Chapter 8

The Carabinieri station on Via Cavour had two rooms, and everyone in Marbolina spent the next three days in one of them.

They took Silvia first, and she sat in the good chair and gave them the whole of it in order, and the fusee and the ferrule went into an evidence bag and were logged with a number, and the pliers went into another, and Maresciallo Cozzi wrote down the number of the putty mark and photographed it, and a man came up from Lucca to look at the torn page in the yard's blasting register, where the Carchio entry for that morning had been cut out with a blade and the stub of it still sat in the binding.

They took Osvaldo Berti, who brought the union's own file, which was nine years of nothing.

They took the notary, a man of seventy in a cardigan, who at first said he had no recollection of the document, and then, when they showed him the 2015 date, said quietly that he had advised against it and had been told by Vitale Ferretti that the family had an arrangement, and that he was paid in full and had kept nothing, and that he had thought about that morning every week for nine years.

They took Marco on the second day, over the children's settlement money, and he came out of the station at seven in the evening and stood on the pavement and smoked a cigarette with a hand that shook, and the province padlocked the yard gate at eight the next morning with a chain and a notice in a plastic sleeve, and the polisher went quiet in its own slurry, and the whole valley stood outside the gate and looked at it.

They came for Nunzia on the third day, and she went in on her own feet with her rosary in her hand.

She sat down and said, without being asked, that she would testify to the notary, to the money, to the shed, and to the Tuesday bread, all of it, in open court.

And then she said, in the same level voice, that in exchange she wanted one thing: that her husband's name should not go into the record in connection with the blast, that Vitale Ferretti should be remembered only as a man who lost his son, and that whatever the Carabinieri wrote down should say that the fuse was cut by a person unknown and that Orfeo Baldini had confessed to a fault he did not commit under pressure from the family, without naming whose.

The maresciallo brought that offer to Silvia himself, in the little corridor with the water cooler, because he was decent and because he wanted to be able to say later that he had asked her face to face.

"Signora, it would take a year off the proceedings," he said. "You'd have your mother-in-law's statement. You'd have the money. Without her cash trail against your father, the notary's evidence goes soft, because the notary needs somebody who paid, and I'd be lying to you if I said otherwise. With her, it's a case. Without her, it's a very bad month in a small town."

"And my father's name stays on that stone at Castagnetola."

"It isn't on the stone."

"The line under the two names." Silvia's voice was very quiet. "Whoever cut this fuse, let him be judged. That's carved into the Ferretti stone in the cemetery where I have put flowers for seven years. Vitale Ferretti carved that line about himself and let the town read it at my father."

Cozzi did not answer.

"Tell her no," Silvia said. "Tell her I'll take the year."

She walked home up the yard road with her hands in her pockets. At the gate she had to stop, because the padlock was on it and she had to lift Bianca over the chain and then Nino, and Nino thought it was a game, and Bianca did not, and she stood on the other side of the chain with her arms crossed and waited until her mother was through.

"Mamma," Bianca said. "Why did the old man cry on the steps?"

Silvia crouched down in front of her in the wet dust.

"Because nobody had touched him for a long time," she said, "and then two people did."