Page 79 of Promised to the Don of Naples
VALENTINA ROSSI
Mondello welcomed me back as if I'd never left.
The driver Luca had sent with me—Tonio, the same one from the yacht—dropped me at the front door at nine forty in the morning.
He didn't get out of the car. He stayed parked about thirty meters from the front of the house, at the corner of the square, the window cracked, a cigarette going.
The other two soldiers were inside an unmarked black van at the corner of the street. "The Don asked for three," Tonio had said when we left Posillipo. "I know you asked to go alone. But the Don asked for three."
I didn't argue, and I went into the house.
Rosalia wasn't there—I'd given her three days off, with the excuse that I'd be shut up in my room, faking the flu so no one would visit.
She didn't believe a word of it, but she took the days.
I crossed the main room. The house smelled the same as it had four weeks ago—dried basil on the kitchen counter, wax on the furniture, and underneath, always underneath, what was left of my mother's perfume, soaked into the walls over twenty-nine years of marriage and still not gone ten years after her death.
I went up the stairs and down the hall, into the back bedroom.
It was my mother's room.
It had been, at least. After she died, my father locked it and no one went in again. The key stayed in his drawer; I'd taken it at fifteen and had a copy made in secret in central Palermo, on a winter Saturday when he was in Rome. I'd known how to get into that room for eight years.
I turned on the light.
My mother's vanity. The closet shut. The bed covered with the white sheet Rosalia changed once a month, even though no one slept in it. The painting of Saint Sebastian on the wall behind the armchair—the saint pierced with arrows that mymother had prayed to for nine years without my ever knowing why.
I walked over to the painting and took it down off the wall.
Behind the painting, on the wall, a square of plaster painted a little sloppily compared to the rest.
I'd never noticed it. At fifteen I'd searched for hidden things in the baseboards, in drawers, behind the mirror, but I'd never thought about walls.
Bianca had been right.
I knocked lightly with my knuckles. Hollow.
I took the dagger from my boot and used the tip to scrape the plaster along the edge of the square.
In about three minutes, I had the edge loose. I pushed, and a slab of plaster about twenty by thirty centimeters gave way into the wall, revealing a dark hollow.
Inside the hollow: the box.
Gray steel, the size of a shoebox, with a small padlock. I took it out and set it on the floor. Then I took Bianca's gold key from my pants pocket and fit it in.
I opened it.
Documents. Brown paper folders, about twenty centimeters high, with labels typed on an old typewriter. Operazione Levante 2012-2015. Conti Esteri Zurigo. Trasferimenti Cayman. Contratti Privati Moretti-Rossi. I leafed through them without reading—this wasn't the time to read.
It was the time to take them and go.
I put everything into a cloth bag I'd brought. And then, at the bottom of the box, beneath the last of the documents—I saw an envelope.
White. Small. Sealed with tape gone yellow over almost ten years.
The handwriting on the front was my mother's.
Per Salvatore. Solo per lui. Aprile 2012.
