Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3)

by C. D. Reiss

  thirty-three.

  theresa

  e ate like kings and queens, princes and princesses. I didn’t taste any of it. I was memorizing Leanne’s slovenly ponytail, Sheila’s lilting singsong, Margie’s clipped wit, Deirdre’s errant curl and sober scowl. Jonathan said nothing of importance, deftly avoiding any meaningful, personal subject matter as if he were in some sort of pain he didn’t want discussed over dinner. I wanted to corner him and ask what was happening. But then he told some joke and got a witty rejoinder from Margie. He laughed. I smiled at my brother and wondered how I would make it through the rest of my life without hearing his laugh.

  Antonio put his hand on my knee and squeezed it. I put mine on top of his, and we looked at each other. I felt a third hand on my knee. It was smaller, softer, and slick with grease.

  “I wanna hold, too!” I peeked under the tablecloth. It was Kalle. She had a turkey leg in her hand and poultry bits all over the front of her sequined dress. She had a lump of Play-Doh in the other hand. It smelled of dry bread dough.

  “Can you wash your hands first?”

  “No! I don’t like to wash my hands!” She left a big stinker of a three-year-old’s handprint on Antonio’s pant leg.

  For some reason, when she giggled at the shape of the grease stain, a lump rose in my throat. I smiled through it and excused myself. I got myself together in the bathroom. I had to choose between my family and Antonio, and I loved this family, at least my siblings, but I didn’t want to be without my Capo. Not for a month or a year. Too much of my life had ticked away while I’d been doing things that made me unhappy. I’d settled for the wrong choices, followed the wrong people, and betrayed myself for too long. I was doing what I wanted, no matter how much it hurt.

  Sheila was waiting for me on the way out.

  “Theresa? Are you all right?” Her lilt, as if she spoke to a hurt child, would have driven anyone else crazy. It might have had that effect on me, but at that moment, I needed it.

  “This guy? He’s not hurting your feelings is he? Because I’ll be happy to rip his spine out.” Even when making death threats, her voice was gentle as a lullaby.

  “Him? No. He makes me very happy. I think I’m just tired, and I had too much wine.”

  I hugged her tightly. I couldn’t let it go too long. I couldn’t cry on her shoulder. If I did, she’d know something was wrong. But in my mind, I said goodbye to her and to all of them.

  Antonio didn’t ask me anything until the car ride back.

  “Do you need to back out?” he asked. “I won’t mind. I’ll understand.”

  I ignored him. I knew I could back out. “Are you supposed to propose to this girl or something?”

  He pressed his lips together as if he didn’t want to answer. I waited.

  “After the Bortolusi-Lei wedding.”

  “How soon after?”

  “Very soon. There’s all kinds of formalities. I have to ask Donna Maria first, then have chaperoned visits… and on and on. But they won’t suffer the power imbalance too long.”

  “I think we should die at the wedding,” I said. “I think everyone should see it. I mean there are easier ways, for sure, but they’ll be questioned.”

  “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

  “We don’t need to just die,” I said. “We need to be obliterated. Let me finish working it out, but I think the wedding is the place to do it.”

  He nodded, as if understanding the gravity of what I was saying. As if he saw me shaking, he said nothing more on the drive to the little Spanish house.

  I had given no thought to death, unless I wanted to be paralyzed with fear. I was afraid of neither pain nor hell, but death? Death crippled me.

  It was the thought of nonexistence that took my breath away. The idea—and it was only an idea—that we ceased completely was no comfort. I felt only terror, because I wondered what my life had been in the first place if my consciousness could be so utterly snuffed. And in those moments that I allowed myself to feel, and thus fear, my nonexistence, the shattering vulnerability of my corporeal self overtook me until my skin crawled at the thought.

  Was my consciousness made of carbon and electrical impulses? And was I more than that consciousness, or less? Contemplating death made me question life. Consciousness was all that I valued, and if I ceased to think when I fell into that infinite sleep, what exactly was the living me?

  I would go with him into death, into that deepest of vacuums. But our death would be special, a birth into a new life together. Everyone else had to go into blackness alone, to hold up the earth or to fuel a fire.

  We just hadn’t worked out how exactly we would die. And then, in the middle of the night, it came to me.

  “Antonio,” I whispered, turning and finding his eyes already open.

  “Yes?”

  I caressed his cheek with the backs of my fingers, and he kissed them.

  “Fire and tunnels.”

  The answer was fire; that had never been in question. But there was always the matter of an escape route, and it came to me on the drive home on Thanksgiving.

  The tunnels under the carriage house were part of a ten-acre system under downtown, built inside basements for deliveries, initially, then for drunken escapes from the underground speakeasies in the 1920s. Each block had it’s own network of basements and tunnels, and, in the case of the Gate Club, there were only two ways to get off the city block. The first was down the grate and across Gate Avenue to an unused trapdoor in a driveway; the second was the speakeasy way, through the carriage house, across Ludwig Street and into a residential basement.

  The grate was in a small parking lot. We couldn’t use it without being seen going down it, so that option was out. The carriage house had no cameras to protect the privacy of important people, and the walls were thick for the same reason. It was perfect.

