Page 24 of Deadly Confessions
He found the book I've been looking for.
He found the book I've been looking for, which means someone told him I was looking for it, which means he asked someone what I read, which means he asked about me. A man like Niccolo Sorrentino does not stumble across information. He pursues it.
I stay on the kitchen floor.
You don't have to make this into something, I tell myself.It's a pastry and a book. It's two gestures from a wealthy man who is accustomed to getting what he wants. This is what that looks like. You know what that looks like.
I do know what it looks like.
It doesn't feel like that.
I put the book on the shelf. I make coffee. I read sixteen pages of the paperback reprint because the first edition is too valuable to read on a Tuesday night in a kitchen where I am sitting on the floor.
Then I take the first edition back down and read it instead.
He calls the restaurant Thursday morning, during the lunch prep shift, and asks to speak with me. Giulia brings me the phone with an expression she is working very hard to make neutral.
I take it into the corridor near the kitchen.
"Don Sorrentino."
"Niccolo." A pause. "You received the book."
"I did."
"Was it the right edition?"
"You know it was."
A small silence. I can hear Naples through his end of the line: traffic, something distant, the specific texture of the city in the morning. "I'd like to take you to dinner," he says. "Not the restaurant. Somewhere else."
I look at the wall. White tile, a crack running from the baseboard up toward the ceiling that nobody has everfixed. "Why?"
"Because I'd like to sit across a table from you somewhere you're not working."
It's a simple answer. Straighter than I expected.
"When?" I ask.
"Saturday evening. I'll send a car at eight."
I think about the candles that didn't move when he walked out of the confessional. All four dark. The steady ordinary nothing of them. I think about my uncle's voice:This is the only thing that matters, cucciola. The candles tell you everything you need to know.
The candles told me nothing was wrong with Niccolo Sorrentino.
They didn't tell me to say yes to dinner.
"I'll meet you there," I say. "Send me the address."
A beat. He's surprised, I think. Not unpleasantly. "All right."
"Eight-thirty."
"Eight-thirty," he agrees.
I hand the phone back to Giulia without looking at her face.
My uncle calls that evening.
