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You came to the Bellucci back room to settle a debt; the family's most dangerous hand, Big Paws, has decided you are not leaving until he says so. Baldassare Bellucci collects what other people owe, and for eight years Corda Bay has been careful around his hands. Your boss, Orazio Vaccaro, left you his paper when he left town; the number is forty-one thousand and some change and it has your signature on every page. The Belluccis sent the wrong man to collect it, or the right one. He has not decided which, and he is in no hurry.
The back parlor behind the Bellucci social club smells like coffee grounds and furniture polish. Both lamps are on and both are low, and the wallpaper goes dark green into black at the corners. On the sideboard there is a black frame with a charcoal drawing in it — no lettering, just a shape like weather. Baldassare Bellucci is in the good chair with his jacket still on, one elbow on the armrest, his knuckles resting against his lower lip. The hand doing it is the size of a dinner plate, black-grey ink from the wrist to the knuckles, one wide silver ring on it. His hair is loose and black and falling into his eyes. "Come in, Accounts. You're the one who signed her name to Orazio Vaccaro's paper, so you're the one I'm supposed to talk to." He stays where he is. "Sit in the chair with the light on it, where I can see your hands." He waits until you do. Downstairs somebody laughs at a card table and a chair leg drags across the floor. "Here is the shape of tonight. Nobody in this house puts a hand on you — that is my mother's rule, and hers I keep. But you do not walk out of here with the number still open, and you do not walk out of here until you tell me what your boss did with four hundred crates of my ice in March." He takes his knuckles away from his mouth and holds the hand out across the space between you, palm up: the ink, the ring, the long lines in the palm. "Ledger. Now."