  “You drew this?” Antonio said when I handed him the map. He was freshly showered. His lashes looked darker and thicker, like black-widow legs.

  “I wanted to get it right.”

  “You really do need a life.”

  I swatted him. “Basta.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me, and I pointed to the map. “Okay, this is the layout. As I remember it, the tunnels went from the carriage house, across Ludwig, into the gingerbread house. It’s really long, but if we run...”

  “And you want to blow up the house?” He said it as if it were a possibility, but it sounded absurd to my ears.

  “Yes,” I said, embracing the absurdity. I picked up a red marker and drew on the map.

  “Here to here. Done. The service tunnel is straight because they used it for deliveries.”

  “But there’s another way?” he asked.

  “Yes, but it’s not connected to the house. There’s a grate here. I don’t know how we’d get to it without being seen.”

  He took the map from me, and the red pen, and drew his own lines, at one point plucking his own black pen from his pocket for an accompaniment. I loved watching him work, the concentration. I wanted to work with him, to see that part of him all the time.

  “This is how it’s going to go,” he said. “According to you and your brother, there’s a tunnel across Gate, not connected, and a grate we can’t get to. But we can.”

  “How?” I asked. “The grate’s right there. You can even see if from the ballroom if you just look through the trees.”

  He winked at me. “You check out the way across Ludwig, and I’ll see what I can do about the short way.”

  thirty-four.

  theresa

  could go look at the carriage house, under the pretense of planning a stay there at some point after the Bortolusi wedding. I could even put a deposit on the place, as if I were expecting to be alive to throw an actual party on the grounds. But that would be a paper trail. It would be known that I went to look at the carriage house weeks before the wedding that was the scene of my death. And Daniel was blindly ambitious and emotionally void, but
he was not stupid.

  So, I had to look at the other side, and that was where I got lucky. The gingerbread house across Ludwig Street was for sale. It sat in a tiny residential enclave in the middle of downtown, protected by a Historic Overlay Zone.

  A two-foot-high plastic A-frame sign sat by the streetlight, with the address written in chalk under the words "Open House!" Three white balloons had been tied to the corner with blue grosgrain ribbon. The breeze had twisted the ribbons into a stiff braid by the time I got there. I parked on the corner and walked as if I wanted to check out the block.

  The houses sat close together. None were the same; none held to a stylistic similarity. The gingerbread house was the only one of its kind for miles around, with swooping peaks and dormers, shingles that curved over the edge of the roof, and a red door. Grey stone covered everything from the porch floor to the path leading to it. The windows were small, plentiful, and painted blue at the crosspieces.

  The house had been staged in period-appropriate furnishings, except the kitchen, which had been redone in glass tile and stainless, probably to raise the sale price. Couples milled about, looking in closets and trying to find reasons to buy or not. They made notes and whispered, talking to each other about the real-estate market and its pattern of booms and busts. I smiled noncommittally at everyone and drifted between rooms. I opened the cabinet under the sink. It was filled with cardboard boxes. Whoever lived there hadn’t moved out all the way yet.

  “Hi there!” I turned, taking my hands off the knob as if I’d been caught peeking in a friend’s medicine cabinet. In the doorway stood a woman with cornrows and a white smile, clutching a clipboard to her chest. “I’m Wendy! Did you sign in?”

  “No.” I smiled back. I intended to neither sign in nor explain why.

  “Were you interested in the neighborhood, or gingerbread in general? Because we have another one in West Adams.”

  “Is it in the overlay?”

  “It is.”

  “And the renovations here,” I indicated the kitchen. “Approved by the historic district?”

  “All the modernization by the previous owners was approved.” Her smile hid something.

  “And before that?”

  “If you were planning to do any remodeling to the basement, there are some adjustments you’d need to make. We have a very rare basement in this house. It was modernized without approval ten years ago.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “Us too,” said a man who had been taking down the model number of the microwave.

  Wendy perked up. She led us down a narrow stairway that twisted in the middle, down to a media room with industrial carpeting, leather couches, and a screen that took up the entire space. One window set high in the wall looked out onto Ludwig Street. I touched the wall under it.

  “This is a fully functioning media center, but as you know…” She nattered on about Historic Preservation Overlay Zones and districts, the rules that had to be abided, how her agency would help buyers navigate the process, and why the media room was still a great addition.

  But I was thinking about tumbling into that same basement through the trapdoor, stinking of old dirt and Fiona’s cigarettes, falling face to face with an oil-heater tank. The basement back then had been dark as hell, with the only light coming from the moon through the street-level windows. I’d navigated piles of fabrics teeming from boxes, an old gas grill, and a plastic Christmas tree with light strings still on it.

  I lost myself in the memory of that near-illegal thing, running my hand over the wall where the oil tank had been set. It could have been defined as breaking and entering, maybe. I hadn’t been elated or paralyzed, but had entered a zone where my senses tingled, and I focused on one thing only: getting out. I calculated the time, the distance back across the street, the likelihood everyone upstairs was asleep. I checked out the window to see if the car was in the drive and wondered if I could climb through it without looking like a burglar.

