RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

Chapter Twelve —Four Sugars

Trattoria Moretti had never looked so small.

Elias crouched in the doorway of a shuttered tailor's shop across the street at four in the morning, watching the building where he had spent eighteen years, and thought that someone must have shrunk it overnight. The front windows were boarded with plywood. Yellow police tape sagged across the door in the wet, one end flapping loose. Above it, the old hand-painted sign, MORETTI, with its chipped red letters that Marco had touched up every spring.

The rain had finally stopped. The street smelled of wet stone and the bakery two doors down, already working.

"One patrolman," Luca murmured from the van's driver seat, a block away, in Elias's earpiece. "Front door, in the car. He's drinking coffee. He's bored. He'll sleep if I give him a reason."

"Is he one of Dante's?" Adrian asked.

"If he is, he's very good at looking like a man who hates his shift." A rustle. "Give me ninety seconds. Back door is the way in."

They waited. A figure in a sling walked slowly up the pavement, stopped by the police car, and bent to the window with the helpless air of a lost tourist asking for directions. The patrolman rolled the window down, frowning. Luca began to speak, and the man's hand started waving at a map.

"Now," Adrian said.

He took Elias's hand. They crossed the street in the shadow of the awnings, slipped down the alley that smelled of old grease and rain, and stopped at the back door, the same door Marco had fallen through, now hanging by one hinge, a strip of tape across the frame.

Elias's hand was shaking in Adrian's. Adrian didn't say anything. He just tightened his grip.

"I can't," Elias whispered.

"You can."

"I can't, Adrian, it's his"

"I'm here." Quiet, steady, the voice that had told him to breathe in a lobby. "I'm right here. We go in together, we find it, we leave. I won't let go."

Elias closed his eyes. Opened them.

They ducked under the tape.

• • •

The kitchen was exactly as he had left it, and nothing like it at all.

Someone had dragged the steel prep table back from the door. Someone had dusted the counters with gray powder and taken photographs, and left small numbered yellow markers on the floor like a game for ghosts. The window above the sink was broken. The air smelled of cold garlic, old bleach, and underneath, faint but unmistakable, something metallic.

There was a stain on the tile by the back door, scrubbed pale and not quite gone.

Elias stood in the doorway and could not move.

He had learned to cook at that counter. He had learned the knife grip at that cutting board, with Marco's big hand folded over his small one. On Sunday mornings the whole room had smelled of ragu, and his uncle had sung off-key, badly, in a language Elias had assumed was a regional dialect and now suspected was whatever Marco had spoken before he had to become Elias's uncle. On the shelf above the stove sat the sugar tin, dented, with a chipped lid.

He made a sound he did not recognize.

Adrian turned him around, gently, by the shoulders, and held him against his chest. He didn't say it would be all right. He didn't say anything at all. He just stood in a dead man's kitchen at four in the morning with his arms around a boy who was trying not to make noise, and let him shake.

"He sang," Elias said into his shirt. "The whole time. Every Sunday. I never asked him why."

"We'll ask Vincenzo," Adrian said, low. "Later. We'll find out what he sang."

Elias laughed, wetly, and wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "Four sugars."

"Four sugars."

"All right." He drew a long, unsteady breath. "All right. Help me look."

The markers were useless. The police had photographed the floor and the counters and the doorframe, but nobody had thought to look under the stove. Elias got down on his knees on the cold tile, ignoring the pale stain a foot away, and shone the little flashlight into the dark gap beneath the old iron range.

Dust. A lost bottle cap. A single, long wooden shape lying on its side against the back wall.

"Got it," he whispered.

He slid it out with two fingers. It was exactly as he remembered: pale wood, worn pale and smooth by forty years of Marco's palms, with a faint dent where a knife had once slipped. It looked like nothing at all. It weighed, he realized for the first time, a little too much.

He turned it in the light. There, where the left handle met the barrel, was a hairline seam so fine he had to run his thumbnail along it to feel it. He twisted. Something gave.

The handle came away with a faint, dry click.

The barrel was hollow. Inside lay a tight roll of oilcloth, tied with kitchen twine. Elias drew it out with fingers that had stopped shaking, unwound it, and found inside a sheaf of thin, yellowed pages, covered in two hands: Matteo's, neat and slanting, and Dante's, an angry scrawl at the bottom of every receipt.

