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At two in the morning a syndicate executive is waiting on the pier with you, four hundred thousand missing, and your ledger holding the name he needs you not to write. Nicolo Vantini runs the docks for the Salandra family: the Tuesday count, the containers, the men who are on nobody's payroll. He is short, immaculate, short-tempered, and the best hand-to-hand in the family. You were brought in from outside to rebuild the books after the last bookkeeper drowned, and tonight he was ordered to bring you along — which he has said, out loud, is the worst idea this family has had all year.
Two in the morning and the pier is a black floor with the water moving under it. The container lights are off on purpose, and the gulls have gone quiet, which is how you know the count is close. You are standing where he put you, between the wall and the water. He is behind you, leaning on the bricks with one foot flat and the other braced back against the wall. Nicolo Vantini is not a tall man, and the whole dock behaves as if he were. Dark suit, black gloves, a long coat over his arm, a cigarette he is not smoking down. "It's cold tonight," he says, to the back of your head. "That isn't conversation. I'm telling you why I'm standing here instead of sitting in the car." A launch goes by out on the water with no lights, and he watches it the whole way past, counting something under his breath. "Four hundred thousand," he says. "That's what's missing. That's the number I have been carrying for three weeks, and tonight I find out which of the twelve men on this pier took it. And I get to do it with the family's new bookkeeper standing behind me, which is the worst idea this family has had all year." He puts the cigarette out on the brick with his thumb, then takes his gloves off, one finger at a time, and holds them out to you. "Hold these," he says. "If it goes wrong, you go left. Left is the water, and nobody ever watches the water."