C16 Pier Thirteen
The number came out of the accounting system at six in the evening, on a page his controller printed and handed him without comment, which was the way bad news travelled in that building.
**Withdrawal, forty-eight hours, personal authority.**
Two hundred and forty thousand, moved out of a family account that Marco had no signing power over except by an old, unrevoked, never-noticed arrangement made when he was twenty-three and the bookkeeper had liked him.
Dante read the page twice.
He knew exactly what that money was. He had watched men buy loyalty his whole life, and he had watched them do it wrong in the same three ways every time: too little, too loudly, and from the wrong hand. Marco had bought himself a room full of people who would agree with him for a month. That was not a coup. That was a bill he could not pay.
He called his brother.
It rang until the voicemail, which was still Marco's voice from four years ago, cracking on the last word of his own name.
He started to dial a second number, and stopped with the phone in his hand in the middle of the room, because the number he had begun to dial did not belong to anybody in the family, and he could not have said why he had wanted to call it.
He called Marco's driver instead. No answer. He called the second man, the one Marco took everywhere, the one with a good face and a bad record. No answer.
The river was greying out past the window. He stood there for a while and did not permit himself a single clear thought about what he was looking at, and then he picked up the phone and called Leo and said three words.
"Thirteen. Now."
---
It was raining on the waterfront.
Pier Thirteen had stopped being a working pier eleven years earlier and nobody had ever told the city about it. The bollards were still there. The crane track was still there. Two of the three container stacks along the quay had gone to rust and been left standing, because moving them cost more than owning them.
The third gate was open.
He saw that from forty meters away and knew, before he had finished getting out of the car, that whatever he was about to look at had been arranged some hours earlier by somebody else.
The container sat at the end of the short pier with its doors open toward the water, which meant it had been opened from the outside, from the land side, and not by anyone in a hurry.
Marco was inside.
He had fallen backward and slightly to one side, one arm under him, the other across his chest. A single gunshot wound, right of the sternum, and enough blood on the floor plate that the rain coming in through the open doors had made a dark, spreading map of it that had stopped widening about an hour ago.
Dante stood in the doorway for a long time with the rain running off the edge of the roof behind him.
Two hours. Maybe three. The body was cold the way things are cold in open air on a wet night, but the color of the hands said two to three hours, and he had seen enough of the dead by then to trust hands.
He looked at the floor before he looked at his brother again, because the floor was the part that could still tell him something.
The marks said this: Marco had walked in on his own feet. Two sets of drag marks behind him—not his; two other men, who had dragged something else in after him. A coil of nylon rope in the corner, used and put back. The doors open toward the water, which was the worst direction to open a container on this quay, because the wind came off the pier head this time of year and anybody who worked here knew it.
Somebody had been given instructions by somebody who knew the quay. The somebody carrying them out had not known it well enough.
He did not kneel. He did not touch him. He came inside past the door frame and stood over his brother in the dark and listened to the rain on the steel. Then he reached down and did one thing.
The collar of Marco's jacket had folded under on one side, the way a collar folds when a body has been moved. He straightened it with two fingers, pressed it flat, took his hand away, and stood back up.
That was all he did, and afterward he was not able to explain to himself why it had been that.
---
The police arrived in twenty-one minutes, which meant somebody had called them from the payphone at the fuel depot half a mile east. The somebody had not been him.
Before that, Leo had done what Leo did: he had walked the container, the quay and the yard with a flashlight, and by the time the first blue lights came over the sheds, the scene was as clean as it was ever going to get.
It was not clean enough.
A car had come before them. No markings, four doors, dark, and it had gone again. Two men, one of them carrying a notebook, and the man with the notebook had spent eleven minutes inside the container and had left before Dante's car came onto the quay.
The notebook had already been used.
There was a bag, sealed, in the hands of the second man when the patrol cars arrived, and he handed it over with the specific, unbothered courtesy of somebody who had been doing this for a long time and did not intend to be argued with.
Dante watched it change hands. He got close enough to read the evidence tag through the plastic before it went into the trunk.
**Item: one federal visitor credential. Recovered at scene. Bagged 21:14.**
The photograph on the credential was hers.
The name was hers.
The date printed under the name was from three months ago—a building pass from a federal service entrance, the kind you are handed at a desk when you sign in with a bar card and hand over your bag.
It had been lying on the cement forty centimeters from Marco's right hand.
Dante stood in the rain and looked at the position of that small flat rectangle of laminated plastic for two full seconds, and what he saw was not the object. What he saw was that a laminated card dropped on wet cement two hours earlier does not lie flat, square to the wall, with its edges parallel to the seam in the floor.
Somebody had placed it.
Somebody had walked into that container, with his brother's body in it, and had bent down, and set a piece of her life on the ground next to his brother's hand, and had walked out, and had driven away.
There was nothing he could do about it.
Not one thing. It was in the bag. The bag was in the trunk. The trunk was in a car belonging to men whose names he would know by Tuesday and whose employer he would not know for a very long time.
---
Afterward, Leo took a blanket out of the back of the car and went in and covered him.
He did it slowly. He did not look at Marco's face while he was doing it, and he did not hurry, and when the medical examiner's people came in with their lights and their trolley, he stood to one side and did not answer any of the four questions they asked him.
When it was finished—when the doors were shut and the lights were doing their work and the rain had settled into a steady drizzle—Leo walked back to the car, stopped at the driver's door, and stood there for a moment with his back to the water.
Then he reached into his jacket, took out a pair of sunglasses, and put them on.
Dante knew what they were. He had asked once, years ago, and had been given a four-word answer, and had never asked again.
Leo adjusted them with one finger and said the only sentence he said all night.
**"I'll drive."**
---
The wipers went back and forth the whole way into the city.
Neither of them said anything. Somewhere past the second bridge Dante understood that he had been sitting with his hand on his phone for eleven minutes without opening it, and understood why, and did it anyway.
It rang twice.
"Hello." Her voice was normal. There was a kettle in the background, or a tap running—something domestic. She was at home, in that apartment with no photographs in it.
**"Where were you last night."**
There was a pause on the other end, but a short one: the pause of a person being asked a procedural question by somebody who has asked her a hundred of them.
"Home until nine. Then the courthouse index till eleven, then home." She said it the way she said everything to him—plainly, in order, with the times in the right places. "Why."
The answer was true. He knew it was true the way he knew most things about her, by a route he had never explained to anybody.
He should have said *my brother is dead.*
He should have said *somebody left your name next to his body.*
He should have said *get out of the city tonight, I'll send a car.*
He sat in the car with his brother's blood on the sleeve of a jacket he had not noticed, and the rain going back and forth across the windscreen, and let the silence run past every one of those sentences.
She started to say something else. His name, probably, in the tone she used when she had decided a silence meant something.
He cut her off.
**"Don't leave your apartment."**
He hung up.
He put the phone face down on his knee and looked out the window, and in the mirror the lights of Pier Thirteen went small, then smaller, then nothing.
And the thing he was thinking about—which he would not have admitted to anybody, and did not entirely admit to himself—was not his brother, and was not his father, and was not the two men in the unmarked car.
**It was that she had given him the times in the right places, and he had listened to them the way he listened to a witness.**
