C11 Three Questions

She had to reach back over her own shoulder to do up the dress, and she did it standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom with her jaw set, because there was nobody in the apartment to ask and she was not going to make a phone call about it.

The dress was five years old. She had bought it for a firm dinner, worn it once, and put it in the back of the closet in the same month. She had not been to a dinner since.

She didn't own jewelry. She didn't own a second pair of good shoes. The only thing in the apartment that cost more than a month of her rent was the laptop, and the only thing in it that she would have taken with her in a fire was a cardboard box she had never opened.

Before she left, she stood in the doorway with her coat over her arm and sent one message.

Not to him. To a number she had not used in four years, and which she had never once used first.

**I need a name off an old index. Tomorrow. Not tonight.**

She put the phone in her bag, put her hand under her left collarbone, counted to seven, and went out.

---

The Moretti house had been opened up the way houses are opened for things that are not really dinners.

Two vans had gone and four more had come. The hall had flowers in it that cost more than the flowers in the church. The long table in the dining room had been extended by two leaves, and every plate on it had three forks next to it, which is a way of telling a guest exactly how many ways they are going to be watched.

She counted twenty guests on the way in, and twenty-four by the time everyone sat down, because four people arrived after her and nobody looked at them either.

She was seated past the middle of the table, on the wall side, between a woman who owned a chain of pharmacies and a man who did something with cranes. It was neither a snub nor a place of honor. It was the seat you give to a lawyer who has done a good job, which in a room like this one is a way of being thanked and filed at the same time.

The head of the table held Salvatore Moretti. On his right sat old Ricci—heavy, seventy, with a mustache that had gone entirely grey and a watch on his wrist that had to be older than most of the room.

Across from her, near the head, sat Sofia Ricci, in dark green, with a string of pearls at her throat.

And at the head of the long side, in the first chair, sat Dante, and he did not look at her once for the first forty minutes.

He looked at her three times after that.

She counted those too.

---

Old Ricci raised three things during the first course.

The first was the two shipping lines north of the harbor, which he mentioned the way you mention a thing you already own. The second was the two berths on the north side, which he described at length, in numbers. The third was March, and the ship schedules, and the fact that the schedules were going to change.

Salvatore ate.

He did not answer the lines, the berths, or March. He did not answer the question that had been buried inside the third one, which everybody at the table had heard, and which was: *when do we talk about what I'm owed.*

Instead, when Ricci had finished, the old man turned his head and said, in Italian, something to the woman on his left about the fish.

She watched the whole table absorb that. Twenty-four people, four forks each, all of them watching an old man chew, and not one of them showing anything on their face, because the ones who had anything to show had already learned not to come to this house.

*This is how they run it,* she thought. *Nobody gives an order. They wait until you've said the whole thing, and then they don't answer.*

Then Salvatore Moretti stood up in the middle of the second course, walked to the terrace door, and went out to look at his bird.

Every fork at the table stopped.

He was gone for a minute and a half. Nobody spoke for the first thirty seconds of it, out of reflex, and then two conversations started in the middle of the table and nobody told them to, and by the time he came back in and sat down and picked up his fork, the meal had reorganized itself around the fact that he had walked out.

---

"Lawyer," said the woman with the pharmacies.

"Yes."

"Fascinating." She said it the way people say a word they have been taught to use. "And you do—what kind of law?"

"Whatever holds."

The man with the cranes laughed, once, without knowing why, and the small stretch of the table around her went quiet for half a second.

Somebody on the other side asked about the fish. The moment passed, the way moments do.

She used the cover of it to look down the table.

Sofia Ricci had not said two words since the soup. She sat with her back straight, one hand at her wine glass and the other at her throat, and every forty seconds or so her fingers would find the pearls, touch them, count them, and come away.

It was the only thing on her that did not match the house.

Everything else had been chosen for her: the green, the shoes, the hair, the smile she deployed on command at the person to her left. The pearls belonged to somebody who was dead.

*She touches them the way I count.*

That thought stayed with her for the rest of the meal.

---

She went out to the terrace during the fish course, because she needed thirty seconds of cold air and because she wanted to see the bird.

The cage sat on the low table where it had been in April, and the bird was inside it, yellow, asleep with its head tucked down, entirely uninterested in the fact that twenty-four people were eating its owner's dinner.

