innocuous enough.
“Very much so,” Enzo said.
“And so according to these results, my DNA matches . . .”
“The Montebianco family.” Enzo pulled out a second report. “This shows your relationship to your now-deceased great-uncle Guillaume Montebianco. The match is indisputable.”
I stared at the papers. I couldn’t argue with a DNA report, but I didn’t quite trust it either. It was like watching a magic act. You know it’s all sleight of hand, but the trick is so smooth you accept it as real. I finished my drink, all of it, in one gulp.
“You okay, Bert?” Luca asked, touching my hand.
“It’s just a lot to take in,” I said, wanting, suddenly, to go back in time to that morning in the kitchen, when the premonition of danger had been so vivid, and dump the envelope in the recycling bin.
“I’m sure this is all quite disorienting,” Enzo said, taking the DNA reports and sliding them back into his briefcase. “But it doesn’t have to be. The estate will go over everything with you in Turin. I assure you, there is nothing to worry about. It will all be clear soon enough.”
He snapped his briefcase shut and stood to go.
“I can’t believe my family kept so many secrets,” I said quietly, speaking more to myself than to Luca or Enzo.
“Every family has its secrets,” Enzo said. “But nothing reveals the truth like DNA.”
Five
We flew to Italy that night.
Enzo Roberts went to get dinner in town, giving me time to talk Luca into coming with me. I explained about my grandfather’s suicide and what I had learned at the Vital Records office. He must have sensed how much I needed him, but he also must have realized that if ever there would be a moment of reconciliation between us, this was it. When he presented the trip in this light to his father, Bob was more than happy to cover at the bar, as it meant giving us time to work things out. We packed a few essentials—pajamas, a few changes of clothes, toothbrushes—turned down the heat, locked the front door, and left everything behind.
At Teterboro Airport, a chartered plane waited on the tarmac. It was impossible to mask my astonishment at the whole thing—the car that ferried us out onto the airfield, the sleek, shining jet, the simplicity and ease of it all. It took all of ten minutes to board. We didn’t have to go through security. We didn’t wait in lines. There was no taking off of shoes and jackets. No uncomfortable pat-downs. We just showed up, walked up some steps into the plane, and that was that. This, I realized, was the world in which certain people lived, a place where those with money were exempt from the rules.
Once in my seat, a uniformed air hostess poured us each a glass of champagne—the Cristal 2008 label peeking out from behind her fingers—gave us each a bowl of cashews, and assured us that dinner would be served as soon as we were in the air. “But of course, if you’d like anything before then, please let me know.”
I leaned back into my huge leather reclining chair, wishing my mother were there. She would have loved the fancy champagne. My father had died in a car accident when I was nineteen, and while his death had been a painful shock, losing my mother had been harder. She had been diagnosed with throat and lung cancer when I was twenty-one, and had lived four more years, each year filled with a Ferris wheel of progress and reversals—she would climb to a state of remission only to fall back into the illness, as if taken down by a sinister gravity. The end was terrible, for her as well as for me. I raised my glass and, pushing aside my feelings about Rebecca and John, and everything else that had been left unsaid, made a silent toast to her.
I was on my second glass of champagne when a TSA agent stepped on board.
“What does he want?” I whispered to Luca, feeling my stomach sink. Surely, they were going to tell me that Enzo was a criminal, had entered the country illegally, and this would all be over.
“Passport control,” Enzo replied as he stood and headed to the front of the plane. “Let me take care of it.”
I watched Enzo, my face growing hot, sure we would be escorted off the plane any minute. But when the TSA agent asked for our passports, Enzo handed him three