Chapter 4: What My Father Knew
I called the number from a payphone two blocks away.
An old habit my father had insisted on.
*Some conversations,* he used to say, *belong to no record.*
The line rang four times before a woman answered in French-accented English.
*Bellini account.*
*This is Adriana Bellini Romano,* I said.
*I need to verify access.*
A pause.
The sound of keys.
*We've been expecting your call for some time, Ms.
Bellini,* she said.
*Your father opened this account nineteen years ago.
He updated the access instructions eight months before his passing.*
My throat tightened.
*What were his instructions?*
*That the account be held until you contacted us directly, without your husband present, from a number not registered to the Romano household.* Another pause.
*He was very specific.*
*How much is in it?*
She told me.
I stood very still on a cold Chicago sidewalk with a payphone receiver against my ear and let the number settle into me like something heavy finding the bottom.
It was enough to disappear.
Enough to start over.
Enough to protect Marco, and Lena, and myself, and still have more left than Alessandro had ever believed my father possessed.
*He told me the business was struggling,* I said.
Not to her.
To the air.
*I wouldn't know about that,* she said carefully.
*No.
Of course not.* I steadied my voice.
*I'll need instructions for a transfer.
Not today.
Within the week.*
*We'll be ready when you are.*
I hung up and walked back to the shop.
Lena was already there — she hadn't gone to Mott Street, she'd circled back through the alley and was sitting on an overturned crate in the storage room with her silver dress tucked around her knees like a child waiting out a storm.
*You didn't go,* I said.
*I wasn't going to leave you alone with him.*
I looked at her for a moment.
*You're braver than you look.*
*I'm terrified,* she said.
*That's not the same as brave.*
*Sometimes it is.* I sat on the edge of the workbench.
*Tell me everything Alessandro said to you.
From the beginning.*
She told me.
It took twenty minutes and she didn't leave anything out.
Alessandro had approached her brother Marco three weeks ago — a debt, a favor owed to someone in the Romano network, the kind of obligation that arrived without paperwork and left without mercy.
The price of clearing it was one evening.
Lena would attend the birthday dinner on Alessandro's arm.
She would say nothing, do nothing, simply be seen.
He had told her the wife would make a scene and leave.
He had told her it would be over by ten o'clock.
*He didn't tell you why he needed me to leave,* I said.
*No.
But I heard him on the phone the night before.* She looked at her hands.
*He said: the lawyers arrive at nine.
If she's still in the house, she'll find it before they do.
Get her out.*
*Get her out,* I repeated.
*He said that.*
*Yes.*
I thought about my father.
About the nineteen years that account had been sitting in Zurich, patient and invisible, waiting for a phone call that almost never came.
He had known something.
Not everything — he couldn't have known Alessandro specifically, the marriage had come after his d\*ath — but he had known the shape of the danger his daughter might one day find herself in.
He had known the Romano world well enough to prepare an exit before she ever entered it.
*How did he know your father?* Lena asked.
The question stopped me.
*Alessandro?*
*He said something else on that call.* She hesitated.
*He said: Bellini hid it better than I gave him credit for.
But I know what it is now.
And she doesn't.*
The room went quiet.
My father and Alessandro.
Alessandro had known my father.
Not just as his wife's father — as someone worth studying.
Someone with something worth finding.
*When did they meet?* I said, mostly to myself.
*I don't know.
But whoever he was talking to — they laughed when he said your father's name.*
I stood up.
*Did you hear the other person's voice?*
*Just once.
When Alessandro handed the phone over at the end.* She looked up at me.
*He said: Ruggero wants to speak to you.*
Ruggero.
His father's cousin.
The old architect.
The man who had lifted his wineglass and smiled while my marriage collapsed across the birthday table.
Not a witness to what Alessandro had done.
The reason he had done it.
My phone buzzed on the workbench.
A text from a number I didn't recognize.
*Teresa sent me your number.
May you like
I need to speak with you before tonight.
— Maso*
