Chapter 13: The Card

They moved Agnese upstairs to a private room with a guard on the door.

Gaspare slept upright in the chair beside her bed.

She slept, one hand open on the blanket.

Her rosary was back around her wrist, and her breathing was slow and even and perfectly ordinary.

I checked her pulse for the fifth time.

"She's fine," Cesare said from the doorway. "You told me she's fine."

"I know what I told you."

"Then come out here."

He walked me down the hall to the window at the end.

It looked over the parking garage where he had pulled me into his lap on Friday.

I told him everything in one breath, and he didn't ask me to say the last part twice.

Cesare didn't move.

He stood with one hand flat on the glass, and I watched the muscle in his jaw jump and jump.

"Next," he said.

"After your grandmother. She's the only one in that family who could stand up and tell the captains what you can't do."

"What I can't do."

"What Tommaso has been doing to you."

He turned around, and I saw his face and took one step back.

"You're not going to work," he said. "You're not going out. I'm putting you in the penthouse with four men and the door locked."

"No."

"Margo."

"I kept a woman alive today," I said, "and a man alive on a dock on Friday."

"That's why I'm locking you in."

"I'm not going to hide in a penthouse and wait for Bianca to bring me cookies."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want to find out who put that bottle in that basket."

"We know who."

"We know whose name was on it."

The aide came down the hall behind us.

She had been crying for an hour.

She held out one small cream-colored card, bent at the corner.

"It was in the basket, signora," she said. "I kept it. I thought, somebody will want it."

I turned it over under the hospital light.

A short line in blue ink, in Italian.

*Per la nonna. Con affetto. B.*

For the grandmother. With affection. B.

Cesare took it from me.

He looked at it for a long time.

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