Chapter 5: Worth More Dead

Ugo knocked on Fausta's back door at eleven that night, with his cane under one arm and his hat in both hands.

"I told your mother I was going to sit up with a sick friend," he said. "It's even true. I'm sick of her."

Fausta looked at him, and then at the sky behind him.

"Come in before the neighbors start praying for you," she said.

He came into the kitchen and stopped.

I was sitting at the table in a borrowed robe with my side held stiff.

Ugo took off his glasses and wiped them on his tie.

He put them back on and looked at me again.

"I knew it," he said. "You always did walk like Carlo, from the hip, as if the floor owed you money. I saw it from forty feet."

"Did anyone else see it?"

"Nobody in that church was looking at a veil. They were looking at your mother."

He lowered himself into a chair, and Pietro shut the shutters.

"Say what you came to say," Pietro said.

"The driver," Ugo said.

He laid a thick envelope on the table and pushed it toward me.

It held two photographs and a sheet of paper.

One photograph was of a man in a hospital gown on a steel table.

I knew him.

He had driven my father to Mass for nine years and driven me to school before that.

"They pulled him out at dawn," Ugo said. "They say he jumped. He left this."

I read the sheet.

It was three paragraphs, typed, confessing that he had sold the route to the Calderara family's enemies for money, and that he was sorry.

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