Mafia Queen: The DiLustro Arrangement #3

by CD Reiss

  Laying hard on the last possibility—that we have to find out where Santino is—seems to go unnoticed. Doubts creep in like spiders under the door. I’ve left too much to their discretion. I don’t have the knowledge I need to give them more detailed instructions. And yet—they haven’t come up with enough of it themselves.

  I am not Santino. I can’t lay out the whole thing. They need to feel as though they’re not taking orders from a woman.

  “Yeah, but…” The man who breaks the tension is tall and gangly—middle-aged and set in his ways. “I don’t like waiting. It doesn’t feel right.”

  Vito turns in his chair. “I don’t remember her asking you to have feelings, Benny.” He says feelings as if it’s a rotten lemon on his tongue.

  Benny whips his hand in a gesture that means both “fuck off” and “never mind.”

  “Do we have a problem?” I ask. “Please. Write it down so I can share it with Re Santino when he gets back.”

  “He could be getting chopped into pieces right now, is all,” Benny protests. “And we’re sitting up here like pussies.”

  He’s driven by loyalty. I appreciate that, but we can’t fall into disarray over it.

  “You’re right,” I say. “But how can we do something without risking our position?”

  He makes a constellation of gestures—a shrug, another wrist flip, a glance around the room, and a bigger shrug.

  “I tell you what,” Benny says. “Someone goes down. Maybe me and one other guy… We go before dawn, down into the city. Talk to people. Find out where he is. If we know that, the wait is over. We go get him.”

  They all look at me.

  “I like it,” I say as if it wasn’t the last part of the plan to begin with. “Good idea.”

  I can’t sleep thinking about Santino.

  What is he going through?

  Am I actually lying here in our bed while it’s happening?

  Am I taking a shift in the cupola for four hours, scanning the city, wondering if I’m looking right at him?

  Is he in pain while we clear the furniture? Cook the meals? Watch the sun crawl across our slit of sky?

  Does he know we’re looking for him?

  Or—with every hour that passes—am I getting him killed?

  22

  SANTINO

  The concrete floor is like a hammer to the back of my head, but I don’t sit up.

  The remaining fingers on my left hand ache with the loss of their brother. The pain that shoots all the way to my shoulder is like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Putting pressure on my skeleton to get myself up is as distant a possibility as tearing down this wall with my bare hands and running to Violetta at a hundred kilometers an hour. But not only am I horizontal, they used quick-hardening mortar between the bricks. And I can’t run that fast. I can’t do anything.

  So there’s me, and pain, and darkness, and regret.

  A lot of regret, in all flavors and colors. Regret for leaving my mother behind where I saw her last, sleeping on the side of a volcano. For treating Violetta like a doll. For withholding information because I was ashamed. For being given away in marriage. For not taking Violetta sooner. For not taking her later. For the baby we lost and the children we’ll never have.

  I regret things I’ve done and things I’ve avoided. I promise not to do things anymore and to do everything, all of it—without defining what it is—if I can just see her again. I promise God nine more fingers for Violetta’s life and offer the whole hand to spend it with her.

  There are noises. Creaking floors. Muffled speech. A kind of harmless cracking, clapping, and slamming one hears in life. I don’t realize my eyes are open for a long time.

  There’s some kind of nightlight in the adjacent room. It casts a dim glow through the little hole at the top of the wall. As much as my eyes adjust, it’s not enough to see by without giving it full attention.

  Deep breath.

  Every sin of neglect and harm has been catalogued. Every sacrifice offered. There’s nothing else to do but wait for heaven’s reply. I have the attention to spend on what I’m seeing and hearing.

  I’ve wet my beak on construction money enough times to know the difference between a property’s value and the assessment, but not enough to know what the net of pipes and conduit just below the ceiling are for.

  Dim light bursts in through the brick-sized space above. After the scrape of a chair, there’s a click and a rattle from above me.

  “Santino,” a woman whispers from the other side of the wall. It’s not Violetta.

