Chapter 33
At the house, Matteo met them at the door.
“The men we took on the dock are talking.”
“Anything?”
“They were hired through a broker. They don’t know Vittorio’s face. They know a voice on a phone and a bank account in the Caymans.” Matteo paused. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Mrs. Conte called.”
Dante looked at him.
“She called the house line. She asked for you. She said she wants to talk.”
“Where is she?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said she’d call back in an hour.”
Dante went inside.
Allesia followed him into the study, and he closed the door and stood at the window with his back to her, and the house settled around them the way a house does at two in the morning — creaking, ticking, thinking.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Talk to her.”
“You think she’ll tell you the truth?”
“I think she’s frightened.” He turned. “She’s been Vittorio’s for thirty years, and tonight she ran, and tonight he tried to have us shot. She’s starting to understand what she’s been working for.”
Allesia set the satchel on the desk.
“And the ledger?”
Dante looked at it.
“The ledger is the thing that ends him,” he said. “Every account. Every transfer. Names, dates, banks. He can kill Bellini and he can run, but he cannot erase this book.” He looked at her. “The question is how we use it.”
“You could give it to the police.”
“Half the men who would read it are on his payroll.”
“You could give it to the papers.”
“Then it’s a scandal, and he’s a ghost, and nobody ever finds him.” Dante shook his head. “He’d like that. He’d like to be a rumor.”
Allesia looked at the satchel.
“Then what?”
Dante was quiet for a moment.
“He said he has men in this house,” he said. “In my security. In my company. That’s the part I believe. He’s been running this family for fourteen years and he has never once shown his face to anyone outside it.” He looked at her. “If I go after him with the police, I’m going after a man I can’t see, in a city where half the doors are his.”
Allesia understood.
“You’re going to make him come to you.”
“I’m going to make him come to me,” Dante said.
“How?”
He looked at the ledger.
“By doing the one thing he cannot allow,” he said. “By reading it out loud.”