Ten Minutes to Closing

The man who owned her brother’s debt came to collect it at ten minutes to closing, and he did not knock.

Nadia Ferrant heard the bell above the workshop door give its thin, cracked note and did not look up. She was fitting a bridge to a cello that had come to her in four pieces, the maple was being stubborn, and anyone who wanted her at this hour could wait. Rain drummed on the skylight. The quay outside smelled of diesel and oyster shells. Down the street a bar was playing the same song for the third time.

“We’re closed,” she said.

“The sign says otherwise.” The voice was low and unhurried, with the particular patience of someone who had never in his life been made to wait for long. “I can turn it for you, if you like.”

She looked up then. He stood just inside the door with the rain still on his shoulders — dark coat, no umbrella, no hat. Tall, but that was not what filled the room. It was the stillness. Most people who came into the workshop touched things: ran a finger along a scroll, plucked a loose string, asked what the smell was. Hide glue, always hide glue. This man kept his hands in his pockets and looked at her as if the instruments were furniture and she was the only thing in the room worth appraising.

She knew his face. Everyone on the waterfront knew it, the way you knew the shape of the cranes against the sky. Teodor Casarin. The Casarins owned the warehouses on the north quay, two restaurants, a shipping concern with an innocent name, and — according to the letter her brother had left in a shoebox under his bed — Luca Ferrant, body and soul, to the sum of forty thousand.

“If you’re here about Luca,” she said, and was pleased that her voice held, “he’s dead. You’ll have heard. The funeral was in March. You didn’t send flowers.”

“I sent flowers.” A pause. “White lilies. You gave them to the woman who sweeps the chapel steps.”

Heat climbed her throat. She had done exactly that. She had not known anyone was watching.

“Then you know I don’t have forty thousand. I have a workshop with a leaking roof and a cello that doesn’t want to be a cello.” She set the bridge down very gently, because her hands wanted to throw it. “Whatever he owed you died with him.”

“It did.” Teodor stepped forward into the yellow circle of the work lamp, and she saw that his eyes were not black, as she had assumed from the photographs, but a dark, unsettling grey. “I cancelled it the day he died. That isn’t why I’m here.” He let the rain fill the silence for a moment. “Your brother had a violin. Old, Italian, varnish the colour of dried blood, a crack along the lower bout that someone mended badly a long time ago. He brought it to you in January and asked you to keep it for him.”

Nadia did not look at the back shelf. She did not look at the case wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket behind the tins of rosin. She kept her eyes on his, and something at the corner of his mouth moved — not a smile. Recognition.

“You didn’t look,” he said softly. “Good. Don’t. Not in front of the window. There has been a car parked across the quay since six o’clock, and it doesn’t belong to me.” He said it the way another man might mention the weather. “The people in it aren’t interested in forty thousand. They want what Luca hid inside that instrument, and they think you know what it is.”

“I don’t.”

“I believe you. They won’t.”

The workshop felt suddenly very small. The skylight, the long windows onto the quay that she had always loved because they let the evening fall across her bench — all of it was glass. She thought of Luca at twenty, sprawled on this same bench with his boots up, telling her not to worry, he had a plan. He had always had a plan.

“And you,” she said. “What are you interested in?”

Teodor considered the question as if it deserved honesty, which frightened her more than a lie would have. “At first, the violin,” he said. “Now I’m less sure.” He came a step closer. Not enough to touch; enough that she could smell the rain on his coat and something beneath it, cedar and smoke. He looked at her hands — the glue on her knuckles, the small scar across her thumb from a slipped gouge — then at her mouth, and then, deliberately, away.

“Here is what I’m offering. I walk you home tonight. Tomorrow a man of mine sits outside this door, and you pretend not to notice him. In a week, when I know who is in that car, you give me the violin and I make sure no one ever parks on this quay again. You never see me after that.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then I leave. I’m not going to drag you anywhere, Nadia. That isn’t how this works.” Something harder flickered behind the grey. “But I’ll be across the street in my own car until your lights go out, because I won’t let them in either. You can decide whether that’s a comfort.”

She should have been afraid of him, and some sensible part of her was — the part that had read her brother’s letter three times and burned it in the sink. But another part, older and far less sensible, had noticed that he said her name as though he had been waiting some time to say it. That he had known about the lilies. That for months he had been keeping watch over her from somewhere she couldn’t see. Across the wet black quay, headlights came on. Held. Went out. Teodor didn’t turn around; he had seen them reflected in her eyes. “Your choice,” he said. “But make it soon.”