  If she was on the other side of the wall, it would melt with shame for being the only thing standing between us. But it’s one of many things, and I don’t know how to tear down the first. I have never felt so helpless and ashamed.

  “Santino,” she says again, closer. Gia isn’t tall enough to see into the hole, but standing on a chair, she can just about put two bottles on the ledge. Looks like aspirin. I need more than that. “I got you…” She stops, huffing with strain as she puts a bottle of water sideways, so the cap looks like a diver peeking over the board. “Water.” I hear her dropping back onto the floor. “Are you there?”

  “Yes.” My head hurts from lying faceup on the concrete. Maybe it’s thirst.

  “I understand why you did what you did to Papà.”

  I let that hang in the air without telling her I don’t need her to understand, because I’ll kill her too, and none of it will matter any more.

  “Is it bleeding still?” she asks.

  When I lift my hand over my face, the shoulder bones feel as if they’re grinding together. “No.”

  “I found some disinfectant,” she says. “And I left you a surprise.”

  Above me, the floorboards creak and the pipes hiss. The shaking silver tube spanning the ceiling is the diameter of a can of tomatoes. They’ve all been making a symphony for what seems like hours.

  “Where are we?” I ask, getting my arms under me. My skull is made of lead and my brain is made of screams.

  “Damiano told me not to say.”

  “Who does he think I’ll tell?” I have to put my hand on the wall when I stand, or I’ll spin right back to the floor.

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me anything anymore. It’s like…” She doesn’t finish.

  “It’s like he doesn’t need you anymore.”

  I reach for the water and pill bottle. I put the label in front of the basement light to read. Advil. Medicine for women’s problems. Fine. Beggars can’t be choosers. If it’s good enough for Violetta, it’s probably too good for me.

  After popping the cap, I shake some into my hand. One falls in the new space between my pinkie and middle finger. Three are left. I swallow them.

  “If I ask you a hard question, can you answer honestly? Even if you think you’ll hurt my feelings?”

  “I will not protect your feelings, Gia.”

  The other bottle is white plastic with a pump top. The name of what’s inside has worn off. When I spray into the air, I smell the bite of hydrogen peroxide. Disinfecting the wound is pointless. I’ll be dead before infection has a chance to set in, but I hold the sprayer over the space where my finger was and douse it.

  “Was I a good waitress?” she asks.

  “Cosa?” The sting hits my open wound and burrows up my nose, clearing my sinuses. I drop the bottle.

  “It’s that…when I was little, you said you’d always protect me. And you did. You always took care of me… Ciro Sirigu. Remember?”

  Of course I do. Gia and Ciro were in school together. They both got a math problem wrong in the exact same way. The teacher—a middle-aged woman who needed her pussy licked more than any woman I’ve ever met—called them in. Gia denied cheating. Ciro fluctuated between blame and paranoia. The teacher blamed Gia for copying Ciro, and—at the same time—giving him the incorrect answer.

  Marco had dragged Gia out by the hair. I asked Emilio to step in before Gia went bald. Like a king, he strode
into the school and demanded they both retake the test. My adopted sister got the same problem type wrong again, proving she was lousy at math, and Ciro got it right, proving he was a cheater.

  “The customers liked you,” I say before draining the last of the water.

  “I always wondered if you regretted letting me work at Mille Luce.”

  “No.” The hissing of the pipes above stops, so my denial sounds like a shout.

  “Because I liked it. I really did. And I was extra careful with adding up the checks. I thought this morning, ‘I’m late for work,’ but then I realized…”

  “You may not have your job back.”

  “I figured. Dami’s been talking about burning it down, but I don’t know if he got to it yet.”

  I should be sad or something, but I don’t care about the café. I don’t care about my house—he can put burning that down on his to-do list. I don’t even care about having my finger cut off.

  A part of my body was used to hurt Violetta. That’s what I care about.

  “You missed these,” she says.

  From the brick-sized hole at the top of the wall, a pack of Marlboros and a small, red Bic lighter drop to the floor.

