RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

Chapter Seven —Signor and Signor Valenti

They crossed to the mainland before dawn in the hold of a fishing boat, wedged between crates of ice and sea bass, with the old man from the quay at the helm and not once looking back. Elias would smell of fish for the rest of the day.

By eight they were in a flat above a tailor's shop in Chiaia that belonged to a friend of Luca's. By half past, Elias barely recognized the man in the mirror: a navy suit cut for someone a little taller, clear lens glasses, hair slicked back from his forehead, his chin shaved smooth. The university student who had frowned out of every news broadcast that morning was gone. In his place stood someone who might own a boat.

"You look like a stranger," Luca said from the doorway.

"Good," Adrian said.

He was in charcoal, sleeves precisely at the wrist, the bandage hidden under the cuff, and he looked so exactly like the man the city whispered about that Elias had to glance away from him in the mirror.

"Banca Partenopea takes appointments only," Adrian said. "A hunted man can't walk in off the street. But a couple opening a joint box on a Wednesday morning is invisible. Nobody looks twice at two men in good suits who hold hands."

Elias's reflection stared back at him. "A couple."

"Is that a problem?"

"No," Elias said, a little too fast.

Behind them, Luca developed a sudden, absorbing interest in the ceiling.

• • •

The bank sat on a quiet street behind Piazza dei Martiri, a narrow stone building with no sign, only a brass plate polished almost smooth. Inside it was marble and silence and the faint smell of old paper. A guard in a gray uniform watched them cross the lobby with the incurious eyes of a man paid to look at everyone.

At the door, Adrian had taken Elias's hand.

"Your fingers are cold," he murmured.

"It's October."

"It's twenty degrees. Breathe."

"I am breathing."

"No," Adrian said, very low, his thumb moving once across Elias's knuckles. "You're not."

He wasn't. Elias let the breath out, and something in his chest unclenched, and he hated how much of it was the thumb.

They were halfway across the lobby when the street door opened behind them.

Elias saw the reflection first, in the polished brass of a pillar: three men coming in from the rain, dark coats, and the first of them had a scar through one eyebrow. The man from the alley. The man who had said we aren't going to hurt you with a pistol in his hand.

His whole body went rigid.

Adrian didn't hesitate. He turned, wrapped an arm around Elias's waist, and pulled him in against his chest, one hand sliding up into the back of his hair to tuck his face into the curve of a shoulder. His mouth was at Elias's temple. His breath was warm.

"Don't move," he said, so softly that only Elias could hear. "Smile. We're in love."

Elias could feel Adrian's heart through two layers of wool, steady as a metronome and a fraction too fast. He could smell cedar and smoke, and the faintest tang of antiseptic from the bandage. His own pulse was hammering in his throat. He closed his eyes, and smiled against the dark cloth, and for three long seconds he did not have to pretend very hard.

Footsteps crossed the marble. Paused. Went on toward the tellers' windows.

Adrian's hand stayed in his hair a heartbeat longer than the cover required.

"Good," Adrian said, and let him go.

• • •

The manager was a stooped man of seventy with a white mustache and a silk handkerchief folded precisely in his breast pocket. Signor Bellandi ushered them into an office lined with ledgers, shut the door, and looked at the key Elias set on his desk for a very long time.

"Two seventeen," he said at last. "It has been twenty years since anyone has asked me for that box."

"I have the right to open it," Elias said. His voice sounded steadier than he felt. He slid the birth certificate across the desk.

Bellandi unfolded it and read it twice. When he looked up, his eyes had gone bright and suspiciously wet. "You frown exactly like him."

Elias flinched. Beside him, very quietly, Adrian said nothing at all.

"There is a formality," Bellandi went on. "Your father left an instruction. If anyone ever came with the key, I was to ask one question, and one only. If the answer was wrong, the box stays closed, whatever the certificate says." He folded his hands. "What did your father call you?"

The room went silent.

Elias's mind was blank. A white, roaring blank. He remembered a laugh and the smell of cigarettes. He remembered hands lifting him up to a counter to watch a stove. He remembered nothing, nothing, that sounded like a name.

Beneath the edge of the desk, a warm hand found the small of his back and rested there, steady, a wall at his spine.

And he remembered.

A kitchen, a long time ago, a man's voice, laughing, and the great, solid height of a counter under him. Watch, watch, piccolo, see how it rises. The steam from a pot. Flour on his father's wrist.

"Piccolo cuoco," Elias said. His throat ached. "He called me his little chef."

Bellandi shut his eyes. His mouth trembled under the mustache.

"Come," he said. "I will take you down."

• • •

The vault lay two floors beneath the street, behind a door as thick as a man's arm. Bellandi turned his own key and Elias turned his, and the lock gave with a heavy, patient click that Elias felt in his teeth. Inside was a narrow room lined with steel drawers. Number 217 sat at eye level, the metal worn bright by long years of hands.

"I will wait outside," Bellandi said, and withdrew.

Elias pulled the drawer.

It held two things. A black leather ledger, soft with age, held shut with a strap. And a cassette tape in a plain plastic case, a name written on it in a slanting, elegant hand he knew now. Matteo.

Adrian opened the ledger, and Elias watched his face as he read.

Columns of dates and sums, in tidy, even handwriting. Payments to a judge. To a police commissioner. To three men whose names Elias didn't know and Adrian clearly did. And at the head of the first page, a date eighteen years old, a single line underlined twice.

V.D. and D.R. For the road.

Adrian's finger stopped on the initials. He didn't move.

"Vincenzo De Luca," Elias said quietly. "And Dante Ravenna."

"Your father kept the book." Adrian's voice was rough. "All of it. Every payment. He knew what they were going to do before they did it. He knew, and he kept it, so there'd be something left."

He had gone gray around the mouth, and for the first time since Elias had met him, he looked his age.

Elias put a hand on his arm. He had not decided to. He just did it.

Adrian looked down at the hand. Then up. His eyes were very dark.

"Thank you," he said, very low, and Elias wasn't sure what for.

He closed the ledger, slid it and the tape inside his jacket, and shut the drawer. "We take these and we go. Before the lobby empties."

They climbed the stairs together. Elias's heartbeat was loud in his own ears. Bellandi was waiting at the top, his face the color of paper, a phone gripped in one hand.

"Signor Ravenna," he whispered. "I am so sorry."

Then the doors at the end of the corridor opened.

The scarred man came in first and stood to one side. Behind him, unhurried, in a charcoal overcoat and a pale scarf that probably cost more than Marco's trattoria, walked a man of about sixty. Silver hair, brushed back. A face that had been handsome and had grown into something more useful: warm, lined, kind looking, the face of a favorite uncle at a christening.

"I do apologize," said the smooth, courteous voice that had come through the speaker in a burning house. "Signor Bellandi was given very little choice. I hope you won't hold it against him."

Elias couldn't move.

The man smiled at him. It was a gentle smile, nearly shy, and Elias saw, with a lurch that went through his whole body, the shape of his own eyes in it. His father's eyes. A man he remembered only as a laugh and a pair of hands.

"Elias," said Dante Ravenna softly. "At last."