by C. D. Reiss
I almost spit my wine. Daniel pressed his lips together so he wouldn’t bust.
She was on a roll, addressing Antonio with a hand cupped as if handing him a golden piece of advice. “My God, you are going to kill someone with that thing one day. This is what I thought.” She put her elbow on the table and wagged her finger at him. “I thought you couldn’t be mafiosi because…” She put her hands up, a foot apart. “But no. Time passed, and you were just like the rest of them.”
She poured wine down her throat and turned to me. “You can have that thing.”
I think I went red. She was imagining me with that beautiful dick, and I felt my barest lust exposed.
“No one woman can keep up with him. He can manage two,” she said.
“Not in America,” Antonio said. “Here, it’s one woman, one man.”
“Sometimes,” Daniel mumbled then leaned back.
She stretched her neck and tilted her head as if bringing her ear closer to Antonio. “Che?”
“Don’t pretend you haven’t heard of it,” Antonio growled.
We’d been through hell together, but this? This was a million times worse.
“Monogamia?” Valentina said with disbelief. “Not for the men in the organization.”
“For this man, it is. I’m sorry, but this cetriolo is for her only.” He took my hand, and though I was proud of that, I also had to shake the feeling that she shouldn’t see any affection between us. “I love her. You waited, I know you waited, until I was the man you wanted me to be. But she took me as I am.”
“A thief and a killer?”
“Alleged,” I said, keenly aware of Daniel’s presence.
She bent her head slightly left then right, left then right, pursing her lips. “We don’t divorce. We aren’t American. I will fight you.”
“I don’t want to fight.”
She huffed as if that was the first time she’d heard him say such a thing. “You won’t make our son a bastard either. I will curse you to hell.”
“I’m going to hell anyway.”
“Can you just fuck her and leave me alone?”
“That’s not up to me. It’s up to Theresa.”
She faced me, full-on, as if expecting me to answer the big questions of her life with a half-eaten manicotti in front of me, my ex on my left, and the love of my life on my right.
“Way to drop it in a girl’s lap,” I said, taking my hand from Antonio’s.
Valentina swooped up the second bottle in one hand and her glass in the other. She came around the table and bent over to whisper, “Let’s go, troia.”
She strode out to the back, ass wagging like a flag, the swinging doors kissing behind her.
“Did she just call me a whore?”
“Worse. Don’t follow her,” Antonio said. “She’s not right in the head when she drinks.”
He started to get up, but I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him down so I could stand. “Stay here and help with the dishes.” I snapped up my glass and went out the back.
twenty-six.
theresa
ia had something going on in the kitchen that smelled like meat. I was still hungry but didn’t pause long enough to ask what was bubbling. Valentina stood in the tiny parking lot, by the dumpster, filling her glass. She had the bottle out to fill me up before I had two feet out the door.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“You’re the one who waited around ten years. What do you want?”
“I want my life back.” She put the bottle on top of a car.
“You gave it up because you didn’t like it.”
“The life before he was consigliere for his father. This one I’m talking about. He was very nice. He was a sweet man.”
Nice. Sweet. Was she talking about someone else? Her eyes were cloudy, and she held on to the edge of the gate to steady herself. Wine was indeed a bad idea.
“Antonio’s a lot of things,” I said. “Sweet isn’t one of them.”
“He used to bring me strawberries, in summer, from the fruit vendor on Via Scotto. So expensive. And beautiful. He took the leaves off and fed them to me.”
I imagined that was true. Of course he’d bring gifts and tributes. It was the sweet part that tripped me up. He must have had the act down pat. He’d wanted this gentle girl and lied to himself to have her.
“He brushed my hair.” She touched it, remembering in a drunken stupor. “Every night. When I had headaches or felt faint, he rubbed my forehead until I fell asleep. If I was tired, he carried me up the steps, and he sang to me. He can’t sing a note, did you know? He’s terrible.”
She smiled to herself and sniffed. She didn’t seem stupid or easily fooled. Valentina was heartbroken and drunk, but I didn’t think Antonio could lie to her about who he was. It was possible that somewhere in that bossy, demanding, vicious man, there was a gentle, sweet husband who brushed his wife’s hair and brought her strawberries.
“I’m sorry, Valentina,” I said. “I think that’s all in the past now.”
She continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “And he changed. I drove him away. I threw him away. I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I dreamed he’d change and I’d go back to him, but I knew it was crazy, and now it’s not so crazy.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “He’s in there.” She poked her chest. “And now I take responsibility. You are young. You seem all right. Maybe you don’t have to be a troia? Maybe you can find your own man? Because I’m going to have my husband again. I waited ten years. I can take as many more as I need.” She raised her finger as if making her point, but when she took her hand off the hood of the car, she wobbled and put her hand back.
“He’s mine.” I spoke as gently as I could. We weren’t going to have a catfight. I had no time for it. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to scratch your eyes out or anything like that, but when you sober up, you need to go home. To Naples.”
“Napoli,” she corrected. “Naaah-poh-lee.”
