Chapter 9: The Trade

Ilario drove me to pier eight with six stitches in his side and a gray face.

I had told him to stay in bed.

He had said he had no choice, and then he'd stopped talking.

I let it go.

In my lap I had an old ledger from my grandfather's house, black cover and red spine, with one page copied into it in my handwriting.

The real book was locked in the safe, and the key was around my neck.

The pier was gray and empty under a flat white sky.

Six of Ettore's men stood on the concrete in a half circle.

In the middle of them stood a big man with a shaved head, and he held Nunzio by the back of his collar.

Nunzio's lip was split.

Ettore himself sat in his car at the end of the pier with the window down, watching.

"That's far enough," the shaved man called when I was thirty feet away. "Give me the book."

I stopped, and I let the silence run.

The wind came off the water.

Behind me I heard Ilario's car door open and then close again, and I knew he was standing beside it with a hand under his coat.

"Let him go first," I said.

"Book first."

"I'll give it to you," I said. "But I think you'd like to know what's in it, because your name is in it."

The man with the shaved head frowned.

"Page two hundred and twelve," I said. "Your mother's name is on that page, and it's the dialysis clinic on Market Street."

"Fourteen thousand dollars. My grandfather paid it every month for six years."

His hand loosened on Nunzio's collar.

"Ettore told you he was covering it," I said. "Did he?"

Nobody on the pier moved.