by CD Reiss
But my men were dead, replaced by Damiano’s, waving me through the blockade without making eye contact, and closing ranks behind. We were locked into that street before we knew what was happening. Armando was shot, and I had a gun to my head.
I could fight, but I’d lose. That was a deal I was ready to accept.
“I want you to know,” Damiano said, “I don’t need you. I’m happy to kill you. And this time, I’m not going to marry Violetta before I fuck her.”
That was how I got here. Surrender. Hands up. Let me live for the chance to protect my wife. They taped my ankles and wrists together. Threw me down a flight of stairs. But I had hope I could protect her.
This time, by turning my back on her, I’ve done the right thing. She is safe behind a gate for a little longer.
“You’ve done so much for me,” Gia’s voice says on the opposite side of consciousness. “So can you wake up, please? So I can do something for you?”
She’s shaking me and spraying my face with water from an old Windex bottle. I cough, snorting soap.
“Okay, good. Hi!” She sits cross-legged on the concrete. “You okay? Your face looks kind of messed up. I mean, maybe it’s not so bad under the blood?”
“I’m fine.”
“Cool, okay, so listen. You need to tell Dami where the crown is before he goes up there to get it. Because if he has to—”
“I told you. I don’t know.”
“Well, it wasn’t at the lawyer’s. Not in the vault or any of the safes they had. And let me tell you, we looked.”
“Did anyone sign it out?”
She clears her throat, inspecting her fingernails, then shrugs like a teen. “That book got burned up.”
“Cristo Santo. Gia. Listen to me. You can’t be this stupid.”
“I am not stupid!”
“Good,” I say. “Because the stupid ones get themselves killed.”
“I don’t want them to hurt you anymore, Santi. I am so sad. I miss Tavie. I miss how we were. How you took care of me always like a big brother. I don’t like this, and I don’t know what to do. Please. I’m begging you. Before he hurts her.”
“Then I’ll kill him the way I killed your father.”
She shrieks, and the high-pitched wail goes on for hours.
“Dov’e?” a man’s voice asks a thousand years later, before another punch lands on my jaw.
I don’t even try to guess his name. Everything is mixed up. Time is optional. This is a blessing. I don’t know how long Violetta’s been without me, worrying. I don’t know if she’s been able to do something brave that’s going to get her killed.
“Ce l’avete voi.” I tell them they have the crown, but that doesn’t make it true. My brain is scrambling time. Obviously, they don’t have it, or they wouldn’t ask.
“If I had it,” Damiano’s voice breaks through the haze, “you’d be dead.”
A chill shocks my skin and settles in my bones. I’m drenched in winter cold. My clothes and hair are soaked through. Carlo Tabona stands over me with an empty bucket. An ice cube rocks on the bottom corner, and his face—the black moustache and low forehead under a deep widow’s peak—snarls down at me.
“Welcome back to America,” I say to him. “I still have to kill you for Elio.”
He slaps me across the face because I’m duct taped to a fucking chair, and I can’t do anything about it.
“That’s for chasing me all the way to the other side,” he says, then hits the other cheek so hard I see stars. “And that’s for the money.”
Goffredo Tabona paid for his nephew’s life in cash. But really, once Carlo was in Napoli, he was out of my territory. The money came with a promise the kid would never return.
“You know what I had to do to pay it back?” Carlo asks.
“Get fucked in the ass by all your dead bastard ancestors?”
He’s about to hit me again, but Damiano stops him.
Carlo tosses the bucket on a tool bench and throws himself onto a mustard couch so old, the first woman to get pregnant on it is probably a grandmother by now. An ice cube settles into the space between my waistband and my spine.
Dami straddles a metal folding chair, forearms resting on the back, thick hands drooping in front. The white part of his wounded eye is blood-filled in one corner.
“Gia’s getting bored,” he says. He grips the chair back and taps Emilio’s crown ring on the metal. That’s the fist that hit my wife. The one that changed her forever.
“Am not,” she objects. “I think we should just go up there.”
“Same thing.”
“That’s not the same. He killed Papà!”
“There are fifty guys up there!” Damiano yells at her. “You wanna die? You go up first. Wag your ass at them. See where it gets you.” She gives him the finger, and he turns back to me. “Look, you’re a dead man either way. But if you tell your wife to give it up, we let her live.”
In this weakened state, it’s easy for a man to lose his shit. Easier when the love of his life is threatened. That’s what he wants, but even if I could be manipulated like this, I don’t have the fucking crown.
“Dami, use your head. You don’t have it. I don’t have it. Who has it?”
“You really are tough to crack, you know that?”
“We need to find them,” I say.
“We?”
“You can’t do it yourself, and you know it.”
For a moment, I think he believes me. Either that I don’t have it, or that he can’t find the third party without my help.
“Nah, nah.” He stands. “You think I’m a stunad.” He leans into my face. “I’m going to give Violetta one chance to give it up.”
“She doesn’t have it.”
“If we’re convincing enough, she’ll have it.”
What are they going to do to her? Everything Damiano promised on the phone, or—with me out of the way—will it be worse?
“You can’t make it appear from a wish.”
