Page 42 of Masked Don

My desk sits beside his. For some reason, that’s the first thing I notice when Marta brings me to the study that evening. There are two desks in his study, the room where he interviewed me. His is a monster, a huge antique thing I remember from the interview.

Mine is smaller, newer, and set against the side wall. It’s angled deliberately, so that anyone sitting at it faces the same direction he does, beside him. I’m not sure what it means, but I’ve no doubt he did it for a reason.

She nods toward my desk, and I notice something placed neatly on it, right in the center. “He left you a note with some rules of the house. I’ll be around if you need me.”

I move to the desk. On the blotter, squared to the edges, is a folder with my name on it and a single sheet of cream paper laid on top. The sheet turns out to be a letter, handwritten, in a slashing black script that looks exactly like how I pictured he’d write.

Miss Callahan,

Notes, in order of importance:

1. My calendar. I keep two. You’ll keep the real one, and you will never discuss its contents with anyone, including people who tell you they already know what’s on it. They don’t.

2. I receive a great deal of correspondence. You’ll sort and summarize it for me, and in time, you’ll learn my voice and answer the less important business in my name. Until then, you sign nothing.

3. Marta runs the house and Carmine runs the affairs outside the house. You take orders from me but defer to them. They are my authority when I’m not here.

4. You will see and hear things in this house. You will repeat none of them. This is not a request, and it is the term on which all the others depend.

5. You’ll be paid weekly. The first payment is already in your account. There’s a phone in the drawer. It’s yours. It’s secure. Keep it on you.

You have a sharp tongue. Good. I have no use for people who are afraid of me. I have a great deal of use for people who are not.

E.A.

I read it twice. The second time, I notice there’s no welcome, no pleasantries, no mention of Matthew. Did I expect him to? The truth is, I have no idea what to expect of him.

I get to work, even though no one has told me to. The calendar’s a labyrinth and the correspondence is worse, and for a couple of hours, I lose myself in it the way I haven’t lost myself in anything since I don’t know when. The simple animal pleasure of being good at a thing, of bringing order to someone else’s chaos for a paycheck, feels good.

Somewhere down the hall, faint through the old walls, I can hear my son laughing. The sound stops me cold. Marta’s got him in the kitchen, the two of them having some cookies and milk. Every now and then, his laugh floats down the corridor, the sort of surprised shriek of delight only kids his age are capable of, and the kind of laugh I hardly hear from him these days.

By the time I’m done poking around the study, and Matthew’s down for the night, I’m restless and wrung out all at once. The house is too big and too quiet to resist. So I do the thing I’m probably not supposed to do on my first night.

I go exploring.

I almost turn back. Then I find the library, and I forget about turning back entirely. It’s two stories, with a ladder on a brass rail and a spiral staircase in the corner. The smell is pure heaven, old paper and rich leather, a smell only books can emit.

I step into the space, running my fingers along the spines without pulling out a book just yet. Some of them are behind glass, and some of them are in languages I can’t read. There’s a globe taller than Matthew, and on the walls between the shelves are pictures of the family, old portraits, going back generations.

The paintings are of hard-faced men with angular features and dark eyes, as well as unsmiling women who practically radiate matriarchal power. I can almost feel the weight and strength of the Accardi line as I stand in the middle of the room.

I find Enzo’s father among them, younger, terrifying, painted in his prime, with a hand on the shoulder of a small solemn boy who could only be Enzo, who could, God help me, be Matthew, the resemblance running down through the generations like a current.

I stand there for so long looking at those faces that I lose track of time, because I realize these aren’t just paintings of random men. No, they’re part of a bloodline.

My son’s bloodline.

Whatever happens in this house, whatever secrets it holds, whatever history it carries, my son is the newest addition to it.

I make myself leave the room before I become too sentimental.

And in the corridor outside, I nearly trip over Genevieve.

She’s seated on the floor near the stairs, one hand white-knuckled on the banister as if holding on for dear life, an empty wineglass in the other hand. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it looks as if she fell to the floor, tried to get up, but is having trouble finishing what she’d started.

Her eyes find me, and they’re bright and wide for a second, as if she’s reverted for just that instant into a little girl, unsure of where she is and what’s happened to her.

Then they narrow, and she snorts.