Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Fourteen — The Commune

Matteo came for her at nine on Monday. He was clean, shaved, in the linen shirt, with the canvas bag and the brick of printouts, and he looked like a man on his way to an office, which was what he was, and he looked like a man who had dug a grave on Saturday night and not mentioned it, which was what he was. He filled the doorway the way he had the first day, and the clean jaw only made the width of his shoulders more plainly a thing, and Giulia, who had spent nine days training herself not to look at men, looked, and then made herself look at the printouts instead, which was harder than it should have been.

"Commune," he said. "We're getting the mill key today, or I'm filing a complaint, which is the same thing in this town, because the comune fears a complaint more than it fears a lie, and the lie is what it sells."

"What for."

"The survey. I told you. The region wants the mill on a list. The list unlocks the co-op money. The co-op money is why Turi wants the village quiet and Bellini wants it dead, and a dead village is a village that sells its mill to a man who already owns the mountain, which is how Turi gets parcel seven without a key, which is why your father buried the key in the first place." He looked at her. "You're coming as my assistant. You add up. I talk. You do not correct me in front of the clerk, because the clerk reports to Bellini's cousin, who reports to Bellini, and Bellini reports to Turi, and Turi reports to no one, which is the whole problem."

They walked up to the square and along the coast road to the comune, which was a low building with a flag and a clerk who did not want to be there and a stamp that did want to be used, because a stamp is the only honest thing in a comune, it says done and it means done, and the clerk stamped the form without reading it, which meant the form was done, and the key was theirs, and the mill was on the list, and the co-op was one step from the money, and Bellini had not stopped it, which meant Bellini had been pulled off it, which meant Matteo's man two doors down was not Bellini's after all, which meant there was a fourth kind of man, the kind who was not Turi and not Bellini and not her father, and she had now met two of them, and one of them was digging graves for her.

The key was on a ring with a tag: n.7.

Number seven.

Giulia held it. The brass was warm from Matteo's pocket. It was not her father's key, the one with SAN VITALE cut into the bow, the one in her pocket, the one that opened the steel door. This was the region's key, the one that opened the law, and the law and the mill were two different locks, and her father had known the difference, and she was learning it, the way you learn a language by being buried in it.

Outside, on the steps, she said, "Bellini's office referred it. Pending. Since when."

"Since the first application." Matteo put the key in his pocket, next to the region's key, because a man who carries two keys to the same door is a man who intends to open it. "Bellini's office refers everything from this valley to Bellini's office, and Bellini's office never answers, and the region reads the silence as a no. That's how a senator kills a village without touching it. He doesn't burn the press. He lets it rust, and he calls the rust a decision, and the decision is pending, and pending is a word that never ends, until someone makes it end, and the someone is usually the person who owns the mountain."

"How do you know that."

"I read the referrals. I'm an auditor. Economic crimes, European Union, seconded to the Palermo prosecutor's office for the asset cases." He said it the way he said Rome has better coffee, as if it were a small fact and not the thing that explained his whole life, the way the key explained the mill. "Your father's assets were seized in March. The paper says holder none recorded. I was sent to find who the holder is. That's the thing within three months. That's the thing I was on the phone about, the day you stood on my steps and heard me say she's here, which was you, Rosa, the woman with the key and the books, the only person in Sicily who could open parcel seven and read what was behind it, and I reported that to my office, and my office is two doors from Bellini's, and I have spent two years learning not to put the word Vitali in a sentence that Bellini can hear."

Giulia stood on the steps with the sun on her face and the region's key in Matteo's pocket and her father's key in hers, and she thought about the fact that a man who audited dead men's money had been sent to find her father's holder, and that he had found her instead, and that he had reported her and not her name, which was a difference she was beginning to trust, the way you trust a floor that holds, even if you do not know what is under it.

"Your father's name is on a list I wasn't supposed to see," Matteo said. "The list of people whose assets were seized and whose families were told they were dead. Your name was on it as deceased. Carlo's was not. Carlo's name is on a different list, the one for survivors, which means someone in the prosecutor's office knows the baby is the only one left, and someone is keeping that quiet, the way Bellini keeps the co-op quiet, the way Turi keeps the villa quiet, the way a family keeps a m******e quiet by calling it a tragedy and calling the survivor deceased."

"Turi," Giulia said.

"Turi applied for tutela — legal guardianship — the day after the m******e. A man does not apply for a baby he just orphaned unless he planned to orphan it. He planned it the way he planned the wine and the smile - and he planned Enzo, and he planned Bellini. The plan ends with Carlo in the gown and the assets in Turi's name. The key to all of it was parcel seven, which Turi already owns: the village sold him the mill for a debt, so he does not even need the buried key. Your father buried it precisely so Turi could not buy his way in. That is why we are standing here, on the steps of the comune, with a key that opens the law, not the door - but the law is the door that matters."

He started down the steps. Giulia followed, because there was nowhere else to go, and because for the first time since the sea a man had told her the truth in pieces small enough to carry. She had not yet decided whether to trust him or to use him — and those are not the same thing. Her father had taught her the difference on a boat, when she was small, before he taught her that a boy pulled from a ditch is a boy you will pay for. She had learned that lesson too, the hard way, the only way a Vitali learns anything. Behind them the comune door stayed shut, but the key in her pocket opened the law — and the law, she was beginning to see, was a door Turi had never expected her to find.