She let go of the car again, and when I caught her, she pushed me away and put all her weight on me at the same time.
Daniel rushed out from the restaurant. “Jesus, Tink, what’s going on?”
“What do you think? And stop calling me that.”
He got himself under Valentina, and she put her arms around his neck.
“I got a call from Gerry,” he said once he had Valentina properly balanced. “He put together a fundraiser tonight. I have to go prepare.”
“Good luck.”
He squinted in the winter sun, hair dropping in front of his forehead in the way I used to love. Valentina rested her head on his chest.
“Spin says she’s not a puker,” he said.
“So you guys talked.”
He nodded. “I had to tell him I wasn’t fucking his wife. Guy thing.”
“Ah. Well. Good luck tonight. With the fundraiser.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “I think I ran out of juice. Even before that fiasco at the wedding, I lost energy for it. So I don’t know. ”
“You can’t drop out. Ten more weeks.”
He laughed to himself, as if I’d misjudged ten weeks as too long or too short, but I’d somehow misjudged everything.
“I parked in front like a dope,” he said. “I’m walking out of a storefront for an Italian crime family—”
“Tell them you were looking at the books—”
“Practically carrying a camorra capo’s wife.”
“Wife!” Valentina interjected loosely, flopping her arm up before pointing at herself and collapsing.
“You’re finished in this town,” I said to her.
I started away, but Daniel called to me.
“Tink, when we have enough evidence on who shot Paulie, we’re taking him in.” He indicated Antonio with a jerk of his head.
I faced him fully and took all the defensiveness out of my voice. I wasn’t protesting, I was stating a fact. “He didn’t do it.”
> Without waiting for an answer, I went back into the restaurant.
twenty-seven.
antonio
tto and Lorenzo pulled up out front just as Daniel went out the back for the women. He’d told me he wasn’t fucking Valentina, which I could have told him. I wasn’t giving him permission either. He was still on the other side of the line, and I wanted him to stay there. I reserved the right to break his legs over that or anything.
Otto closed the driver’s side door, scanning the street as always. Lorenzo got out of the passenger side. And no one else. They walked away from an empty car.
Could they not find the others? Or were they coming separately? Normally that wouldn’t even give me a second’s pause, but a bit of doubt crept into my head. Something wasn’t right.
Zo came in first. He didn’t make eye contact. Otto came in in the middle of lighting a cigarette. I sat at the bar as Zia came out with a tray of something that steamed.
“How many are coming?” she asked, putting the tray in the center of the table.
“Two more,” I said. No one disagreed.
“The staff will be here in half an hour. So sit!”
Otto and Zo mumbled thanks and sat for lunch. When Zia passed me again, I put my arm around her. I didn’t say a word, just kissed her forehead. She’d been good to me, and I might always be angry at her for hiding Valentina, but I had to forgive her or more than my love for my wife might die. She patted my arm and pushed past the swinging doors.
Otto leaned back in his chair, cigarette between his third and last fingers. Zo sat with his hands folded over his crotch and cleared his throat.
There was a heavy silence I didn’t understand.
“Simone and Enzo?” I asked, sitting.
Zo put his hands out then back down. More silence. A pot banged in the kitchen.
“Come on, Zo!” Otto shouted.
“I can’t say it.”
Otto stamped out his cigarette as if nailing it to the ashtray. Then he clapped twice. “Welcome back!” Otto came at me with both hands out. He planted them on my neck and kissed my cheeks twice. “You look good for a dead guy! Gagliardo!” He patted my shoulder and kissed my cheeks again.
“You kiss me again, you’re going to have to marry me,” I said.
“I have a wife,” Otto replied. “This guy”—he indicated Zo—“he’s single. Give him a kiss, would you?”
“I think Zo fucked me already,” I said. “Where are the others?”
Zo made a noise that was a cross between a groan and an ah. “They ain’t coming.”
“Excuse me?”
“We… uh. The day you was gone, we made a pact with Donna and now… they got families. They don’t want another war.”
“They’re cowards!” Otto shouted, but I didn’t hear him.
There were a million reasons to make peace. Strategies within strategies. It depended on who my people thought had killed me. If they thought it was the Bortolusis, which was what we’d intended, then the allegiance would be to partner against them.
“You made a pact? For what purpose?” I asked.
Zo looked stricken. “Business.”
“I’m glad you didn’t marry that bitch,” Otto said, as if trying to pull solidarity from the jaws of anarchy. “I don’t want to work with the Sicilians. I never liked it. You ever been to Palermo? It’s backward, like they got their own pope. I don’t want to answer to a man I never met. Never shook his hand. Nothing.”
Otto was talking for the sake of talking, because no one was hearing him. It was Lorenzo and me in the room.
“I’m sorry to speak ill,” Otto continued. “But Paulie, he was dangerous. I’m sorry you had to do what you done with him, but I’m glad I don’t gotta worry no more.”
“Lorenzo,” I said, “you didn’t tell me this was your plan.”
He faced me full-on. He wasn’t afraid of me, and that concerned me.
“So?” he said. “This way we didn’t have to avenge you. Because I didn’t want to avenge a guy who wasn’t dead.”
