Chapter 5

On Monday morning Marco moved her off the polishing line and put her in the slurry channel with a shovel.

"Tonino's got the polisher," he said. "You'll finish gravestones on Saturdays if there's any."

She stood in the channel up to her bootlaces in white mud for nine hours and said nothing to anyone, which was the way she had done everything for nine years, and at six o'clock she took off her boots and put on her good coat over her overalls and walked down to the Camera del Lavoro by the railway.

The hall was one room, green paint, a long table, a flag, two sagging armchairs, and a barometer on the wall that did not work. Osvaldo Berti had been the steward since before she was born and had a chest full of marble dust and no illusions.

"Sit down, Silvia."

"I need to know what I'm owed."

He got the ledger out. He wrote figures for half an hour with a stub of pencil, and the figures went: nine years of wages recorded at the yard at the correct amounts, nine years of payslips never filed with the provincial office, nine years of contributions - she watched him add that column twice - never paid into anything.

"That's not what I asked," she said.

"This is what you asked." He turned the ledger around. "Now the other thing. You said the settlement for the children. Draw the line down from the top."

She drew it. It took him eleven minutes and then he sat back and looked at the ceiling, which was the closest Osvaldo Berti came to swearing.

"November, three years ago," he said. "Six thousand eight hundred out. January, five thousand two hundred out. Last April, four thousand out. All of it against yard payroll, all of it in the children's names, all of it signed for in a hand that isn't yours."

"It's Nunzia's."

"It's Nunzia's." He put the pencil down. "It's a trust, signora. It's gone into a yard that can't pay its own workers. That's not an accounting error. That's a crime with a name, and the name is the man who signed for it, and the man who signed for it is your employer, and your employer holds your flat."

Silvia sat with her hands in her lap.

"If I file this," Osvaldo said, "your wages get prosecuted, and there's a decent chance the flat goes into the file with everything else, and there is nothing I can do about that. And Marco will know it was you before the ink is dry, because there's nobody else in that yard who'd walk down here."

"He offered me cash for a signature."

"Then take the cash and keep your mouth shut, and I'll say nothing, and in five years you'll still be shoveling slurry and Bianca will be ten and Nino will be eight and the money will be gone and nobody will ever be able to prove where." He folded his hands. "Or don't."

Silvia walked home along the railway and up the yard road and Marco was standing at the gate with his hands in his pockets, waiting for her, which he had never done in nine years.

"Friday," he said. "The release. You come to the office Friday morning and sign, or I need the flat for the new foreman and I'll need it by the first of the month."

"Who told you I went to the union."

"My mother told me you'd gone to the union," Marco said. "She also told me not to do this. It's the only time in nine years she's ever asked me for anything and I'm not doing it." He looked at her with the vein showing at his temple. "Friday, Silvia. And keep your children off my family's steps."

She went up the outside stairs to the flat, and Bianca was at the window with her nose flattened against the glass, watching the yard, and Nino was on the floor with two spoons and the tobacco tin's little brass-colored cousin - a paint tin, but he called it the bell.

Silvia sat down on the floor with her children and did not tell them anything.