by Karen Dodd
“What about the authorities hounding you?” Nico was particularly worried about the police telling Mrs. Rapa that it was her text that had tipped off Baldisar’s goons before they ran her daughter off the road.
“After your notoriety at the warehouse, they seem to have backed off,” Giorgio said. “They even found Caesar and took him to the vet until I could get back there.”
Nico wasn’t sure which he was more excited about: that Giorgio’s beloved dog had survived, or that its master was determined to rebuild the bar.
“Speaking of dogs,” Nico said. “I’m wondering if I can make arrangements to have Gabriela sent over to you. She was Lydia’s, and therefore yours.”
“What, you don’t like her?” Giorgio asked.
“Well, I . . . um . . . of course I do, but—”
“You know, my friend, God has given you a second chance. You shouldn’t waste it.”
Nico had no earthly idea what he meant. “Sorry?”
“You lost Ariana, but you have the son you both created.”
“What does that have to do with Gabriela?”
“Open your eyes, my friend! What do you think every little boy dreams of having?”
Nico scratched his head. “A dog? But she was your sister’s. You should have her.”
“Be a hero to your little boy, Nico. Keep the dog. Lydia would have wanted it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she loved little Max.” Giorgio winked and let out a hearty laugh. “And she knew Caesar would cheerfully eat Gabriela for breakfast.”
* * *
Before Nico left Malta, he had one more thing to do. All too often, when prosecuting organized crime, he had convinced himself that the end justified the means. Many times, he’d let one slightly less evil monster go in the hopes they would lead the authorities to the bigger rathole from which they came. Trouble was, even when the strategy worked and they flushed the vermin from their hiding places, Nico found himself pleading a case before a judge who was on the Mafia’s payroll. It had become a zero-sum game.
Now, in this final act before he left Malta, he faced an excruciating decision. Baldisar, for all intents and purposes, was a vegetable. Nico could say the word, and he’d be sentenced to life in a federal prison’s rehab facility for whatever time he might have left. Or they could release him to his family—if they would have him after all he’d subjected them to—who would have to feed him and change his diapers, perhaps for years to come. He would never walk again, or even wipe the drool from his own mouth. Now an empty shell, he was incapable of grasping what he had done. He was responsible for Ariana’s and Lydia Rapa’s murder, Francesca’s abduction, and Esme Agius’s death after it was determined that one of his henchmen had killed her over fears she could identify him.
Elle would remain in a UK prison for years to come for her role in Max’s disappearance. By refusing to tell authorities where he was, she’d earned herself a longer sentence. Though still shattered by her true colors, Nico couldn’t help but be glad about that.
On the other side of the ledger, Max had been born out of a night of romance with Ariana almost six years ago. While they’d occasionally been intimate after that, he’d long since come to terms with the impossibility of ever having a permanent relationship. They’d remained close whenever she came to Tropea, but he couldn’t let himself fall for her all over again. While he’d accused her of having frozen him out, he realized he’d done the same by keeping her at arm’s length emotionally. Even she had said he should get out and date other women. He’d tried a few times, but as a friend once pointedly said, how could any woman compete with the torch he carried for Ariana?
Max was safe. He adored Francesca, and he was young enough to eventually move past his mother’s death—even if Nico wondered if he, himself, ever could. Nothing would bring Ariana back, but he’d always have a part of her. If indeed he’d lost his soul, as she’d accused him of the night before she died, he’d been handed it back when he learned he was Max’s father. He now had that lifelong commitment he’d so desperately wanted. With his and Ariana’s son.
And so, when called by the nurse, he rose from his seat in the hospital waiting room. With sweating hands, he smoothed the creases of his trousers. For most of the previous night and this morning, he’d been asking himself what if? What if the tables were turned and Alesandru Baldisar had to decide Nico’s fate? What decision would he make? But he knew in his heart that the old Baldisar would have believed in that zero-sum game. Everything he did, every relationship, had proven to be transactional—quid pro quo. There would have been no other choice for him. He didn’t know any other way.
As Nico followed the nurse down the hall and past the guard posted outside Baldisar’s room, he wondered, what would Ariana have wanted him to do? How would she have responded if she had been the one to hold the fate of this evil man in her hands? He remembered Francesca’s comment about Ariana, word for word: “She was unrelenting. She took no prisoners. Her sense of right and wrong was polemic; it overrode everything.”
That left him very little wiggle room. He took a deep breath as the nurse pushed open the door to Baldisar’s room. What struck Nico first, before he even focused on the figure in the bed that was attached to tubes and monitors, was the austerity of the room. Although Baldisar had been there for a week, there were no flowers. No cards lined the windowsill. No hand-drawn pictures, like the ones Max made for Nico, were taped to the wall. Where had all the people gone that had constantly surrounded this formerly prestigious banker?
“Is he conscious?” Nico asked the nurse as she turned to leave.
“Do you mean, can he hear you?” She shook her head. “He is in what we call a persistent vegetative state.” She stood in the doorway. “Unless you need anything else, I have rounds to make. Let the nursing station know if you need assistance.”
