, three times.

Her hand was not steady anymore.

"Stop it there," I said.

Gabriele stopped it.

The page was grainy, but I could read the top line, and I knew the handwriting.

It was mine.

"I wrote that," I said.

Nobody asked what it was.

"Five years ago," I said. "The week he took the seat. He gave me a folder and told me to close the file on Carlo Benvenuti."

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