Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Eleven — The Dig

They dug where the floor was softest, between the press and the wall.

Matteo measured two paces from the stone and marked the earth with the shovel blade. Giulia held the torch. Her right hand had stopped shaking somewhere in the last hour, the way a fire goes out when there is nothing left to burn, and the stillness in it was worse than the shaking had been, because shaking meant she was alive and still, just then, meant she was not sure.

The ground took the blade on the third push. Under the topsoil it was the old olive-mill floor, packed clay and broken lime, soft from two hundred years of oil and water and the feet of men who had turned the wheel. Matteo worked without speaking. He dug a hole the length of her body and a little more, and when it was deep enough he stopped and leaned on the shovel, and the rain came through the missing roof and ran off the blade onto his boot.

"Get in," he said.

She did not.

"It's not for you," he said. "Get in and check the depth. You're the one who has to lie in it."

She stepped down into the hole. It came to her hips. She lay back. Her heels reached the far wall. Her head did not.

"Another hand," she said.

He dug it out himself, kneeling at the edge, the shovel moving with a rhythm that said he had done this kind of work before, or work like it. When she lay back again her hair touched the clay at both ends, and she looked up at the storm through the hole in the roof, and for a moment she was in the sea again, counting, because the dark and the rain and the cold were the same, and then Matteo's face came over the edge of the hole and she was in the mill, and the man she had killed was on the floor above her, and she sat up.

They carried Nello Sciacca by the arms and the belt of his trousers. He was heavier than he had looked standing, and he had gone still in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, the way her father had gone still in a chair at a baptism lunch, except her father had been holding a glass, and Nello was holding nothing. Matteo went first, walking backwards, and Giulia took the feet, and they lowered him in feet-first because the hole was too short the other way, and then Matteo climbed in and turned him, and they stood there for a moment in the rain with the dead man between them, and Matteo said, "Down," and they pushed, and the clay took him the way it had taken a hundred years of olive paste.

The earth went back in layers. Matteo stamped it with the flat of the shovel and then with his boot, the way a man lays a floor and not the way a man hides a body, and that was the part she would remember later, that he was not afraid of this, that he had done it before or something like it, and a man who is not afraid of a grave is a man who has stood at one he did not dig.

When it was done he set the loose granite block — the one she had used — on top of the mound, because a mound with a stone on it looks like a fallen wall, and a mound without one looks like a grave, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a village that asks no questions and a village that finds a body.

He stood the shovel against the press.

"Talk," he said.

She told him the bare facts. A man in a grey jacket had been in the mill. He had known her name. He had worked for Turi. He had cut her arm and she had pushed him into the press and the back of his head had met the rim. She did not say she had dropped the stone twice. She did not say she had been sick in the brambles. She did not say that for a count of ten after it was over she had not been sure he was dead, and that the not-knowing had been the worst part, worse than the doing.

Matteo listened with his head tilted, the way he listened to a spreadsheet, the way he had listened to the EU fund allocation on his terrace, as if every fact was a cell and every cell had a column.

"Nello Sciacca," he said, when she had finished. "Turi's fixer. The one who cleans up the things Turi's sons are too stupid to clean up themselves. He was in the bar on Monday asking about a woman with something wrong with her hands. That was you. Turi sent him to San Vitale because San Vitale is where the money is, and the money is parcel seven, and parcel seven is the key your father put in your pocket."

"How do you know his name."

"I read his licence in your pocket an hour before you did." He looked at her. "You left the door open. I came in. I saw the body. I read the licence. Then I went and got the shovel, because a body on a mill floor in September is found by the first boar that comes down the hill, and a boar does not keep secrets, and neither does a man who works for Turi, once he's in the ground with one."

Giulia's throat was dry. "You said you didn't know me."

"I don't know you. I know Rosa. And I know whoever opened that steel door is the only person alive who can read what's behind it." He said it without weight, the way he said everything that mattered. "You found the ledgers. Don't lie. You photographed them. You put them back. You came back for them tonight and he was already there, because he had been there since Wednesday, sleeping in the cupboard, waiting for you to come back for them, the way a spider waits for the fly to come back to the web it already ate through once."

She went still.

"You found the ledgers," he said again. "I've been looking for them for two years. Parcel seven. Seized in March, holder listed as none recorded, which in Palermo means the holder is the one name you're not allowed to write down. The region numbered it in 2019. Your father numbered it in 1962, in a ledger, in pencil, and put the key in his pocket and waited twenty years to die holding it, because a man who buries the truth in a mill does not trust the truth to a bank."

Giulia looked at him. The rain had soaked the front of his shirt and his hair was flat to his skull and he looked like a man who had been awake since Monday, which he had, and he looked like a man who had read her passcode, which he had, and he looked like the only person in the valley who had not asked her a single question she did not want to answer, which was the most dangerous thing about him.

She looked down. Her right sleeve was dark and stiff at the forearm, and she had not noticed until then, because the cold had numbed it and the killing had used the rest. Matteo saw it before she did. He stepped in, close enough that the rain off his shirt fell on her shoes, and took her wrist — gently, the way a man takes something that might break — and turned it so the lamp caught the long shallow line the knife had opened. His thumb rested on the inside of her wrist, where the pulse was, and stayed a beat longer than tending required.

"That needs a stitch," he said. "Not tonight. Tonight it needs to stop bleeding, and you need to stop shaking."

But she was not shaking anymore. She was still, the way she had been still in the sea, counting, and the stillness now had a different cause, because his hand was warm and his wet shirt was against her knuckles and he was close enough that she could see the rain on his lashes and the line of his mouth under it, and she thought, with a clarity that frightened her more than the body on the floor had, that if he leaned down she would not step back. He did not lean down. He let go of her wrist the way a man lets go of a rail he has been holding not to keep from falling but to keep from crossing a line, and the line between them stayed drawn — but she had seen where it ran, and so had he.

"Who are you," she said.

"The man who's going to keep you alive until you finish what your father started."

"My father's dead."

"Then until you finish what he couldn't." He picked up the shovel. "Tomorrow. You start working for me. Not as Rosa. As the person who can read those books. We'll go through them properly, on my terrace, in the light, and you'll tell me what your father was paying Enzo Costa twelve hundred euro a month for, across nineteen years, and why he stopped on the fourteenth of June, which is the date at the bottom of the last entry, which I also read on your phone while you were digging, because the passcode is your birthday backwards, which is the first thing anybody tries, and you should change it before Turi's next man comes through the window, because the next one will not ask you your name first."

He walked to the door of the mill and stood in the rain.

"Sunday," he said. "The village has a lemon festival. Go to it. Smile. Be Rosa. If you run now, he wins, and the books go back in the ground with Nello Sciacca, and your father stays in the lie they buried him in, and Carlo stays in the gown, and the gown stays on the poster that says you are deceased, which you are not, which is the one fact in this valley I am certain of."

Then he went up the road, and she stood in the mill with the rain coming through the roof onto the fresh earth, and she thought about the fact that a stranger knew her passcode and had not used it against her, and that he had dug a grave for a man he had never met to keep her alive, and that he had called her deceased and then corrected himself, and she did not know which of those three things was the most dangerous, and she wrote the line in her head that she would not write in the notes app, because some lines you keep in your chest where no passcode can open them.

He is not Turi, not my father, not Enzo. He is a kind of man my father taught me to name but never to trust — and I have not met this kind before.