Chapter 4

They let her into the office because she was the polisher and it was ten past seven and her shift started at seven.

Marco was behind the desk with the woodstove going and his good gray coat still on, and the two Carabinieri were standing because there was nowhere in the office for two Carabinieri to sit, and Maresciallo Cozzi was writing in a notebook with a pen he had borrowed from the cash drawer.

"Signora Ferretti," Cozzi said. "You were on the steps last night."

"I was."

"Did the man on the steps threaten your children?"

"No."

"Did he touch them?"

"He held my daughter's hand," Silvia said. "She held his. She's five. She was sitting in his lap when I found them."

Cozzi wrote that down. Marco looked at the stove.

"Nine years ago you were the widow in the Carchio blast," Cozzi said. "Yes. A long time."

"Your father-in-law signed the statement against Orfeo Baldini in 2015."

"He signed nothing," she said. "I was told the man confessed and left."

The pen stopped.

"Your father in Genoa," Cozzi said, reading from his notebook. "Died 2017."

"Nine years ago the blast," Marco said, from behind the desk, pleasantly. "Two years after, a telephone call from Genoa, a stroke. That's what the town was told, signora, and the town was told it by your mother-in-law, which is a thing I've never asked her about, so don't you ask her either."

The maresciallo closed the notebook and put the pen back in the drawer where the pliers lived, and Silvia watched his hand go in among the rubber bands and come out empty, and she said nothing.

"You'll keep your children off the man," Cozzi said. "That's all I came to say. Whatever he is, he's a public nuisance and now he's a public nuisance with children in his lap. If it happens again, signora, I'll write it as a complaint against you."

They went out. The car went down the Canalone road and turned left at the gate.

Marco got up and went to the stove and opened the door and put in a piece of scrap and watched it catch.

"You want your money," he said.

"I want my money."

"Next week."

"You said next week in September."

"I said next week in September and I meant it in September." He shut the stove door. "You're owed about two thousand four hundred. I can't pay it out of an account the province is looking at, and the province is looking at it because your dead husband's lease is on it, and it was always going to be on it. Sign the release on the Carchio settlement and I'll have the money in your hand by Friday, in cash, and the two thousand on top, and we'll forget the whole thing."

"The settlement's the children's money."

"The settlement is what's left of my brother," Marco said, "and my mother's name is on it and my name is on it and yours is on it as their guardian, and if you sign, it stays in the family and everybody eats this winter, and if you don't sign, the auditors come and they freeze it and nobody eats, including your two."

Silvia looked at the cash drawer.

"Fine," she said, and went out to the polishing line, and did not go home at lunch.

At half past nine that morning, when the saws were running and the yard was loud enough to hide anything, she walked back up the powderman's path with her work gloves in her pocket.

He was breaking scrap with a sledge, sorting the good white from the gray, and he stopped when he saw her and put the sledge down against the shed wall, and his shoulders came down and his whole body got smaller, the way a man's body does when he decides not to run.

"Say it quick," he said. "You've got a shift."

"Am I your daughter."

His jaw worked. The milky eye did not move; the other one did.

"Yes," he said.

The mountain did not fall. A truck went by on the switchback above them and the ground shook a little, and that was all.

"Then why," she said, and her voice came out of her like something being dragged out of a drawer, "did you let me put flowers on a stone with your name on nothing, for seven years."

"Because of the flat," he said.

She hit him.

She had never hit anyone in her life, and she hit him across the face with a closed hand, and his head turned and stayed turned, and then she put her arms around him and he did not put his arms around her, and they stood like that in the wet white dust for the length of a Hail Mary.

"I didn't cut the fuse," he said. "That I'll say. Nothing more."

"Who did."

"Nothing more."

"You'll tell me."

"No."

"Papà."

He closed his eyes. It was the first time in nine years anybody had said it to him, and he took it the way a man takes a bucket of cold water - without moving, and without any sign that it helped.

"Go down," he said. "You've got a shift."

On her way back along the shed wall she saw the satchel. He had put it inside, on the cot, and it was open because he had been looking for something in it, and it lay there on the blanket with its oil-stained flap turned back and its lining split at the seam.

Silvia looked at it for four seconds and then walked down the mountain and did not touch it, and she thought about it for the rest of the day, through every headstone edge, through every pass of the felt wheel.