Chapter 27: Struck From the Book

At noon on the day of the feast, thirty-one Santoro captains sat down at the long table in Ettore's dining room.

Adriano's men stood along the wall behind them with their hands folded.

It was the room where I had been assigned a chair every Sunday of my childhood.

Ettore sat at the head with his stick across his knees.

Bianca stood at the foot, in the same torn coat, with two Corvi guards at her back.

Nobody offered her a seat.

"Tell them," Ettore said.

"Uncle..."

"Tell them what you told me in the gatehouse. All of it, in the order it happened."

She looked at the table, and at the faces on both sides of it, men who had carried her on their shoulders at her christening.

"I sold the guard rota," she said.

Nobody spoke.

"For two years. The convoy plans. The yacht route, last month."

"The yacht," said the oldest captain. His son had been on that boat.

"They said it was only a test of whether the information was real," Bianca said. "They said nobody would be hurt."

"Who did it hurt?" the old captain asked.

She didn't answer.

"Three Corvi men are dead under the Henry Hudson," Ettore said. "They were killed at a checkpoint using the passphrase from my own safe."

"Who gave Massimo the books to carry out?"

"I did," Bianca whispered.

"Louder."

"I did. I made him take them. He didn't know what they were for."

The old captain put both his hands flat on the table.

"Did my boy know?"

"No."

"Did the heir know?"

"No. Massimo knew nothing." She was crying now. "He loved me. That was how I got the books. I never said a word of the rest to him."

I listened with my face turned toward the window.

Behind the glass the rain had started again, light and steady, on the colonnade where I had given back a ring.

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