Page 32 of Promised to the Don of Naples
My father didn't speak to me for an hour.
We sat on the same back seat, separated by two feet of German-car leather, and he read Il Sole 24 Ore from the front page to page four, in silence, as if I were furniture.
I looked out the window at the sun rising over Calabria. Cows, cypresses, gas stations going past.
Twenty-five miles before Salerno, he folded the newspaper.
"That was brave."
I looked at him.
"What?"
"The red," he said without looking at me. "The night of the engagement."
"It was necessary."
"I observed Bianca last night in the salon, before you came down. She'd been planning that scene for a week."
"I noticed."
"You answered well."
"Thank you."
"It's not a compliment. It's an observation."
I glanced at him sideways. My father at sixty-two was a man who had shrunk over the last few months without my noticing—the suit had gone half a size too big in the shoulders, the skin of his neck a little loose over the collar, his hands marked with spots I didn't remember seeing. The small black eyes were still the same, but the whites had yellowed a little.
This man right here could have had my brother killed,I thought.This man right here could have ordered a Moretti soldier to pick up a gun and fire.
I couldn't hold on to the thought, and I looked back out the window.
"Papà. Why did you never tell me about Capri?"
"Because Matteo died, Valentina. Because the Morettis became our enemies after that. And because I didn't want you growing up thinking of your brother as someone who had an emotional bond with the family that killed him."
"You mean, with the family that seemed to have killed him."
He turned, and that was when he looked at me, very slowly.
"What did Luca tell you?"
"You know what he told me."
"I know what I think he told you."
"He said the bullet came from a Moretti gun, but the order came from somewhere else. That there's a traitor inside his house, one he's been hunting for three years."
"I see."
"Do you believe it?"
He took another drag, looking straight ahead.
"I believe that Luca believes it."
"That's not the same thing."
