Chapter 4 - Four Wrong Notes
The four wrong notes matched four altered words in Nona’s version.
Pietra.
Santo.
Tre.
Acqua.
Stone. Saint. Three. Water.
Giulia opened the bottom panel of the music box.
Inside were scratched initials and numbers.
Christopher pulled old immigration maps from his archives.
Not Italy.
Boston.
Three olives led us to Tre Olivi, a restaurant that had closed in 1968.
The building still existed in the North End.
Christopher owned it through a holding company.
“You own half of Boston?” I asked.
“Not half.”
“That was not comforting.”
The basement still had an old stone cistern and a carved saint whose face had been worn away.
Foundation stone.
Faceless saint.
Three olives.
Black water.
We had a location.
Then Marco’s phone rang.
His expression changed.
“Cafe Napoli.”
My stomach dropped.
“What?”
“Fire department is there.”
We reached the cafe twenty minutes later.
Smoke stained the rear bricks.
The fire had been contained.
Mr. Bellini sat outside wrapped in a blanket.
When he saw me, he pointed.
“They asked for you.”
“Who?”
“Two men. They wanted your sheet music.”
“I don’t use sheet music.”
“I told them.”
Christopher crouched beside him.
“What happened?”
“They searched the back room. Then one of them poured something on the floor.”
Arson.
My chest tightened.
Christopher stood.
“This ends.”
“How?”
“We find the ledger first.”
“No.”
He frowned.
“We find it together.”
“This is dangerous.”
“It became dangerous when they dug up Nona.”
Before he could answer, a car accelerated at the curb.
Marco shouted.
A shot cracked through the street.
Christopher moved instantly.
He knocked me behind a parked car and covered me with his body.
A second shot shattered a window above us.
His hand pressed my shoulder.
“Stay down.”
Security returned fire toward the car’s tires.
The vehicle sped away.
Christopher looked at me.
“You hurt?”
“No.”
He checked anyway.
His hand was trembling.
I realized the feared man with money, guards, and an inherited criminal empire was terrified.
Not of the bullets.
Of losing me.
That realization frightened me in a completely different way.
Back at the safe house, Giulia played the music box again.
The last wrong note pointed to a date.
1968.
The year Tre Olivi closed.
At midnight, police and Christopher’s security entered the basement with us.
Behind the faceless saint stone, Marco found a narrow metal compartment.
Inside was not a ledger.
There was a cassette tape.
A brass key.
And a photograph.
Nona and Maria stood outside Cafe Napoli.
On the back:
IF THE SONG RETURNS, BEGIN WHERE WE BEGAN.
I laughed in disbelief.
“The cafe.”
Giulia nodded.
“Lucia always liked layers.”
Christopher looked at me.
“So did Maria.”
We played the cassette.
Static.
Then two women began singing.
Nona.
Maria.
Christopher stopped breathing.
I covered my mouth.
For the first time in years, we were hearing the dead as living women.
Halfway through, they stopped the song and laughed.
Then Nona said, “The key opens the cellar box at Napoli.”
Christopher looked at me.
“Tomorrow.”
I shook my head.
“Now.”
For once, he did not argue.
Before Dominic arrived, Christopher and Marco took the ledger into a secured room.
I followed.
Christopher looked at me.
“This part may involve names you should not know.”
I stared at him.
“You mean names people tried to burn my workplace over?”
He sighed.
“Right.”
We photographed every page.
Marco read out companies while I entered them into a clean spreadsheet.
The pattern appeared quickly.
Money moved through construction firms, restaurants, shipping companies, political committees, and medical charities.
“Medical charities?” I asked.
Christopher leaned closer.
One organization had funded treatment centers in Calabria and Massachusetts.
Giulia recognized it.
“Greco used them to move families,” she said.
“Families?”
“Witnesses. Relatives. Sometimes people hiding from other families.”
The ledger was not a simple list of villains.
Some payments were bribes.
Some bought silence.
Some saved lives.
That made it harder.
“If this becomes public without context,” I said, “innocent people could be exposed.”
Christopher nodded.
“That is why Matteo wants it.”
“Not just because it incriminates him.”
“No. Because whoever holds the whole story controls which pieces are called crimes and which are called favors.”
I looked at the black book.
For decades, men had used secrets as currency.
Lucia and Maria had stolen that currency.
Then hidden it instead of spending it.
“Why didn’t they go to police?” I asked.
Giulia’s laugh was bitter.
“Some of the police are on page twelve.”
Fair.
Christopher closed the book.
“My mother did not want power.”
“Then why keep evidence?”
“Leverage.”
“Same thing.”
He looked at me.
“No.”
“What is the difference?”
“Power lets you make someone do something.”
“And leverage?”
“Sometimes leverage is the only reason they cannot make you.”
I thought about that.
Nona, raising me alone, had never seemed powerful.
Maybe she had spent her life holding a shield I could not see.
When Dominic walked in without being called, the answer in his face made the ledger suddenly feel less historical.
The men on its pages had children.
Those children had inherited companies.
And some had inherited the habits too.
Before leaving the damaged cafe that night, Mr. Bellini stopped me near the door.
“Your grandmother used to sit at that table.”
He pointed to a corner beneath a framed photograph of Naples.
“Nona came here?”
“Every Thursday for years.”
I stared at him.
“She never told me.”
“She met Maria here too, before Maria got sick. They argued constantly.”
“About what?”
“Everything. Politics. Music. Which tomatoes were respectable.”
Despite the smoke smell, I laughed.
Bellini smiled.
“Lucia once told me the safest hiding place is somewhere people think they already understand.”
I looked toward the cellar stairs.
The cafe had never been random.
Nona had guided me back to the same room where the women had hidden their evidence.
Christopher heard the last sentence.
Outside, he said, “Do you think she knew you would sing here?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“She was terrifying.”
He nodded.
“That seems to be the family trait.”
I looked at him.
May you like
“Careful.”
For the first time since the shooting, we both laughed.