“Wish for what? A crown I know your wife has?” Damiano leans down to look me in the eye. “It should have been mine anyway. My father is the older brother.”
Cosimo is the older brother to whom? And why would that matter?
“Come?” I ask. My voice sounds like worn sandpaper.
“Half brother. But still.” My expression sends a smile spreading across Damiano’s face, and he chuckles. “You didn’t know? For fuck’s sake, Santi. Did you even know about him and…?” He makes a side-to-side motion with his hand, then—when it’s obvious I don’t know what he’s talking about—waves away the rest of the sentence. “Never mind. That nugget belongs to your little missus.”
He pats my chest before standing, then stops himself. He reaches into my breast pocket and takes out my cigarettes and bent lighter.
“This is what saved you,” he says, inspecting the lighter.
“God saved me.”
“Sure, Santi. God gives a shit.” He takes out a cigarette and puts it between my lips. The bent Zippo is too hard to open. He throws it on the cushions of the mustard couch and snaps his fingers at Carlo. “Give me yours.”
Carlo takes a tiny red Bic lighter and a pen from his pocket.
“Let me see that pen too,” Damiano says. Carlo hands them over, and his boss turns back to me. “I don’t want you to think I feel good about any of this.”
“I don’t care how you feel,” I say, cigarette bobbing as I talk. “But you’re going to be disappointed. Then you’re going to need me, and if she’s hurt…”
“Yeah, I know. You’re going to blah blah.”
He lights my cigarette, and I suck on the filter. I don’t want the kindness, but for the sake of a deal, I need to accept it.
“You still think I’ll come crawling back? Be like,” Damiano continues in a falsetto, “‘Oh, Santi, please help me find it!’ so you can tell me to fuck myself?”
“I will help you hunt down whoever has it.”
“You’ll nev
er help me. Your face looks like you been bobbing for sausages in the Sunday gravy.”
“Part of the job.”
“Glad you understand,” he says, fanning the pen between two fingers. “Anyway. As a show of good faith, since we got a pen right here, you want to leave Violetta a message or something? Tell her to open the gate? It’s taking candy from a baby either way, but if she don’t fight, we’ll let her live.”
There’s no chance I’ll tell my wife to submit to this man, and there’s no world in which she wouldn’t fight.
I know what I’m going to write, but I don’t know where.
Damiano jerks his head to Carlo, who gets a pair of hedge clippers from the wall.
21
VIOLETTA
The room is filled with silent people.
Armando is dead on the dining room table.
They have Santino.
Well. Not all of him.
His ring is in my fist, and Dario is still holding the baggie with a piece of his body in it. This is offensive.
Santino is mine. All of him.
I reach over the table and snatch the bag away.
I’ve spent months pissed off, but I don’t know how to be this angry. There has to be some kind of talent to containing and releasing it. Or a skill to separating it from sadness and grief, like coffee or nicotine passing through a filter—a massive centrifuge for fire and electricity. My pores are too small to fit all the rage through. It’s too big for my body. If it would fit through my mouth, I’d scream.
Wait.
I am screaming.
Everyone looks scared.
Good. They should be. Because this monster in my chest isn’t made of love and light.
Loretta isn’t frightened. She’s in front of me, her hands on my cheeks the way Santino does, saying something I can’t hear over my own voice.
She hugs me, and I run out of breath. I appreciate her embrace, but I’m too empty to cry. My fist with a ring and the hand with the baggie are folded between us, and I let Loretta hold me as long as she wants—not for me, but for her. When she lets me go, I feel the hard ball of knuckle in the bag, and for a split second, I’m reminded of Zio eating pig’s feet. Rosetta and I watching as he dragged his front teeth along the balls of the joints.
The memory is wonderful, but the smile doesn’t find my mouth in the tangled route from my heart. Even so, I have to make sure the baggie contains a finger, not lunch. I open it and find a human finger, as promised—bloodless, grayish, with the skin shrinking away and the carpal bone poking out like a branch from the gristle of flexor tendon. Between the proximal and distal joints are lines in blue ink that make two words.
LOVE RULES
“Love rules without rules,” I say to my husband as if he can hear me.
He can’t. But I hear him, loud and clear.
The feeling of being stretched by an expanding force inside me—of molecules banging against containment—goes away. The anger is still volatile and hot. It doesn’t shrink or lessen.
I am not soothed, but I am big enough to hold an exploding star.
“We need to finish this,” Dario says. “Tonight.”
“How?” I ask, still clutching the bag.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says dismissively. “You. Gennaro, is it? Let’s see what kind of ammo we have. We’re going to shoot through this problem and burn everything else. You, what’s your name?”
Carmine stammers an answer.
“Locations for every family member, friend, and mistress he’s ever had,” Dario says.
This man…this stranger, is going to descend on Secondo Vasto like a blanket of fire. There will be mass killing. Maybe we’ll find Santino, and maybe we won’t.
This is the war Santino was trying to avoid.
We’re in it.
Everyone knows it. Loretta, Celia, Vito, Gennaro, all know as they stand in silence, waiting to be told what to do.
If I want control of this situation, I have to take it before Dario does. I have to earn it, and that won’t happen as long as I’m sitting here clutching a body part.
