Chapter 16
Giovani kept his promise.
Below it, in different handwriting:
The maid knows where to look.
CHAPTER 6 — LOCKER 317
Alessia read the note twice.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
Dante looked at the key. Small, old, a number stamped into the metal.
Three hundred and seventeen.
Alessia stopped.
“What?” he said.
“My father had a storage locker.”
Dante looked at her.
“Number 317.”
She nodded slowly.
“When I was a child, he used to take me there every Sunday. He said it was where he kept the things that mattered.” Her voice thinned. “I haven’t thought about it in twenty years.”
“Where?”
“Union Station.”
They arrived after midnight.
Union Station at that hour was a cathedral with no congregation. The great hall stood empty under its ceiling of golden light, the marble floor polished to a mirror, the ticket windows dark. A man in a security uniform sat behind a desk near the south entrance and did not look up from his phone as they passed.
Locker 317 had not existed publicly for years. The bank of numbered steel doors where Alessia remembered it had been walled off during a renovation in the nineties, and the corridor behind it was sealed from the concourse by a fire door that had not been opened, by the look of the dust, in a very long time.
Matteo had the fire door open in ninety seconds.
The old storage corridor ran behind it, narrow and unlit, lined with steel doors from before the renovation. The air was dry and mineral. Their footsteps were the only sound.
Three hundred and seventeen was at the end.
The key fit. It turned easily, which meant someone had oiled it recently, or used it.
Inside was a single cardboard box.
Alessia stared at it.
“My father put this here,” she said.
Dante opened it.
Tax records. Company ledgers. Photographs, bundled with string. And beneath them, wrapped in a piece of white cloth, a red leather book.
Not a folder.
A ledger.
Dante lifted it out. The leather was soft with age, and the spine was cracked, and on the front cover, in gold that had almost worn away, there was no title at all.
He opened it.
The first page was Bianca Moretti’s handwriting. He knew it — he had a drawer of her letters at home, and he had read them so many times that he could recognize a single word of her hand at twenty paces.