Chapter 6
The three weeks ended.
He flew back to New York on a Sunday night and was in the office by seven a.m. Monday. The specific quality of the light on the East River, which he had watched from his window at four in the morning three weeks earlier while Bianca told him what she had been carrying, looked different to him now. He did not spend long trying to name why.
Enzo was already there.
“You need to sit down for this,” Enzo said. Which was not something Enzo said often.
Alessandro sat down.
“The word is out,” Enzo said. “Not the whole word. Not Camille’s name. Not the address in Paris. But the shape of it. Vitali has a daughter. Six years old. The mother is European. Everyone who matters heard about it in the last ten days.”
“How?”
Enzo made the small, controlled shrug of a man who had known Alessandro long enough to know that *how* was not the useful question.
“Somebody in the building on Rue des Tournelles took a photograph. It moved through channels. It has been sitting in three different offices in this city for the better part of two weeks.”
He paused.
“Delvecchio has it. Moretti has it. Barzini has it.”
Alessandro absorbed that.
“And my mother?”
“Heard it four days ago. She has not left the house since Thursday. She has, however, made one phone call I would want you to know about.”
“Tell me.”
Enzo told him.
Isidora Vitali did not make appointments with men like Vittorio Raldi in her own home. She made them the old way. She drove herself to a restaurant in Bensonhurst that had been owned by the same family for forty years and asked in Italian for the corner table by the kitchen, which no one else was ever seated at.
Vittorio was already there. He was sixty-two. Heavy in the shoulders. Soft in the hands. Wearing the specific kind of watch that a certain generation of men in his position wore because their fathers had worn it. He rose when she came in. He kissed her on both cheeks. He had been a friend of her husband. He had been at her son’s baptism.
She sat. She did not order anything to eat.
“I would like a favor,” she said.
“Anything, Isidora.”
“There is a woman in Paris. If she ever finds herself in New York, I would like her advised — gently, as an old friend of the family might advise anyone — that her circumstances would improve very much if she were to leave the city and stay left.”
Vittorio nodded. “Of course. Gently. Naturally.”
She rose. He rose with her. He kissed her hand at the door.
He did not go home.
He went to a second room in the back of the same restaurant, sat down at a different table, and began slowly to think about the child. Because the child was the point. He understood this the way a man understood weather.
Alessandro Vitali had exactly one soft place in the world now, and it had a name.
And Vittorio Raldi had spent forty years learning what to do with soft places.
He wanted thirty percent of the ports. He had wanted them for a long time. Now, at last, there was a door.
Alessandro listened to the end of the report without moving.
“Where is she now?”
“Long Island. She has not left the property since the meeting.”
He stood up. He walked to the window. The river was gray under the morning sky. The city was doing what it always did — moving, indifferent, full of people who had no idea what was being decided in rooms they would never enter.
“Sophie arrives at the end of the month,” he said. “She and Camille. I need Franklin Street ready.”
“Sir —”
“Ready. Not for me. For them.”
Enzo was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded.
“Understood.”
Sophie arrived at the end of the month. She came with Camille on a mid-morning flight, and Alessandro met them at the gate with his hands in his pockets and a small paper bag that turned out to contain, when he handed it over on the walk to baggage claim, a single macaron he had bought at the airport shop. Because he had remembered. Because he had at some point in the last three weeks started remembering things about her. That she liked green ones.
She ate half of it in the cab. The other half she saved for later, she said, in case later was long.
The apartment on Franklin Street was small by his standards, which meant it was large by every other reasonable standard, and he had spent two days before their arrival removing from it every object that did not belong in a place a six-year-old was going to sleep. The gun safe had been moved. The two decanters on the sideboard had been moved. The steel window shutters had been unlinked from their automated system and left flush against the walls, which was how he understood now they were meant to look most of the time.
For three days, nothing went wrong.
Central Park in the morning. A slow loop through the Ramble. Sophie collecting acorns with the total professional attention she brought to any project of collection. The Staten Island Ferry at noon, Sophie in her yellow raincoat with her hood up because the rain had come and gone and come again, pointing at the small green figure across the water and asking whether she was really that green in person or whether it was the distance.
He told her the distance did most of it. She accepted this.
Ramen in the evening at a small place in the East Village where the woman at the counter recognized Alessandro from a hundred late nights and said nothing about the child.
Camille was careful. He could feel it in the way she stood. In the way she watched the periphery of every street they crossed. In the specific attention she paid to the faces of people she did not know.
May you like
But there were moments. Small. Unguarded. The third afternoon on the High Line, when she laughed at something Sophie said and did not look immediately over her shoulder afterward.
Alessandro thought — with the caution of a man who had learned to distrust his own hope — that this might actually work. That he might actually be able to do this. That the two lives could coexist.
