Chapter 9
Alessia sat in the hallway outside the library in her maid’s uniform, because her other clothes were still inside the suitcase, and nobody was allowed to touch it.
At one o’clock, Matteo came for her.
Dante was standing in front of the paneled wall behind his desk.
The room was large and cold and smelled of the cedar from the fire in the library, which had followed her in somehow, or which her mind had put there. Bellini was not in the room.
“Come here,” Dante said.
Alessia came.
“Show me.”
She looked at the wall. The paneling ran in three vertical sections between two bookcases. She had seen it a hundred times, from the doorway, when she came to collect the tray. It looked like wood. It looked like nothing.
She reached out and ran her fingers along the molding beneath the center panel, the way she had watched the man do it in the dark.
Nothing.
She tried again, lower, where the molding met the baseboard.
There.
A small, precise click.
A narrow section of the paneling swung inward, three inches wide, silent on well-oiled hinges. It was not a door. It was a seam — a panel designed to look like part of the wall.
Behind it was a steel safe.
Matteo stepped forward and looked inside.
It was empty.
Dante’s face became cold. Not angry. Cold, the way a window is cold in winter.
“My father built this room,” he said.
Matteo glanced at him. “You didn’t know about it?”
“No.”
“Did Bellini?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m not.”
Matteo looked at Alessia. “You trust her?”
“No.” Dante looked into the empty safe. “But I trust what she didn’t do.”
“What?”
“She didn’t accuse him. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, and she didn’t.”
Matteo nodded slowly.
Dante reached into the safe and came out with something between two fingers: a strip of red paper, torn at one edge, caught near the hinge. He held it up to the light.
The missing folder had been real.
“Matteo.”
“Sir.”
“Bring Bellini back in.”
Bellini came in with his hands in his pockets and his chin up. He looked at the safe — at the open seam, the exposed steel, the fact of it — and something crossed his face for less than a second. Then it was gone, and he was smooth again.