A ventilator breathed for Baldisar and a massive gauze bandage was wrapped around his head. Nico had been told that the surgeons didn’t try to remove the bullet; digging around in his brain to get to it would cause further harm. Instead, they had tried to reduce as much of the damage as possible. They’d temporarily removed a portion of Baldisar’s skull to accommodate the swelling. Nico couldn’t help but think of the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, where Hannibal Lecter felt he had to eat Will’s brain in order to forgive him.
Was there anything that would allow Nico to forgive Baldisar for what he’d done? Even without absolute proof that he’d been responsible for Ariana’s murder—as well as the other four victims that had died that day—he’d taken Mrs. Cilia’s granddaughter, Esme, from her. He’d ended Lydia Rapa’s life and taken her from her mother and brother as surely as if he’d driven her off the road himself. Being the coward that he was, he’d failed miserably at taking his own life in order to escape the consequences of his malevolence. And now, here he lay.
The hospital’s neurosurgeon had told Nico that Baldisar would likely remain like that for six months before succumbing to his injuries. Alternatively, it was possible he could live as long as two to five years before an infection would cause severe organ damage leading to death. In the meantime, he would have no quality of life. He’d lost his family. All the horrific things he’d done to others would go unpunished. Their loved ones would never be able to mete out the retribution they so richly deserved.
But weren’t the consequences Baldisar was now facing the ultimate retribution? Who among us would not choose life in prison over existing like this, possibly for years? Some would say he’d gotten off scot-free. Others would say he’d paid the ultimate price.
What would you do, Ariana?
A tiny bird landed on the sill outside the window. It was turquoise, pearlescent. As it hopped closer to the glass, Nico noticed it only had one leg. The bird cocked its head and seemed to look directly at him.
You are a good and kind man. You love unconditionally and are loyal to a fault. You will always do the right thing.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The guard posted outside Baldisar’s room bid Italy’s special prosecutor Nico Moretti good night and watched him sign out. Moretti walked purposefully to the elevator and stabbed the button once, then again, as if for good measure. There seemed to be a different air about him than when he went in.
The guard watched the elevator doors close behind him, all the while scanning both ends of the corridor. He’d memorized the shift changes that were as predictable as a fine-tuned Swiss clock.
In exactly two-and-a-half minutes, the pretty nurse would arrive to give Baldisar his last medication for the night.
On schedule, she appeared in the hallway and walked toward him. She had parked her meds cart outside the door before she looked up with a note of surprise in her eyes. “Oh, hello. You’re not Matthias . . .” Her cheeks grew pink. “I mean, Officer Vella.”
“Good evening,” the guard replied. “No, he called in sick.” That wasn’t strictly true, but the fact that the officer lay dead at the bottom of a nearby dumpster qualified him as being a little under the weather. “I’m his replacement.”
She shook her head. “I hope he hasn’t caught the flu. It’s a nasty one this year.” She put a hand on Baldisar’s door, ready to push it open.
“The man that was just here visiting,” he said, holding up a leather wallet. “This must have dropped from his pocket as he got on the elevator.”
“Oh, dear. Do you think you might still catch him?”
“I’m not allowed to leave my post.” He smiled at her warmly. “Would you mind? He’s probably still in the lobby.”
She hesitated a moment and looked at her watch. “Well, it’s not like our patient’s going anywhere, is he?” With a giggle, she took the wallet from him.
After watching the elevator doors slide closed behind her, he pulled a syringe from his breast pocket and swapped it for the identical one she’d left on the cart. Then he poured himself a steaming cup of coffee from his thermos and sat down to wait.
There was a ding as the elevator doors opened. “He said to thank you, but it isn’t his,” the nurse said, handing him the wallet. “Would you mind taking it to the nurses’ station when you change shifts?” She lifted the med tray off the cart and pushed open the door. “I’d better get in there and give our patient his meds.”
The medication wouldn’t even need to snake its way through Baldisar’s veins. The pinprick it took to break the skin would be more than adequate. Thirty seconds later, his useless, disgusting body would convulse uncontrollably, and he would die from cardiac arrest. Or perhaps he would suffocate, drowning in his own fluids as they filled his lungs. Either way, the job would be done.
He felt bad, though. He would have liked to have seen the nurse again.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Tropea, Italy
Nico leaned on the fence and watched Max playing on the lawn of their new home in the hills above Tropea. Max’s high-pitched squeals and Francesca’s easy laughter lightened the heavy afternoon sky. While still on Gozo, Francesca had offered to sign over guardianship to Nico before he’d even broached the subject. The day, she later told him, she knew he would take Max from her.
“I love Max as if he were my own,” she had said with tears in her eyes, “but you are his rightful father. He belongs with you. And it’s what Ariana would have wanted.”
Inspector Mifsud hadn’t known the results of the paternity test Nico had requested when he’d driven him to the ferry. He’d told Nico later that even if by some slim chance Max wasn’t his, he’d wanted Nico to discover his feelings for the little boy for himself.
“One doesn’t have to be a biological parent to love a child,” he’d said, before telling Nico all three of his girls were adopted. “I couldn’t possibly love them any more than if I were their biological father.”