He was right. He could have used my death to start a fight that might have brought him millions if he won. But he’d opted for the path of right and found a way to navigate it. Not bad for a baby don. Not bad at all. Except he hadn’t maintained the loyalty of the crew. Because they were gone, with a bigger love for peace than their own lives.
“They already tried to kill us,” I said. “And the crew, they don’t realize it’s me today, and it’s them tomorrow.” I had a finger up, talking to Zo but seeing Enzo and Simone. “If we were in Napoli, that would be a given. You cannot trust Americans. Cannot. They turn on you the minute there’s a risk. Nothing gets done alone.” I pushed my wine three inches left. Two right. “Americans. All lone guns. Let me tell you something. That fails.”
“I’m with you,” Zo said. “You was dead, but now you’re not and they put a price on your head. It’s changed. But some guys don’t change so fast.”
The wine became offensive to me. Liquid celebration turned bitter by betrayal. I threw it across the room. It hung in the air in a streak of red then splatted everywhere.
Theresa walked in from the kitchen just as the glass landed, and I felt a deep shame at my tantrum. She deserved better. She deserved a man who could solve problems. But my thoughts were like pigeons in the piazza, a sea of cohesive grey scattered to the wind by a running child.
“You got this,” Otto said, seemingly unaffected by my tantrum. “I don’t know how. But as long as we can get close, we can attack. And that gets the price off your head because if you kill her, you run her business.”
That was the last thing I needed. But he’d given me an idea if I could just get my head around the execution.
“No,” I said. “There are too many ways to die.”
Theresa came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder. I slid mine over hers and stayed that way for a second. I was surrounded by treachery, but she was behind me, like a balm.
“You guys eat,” I said. “I have business to attend to.”
twenty-eight.
theresa
hen he took my hand and stood, making eye contact, I melted a little. He cut through the business, the violence, the calculation, and took me to the kitchen. My cognizance of the space his body occupied sharpened like a razor. I was nowhere near his dick, but I was aware of it. My body was aware of it. My nipples hardened as if that could get me that much closer to it.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I am being betrayed.”
“By who?”
“Possibly all of them.”
“What do we do?”
He took my hand, and I let him because I felt no will outside my desire. He led me past Zia scrubbing a pot and greeting the lunch staff, to the office where I’d looked at the restaurant’s books a million years before. The same squares of yellow sticky paper covered the wall, and the same beige computer hissed and hummed. He snapped the door closed and pushed me against the shelf that served as a desk.
“Let me have you,” he growled. “Today. Now. Adesso. I don’t care about anything but your body. I can’t think without it. I’ll get a divorce. An annulment. I’ll murder anyone who comes between us. I’ll promise not to. Anything. But I want you. Please. Call it a fuck of agreement. Call it a fuck for good-bye. Call it a che sera, serà. I don’t care. But don’t tell me I’m married to someone else. There is no one else.”
I didn’t want to believe him, because everything about what he was saying was wrong. But I did believe him. From the soaking arousal between my legs to the tips of my toes, from basest parts of my lizard brain to the intellect in my frontal cortex, I believed him.
I didn’t believe the world would cooperate, but I didn’t want the world inside me. I wanted him. His… what had Valentina called it?
“What does cetriolo mean?” I asked quietly.
His mouth twitched on one side as if he was trying not to smile. “You call it…” He cleared hi
s throat and rubbed his eye as if he were so embarrassed he couldn’t even see straight. “A cucumber.”
“No, that’s not what I call it at all.” I spoke only in breath, my eyes on his luscious mouth. Those lips. On me. On my neck. On my body. My resistance slid away, lubricated by Valentina’s dismissal and the shape of Antonio’s mouth.
With a tilt of his head and a tsk of his tongue hitting the roof of his mouth, he had me.
“She doesn’t seem to care if you fuck me,” I said.
“She said that?”
“More or less. She seems to want every part of you but your eggplant.”
His eyes lit up, and his mouth tightened in a smile. I’d given him as good as a “yes.”
“It comes with the set,” he said into my neck.
“Give it to me. The whole package.”
I kissed him, pushing my body up against his. We wrapped our arms around each other, and pressed together, the outline of his erection was tight against me. He pulled back, and I drank in the lines of his face, the texture of stubble on his cheeks, the espresso of his eyes. Our lips came together again in an explosion of shared desire.
He pulled my shirt and bra over my breasts in one move, releasing them. “I missed these,” he said, squeezing a nipple. “You are magnifico.”
I groaned his name when he took my breast in his mouth. “I won’t let you go,” I said in a gasp. “I know I said I would, but I can’t. I’m so confused.” He sucked the nipple hard, and my last word came out as a squeak.
“I’m not.” He opened my pants. “Fucking is very simple.”
I was going to do this. I was going to break my promise to myself into a thousand pieces.
“Your body is mine.” He kneeled in front of me, kissing my belly and the triangle where my legs met, slipping my pants down as he went. “I’m going to do what I want with it. Trust that I want what’s right for it.”