  Smoking will make the headache worse, but I light one anyway. The nicotine clears my head despite the way the smoke puts a knife in my skull.

  “Where is she?” I ask. “My wife. What’s happening with her?”

  “She’s up at Torre Cavallo, I guess? I overheard Dami saying he’s waiting for all the guys to come down to find you, or he’ll go up.”

  That won’t go well. Altieri Cavallo put his mistress there for a reason.

  The ceiling rattles rhythmically. The smell of dry, hot air fights the cigarette smoke.

  “Santi?” Gia says. “Can you tell her to come down with it? The crown? You could write a note or something. She’d listen to you.”

  There’s no use saying we don’t have the crown. None of them believe it.

  “I’m not in charge anymore.” I flick the lighter, watching it spark. The flame doesn’t add much light.

  “What if I talked to Damiano? Maybe I could convince him to free you? Take this wall down so you can reason with her and all this could be over?”

  It’s tempting to encourage her just for the chance to get out of this little room, but she can’t deliver on the promise. Damiano will attack Violetta before letting me out to convince her to give up a crown she doesn’t have. Gia may as well be suggesting Santa Claus can come through a silver vent the width of a tomato can, drop a hammer and chisel wrapped in a bow right in front of me, and ho-ho-ho his way back up to the fucking reindeer.

  That same silver vent has a tiny slit in it, opening and closing like a mouth that doesn’t know what to say. The hot, dry smell is coming through there. Poor Santa would be cooked like a Christmas turkey.

  “She has her own mind, Gia. Just like you.”

  When I bend over to right the folding chair, my headache doesn’t protest. When I stand on the chair, the pain stays a dull throb. The Advil must be stronger than I ever gave it credit for.

  “Tavie’s not answering his texts,” Gia says.

  Damiano really isn’t telling her anything at all.

  I touch one of the hissing pipes. It’s warm and vibrating as if something’s flowing through it. Water. “He’s dead, Gia.”

  “No!”

  “He was shot by one of your guys.”

  “They’re not mine!” she protests loudly.

  I don’t mind. On the other side of this wall, I would have imposed the correct version of the situation on her. But here, on the dark side of the wall, her delusions are her problem.

  “If you say so.” I move the chair to reach another pipe. “He’s still dead.”

  “Oh, my God, no…” She breaks down into sobs.

  The second pipe is cool and still. If the rhythmic rattle of the floorboard is a washer spinning, then Santa’s silver vent hose is for dryer steam. There’s a way out.

  All I have to do is be stronger than any man before me.

  23

  VIOLETTA

  If I’m up in the cupola for meals, I take them as I watch the men at the gate and the town below. I crane my neck toward the line of rock above and downward to the edges of the lawn. I don’t look for his face or his body, but a sense of him, somewhere in the world with me. A direction. An arrow pointing to the center of the universe.

  The stairs creak. Someone’s coming up.

  “How’s Dario?” I ask, recognizing the pace and weight of the footsteps.

  “Polite,” Loretta says.

  “Should we let him up?”

  She stands next to me and looks over the city, watching the streetlights go on. At the front gate, the floodlights drown the top of the road in blazing light.

  “He’s like a rattlesnake,” she says. “He’s courteous. He’ll rattle his tail to let you know he’s going to strike, but you’ll die just the same.”

  “We can’t keep him down there much longer.”

  “Probably not.”

  “By tomorrow”—I turn away from the valley to look at her—“we’re going to need to make him into a friend or shoot him.”

  “Well,” she says with a shrug. A flash of light—fast as a blink—lights her cheek then disappears. “You can’t shake hands with a snake, so—”

  We’re interrupted by a pop in the distance, then nothing. The sky is still glowing orange as a pillar of black smoke rises over the horizon, blooming into a gray mushroom cap at the top.

  “The bridge,” I gasp. “They hit the bridge.”

