I watched Angela walk toward the far end of the property. She didn’t look back. She didn’t have to.
I started toward the cellar, but the sound of a car pulling up on the gravel drive made me stop.
I turned.
Sal was here.
He stepped out of the car in a suit that looked like it had been ironed by hand, probably because it had. He shut the door with the same care he used for every object he touched. His face, when he saw me, was unreadable.
He walked over, hands in his coat pockets.
“Fratello,” he said.
“Sal.”
He looked around. “Where is everyone?”
“Inside. Angela is out by the river.”
He nodded. “Come.”
He led me toward the barn, a hundred meters down the drive, where the sound of the house and the river fell away.
Inside, the air was cold and sharp with the smell of hay and machine oil. Sal closed the door behind us, then took a folded document out of his coat and handed it to me.
I opened it.
Bill of lading. Scordato eastern shipping office. Three weeks ago.
Gianni’s signature at the bottom, a flourish I knew as well as my own name.
The document was a routing for a single container. Port of departure: Piraeus. Port of entry: Palermo. The consignee was a shell company—Sal had circled the name.
I recognized it.
Angela’s work had flagged it in Malta, in the big board she built for Dante after the Enzo operation: a Valenti node, old Halberd money, supposed to have gone dark.
I looked up at Sal.
He said, “It’s not Valenti. It’s Gianni.”
I felt it in my stomach. A cold, hollow pit.
He said, “I have been watching his shipping since he betrayed Serafina. This is the first proof.”
“What do you want to do?”
He looked away, out the narrow window at the field. “Nothing. Yet. We say nothing to Dante. Nothing to Arturo. We need more.”
“He won’t listen.”
Sal shook his head, once, sharp. “He will not. Not until we have something he cannot deny. And then—”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
I folded the paper and handed it back.
He put it away.
