Chapter 10: The Gate

I did not wait for my father.

I took the car, and Lev, and the old doctor who had come back from Milwaukee at midnight and was still wearing his travelling coat.

We reached the Greco gate at half past two.

It was shut and chained, and two guards stood behind it with their hands in their jackets.

I got out and walked up to the bars.

"Open it," I said.

The guards looked at each other.

I knew them both.

One had a wife who had held a baby on her hip at the christening.

The other had eaten my lemon cookies every Sunday for five years.

"Madam," the first one said. "The Don's orders. Nobody comes in."

"Nobody?"

"Nobody, madam."

"Who is the lady of this house?"

He hesitated.

"You are," he said, finally. "Until the Don says otherwise."

"Has he said otherwise?"

"No."

"Then it's my gate," I said. "And there's a girl in my guest room having a baby with no doctor. Open it."

Lev stood two steps behind me in the dark and said nothing at all.

The second guard looked down the drive at the lit windows.

Then he took out his keys.

"My wife says you nursed her mother," he muttered. "I'll answer for it in the morning."

The chain came off the gate.

I went up the drive at a run, with the doctor puffing behind me.

The front door was open.

In the hall stood a man in a grey suit with a notebook, sitting in the chair that had been placed there for him.

"The Commission's observer," Lev murmured in my ear.

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