There was a sprinkle of seed on the table beside the cage. Somebody in this house came out here in the middle of a business dinner and fed a bird by hand.

She was standing there when Dante came out.

He did not stand next to her and he did not come around in front of her. He walked past, took a position at the railing three feet behind her left shoulder, and looked out at the garden, and neither of them said anything for a moment. That was the first time.

Then his hand came past her, at hip height, and set a glass of water on the stone ledge in front of her.

She looked at it. She had been holding a glass of wine she had not wanted and had been carrying it around all evening like a passport.

"Somebody counts the glasses," she said.

"Somebody counts everything." He stayed where he was, behind her shoulder, looking out. "The man with the cranes counts the cars."

"Is that why you kept the car running on Thursday."

"That was different."

"How."

"Because nobody was counting that one."

She took the water, and drank some of it, and the fact that he had replaced her wine and gone back to standing behind her shoulder, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off his coat, was the second time.

---

It happened in the side room, after the plates had been cleared and the older men had drifted toward the brandy and the older women had developed headaches.

She had spent the evening doing two things at once: watching the table, and waiting for the right half minute.

She got it at ten past eleven.

He was standing near the corner of the side room with a glass he wasn't drinking and three people around him who were talking about a hotel in the south of the country. She walked up to him with the water glass in her hand, which gave her a reason to be there, and she stood next to him for long enough that one of the three men turned and greeted her, and she said good evening, and then she spoke over the man's shoulder, quietly, in the middle of a conversation about hotel rates.

"Which case."

The man in front of her kept talking about the hotel.

Dante took a moment—not a long one; a moment exactly as long as it took to lift his glass and put it down—and then he looked to his left and to his right, the way a man does when he is deciding who is allowed to hear him.

Four people within range. Sofia Ricci at the edge of it, standing alone with a glass she had not touched.

"The one nobody has been able to close for eighteen years," he said.

The man talking about the hotel did not stop.

"The one where every file that should be in a cabinet is in somebody's house instead."

He said it in the same tone people use for hotel rates. He said it without one name in it. And it was exact, and precise, and total, and it landed in the room the way a coin lands on a floor in a quiet house.

"Then you know," she said.

"I have the same list you have," he said. "Mine's just got more names crossed off."

She stood there with the water in her hand while the man beside her finished his sentence about the south of the country, and she felt the thing she had felt exactly twice in her adult life: the floor under her feet being somewhere other than where she had put it.

He had answered her in front of witnesses. He had put a marker down in public, in his own house, in front of his family's guests.

She had asked for information and been given a position.

---

She left at half past eleven.

Her coat was in the hall and her driver was still ten minutes out, and she stood in the corridor by the side door where the staff went in and out, because it was the only place in that house where nobody was standing around being looked at.

Footsteps came up behind her and stopped beside her.

Sofia Ricci stood there with her wrap over one arm and the same glass in her hand—the one she had been carrying since the beginning of the evening, still full.

Neither of them said anything for four or five seconds. Down the corridor a door opened and closed. Outside, a car went past the front of the house.

"Your shoes," Sofia said.

Elara looked down. She was wearing the good ones, the only pair.

"They're the wrong shoes for this house," Sofia said. "You'll hear it from three people before you get to your car. They'll be very kind about it." She paused. "The pair you had on Thursday is the right one. He noticed that."

"Did he tell you."

"He doesn't tell me anything." Sofia said it without any weight in it, like a fact from a weather report. "I just watch him."

She turned the glass slowly in her hand, and the pearls moved at her throat, and for a moment Elara saw the whole arithmetic of the woman: thirty years old, standing at the back door of a house she was being given, holding a drink she was not going to drink, wearing the only object in her life that somebody had left her.

"Sofia."

"Don't." Sofia said it quickly, but not unkindly. "If you start explaining, I'll have to pretend I believe you, and then we'll both have lied tonight, and I've been trying to stop."

She lifted her wrap off her arm and settled it on her shoulders.

Then she said it—quietly, without looking over, in the exact tone of a woman commenting on shoes:

"I know who you are."

Elara didn't move.

Sofia did not wait for an answer. She walked back down the corridor toward the noise and the light with her full glass in her hand, and she did not look back, and by the time Elara's car pulled up at the side door, there was nothing in the corridor but the smell of flowers and the noise of twenty-four people finishing an evening that had not been about any of them.