Under a Gilded Moon(101)

She turned.

“I knew Aaron Berkowitz. Before that day at the station.”

“Yes,” she said. To say I saw it on your faces that day was no help now. “Although you didn’t volunteer that at the time.” Which has made me wonder if you could be trusted.

“Call it cowardice. Call it being ashamed of the past. Both would be fair.” He drew a breath. “While we were at Harvard, our interests aligned not only on the classics and political affairs, but also . . .”

“You were in love”—her voice had gone husky—“with the same woman.”

“He was in love, I believe. With a girl from an old family on Brattle Street in Cambridge. But it was nothing so noble as that on my part.” He waited to go on until Kerry raised her eyes again to his. “I’ve told you I was reckless and angry in the months after my family was killed. I pursued her, this woman he loved, only because, perhaps, I liked the feeling of power, being able to shift her attention to myself. I had no real interest in her. Which was . . .”

“Cruel.”

“Yes. To her and to him. I was numb, I think, during that time. Prone to smashing things up just to see if I could make myself feel—something. Anything. I probably did the young lady no permanent harm. After I quit calling on her, she recovered, married another classmate of ours. But I destroyed Berkowitz’s trust in her and in me—whatever future they might have had.”

He sighed. “I should have offered this to the police right away. But I’ve been ashamed by the whole affair—my own handling of it. Then, after I waited so long to speak up, I was afraid I might seem . . .”

“Untrustworthy. Yes. You did.”

“I didn’t think that one omission mattered much at the time. But now . . . I’m headed to the jail. To point out other suspects the police have overlooked, including me.”

The call of the tree frogs thrumming in her head, Kerry pictured the brothers huddled under the hay. She turned in the direction of the dairy barn, as if she could see past Biltmore House itself and the acres of deer park and pastures and woods.

“Kerry, there’s something else urgent I need to say. Leblanc seems to have gotten a tip on where the Bergaminis were hiding.”

She spun back toward him. “No. Did they . . . ?”

“They were found, Kerry. They’ve been arrested.”





Chapter 46

Sal gripped the bars of his cell, one hand around his brother’s shoulders, which were trembling. Nico pressed closer, as if the strength he felt in his brother could be passed through damp skin and dripping clothes. Sal reached for the thin blanket flopped on the cot. Wrapped it snugly around Nico.

“We must keep you warm.”

His mother’s words echoed in the silence of concrete and cold: I beg you, my son, protect our little Nico.

“I’m trying,” Sal said into the quiet. “I won’t give up trying.”

In a driving rain, Leblanc had arrived at the dairy barn with Wolfe. Through the cracks in the planks, Sal had seen Leblanc turn up the collar of his black coat.

“Best come on out,” Wolfe had called. “Can’t say I’d relish hurting a kid.”

Leblanc had made a show of aiming his revolver up toward the dairy barn’s loft. “Nothing but a dago. Not much of a loss.”

The steady thrum of his fear for Nico that always lived in his chest had swelled to a roar.

Now, at the jail, Sal was no longer seeing Wolfe a few feet away but a much older man. Steely eyes. Hunched behind a mahogany desk, as if its bulk reflected his personal strength.

“How do I know,” Maurice Barthélemy had demanded of him that day four years ago, “that you’re not Hennessy’s murderer? How do I know it wasn’t you our valiant chief saw in that alley where he was shot? How do I know you weren’t the dago he mentioned with his final breath?”

Sal could have told him it had, in fact, been his own face—and Frank Cernoia’s—that Hennessy saw there in the alley. But Sal had skipped to what mattered most.

“My brother, he is lost. Last night. The riot.”

The man lit a cigar. “You dagos can’t even trust each other.”

All these years later, Sal could still feel the seething that made his whole body throb. “My brother is very young.”

And afraid.

The man chewed on the end of his cigar. “Comme c’est triste, as we say in my family. How very sad.” The man’s tone dripped in sarcasm.

From behind Sal, the office door slammed then, the heavy tread of one of the man’s thugs approaching.

“Mr. Barthélemy, I was told this guy here needed removing.”

“Indeed, Leblanc. This guinea here appears to be under the impression that I, of all people, might somehow be responsible for the regrettable unrest last night in our fair city.” He swigged from his Scotch. “Can you imagine?” Barthélemy laughed hoarsely, as if the Scotch or his own words had shriveled his throat.

Sal had said no such thing. And until that moment had not even thought it. He’d only come here to a man who owned much of the wharves because he’d hoped for his help finding Nico.

And now, suddenly, here in this jail cell, blocks of thought moved in Sal’s mind, arranging themselves into a picture like the sections of the painting being pieced together at Biltmore on the library ceiling. Only instead of a bare arm extending to share the lamp of knowledge, here before Sal was the image of this man’s arm in its glossy white shirtsleeve, its cufflinks of pearl, as he motioned to his thug Leblanc.