Chapter 6

The drizzle came back on Thursday night, and it came back hard, and the yard emptied early.

Silvia stayed. She had the headstone of the Notari widow's husband to finish and she was doing it in the polishing shop with the door shut and the felt wheel turning, and at nine she stopped the wheel and stood there listening to the rain on the corrugated roof, and then she walked up the Canalone road in it with a torch.

Orfeo's shed door was unlatched.

He was asleep or pretending to be. She did not wake him. She took the canvas satchel off the nail by the door, and she looked at the cot and the tin and her mother's hoops in their newspaper and the photograph of a ten-year-old girl with a piece of paper in her hand, and she took the satchel and went out and closed the door behind her, and she walked down the switchbacks in the rain with the bag against her chest under her coat.

At the yard she let herself into the office with the key on her own ring, the one she had used for nine years to open the polishing shop on winter mornings. The stove was cold. She did not turn on the light.

The cash drawer had no lock on it worth the name. Under the rubber bands, behind the receipt book, under the pen the maresciallo had borrowed, lay the old two-jaw crimping pliers with the re-welded handle, and nobody had moved them in nine years, because nobody in that yard would touch a thing Vitale Ferretti had carried in his coat.

She took them into the polishing shop and put them on the bench.

The satchel's lining was split along the seam, the way Orfeo's coats were always split, because he mended everything with wire and never with thread. She put two fingers into the split and felt along the padding and found the shape of it before she found the thing itself: a hardness about three inches long, and a small knuckle of metal.

The fuse stub was black and greasy and cut clean at an angle. The ferrule was a crushed brass crimp the size of a thumbnail, squeezed flat by a jaw and never released.

Silvia stood in the polishing shop with the two objects in her palm and the rain on the roof, and then she got the putty.

It was the putty the polishers used to seat a slab edge before a fine pass - gray, soft, and it took a mark and held it. She rolled a ball of it and pressed the ferrule into the ball until the crimp's whole profile came up out of the putty like a little city. Then she took the pliers and opened the jaws and seated them, very slowly, over the impression, and closed them until the re-welded handle stopped.

She lifted the pliers away.

The jaw-mark in the putty came up whole. It had a chip in the upper jaw at the corner, an old chip, white and bright against the rust, and the impression below it carried the same bright corner, the same little crescent of missing metal, the same offset where the weld had pulled the jaw a hair out of true nine years ago.

She had seen that chip a thousand times. Every man in the valley had seen that chip. Vitale Ferretti had used those pliers in front of witnesses at every blast he ever set, because it was his joke that a Ferretti crimped his own charges.

Her hands were shaking, and she wasn't cold.

"Eight years," Nunzia Ferretti said from the doorway.

Silvia turned. The old woman stood with the rain running off her coat and her rosary in her hand and did not come in.

"I have paid for that shed for eight years," Nunzia said. "Not Marco. Not the parish. Me, out of the money my husband left me, every month, in cash, to a man I call a murderer in the street in front of my own grandchildren. And every Tuesday since he came back down off that mountain I have had bread taken up to him, and every afternoon for two years I walked those two children to the fountain and let them sit on his knee, and then I walked them home and told you I had collected them from the asilo."

"Why."

"Because he signed it." Nunzia's voice did not change at all. "Two days after the blast, in this office, at that desk, with a notary sitting where you're standing. He signed his own name to my husband's sin, and he did it for you and for the child you were carrying, so that you would have a roof and a wage and a name in this town that people would say without spitting. And I have been paying him back ever since, in bread, because I could not pay him back in anything else without taking the roof off you."

Silvia looked down at the pliers in her hand.

"Emilio Pagani's in the hospital in Massa," Nunzia said. "They moved him Tuesday. He was on the road that morning with the water truck and he saw my husband go down to the bench with the fuse reel. He's seventy-nine and he won't see Carnival. If you're going to do this, do it before that door closes."

She turned and went out into the rain.

Silvia stood alone in the workshop with the evidence of nine years in her two hands, and a woman's voice in her head saying do it, and her own voice saying the first of the month, the flat, the first of the month, and up the mountain in the dark a man sleeping in a shed that somebody else had paid for.