Chapter 11: The Study

Santino's POV

I stayed behind after the captains left, because I wanted to know what my brother meant.

Gemma had gone out to the cars with Nino, white to the lips.

She would not look at me.

I did not blame her. A few hours earlier I had been inside her, and now I was still the man with the envelope of photographs.

Dario watched her go.

Then he went upstairs, humming, and I stood alone in the dining room with twelve empty coffee cups.

I knew the study code. Our father had taught us both, the same week.

Dario had never changed it, because Dario never thought I would use it.

I went in.

The room smelled of cigar and lemon oil, and the portrait of our father hung over the desk, as it had for fifteen years.

I took it down.

The safe behind it was older than either of us.

I put in our father's birthday, and it opened on the first try.

There was money in it, a pistol, and two passports in names I did not know.

Underneath lay a long grey folder, with one word on the tab in Dario's handwriting.

Sartori.

I carried it to the desk lamp and opened it.

Three papers.

The first was Alberto Sartori's death certificate, from three years ago.

Cause: cardiac arrest. Signed by a doctor on Bay Parkway.

Clipped to it was a receipt for ten thousand dollars, paid in cash, the same day, to the same doctor.

I looked at it for a long time.

The second paper was a bank slip in Lidia Carbone's name.

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