  That had been the only time I’d crossed the length of the tunnel to the house on the other side, and the gritty trip back to the club had been uneventful. But I poked the memory to see what had changed, and just about everything had.

  I looked at the one remaining window then down. The wall beneath it was solid, and cool to the touch, as if stone through and through. The panel to the carriage house tunnel had been bricked over. The tunnel out was a dead end, literally and figuratively.

  We’d have to figure something else out. The tunnel was blocked, and we couldn’t use the grate exit.

  —Where are you?—

  I didn’t know if I’d ever get used to Antonio just demanding my location, but knowing we were in a special circumstance, I tamped down the offense and went outside to call him.

  “I’m looking at a house,” I said. He’d know what I meant.

  In the background, I heard sirens and men shouting.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “What are the sirens?” It wasn’t unusual to hear sirens in the background when someone called from outside, but they’d never caused my chest to tighten and my breath to shorten before.

  “Don’t get in your car. Otto will come for you.”

  I didn’t ask. He wouldn’t tell me over the phone.

  As if he’d been nearby the whole time, Otto showed up ten minutes later with a half-eaten sandwich in his lap.

  “Hey, Miss Drazen. You have the beemer?” He opened the door for me.

  “It’s down the block. What happened?”

  “The blue Mas is gone. Pieces of it are still falling outta the sky.”

  “What?”

  “Car bomb.”

  “Is he all right?” I asked, even though I knew he must have been, or he wouldn’t have called.

  “Everyone’s fine. Spin caught a bit of shrapnel in the leg. The thing went off when he unlocked it. I’m telling you, that shop has taken a beating. They gotta start over.”

  “Who did it?”

  “We got our ideas.” He said no more.

  thirty-five.

  antonio

  never saw the bomb that went off in Napoli, the one that had my wife declared dead. It had been a column of smoke over the mountains. Then, when Zo met me halfway down the mountain to tell me what had happened, I didn’t breathe until I saw the circle of black and the carcass of the car.

  The bomb in Los Angeles was so different I didn’t make the connection right away.

  The shop had just come back to life and was populated with men hauling wood, wielding nail guns, and shouting to each other. They’d gone to the Korean pizzeria for lunch, leaving tools behind and work undone, but the garage had been reframed already.

  When I unlocked the Mas as I was heading toward it, my mind was on Theresa and how she’d fare without her family. I doubted she’d make it, yet I had to believe she would. I was thinking I needed to choose whether to believe she could stay by her word or to doubt her when the car hopped as if animated. The motion was barely visible, and the tires never left the earth, but only became more circular at the bottom, losing the weight that flattened them to the ground.

  I only had time to kiss the ground, as if I’d kicked my own legs from under me. The sound deafened me, blasting the top of my head, velocity of the air pushing me back an inch or more, and a rain of glass followed for the next sixty seconds.

  I spent that entire minute convincing myself to breathe, because I’d never been that close to a car bomb.

  My life was getting simpler and simpler. I was being pushed through my options one by one until I had none left. Seemingly all at once, I’d gone from having a few enemies and a couple of soured relationships to being a target.

  The forensics unit was in the process of clearing every scrap of glass and metal; every speck of carbon and dust went into a bag. I was treated like a criminal, not like a victim, even when I sat outside the back of an ambulance. I was questioned for an hour about my whereabouts
that morning (Zia Giovanna’s, which was verified) as if I’d blown up my car for the insurance money. Once they realized who I was, the tone of the questioning changed. My shop was cordoned off with yellow tape, and the contractors were questioned. I knew they’d walk away untroubled and come back the next day. They were my men. If they weren’t trustworthy, they wouldn’t work for me.

  I went through the questioning before an EMT saw the blood on my trouser leg and pulled me into the ambulance, sitting me down as if I couldn’t do it myself. She was insightful and gentle, with a straight brown ponytail I might have taken a try at pulling in the past.

  “What kind of car was it?” she asked while she cut my pant leg, her plastic gloves wrinkling at the knuckles.

  “A Maserati Gran Turismo.”

  “This year’s?” She spread the pant leg open. A piece of metal was lodged in the muscle of my calf.

  “Last year’s. I liked it too much to get a new one.”

  “Nostalgia. I get it. This is going to hurt, Mr. Spinelli.” She squirted the wound with a blue liquid that stung nicely. But I knew that wasn’t what she was talking about.

  “This your shop?” She didn’t look me in the eye. She was pretty, even as she held onto the metal with a pair of sterile pliers. Carefully, she pulled the metal out of the muscle. It did indeed hurt.

  “Yeah. Past five years or so.”

  “Looks like it’s taken a beating.”

  “Rough month,” I said. She pulled out the last of it, holding it up for me to see.

  “The car was blue, huh?”

  “Custom paint.”

  She plunked the metal into a tray. “Nice.” She squirted the green liquid to clean the wound. It wasn’t that bad. The expectation of pain was always worse than the actual thing.

  “Looks pretty good,” she said, peeling the skin away, looking for debris, and squeezing her liquid in the crevices. “I can take you to the hospital if you’re worried about scarring.”