第18章 The Confrontation

The injunction arrived on a gray Monday, pinned to the factory door like a proclamation of war. Serra had filed papers claiming the formula for the laguna ruby belonged to the estate of Gianni Bianchi, his old partner, and that the rights to it had passed to the consortium when Gianni's share of the factory was sold in the nineties. He was asking the court to stop the exhibition and to seize the chandelier until the ownership was settled. "It's a lie," Isabella said, reading the papers again. "Gianni sold his share. My grandfather bought it outright. There's a receipt in the ledger." "Then we show them the receipt," Marco said. "We can't. There is no receipt for the formula. There never was. The formula is in a notebook my grandfather wrote in secret and gave to me. Serra knows that. He's counting on it." She spent the morning preparing. She called the lawyer the foundation had recommended, a grave young woman named Antonella who took notes in a small black book and asked the questions Isabella had not thought to ask. She made copies of the ledger pages, of the letter, of the notebook's final page. She did not tell Marco she was going to see Serra alone, because she knew he would try to stop her, and because she needed to do this thing herself. Her grandfather had faced this man for twenty years. She would face him once. She practiced the words in the mirror of her small bathroom, and they came out too loud and then too soft, and in the end she gave up rehearsing. The truth did not need to be rehearsed. It needed only to be carried, and she had been carrying it since the day she read her grandfather's letter. She dressed carefully, in the dark red dress that made her feel like herself, and she walked to the palazzo through streets that had stopped feeling like a stranger's streets long ago. She went to see him that afternoon, alone, because he had asked her to, and because she was done being afraid. His office was on the third floor of a palazzo on the Grand Canal, all marble and old light and the smell of money. He received her in a room full of glass, his own collection, every piece signed and cataloged, and he gestured her to a chair like a man offering a gift. "You've been busy, Signorina," he said. "The whole of Venice is talking about the Moretti chandelier. I confess, I was not expecting you to fight." "Neither was I," she said. "But you made one mistake, Signor Serra. You told me my grandfather owed you, and I went looking for the truth. And the truth is that you've been waiting twenty years to take this factory, and you killed my grandfather to do it." His face did not change. "That is a serious accusation." "It's not an accusation. It's a statement of fact. You were there the night he died. You told everyone you found him. You were the last person to see him alive, and he had a bad heart, and you had spent twenty years wanting what he refused to give you. The only reason there's no proof is that you made sure there was none." Serra laughed, a dry sound with no humor in it. "You have inherited your grandfather's imagination, if not his sense of proportion. Emilio and I were friends once, in the way of two young men who want the same city. He chose the furnace and the poverty that came with it. I chose the other path. Neither of us was wrong, Signorina. We simply made different bets." He spread his hands. "My bet is coming due. Yours is standing in the ashes of your workshop, burning with a formula you cannot prove belongs to you." Serra set down his cup very carefully. "And what will you do with this theory of yours, Signorina? Go to the police? An old man's heart, a grief-stricken granddaughter. They will pat your hand and show you the door." For a moment she did not answer. She thought of her grandfather's letter, of the eleven years of failures that had ended in three words of triumph, of the fire and the flood and the man she loved standing guard over a furnace full of light. Whatever the world did with her words, she was not a guest here anymore, and she had stopped being afraid of men like this one the night she ran into a burning building. "Maybe." She stood. "But I'm not here to threaten you. I'm here to tell you that the injunction won't save you, because I have the formula, and it was left to me, and every master in Venice will testify that the color is mine. And I'm here to tell you that when the exhibition opens, you will be remembered for one thing only: as the man who tried to steal a dead friend's last gift and failed." For the first time, something moved behind his eyes. "You are very sure of yourself." "I learned it from my grandfather." She walked to the door and stopped. "He wrote me a letter. He said to beware of a man with money and a smile, especially one named Serra. He knew, at the end, exactly what you were. And I think, when you left him that night, he knew it too." She left him in the marble room among the cataloged glass, and she did not look back. Marco was waiting for her on the fondamenta when she came out, and she stopped short. He did not look angry. He looked tired, and worried, and when he spoke his voice was gentle. "Beppe told me where you went. I should be furious with you. I am furious with you. I am also proud of you, which is worse." He pulled her into his arms and held her, and she felt the fear she had been carrying all afternoon finally begin to drain out of her. "Never again alone," he said into her hair. "We face him together, or we do not face him at all." But the victory, if it was a victory, was short. That night Beppe called her, his voice shaking. Someone had been seen in the yard again, and the lock on the hidden workshop had been forced, and this time the intruder had not stopped at the doorway. The racks had been pulled down. The ruby discs were gone. And on the floor, in the same tarry hand as the first message, a single word: "Tomorrow." They stood in the wreckage of the old room, and Beppe picked up a shard of ruby glass and held it to the light. "He has the discs," he said. "He thinks he has the color. But color without the knowing is just something pretty that broke. The knowing is in the notebook, and the notebook is safe, and the man who has the discs has nothing but a box of broken red." He dropped the shard and looked at Isabella. "Tomorrow, we light the furnace." ---