Chapter 18: The Chair

Ettore was waiting at the foot of the quay in a truck with its lights off.

He had been searching every road in Liguria for five hours, and his shirt was black with someone else's blood.

I walked straight into him, and his arms closed around me so tightly that my feet left the ground.

"The old man?" I whispered.

"The bullet went through his shoulder. He is cursing the nurses in two dialects."

"He lived."

He pressed his face into my hair for one breath and set me down.

"The board," I said. "Saturday, ten o'clock. They are going to name Dario chairman."

"They do not have Ilaria's shares anymore."

"He still has a forged paper with my father's name on it."

"Then we bring the real man," said Ettore.

At ten the next morning, the Grimaldi boardroom looked down on the harbor from the thirtieth floor.

Eleven men sat at the long glass table, and the twelfth chair at the head of it was empty.

Dario came in last, in a dark suit, with a lawyer and a bruise on his own knuckles.

He had not slept.

He did not look at me.

"Gentlemen, we have a quorum," he said. "As the holder of Signor Grimaldi's proxy, I propose to take the chair until he recovers."

He laid a paper on the glass.

It was the forged order from the clinic, with my father's signature scrawled across the bottom in a hand that was not his.

"Seconded," said a man at the far end, who owed Dario money.

"Signor Castellani," said the old chairman. "Your wife ran from the dinner last night with the shares she held."

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