Why Cry When You Made Me Leave? novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Forger
Ema and Corrado's crew take the Dock Street forger, who confesses on tape that page one was real before Tancredi touched the folder.
At one in the morning the back door of the boathouse opened, and two of Corrado's men carried the old driver in on a hospital chair.
His ribs were taped under his shirt.
His left eye was swollen shut.
"Miss Ema," he said, and tried to stand up.
"Sit," I said, and knelt in front of him.
"You shouldn't be here."
"I'm not anybody's miss anymore," I said, and heard how it sounded.
He had taught me to drive when I was fifteen.
He had cried in the garage the day he told me what he carried to Dock Street.
"The cook's sister works nights at St. Agnes," Corrado said from the doorway.
"The Cardinales will find the bed empty by morning."
"They'll think you took him," I said.
"They'll be right."
I put my hand over the driver's, and the old man turned his face away so I wouldn't see him cry.
The cook took him through to a warm back room with a cot and a radio.
Corrado leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed.
I could feel him waiting for me to say something about the ribs, or the hospital, or my father's threat.
"The man on Dock Street," I said.
"Tell me where he sleeps."
"He doesn't sleep there," Corrado said.
"He lives over the pawnbroker."
"Tomorrow, with a plan."
"Tomorrow my father's men will be watching the hall," I said.
"Tonight he's drunk on his own cleverness."
"Take me now."
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he took a black coat off the hook and held it out.
"It's too big," I said.
"It's warm."
The pawnbroker's shop was dark.
A staircase on the side of the building went up to a green door with ink smeared on the handle.
Corrado's two men went up first, quietly.
I followed Corrado, and I stood behind him when the door opened.
The forger was a thin man in his fifties with ink under his fingernails and a cigarette he dropped when he saw us.
He tried to run for the window.
One of the young men put him against the wall with a forearm across his chest.
"Please," the forger said.
"I don't know who you are."
"I do," I said.
I walked into the shop past the presses, past a rack of stolen shipping labels, to a drawer of papers I'd seen in Tancredi's phone photos a month ago.
I opened it.
Under three layers of fake passports lay a lab letterhead, blank, printed on cream stock.
"Port Hollis Medical Laboratory," I said.
"It closed two years ago."
"You printed that for Tancredi Brandolini, and you printed the notary's seal for the adoption order."
"I didn't know what it was for," the forger said.
"You knew," Corrado said.
His voice wasn't loud.
The forger swallowed.
"He paid six thousand."
"Cash."
"He said it was a family matter."
I took out my phone, the cheap one the cook had given me, and set it recording on the press.
"Say it again," I said.
"Say who paid you, what he asked for, and the date."
"I can't," the forger whispered.
"They'll kill me."
"They will anyway," Corrado said.
"If you stay alive long enough to be useful to them."
"Say it, and you walk out of Brogary tonight with my driver in the car and enough money for a new city."
"Refuse, and I leave you with the Brandolini family when they come to clean up."
The forger looked at me.
It was a bad look, the look of a man who knew exactly what kind of girl he had ruined.
"Do you want me to say I'm sorry?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"I want you to say it plainly, so they can't call it a trick."
He told it.
He gave the date, the sum and Tancredi's name, and then described the exact folder Tancredi brought in with him.
"Brown, with a gold clasp," the forger said.
"A Cardinale lawyer's folder."
"He wanted a lab sheet that said she wasn't the Don's blood."
"He wanted adoption papers to match."
I let him finish.
"Okay," I said.
"Is that all of it?"
He licked his lips.
"There's one more thing."
"There's always one more thing," Corrado said.
"I'd already seen the folder," the forger said.
"Before he came."
"The lab sheet and the adoption order were in it when he walked in."
"I didn't print page one."
"I printed page two, the one he asked me for, and I gave it back, and he stapled the two together."
"Page one was old paper, sir."
"Yellowed."
"Real."
I stared at him, and I felt Corrado go absolutely still beside me.
"What did page one say?" I asked.
"I didn't read it," the forger said.
"But the name in the corner wasn't Cardinale."
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