Chapter 16: Seventy-Five Years

Tommaso didn't move.

He didn't take his hands out of his pockets.

"My brother," he said to Chiara, very evenly, "has never been to New York in his life."

"He didn't need to be. He has email."

The lawyer took her elbow and steered her down the sidewalk.

She looked back once, at me, not him.

Then they were gone around the corner, and the old man next door turned his radio back on.

Tommaso called La Morra from my stoop.

I heard his half of it.

It was short, in Piedmontese dialect I could only half follow, and it ended with his brother hanging up.

"He says it's a lie," Tommaso said.

"Okay."

"He says Chiara's a liar and so is Raffaele."

"They are."

"He says don't call him again with this."

He sat on my step and looked at his phone for a long time.

Then he drove home.

Three weeks later, a copy of an email arrived at Ponte through Nonna's lawyers.

It came from the DA, who'd gotten it from Chiara's lawyer.

It was from the Ferri estate's email address, two Februaries ago.

Here is the file. Please don't tell anyone where it came from.

I put it on Tommaso's desk.

He didn't open it.

"I don't need to read my brother's email," he said, and went down to the loading dock.

His brother hadn't answered a single call since.

Ponte's seventy-fifth anniversary party was on the twentieth of June, a Saturday.

Pina had been planning it since February.

When the front page hit, she'd refused to cancel.

"We had a party in 1977 when the roof fell in," she said. "We'll have one now."

So we strung lights between the racks.

We put long tables down the middle of the warehouse floor.

The drivers brought their wives and kids.

The foreman brought his accordion, which nobody knew he played.

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