  I run downstairs and out the back door, to the lawn where men run and shout, where the smell hits like a wall made of tar and asphalt and grit, following the flow of traffic to the gate.

  A cry goes up from the station atop the guardhouse. I climb the ladder in the back of the structure, scrabbling to the top before anyone can tell me not to. Gennaro is up there already with a pair of binoculars.

  The bridge is burning. The dots of flame peek out from the smoke then disappear.

  We’re trapped.

  All of us. Not just those of us on Torre Cavallo, but Secondo Vasto. My church, my school, the pork store, and the playground. They’ll starve us all until they have what they want.

  I wish I had the crown. I’d shove it up Damiano Orolio’s ass.

  But that’s not what Gennaro is looking at through his binoculars. I follow his sights to a car coming up the hill. It’s shiny, black, expensive. Not quite a limousine.

  “What is that?”

  Gennaro snaps around, not expecting me to be standing next to him. He hands me his binoculars without questioning why I’m here.

  I put them to my eyes. The Lincoln Continental has its headlights blazing as if it’s on the way to a funeral. The windows are tinted so dark they’re opaque, and I wonder, and hope, and pray that Santino is in that car, coming up the mountain in victory.

  Then another pop comes from the bridge. An explosion. More fire.

  “Violetta!” Carmine says from the ground. “Get down! You’re going to get killed!”

  They won’t kill me. Not as long as they think I have the crown.

  I take out the gun Santino gave me, holding it ready at my shoulder the way he taught me, and watch the black car make its way to us.

  “We should get Dario,” Carmine says.

  “Get Dario,” I reply, “and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  He glances at the car, then back to me. The only reason he’s not running to free Dario from the basement is the possibility that Santino is in that car. If that’s the case, I’ll say “fuck the ladder” and float down to him like a leaf in the toxin-scented breeze—but it’s not. If my husband was coming toward me, I’d know it.

  They’re all looking at me. I can read their minds. They’re wondering what this looks like if Santino’s in that car. What will it look like to have his wife so exposed? What are the consequences of not taking her down and put
ting her away like a china doll? What will the king do if his wife is touched? And what won’t he do if she’s hurt?

  They’re asking the wrong questions. They need to ask themselves what I’ll do if they don’t get behind me.

  “Vito, behind them.” I make a half-circle with my hand.

  He returns a quick salute, gathering four men into the brush on either side of the road.

  When the car crests the last rise, I point my gun at it. It’s a command. A call to action. I’m telling the men to take their eyes off the threat to themselves and direct their attention to the threat we all face.

  There’s still an indent in the dirt where Armando fell off his moped. This is exactly where the car stops. It clicks into park. The engine shuts. Carmine’s men come from the brush and line up behind it.

  Gennaro succumbs to his panic and yanks me back.

  I elbow him off me and glare. “Do not.”

  He holds his hands up in surrender, apologizing, but I have no time. No one does. Everyone holds their gun at the ready as the driver’s door opens. A blond man with thinning hair and a doughy build gets out with his hands up. He’s wearing bright white gloves in the August heat, but not a jacket to hide a holster.

  “Occhio, che arriva il Blocco!” he shouts, announcing the arrival.

  The Lock? What does that mean? Another dead man? Is it Santino this time? Or just another part of his body?

  If it’s a single royal toenail, I’m killing the messenger and putting his head on a pole.

  “Nazario Corragio,” Gennaro mutters with relief. “He’s one of us.”

  “He needs to be disarmed,” I say without raising my voice, yet I’m heard.

  Men come to push the driver against the car. They take his gun and rifle through his pockets, then back off. He stands and looks up at me, indicating the back door as if asking if he can open it.

  “Vai!” I shout, telling them to get the hell on with it. “Sbrigati!”

  The driver opens the back door. From my angle, I can only see his back as he takes a cane, and the stretch of his shirt across his shoulders as he strains to hoist the passenger to his feet. Then he moves enough to reveal an old man in a suit it’s too warm for. He gives the man the cane and reaches into the back seat again.