After closing up Ariana’s house for the summer, Nico had prepared to head back to Tropea with Max, and Francesca had been packing her things to return to her apartment in Valletta. But, he would never forget her expression when he’d suggested she come with them to look after Max and pursue her dream of writing children’s books. He would need to look for a proper house, rather than the apartment he’d been renting since taking the job as Tropea’s special prosecutor. Not wanting to pressure her, he’d suggested they look for something with separate quarters for her, but on the same property. Soon, Max would start school and she would have much of the day to herself.
“You mean nanny’s quarters,” she’d said with some hesitancy.
“A writer’s studio,” Nico had replied. “A place of your own, but where you can be with Max whenever you want to.”
So, together, they’d found a recently restored farmhouse, not unlike Ariana’s, in the hills above Tropea. It was close enough for Nico to easily commute to work and close to where Max would go to school. The guesthouse where Francesca lived, and had begun to write, was on the other side of a small cement swimming pool where they would often share their meals alfresco. Gabriela had decided that Nico was old news and now followed Max everywhere.
It was the smoothest transition Nico could have hoped for. While Max had his moments of tears and asked about his mother and where her soul had gone, he was remarkably well-adjusted. Nico gave Francesca 100 percent of the credit for that. Together, they’d made a pact that they would always be honest with Max, even if it just meant one of them holding him close and telling him they didn’t know all the answers.
Nico had arranged for a small private service for Ariana in the church she attended when she was in Tropea. Afterward, they all came back to the house for lunch. Having returned from Istanbul, Vincenzo Testa was there with his wife and new baby. Giorgio had come all the way from Gozo, which touched Nico deeply. Caesar had survived being shot at, and while he had lost part of his hip to the infection that went untreated until someone found him, Giorgio beamed when he’d shown Nico a picture of him. Mrs. Rapa had been invited, as had Mikel Mifsud. She was frail and sent her regrets. Mikel had to pass as well, but he sent along a huge package of toys for “Maximillion,” as he called him. He thought Massimo sounded too serious for a little boy. Nico didn’t tell him Ariana had named him that as a nod to their son’s half-Italian heritage.
Sergio had been at the Lamezia Terme Airport to pick up the three of them and Gabriela on the day they flew home. After Nico got over his shock of his assistant prosecutor coming on his time off to welcome them home, he met, for the first time, his little girl. The one who Nico hadn’t even known how old she was. It turned out his daughter was exactly the same age as Max and they would be in the same school together. His wife, Martina, was lovely and taught German in the village.
Roberto Pezzente was the enigma. As Nico had told Mifsud on the way to the ferry, he assumed the next time he crossed paths with the investigator would be in a legal capacity. But unknown to Nico, he’d been sitting at the back of the church during the service. It wasn’t until the small group of guests had filed out that Nico noticed a lone figure partially obscured in the darkness.
“Roberto?” Nico asked, uncertain if it was even him.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude,” Pezzente said awkwardly. “I… I just wanted to pay my respects. I knew Ariana. Personally.”
Nico swallowed, unsure he wanted to hear more.
“When my wife and daughters died, she came here to their service.”
Ariana had known Pezzente’s family? She would have been in Milan at university then.
“Her uncle—her father’s brother—was in the ’Ndrangheta,” Pezzente said. “He ordered the murder of my family.”
The floor threatened to give way under Nico’s feet. After believing Ariana’s parents had died in an accident, Ariana had eventually told him that her father had killed her mother and then turned the gun on himself. She was devastated. It was after that, that he understood the change he saw in her when she returned briefly to Milan. But if her uncle had been involved with
the Mafia… poor Ariana. She’d carried that burden all by herself.
Pezzente cleared his throat, bringing Nico out of his revelry. “Without Ariana’s knowledge, I always assigned a member of my team to surveil her whenever she came to Tropea. For her safety.”
Nico had always worried more than usual about Ariana whenever she worked any case that involved the ’Ndrangheta. But had he known this, he would have outright stopped her. Not that she would have listened.
“On her last visit, none of my people were available. I was across the street that day when the bomb went off.”
The tall individual Nico had seen getting into a car outside the restaurant.
In shock, he sat down heavily beside Pezzente.
“At the cemetery, after the service, she came up to me and apologized for her family. She swore to me that one day she would see that her uncle and his cohorts would be brought to justice.
“She made good on her promise,” Pezzente said. “Through you.”
Nico shook his head, not understanding. “Me?”
“Yes, you successfully prosecuted him, but he never did a day in prison. He was killed in a drive-by shooting while out on bail made possible by a corrupt judge.”
Oh my God! Nico remembered the case. But he’d never put two and two together. That’s why Ariana was so angry with him when he didn’t try to get his most recent case retried by an honest judge.
Pezzente rose to leave. “It was a beautiful service you had for her. Quiet, intimate, with no fanfare. That’s how Ariana would have wanted it. I’m sorry to have intruded.”
Nico saw Francesca peering into the entrance of the church, looking for him, as Pezzente turned to walk out.
“Roberto,” he called after him. “We’re having a few people up to the house for lunch. I’d be honored if you’d come.”
* * *