The Don's Secret Twins novel · Chapter 10 of 32

Chapter 10: The Piano Bench

I turned the phone face down on the counter before Coco could see.

She was busy pressing a fork into a gnocchi.

Ezio's mother wasn't.

She had read the screen over my shoulder.

For one second something crossed her face.

Then she went back to the dough.

Ezio was in the study with the door open, already on the phone.

"Take it down," he was saying. "I don't care what it costs. Find who sold it."

He hung up and saw me in the doorway.

"I'm moving you," he said. "Tonight. A house on the North Shore. Nobody knows it."

"No."

"Marin, they have your mother's grave."

"I know what they have."

"Then you know what they want. They want you scared and running. Out where nobody's watching."

"Exactly," I said. "So I'm not running."

He stared at me.

"Eight years I hid," I said. "I hid in Kansas and I hid in Ohio, and hiding is how they found me. Hiding is a room with one door and a man who has the key."

"So what do you want?"

"Your bar. Friday night. My old bench."

He went completely still.

"Every phone in this city will be pointed at you."

"Good. Let them point. I want every one of them recording."

"That's insane."

"That's a witness list."

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he picked up the phone again.

"Clear the calendar in the lobby bar for Friday," he said into it. "The piano. Yes. Her."

By nine on Friday there was a line out the door onto Canal Street.

The bar off the lobby looked exactly the same.

Dark green walls, brass lamps, the long mirror behind the bottles.

The baby grand sat in the corner where it always had.

Somebody had kept it tuned.

I sat down on the bench in a black dress Fia had lent me and the flats I'd driven up from Ohio in.

My whole body remembered the height of it.

The room was full of phones.

They pointed at me from every table, from the bar, from the doorway, little black eyes.

Fia sat at the front table with a glass of wine, glaring at anybody who got too close.

I didn't say anything.

I put my hands on the keys and played.

Joplin first, because my fingers needed something to run on.

Then Ellington. Then Professor Longhair, loud enough to make the bartender laugh.

After an hour, people put their phones down to clap.

After two, some of them forgot to pick them back up.

At midnight I played the one I'd been avoiding.

"Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans."

The song I'd played twice for a stranger at two in the morning, eight years ago, with my shoes off.

Halfway through the first verse, the room went quiet in a new way.

I didn't have to look up.

Ezio had come down from his office.

He walked through the bar in his plum suit, and the crowd made a path for him without being asked.

He didn't sit.

He came and stood at the end of the piano and put one hand on the lid.

Right where his hand had been in his mother's parlor.

The phones came back up.

He didn't look at any of them.

He looked at me, and he let the whole city watch him do it.

I played the song to the end.

Then I played it again.

At two the bartender called last call.

At two-thirty the room was empty except for Fia, who stood up, kissed my cheek and pointed at Ezio.

"If she cries, I'm burning down your hotel."

"She doesn't cry," Ezio said.

"I know. That's why I'd burn it."

She left.

I closed the lid over the keys.

"You believed me," I said. "In the garage."

"Yes."

"Then ask me again."

He didn't pretend not to understand.

He held out his hand.

I took it and stood up.

We walked through the empty lobby, past the gold doors and the night clerk who suddenly found his screen very interesting.

The elevator was the same one.

The brass doors, the little mirror, the red carpet worn pale in the middle.

He pushed the button and didn't let go of my hand.

The doors closed.

I reached past him and pressed 14 myself.

He looked down at my finger on the button.

Then at me.

"Marin."

"I'm saying it," I said. "Yes."

He kissed me before the elevator moved.

There was nothing careful in it.

Eight years went into it, and every bar in Memphis, and the parlor, and the garage.

His hands came up and held my face, and mine went into his jacket and pulled him down.

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