The original.

A smaller piece of paper had been folded around the pages. A scrap of butcher's paper, torn from the roll above the counter. Marco's handwriting, blunt and crowded.

Piccolo cuoco.

If you are reading this, I failed, and you are braver than I raised you to be. Forgive an old liar. Everything I ever taught you was true. The only thing in this kitchen I never taught you to use properly was the pin. Keep the sugar. — M.

The words swam.

"Elias." Adrian's hand was on his shoulder.

"He knew I'd find it." He pressed the note flat against his chest with both hands, as though it might blow away. "He knew. He put it in the one thing I'd pick up if someone broke in." He was laughing and crying at once. "You old fox. You stubborn, lying, wonderful old—"

The lights came on.

It was a single bare bulb in the dining room beyond the swinging door. It lit the narrow gap with a yellow bar.

"Nice work," said a voice from the dark.

Adrian moved before Elias could breathe. The pistol was in his hand and he was between Elias and the door in a single fluid step. The swinging door opened.

The scarred man stood in the doorway with a gun hanging easily from one hand. He looked rested. He looked like someone who had been waiting, patiently, for several hours, in the dark, in a chair.

"I wondered who'd come," he said. "Dante said the boy would, sooner or later. He said sentiment gets people in the end."

"Put it down," Adrian said.

"Or what? You'll shoot me in a crime scene with a patrolman forty feet away?" The scarred man's gaze slid past Adrian to the rolled pages in Elias's hands. "The pin. God. Eighteen years. We took apart three houses." He shook his head. "Who'd have thought a cook."

Elias had risen to his feet without knowing it.

He looked at the man. The scar through his eyebrow, the tired eyes, the hands that were steady. This was the man who had stood in a kitchen with a pistol and watched Marco Moretti fall through that door. This was the man who had said we aren't going to hurt you in an alley.

The skillet was on the stove. The big cast-iron one, black with forty years of seasoning. He didn't remember crossing to it. He only knew that it was in his hand, heavy as a stone, and that Adrian was saying his name very softly, and that the scarred man was watching him with a mild, curious expression, as if waiting to see what a cook would do.

He could do it. He knew that, with a cold, clear certainty. One swing.

"Elias," Adrian said again. "You don't have to."

"I know." His voice was steady. "He taught me to cook. He didn't teach me this."

He lowered the skillet. Slowly. He set it back on the stove with a quiet clank.

The scarred man blinked.

Then Adrian moved. The pistol came down across the man's wrist, and the gun went skittering across the tile, and the second blow, with the butt, dropped him to his knees in the same place Marco had fallen. Adrian had him face-down in a heartbeat, a knee on his spine, a zip tie biting into his wrists.

"Ferrante will need a witness," Adrian said, breathing hard. "Someone who can say Dante's name in a courtroom. You're going to be very helpful."

"Dante will kill me," said the scarred man into the floor.

"Then I suggest you cooperate with the people who might keep you alive."

The scarred man started to laugh. It was a breathless, cracked sound, with no humor in it.

"You think you've won," he said. "You think a stick is what he wanted?"

"What do you mean?" Elias said.

A phone rang.

It was in the scarred man's jacket, a small black burner, buzzing against the tile. Adrian dug it out, looked at the screen, and went absolutely still.

No number. Just a single line.

LUCA.

He answered it, and put it on speaker, and a smooth, courteous, unhurried voice filled the dead kitchen.

"Good morning, Elias." Warm. Almost affectionate. "I do hope you've found what you came for. I'd hate for this to have been wasted."

Nobody breathed.

"I have your friend here. The one with the sling. He's been very brave, but I'm afraid he isn't going to be able to hold out much longer." A pause. In the background, faintly, someone grunted in pain. "Bring me the pages and your signature on the trust by noon, Elias. At the villa. Come alone. Or I'm afraid I'll have to start teaching your friends what happens when a Ravenna loses patience."

The line went dead.

Elias looked down at the oilcloth in his hands, at the pages that could end it, and at the man he loved, standing over a prisoner in a dead man's kitchen with a face like stone.

"Adrian," he whispered.

"I know."

"He's got Luca."

"I know." Adrian's voice was very quiet. "We have until noon."