I speak up. “I asked you—”
“Ma’am,” Dario interrupts, “with all due respect, this has to be fixed before the sun comes up, or it’ll go on for a week…and we’re not fighting with glue guns and knitting needles.”
By rights and experience, Dario should be in charge, but this fight isn’t his. I own this war, and it will be won or lost because of me.
“With all due respect,” I say, standing, “this house and the town it protects are mine. The king you’re pledged to is mine. The crown they think they’re coming for…it’s mine.”
“The kitchen is that way. Or we can lock you in the basement cucina until you cool down.”
“That’s the only good idea you’ve had.”
We stare at each other over Armando’s body. I don’t know what Dario’s thinking, but I use the time to inventory who’s in the room, how physically strong they are, and the depth of their roots in Secondo Vasto.
“Vito,” I say, keeping eye contact with Dario. “Gennaro. Would you please escort Mr. Lucari to the basement?”
“I don’t want to make this painful for you, Mrs. DiLustro,” Dario says. “But I will.”
“Sure.” I break eye contact and jerk my head toward Vito. “Take the gun and the phone before you lock him down there.”
I try to sound commanding, but I hear a voice that sounds small and feminine. I’m sure Vito won’t listen to me, and I’m going to end up in the basement, screaming while a war is waged over my husband’s death.
Whatever weakness I hear in my voice must be inaudible to Gennaro because he reacts first, coming at Dario from behind and pulling his elbows together. Vito’s right after, reaching into Dario’s jacket for the gun. Dario fights for a moment, but when Carmine makes three—removing the small pistol from his ankle holster—and Vito bends him over Armando’s dead body, he calms down. There’s no use fighting this many.
“This is a mistake,” Dario says to me.
“Probably. But it’s mine to make.”
Dario’s hauled to the basement and locked behind the door.
The basement has food for an army and a bathroom, but he won’t be kept there for long. Now this really has to be done quickly.
Behind the row of buildings on the opposite side of the lawn, between the bricks and the rock face, is a few feet of dirt. My shoulders touch wall on one side and mountain on the other, but I just about fit. When I kneel, my hips wedge me in tighter.
Good. This is what I want. A space just for us.
I turn so I can reach my pockets, getting out a gardening trowel. I dig. The hole is narrow and eight inches deep before I can go no farther. I take out the baggie with the zip that won’t lock.
LOVE RULES
I don’t know how the message wound up between Santino’s knuckles. Did he write it, knowing they’d cut it off and send it to me? Or did Gia and Damiano write it there? They’re definitely Santino’s words.
Love rules without rules.
He’s telling me to do whatever I need to do to win, and he will do the same.
There are no rules for us.
I smile. Silly man.
After all he’s seen from me, he still thinks I need his permission.
A dozen men stand around the perimeter of the office. Gennaro and Carmine sit in front of me. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I sit behind Santino’s desk anyway. It’s too big. The chair is too high. I look like a child playacting in her father’s office.
I’m prepared for this. I have to use both my power and vulnerability to everyone’s advantage.
“I know it’s upsetting that Armando’s dead. I know it pisses you off to get our king’s finger detached from the rest of him. I want to go down there and burn it all down too. But you know why we can’t do that.”
The men look to me for a plan—but only so they can dismiss it. In the end, at least part of it has to be
their idea.
“We don’t know where they are. Descending on the city not knowing where to look leaves this compound exposed. It leaves us spread out all over to get picked off.” Looking from man to man, I take the temperature of the room. Lukewarm.
“Yeah,” Vito says with a nod. “She’s right.”
His approval warms the room a few degrees.
“They know where we are,” I say. “Obviously. And they expect us to come for them. They’re waiting for it.”
“There’s no one at the bottom of the mountain,” a man says, stepping into the room. “If you don’t mind me saying.” He’s so cartoonishly deferential, I barely recognize him. It’s Fat Lip. The guy I punched the first day of my marriage. “We got cameras on some of the trees, and there’s nobody hanging around waiting. At least not there. Could be anywhere else, I guess.”
“Good,” I say. “Are there cameras all the way up?”
“No. Just where the road goes private. That’s how we knew Mando was coming, but we couldn’t tell it was him.”
“Thank you. Anything else I need to know?”
The negative answer comes in murmurs and gestures. They’re not convinced I should be followed, and the benefit of their doubts won’t last long. Everyone in this room has been trained from birth to dismiss women, including me. I have to come at this obliquely. Don’t tell them what I want. Tell them what we need.
“They don’t want to come up here. If you’re uncertain about that, just look at how hard they’re trying to draw us out. We’re near the top of a mountain. There’s one narrow road up to a fortress. Blind turns. A dozen places we can shoot them from. So first, someone’s gotta be in the cupola twenty-four hours a day, watching. Yes?” I take their temperature again. No one’s abandoned ship yet, but once someone does, they all could follow. “Second, all guns out, loaded, and lining the ridge overlooking the road up.” The last thing to do after flexing my muscle is to let them know I’m not trying to be a man. “Celia, Loretta, and I will keep the home fires burning until they come or we figure out where he is.”